voice-over: this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines for you at the top of the hour, which is straight after this programme. hello, i'm caroline steel, this is the bbc world service and welcome to the engineers. this year we're at the science specialist university, imperial college london, and we're here to focus on the technical revolution defining our era — artificial intelligence. i'm joined by a panel of three world leaders in the field and a large, enthusiastic audience in imperial�*s great hall. applause

already, a computer can defeat the world's greatest player at our most complex strategy game. the first movie written entirely by ai has just been released, and ai may have discovered ourfirst antibiotic in three decades. together with our partners, royal commission 1851, we've brought together three engineers at the cutting edge of this field to discuss their work and what it means for us humans. paolo pirjanian is armenian, but he was born in iran and started his career working on mars rovers for nasa. he's now founder and ceo of embodied, which is a company that builds emotionally intelligent robots to help with child development. david silver is from the uk, where he's principal research scientist at the ai research lab google deepmind. he led the team that used al to defeat the world's best player at the complicated strategy game "go." and he's working on artificial general intelligence. regina barzilay is

israeli—american and a distinguished professor for al & health at mit in the us. she created a major breakthrough in detecting early stage breast cancer, and also led the team that used al to discover what is hoped to be a brand—new antibiotic. so, please dojoin me in welcoming them all. applause regina, let's start with you. so what is it that made you shift your work to oncology? sadly, you were in the perfect position to do that, weren't you? yeah. so, actually, i started my work at mit in 2003 as a faculty, and i was working on natural language processing and ai. in 2014 i was diagnosed with breast cancer, and i was treated in one of the best hospitals in the united states, massachusetts general hospital.

what i discovered going through the treatment, there was really no al or not even basic information technology as part of the treatment. neither the diagnostics nor the treatment, nor the post treatment. and after i was treated, i just was totally confused as to what i want to do because it was the first time i realised that my life is finite. i've seen a lot of very sick people there surrounding me. and i was thinking, "what can i do?" mgh, this hospital, and mit, are just one subway stop away, separated by a bridge. i'm thinking, "how come we have all this great technology at mit, "but none of it is actually coming to the hospitals and helping patients?" after i finished my treatment, i still didn't have my hair. i started going from doctor to doctor, asking them, how i can bring ai, i will do it for free, i'm a professor. there were not many takers. but eventually we found somebody who, um... it was a doctor called connie lehman who had the idea that we can apply al to do

early detection of cancer. thank you, regina. david, you came to ai via the games industry, and you did a phd in reinforcement learning. what is reinforcement learning and how did you use it in those early days? i guess i started out in the games industry before i went back to academia. and i was working on building computer games and a big part of building computer games is building the ai for those games that kind of makes all of the characters move around. and i found myself being fundamentally disappointed by the methods that were being used in those games. it felt like what i really wanted to do was build something that had real ai in it. i discovered this idea of reinforcement learning, which is basically a method very much like those that animals and humans use, where the system is able to learn for itself from experience, from trial and error, from trying things out and seeing what works and what doesn't.

so is it sort of like when we learn to not touch fire because at some point we try it and it really hurts and we learn, "don't do that in the future," because the consequences aren't appealing? is it sort of like how humans learn, reinforcement learning? yes, it's a lot like that. in fact, humans are believed to have a major part of the brain which is devoted to providing a signal, giving feedback that makes the brain actually learn to do more of the good things and less of the bad things. so, actually, that's inspired a lot of work in machine learning to make machines have that same capability. but a machine doesn't feel heat or isn't rewarded by a cookie. how can you reward a machine? yeah. so, for a machine, it'sjust a number. what?! you give it a positive number if it's done something good and a negative number if it's done something bad. and at the end of the day, it stems from that one single number. this one single number, which we call the reward,

contains enormous power because it's the signal that drives everything. paolo, you said your experiences of feeling alienated in foreign countries made you want to create an imaginary friend. and i'm sure much of our audience can relate to having an imaginary friend, but for most of us, they stay imaginary. how did you go about making a real one? so, unfortunately, there| is a lot of people in need of companionship or therapy, and there is a massive gap i of labour force that can provide this. i as an example, to use numbers from the us,j we know the prevalencej of things such as autism is growing rapidly. ten years ago, it was one out of about 200 kids. i today, it's one out of about 30 kids. i so the experiences i had, i which was leaving my family at a very young age, - living abroad, in a society, that's amazing. i mean, danes are amazing people, but yet you are - different, so you're not going to be embraced. | this is not too dissimilar. from a child on the autism

spectrum that has a hard time expressing themselves- or reading emotions from other people. i and that was the genesis - of creating a robot companion that understands human - emotions, can create a deep relationship with a child, - and then help them exercise and practise these social. skills such as eye contact, turn—taking, joint attention| and so on, so that the child has a chance of being - successful in their society. thank you. regina, what can ai do, when it comes to understanding cancer, that humans can't? so i think that in cancer and in many other diseases, the big question is always, how do you deal with uncertainty? unfortunately, today, we rely on humans who don't have this capacity to make predictions. as a result, many times people get wrong treatments or they are diagnosed much later. one question that really troubled me is, you know, how late i was diagnosed. and when we developed a model,

i came back to my own mammograms and we discovered that the mammograms two years earlier already had on it a tiny small cancer. now for the human eye, for radiologists, it's impossible to diagnose it because it's so, so confusing. there are so many other spots on your tissue. so what ai can do, it can do a lot of tasks which humans cannot do. take all the data that we have and remove the guessing out of diagnosis and treatment. thank you. david, ai had already defeated the reigning grandmaster garry kasparov at chess well before you started your project, alphago. the rules of "go" sound quite simple. basically, on each turn, a player puts down a counter on the board and you gain territory by connecting your counters and the player with the most territory at the end of the game wins. why is it harderfor a computer to beat a human at "go" than at chess, which sounds more complicated?

the game of "go" is this very beautiful and elegant game where it seems at first glance the rules are very simple, but once you start to understand it, a bit like unpeeling an onion, you discover more and more layers of complexity. what's amazing is that when humans play this game, they basically... you ask them to describe how they did something but they really don't know. they've used incredible intuition. and so these amazing professional players who've devoted their entire lives to this game have built this incredible intuition and creativity. and intuition and creativity are two traits which were previously considered to be very human and very hard to build into machines. so while chess, it was possible to succeed just with tactical look ahead, in the game of "go" that wasn't enough. because, you know, early on in the game, you just have this handful of stones on the board and you really just have to imagine what the game will pan out like 300 moves later with this sort of intuitive sense of where it will go.

that required some major breakthroughs. paolo, debatably even more complex than "go" is human children. your human—centred robot forms an emotional bond with children. how can a robot do that? well, first of all, it's - important to make clear that the robot is not - meant to replace the need for human contact. it's really almost like i training wheels to teach children the social skills - and then be able to practise those in real life. the way the robot forms bonds is that humans i are wired to bonding. we create connections with inanimate objects all the time. i mean, with a robot that has eyes, can make eye contact, | can smile back at you, and can speak to you and express - emotion and empathy, . it's actually not that hard to create a bond there. children open up to these l robots very quickly in ways they may not even open up i

to their therapists or parents. thank you, paolo. regina, you not only made an impact on oncology, your team at mit used al to discover what could be our first new antibiotic in three decades. it seems it can be e. coli, mrsa, and strains of bacteria which are currently resistant to all other antibiotics, so i think we all wish it success. how did you do that? so i should say that developing antibiotics is not an area with immense competition, even though the resistance to antibiotics that we have continues to grow. this happened to be an area where pharmaceutical companies are not very active because economically it doesn't work for them. so in some ways we do need to have alternative approaches. i met a colleague and he was working, he was from biological engineering. he was working on antibiotics and he was describing the big problem of finding new molecules, which are effective against bacteria,

drug—resista nt bacteria, but at the same time are not toxic to humans. they had some molecules screened against, i think, e.coli. we started with that, and then we just gave to the machine, you know, thousands of molecules. and for each molecule, you knew whether it kills the bacteria or not. and it was kind of the first attempt to learn automatically, how do you look at the structure of the molecule and predict whether it would have a desired effect? we found a molecule that didn't look like something human created, and it turns out in the lab that it was able to kill using a different mechanism of action — kill it in a different way. and that's what made it so effective against so many different species. david, let's go back to you. so far we've been talking about systems designed to perform one task — that's known as narrow ai. but you're working towards artificial general intelligence.

could you explain what artificial general intelligence is? so, if you think about humans and human intelligence, it's this wonderful and beautiful thing where we're able to learn skills which are incredibly diverse, where one person might choose to specialise in learning how to play tennis, and another person might specialise in becoming an amazing chef, and another person a pianist, and another person a scientist. and so when we want to build artificial intelligence, we want systems which not only solve a single problem, but, in a similar manner to humans, are able to approach any number of problems with intelligence, that's capable of doing amazing things in each of those different areas. and that's what we refer to as artificial general intelligence, or agi for short. and how far off do you think we are from that being a reality? i think it's going to be a spectrum over many years. i also think it's likely, or at least plausible, that there are many breakthroughs that are still required before we can really crack the same level of intelligence that humans have. regina, you've developed al to better predict cancer, but it's only employed

in a tiny number of cases. why is it... why is al not used more widely in medicine? the problem is that we're creating a lot of great technology, but this technology is not really translated into patient care. if i would ask the audience, you know, how many of you, when you last time see your physician, you actually seen any ai? and i'm sure not many can really attest to it. and so i think the technology, for many of the tasks, is really mature. but there are many other questions which have nothing to do with al per se. one is regulation. regulations both in europe, uk, us, continue to change. another big problem is people don't really know how to build for al. and today, the american doctor who uses ai loses money when they see the patients, so it's not much of a motivation. so just to clarify there, did you say that using ai for doctors in the us can actually make them lose money

because it makes treatment more effective and therefore they're charging for less? i'm referring to a specific paper. the way the billing is done, it somehow relates to the time the doctor spends with the patient so if you have something that makes it faster, you're actually losing money. very depressing! paolo, what about your challenges? the robot you've developed mimics human behaviour. what's next? i'm very hopeful with - what we are doing in terms of creating social, emotional ai systems that can help - humanity become its best. if we can intervene early. with children, for instance, on the autism spectrum, i they have a chance of really integrating well with society and do really well. - when we think about otherl vulnerable areas of our life, when we age, social isolation, being lonely, and that leads. to mental health issues that . leads to physical health issues and so on.

we can have the same systems become a companion that - help you there. once we figure out the physical task, you can also imagine - that they can give i you assistive care. meaning that they can be not only be a social emotional. companion for you, but they can also be a companion in saying, i "let's cook some food together, let's go for a walk together," - and so on, which is going - to help a lot with independent living with dignity - when we are at that age. do you think we'll see robots helping with assistive care in the future any time soon? or is this way off in the distance? i think it is within the next decade. | oh, wow. david, you're working on gemini, which is google�*s answer to chatgpt, and you aim for it to be able to do both tax returns and write a novel. people would probably be happy to have their tax returns done, or i definitely would be. but novels — should we really be letting ai sort of take over human culture? so, it's a great question.

i think i wouldn't see it as taking over human culture. i think what will happen, or the most likely outcome, is that we'll be providing an incredibly powerful tool to human authors. so we've already seen this in a number of areas where we've developed technologies that enable authors of different kinds of media to basically create things much more powerfully using tools. for example, there's a music authoring system called lyria that was released recently, and there's this wonderful footage of will.i.am when he's playing with it for the first time, and he'sjust so excited because he says it can speed up his songwriting process by ten or 100 times. so, i think what i really hope we get to is a world in which the ai and the humans work together tojust make everything better. so, you know, i'm excited to be in a world where we have much more. the most amazing novels that we can imagine, which go far beyond the ones we have today. thank you, david.

this is the engineers, intelligent machines, from the bbc world service. we've discussed medical ai, emotionally intelligent robots, the goal of artificial general intelligence, and the threats ai might pose. has anyone got a question on anything we've discussed so far? wow! 0k, pretty much everyone has a hand up, so this is going to be tricky. could we start with the man in the red shirt? if you could stand up and say your name and your question. thank you very much. hello. my name is simon. british government wants to make britain a leader in al, and sees the way to do this by making it a safe space. they're looking at doing that by making sure you can't develop ai where you don't understand the consequences before you develop it. does the panel think that's the right approach? so, yes, david, what do you think about legislation around ai? i think we need some kind of regulation. i think it's an area which clearly is going to have

more and more consequence and impact on society so i think regulation is important. i think some of the areas which have been agreed in various summits over the last year are a fantastic start. one thing i would say is, i think it's hard sometimes to come up with a one—size—fits—all recipe for al because it's so different in different areas. so the regulation that you might need in medicine might look quite different to the regulation you might need for, say, a chat bot. so i think we have to look at each area separately and make sure that whatever we do, we really fully understand the consequences of what the impact of ai will be in that area. there's a lot of anxiety about the pace ai is moving. we have people resigning, leaders in the field, to campaign for more safeguarding against the threat and even an existential risk

to humanity. regina? i actually feel quite the opposite. people are really suffering. there are lots of incurable diseases. it's hard for patients. it's hard for their families. there is a lot of technology — it is out there. and because we cannot get together, put the regulation in place, make the payers take part of it and find a way to bring it, i think we are... ..really making many, many people suffer. thank you. paolo, what about robots? are they going to take all ourjobs? yes. 0k, great! we've got it. we finally have an answer. thank you, paolo. caroline laughs on a serious note, i feel it's a bit of a conundrum - to think about legislation. because on one hand, yes, there are definitely risks i and you would like to regulate it so no—one with bad - intentions goes wild. 0n the other hand, i if you think about it, it's an extremely . potent technology. could change everything in our lives, including i

being strategically important technology to master, - from a national perspective. and from that perspective, if you regulate it... - let's say, part of the - regulation is slowing it down, what are our adversaries going to do? _ are they going to then - have an advantage over us? so it's a bit of an arms race, and i think for that reason, i practically speaking, - i think it's going to be very hard to regulate it to thati level, unless you can have international regulation i and agreement across all the powerful nations to say, "this is how we're going - to handle it. " and i haven't seen that work out very well in l the history of time. fair enough. audience, we have time for a couple more questions, so hands up. if we could go to the man in the white top. thank you. hello, panel. my name is rob and i'm a business and sports coach.

i'm wondering whether what you've been talking about is possible for helping humans to improve their performance at a sport. oh, good question. who's our greatest sport enthusiast? perhaps this one is for you, david. can we be using al to improve sports performance? it's a great question. there's a lot of really amazing research that's happening to try and do just that. one thing which we've been doing at google deepmind is actually a collaboration with liverpool football club to try and help them improve their tactics. they laugh so, that's one example. i think the amazing thing about sports is it's become, over time, so refined in terms of the particular approaches that people take that, actually, you know, they're very open to new discoveries and new ways to do things. it's been really fun, actually, just watching that kind of thing unfold. very cool.

thank you, david. i can see we've got lots of young people in the audience, some teenagers even. does any of our younger audience have a question? if so, stick your hand up. there was a young lady who had her hand up here with a ponytail. yes. as ai develops, i reckon that humans probably depend more on al and maybe learn less. is there anything we could do to maybe make sure that as ai develops, humans still develop and learn? 0oh. good question. so, will we stop learning as ai does the learning instead for us? i'm going to put that to all of you, if that's all right.

what do you think, david? i'd like to imagine a world where we have an agi, which is like our personal friend, assistant, teacher, and everything we do, it understands what we want to learn, and it knowsjust how to teach us and help us to learn more and more and more and more. regina, what do you think? do you think we're just going to end up relying on al for everything? as a non—native speaker of english, i remember as a young professor, i spent a humongous amount of time reading my papers and making sure, because in my native language we don't have "an" there so i make a lot of mistakes when i write. i see now how i write papers, actually, it removes a lot of my pressure in writing, and i can really focus on ideas rather than doing the small things. so i hope that we will find a symbiosis. we don't really, you know, remove our basic skills, but we can just do more and focus on the things that we can do better. paolo. i would like to imagine if- isaac newton or albert einstein had access to these tools today. - i mean, as prolific- as they were at a time where we didn't even have calculators, imagine - what they would have done i and the impact it would have had on the world if they had access to these tools. - in the next five years, potentially, you don'tl

need to code. you willjust tell your ai, favourite ai system, - and say, "i want a code that does x, y, z" and you can . accomplish what would take . years of many people in hours today, so it will make you more prolific. - thank you. i think it's fair to say all three of you have given us hope for the future. audience, thank you so much for your questions. i wish we could take more, but i'm afraid we're out of time. that's it for the engineers, intelligent machines, at imperial college london. i'm caroline steel. on behalf of the bbc world service, our partners, the royal commission for the exhibition of 1851, and my producer, charlie taylor, pleasejoin me in giving a warm round of applause for our brilliant, pioneering ai engineers regina barzilay, paolo pirjanian and david silver. applause

hello there. there was a lot of cloud around on saturday for northern and western areas. the best of the sunshine was further east — and part two of the weekend looks pretty similar. we start dry with lots of sunshine, and then the cloud amounts will tend to build up into the afternoon, producing just one or two showers. now the azores highs continuing to nudge northwards across much of england, wales, northern ireland. so, light winds here, but fresher across scotland. it will remain breezy throughout the day here. we start off with plenty of sunshine after that fresh start, and then clouds will tend to build up into the afternoon. it could turn quite grey in a few places. the odd shower likely for western scotland, maybe western hills of england and wales. otherwise it's mostly dry, up to 25 celsius in the southeast, the high teens further north. sunday night, we do it all again, the clouds tend to melt away for many, and the clear skies, it'll turn quite fresh again with temperatures of 8—12 celsius. now, some changes taking place

to start the new week. the first of a series of low pressure systems will work its way in to the country during the day. so we start off with plenty of sunshine, but the clouds will tend to build in the west, and it'll turn wet and windy through the day. some pretty heavy and persistent rain for northern ireland, and it will turn windy with gales, perhaps around some irish sea coasts, but lighter winds again in towards the southeast, where it will stay dry and sunny all day. so temperatures responding, up to 25 celsius or so — that's the high teens further north and west, picking up a little bit more humidity as well from the south. and then monday night, that area of low pressure and its weather fronts crosses the country. it stays quite breezy into tuesday, with the low sitting to the north of scotland, and that will bring a day of sunshine and showers, some of them will be heavy and thundery, particularly in the north and west, some of them merging together to produce longer spells of rain for western scotland.

temperatures down a touch, i think 22—23 celsius will be the high, mid—to—high teens further north. and then we look out to the atlantic, this next area of low pressure contains the remnants of what was hurricane ernesto. and that potentially could bring quite a lot of rainfall to the northwest of the uk around the middle part of the week, certainly so for western scotland. but further south and east, it will tend to stay dry, i think, with some sunny spells, and it will turn increasingly humid as we pick up these southwesterly winds. stays pretty unsettled for the end of the week across more northern and western areas. a better chance of staying drier towards the southeast.

live from washington, this is bbc news. an israeli team says it is cautiously optimistic about gaza ceasefire talks while hamas describes suggestions of progress as an illusion. opposition supporters rally across venezuela and the world against the president's claim he won last month's election. and two cases of mpox are found outside of africa — before and cave claims to have taken more than 80 russian settlements in its incursion over the past two weeks. hello. welcome to the programme. i'm carl nasman. israel says it has killed two senior hamas militants in an air strike in the occupied west bank on saturday. israeli officials claim the militants were involved in the recent killing of an israeli man in thejordan valley. meanwhile, tensions continue to rise between hezbollah and israel.