>> [static buzzing] >> [indiscernible voices] ashlee: this is colossus. ♪ ashlee: it came to life here in england at bletchley park in 1943. the machine raced to decrypt german messages by analyzing thousands of words of coded text every second. with its mix of vacuum tubes, wires, and switches, colossus emerged as the first electronic programmable computer. its arrival gave the allies a

huge edge in world war ii and saved thousands of lives. it also marked the start of the information age. england built 10 of the colossus machines. and they became the heart of its booming computing industry. actually, no. this is a replica of colossus. the real machines were destroyed after the war so that the pesky russians would not find out about the technology. the metaphor then is a simple one -- england dismantled decades of pioneering computing work because it seemed like the proper thing to do, and it suffered the consequences ever since.

as i doubt many of you can name a single tech product or startup that hails from this country. what you will see next then may come as a real shock. ♪ ashlee: because in its very subdued, self-effacing way, england has in fact given rise to a handful of tech companies that have impacted the world on an immense scale. i am heading from london to cambridge and into the english countryside to find the best technology that england has to offer. along the way, there will be fancy hairdryers and ai-infused software. along the way, there will be fancy hairdryers and ai-infused >> hello. my name is --

what is your name? ashlee: and of course there will be a spot of tea, all on this episode of "hello world." >> [dial-up modem sounds] ashlee: silicon valley may be home to some of the biggest tech giants in the world, but it is being challenged like never before. crazy tech geniuses have popped up all over the planet, making things that will blow your mind. my name is ashlee vance. i am an author, a journalist, and i am on a quest to find the most innovative tech creations and meet the beautiful freaks behind them. >> hello world. ashlee: if you tried to design the perfect university town, you would probably fail to think up something as idyllic as cambridge. it is a city filled with temples to learning and young,

privileged brainiacs. hop on a bike and you can go on a ride through academic history, from newton's apple tree right on up to the pub where watson privileged brainiacs. and crick drank to celebrate the discovery of dna's double helix. if that seems boring, you can also be ritually abused at the old cambridge market. thanks. it is like sour soap. [laughter] today, cambridge also serves as the heart of england's tech industry with its research centers, startups, and massive biotech firms. outside of the university, the biggest reason for cambridge's technology success is a company called arm. it designs chips, and they are the brains at the center of almost every iphone and android smartphone. in short, the modern world runs on arm.

i've met up with my old friend and arm cofounder mike muller to share a warm, british beer and find out how this happened. we are in a pub. what has a pub meant to arm over its history? mike: we met our first ceo in a pub. we are in the pub that is about 100 yards away from where we actually started, and in those days we used to come here every lunchtime, so yeah, it has played an important part in the business. ashlee: right. >> [laughter] ashlee: arm started on something of a whim. its first major customer was apple, which needed a chip for its upcoming newton handheld device. instead of making a screaming fast, super-hot chip like everyone else, arm decided to make a low-power, energy-efficient chip. soon enough, making low-power chips became arm's thing. it took a while for the bet to

pay off, but once mobile phones, and then smart phones arrived, arm ended up as a major force. mike: lifetime, our partners have shipped over 80 billion different chips, and last year there was about two per person on the planet, so that is about 15 billion arm chips shipped. so they are in everything, phones, printers, antilock brakes, televisions, wi-fi routers, cloud servers, medical devices. i could keep going. ashlee: to muller's point, one of the most innovative and glorious things built around an arm chip is raspberry pi. ♪ ashlee: it might not look like much, but this $35 assembly of electronics is a fully functioning computer. there is an arm chip right here, tons of usb ports, an ethernet port, even an hdmi port. with this teeny little thing, you can do just about anything. released in 2012, the pi has inspired near religious devotion

among geeky hobbyists and inventors. some of them show off their pi creations at things called raspberry jams. i went to see david pride, who has a shrine to the low-cost personal computer at his home in gloucester. what has this little device meant to you? david: it has changed my life. i was very happy, very stable, had a nice, well paid job, but i was very, very bored, and i realized at that point that if i wanted to do something different, this was the opportunity to learn the skills that i had always wanted to learn -- electronics, robotics, coding.

ashlee: his house is littered with pi creations, from motorized cars to robots. >> greetings to everyone watching "hello world." ashlee: [laughter] that is a nice touch. his most famous invention, though, is the fourbot, an ai-infused machine that plays a mean, albeit slow, game of connect four. that is cool. how long did it take you to make this? david: about three months of evenings and weekends. ashlee: now i have to go. david: you make your move. it is now thinking about the move it has taken. ashlee: oh, you bastard. david: you have just lost. ashlee: i feel ashamed. >> [laughter] ashlee: i feel like i should have done more for the humans. ♪ ashlee: to really understand the soul of the raspberry pi, i had to head back to its birth place in cambridge and take a boat trip with eben upton. he is the computer scientist that invented the pi.

around 2007, eben grew alarmed by the declining number of computer science students in england and decided to try and inspire the youngsters with a new approach. eben: i have always assumed cambridge is the best place in the world to study computer science, certainly the best place in the u.k.

and we saw this collapse in the number of people applying to study computer science at the university of cambridge. which is crazy, because the computing industry is blowing up. it is a beautiful environment to come and study in. the theory we came up with was that most of us arriving in the mid-1990's, like i did, had grown up with a cheap, programmable eight-bit micro computers. ashlee: you grew up using the bbc micro. that's what got you -- eben: that's it. i had a bbc micro at school and sat in the corner of the classroom, and those were beautiful machines. ashlee: supported by the u.k. government, the bbc micro gave many students their first taste of coding and the possibility of what computers could do. >> i am just going to scroll up. ashlee: the pi has very much followed in this tradition and emerged as a consumer hit along the way. it is now the third best-selling computer of all time behind the mac and the pc. eben: our lifetime dream volume of 10,000 units, now we are closing in on 10 million. but as that has happened, we just got more ambitious, just got more greedy, i guess, about what we were trying to accomplish. we have gone from can we move the needle on people applying at cambridge to can we do the same for other universities? can we do the same for other countries? can we do the same for other subjects? ashlee: think big, jason statham impersonator, think big. coming up next -- hi, daisy. i interview a baby about the

future of artificial intelligence. >> [baby crying] ♪

ashlee: the intellectual underpinnings of computing began here in cambridge. in 1833, the cambridge-trained

mathematician charles babbage built a prototype of this thing, the difference engine. it can solve equations with the turn of a crank and some gears, and is considered the first mechanical computer. a hundred years later in the 1930's, another cambridge mathematician named alan turing devised the concepts behind the modern-day computer. he proved that a machine can be programmed to calculate just about anything. decades after turing and babbage, cambridge is still at the cutting edge of computing. companies like microsoft place their research centers here to tap into the local academic talent and to explore their most ambitious ideas.

chris bishop runs this lab and oversees research in a number of areas. one of the most compelling and frightening areas is artificial intelligence. chris: this is just an amazingly exciting time in artificial intelligence. more and more tasks are becoming solved in image understanding, in speech recognition, and so on. so while we have got a very long way to go before we get to the full capabilities of the human brain, there is a sense that for some kinds of tasks, sort of the barriers have been removed. ashlee: computer scientists have dreamed of creating a true artificial intelligence for decades. they have been hunting for a machine that can equal or surpass humans. recently, people like bishop

have started to make real headway thanks to an approach called machine learning. chris: if you go back to the time of turing, computing is about logic, it is about determinism, and the code, the instructions on which the computer runs are created by humans. as we're seeing in machine learning, there is something very different. instead of programming the computer to solve the task, you program the computer to learn from experience, and then we train the computer by showing it lots of examples, giving it lots of data. ashlee: ai powers a ton of experiments here, including this computer vision simulation. microsoft's connect sensor used to struggle to make out a hand, and now it can pinpoint the movement of fingers. there is also an ai-powered movie recommendation algorithm for xbox that does a pretty good job at figuring out my eclectic taste in movies. you know, actually, i did like "twister."

chris: ok. think it let's see what happens this time. now we see a big change. ashlee: this lab is not just about entertainment, though. they are actually saving lives with a program that can tell the difference between cancerous brain tissue and healthy tissue in an mri. him and chris: what you see here is a pretty nasty brain tumor, so what the machine learning is doing now is it is labeling it according to whether it is tissue that has already died or it is tissue that is cancerous and proliferating. this is really important because this is used to design treatments. so we will fire in radiation from lots of different directions, and people tune of the amount and direction of the radiation to try to kill as much of the cancer as possible, but to do as little damage to normal tissue as we can. ashlee: down the street from microsoft, there is a startup that already has its ai technology in the wild. it is called audio analytic, and you can think of it as a type of

shazam for real-world sounds. stephen: we use artificial intelligence to allow smarthome devices to recognize a whole range of different sounds that happen inside your houses to make your house more secure by detecting glass windows being broken and then turning on the lights to scare off the burglar, taking active protection on things you care about. ashlee: so what do we have here? what is all this stuff? stephen: so we have got a couple of devices that makes this sounds that this detects. smoke alarm. >> [alarm sounding] stephen: it has detected the i smoke alarm on there. nobody's at home, so now it is sending a message. another sound is glass break. >> [glass breaking] him and ashlee: yeah. stephen: you can see it says, "window broken." ashlee: yeah. what is the science behind all of this? stephen: we had to do a whole

bunch of innovation in terms of understanding sounds, how to a machine understand them. even if we take a simple sound like a smoke alarm, the beep, well, now we have two of them going beep at different times. >> [dog barking] stephen: with a whole bunch of background noise going on. that is a big ai problem to solve. ashlee: computers have to be trained to distinguish one sound from another and to learn the unique signature of say glass breaking. >> [glass breaking] ashlee: of course, no two breaking windows sound exactly alike. >> [glass breaking] ashlee: so these guys get to relieve stress by breaking a lot of glass. >> [glass breaking] ashlee: how many windows have you had to break? stephen: windows -- we have literally filled warehouses for months on end. different sizes, different thicknesses, different types of glass. >> [glass breaking] ashlee: how many smoke alarms? stephen: smoke alarms, we literally bought all the smoke alarms that you can find in the marketplace, and then indexed all of those.

that was a huge undertaking logistically. ashlee: the software can also recognize the sound of a baby crying. hi, daisy. >> [baby crying] ashlee: oh, hi. and, as luck would have it, we found a cute, hungry baby on which to experiment. >> [baby crying] stephen: so you can see on the screen that it is detecting the baby crying. ashlee: audio analytic software already ships inside a number of smarthome products, and the company plans on adding many more sounds. stephen: there we go. ashlee: but for now, it is the perfect technology to discover when an angry baby has thrown a smoke alarm through a window. next stop, i head to london to explore more serious matters, like getting the perfect hairdo. i feel like i am two inches taller now. >> [laughter] ♪

ashlee: i arrived in england at the height of brexit mania. ♪ the tourists were happy because the entire country had gone on sale. some of the locals were morose, and some of them just didn't

care, like the people drinking these $20 cocktails at a fancy hotel bar. nothing says hello to financial ruin like sipping rum from an elephant made of legos or gin from whatever this is. you know who else doesn't care about brexit? people willing to pay $400 for a hairdryer. dyson, as we all know, has perfected suck. now, it is on to blow. meet the supersonic. ♪ ashlee: according to the ample dyson propaganda, this is the smartest hairdryer ever built. it uses an electric digital motor to produce an intense stream of air and then sensors

to make sure that air never gets too hot. as a result, your hair comes out shinier and healthier than ever before. i feel like i am two inches taller now. >> [laughter] ashlee: to see how dyson built this thing, i had to leave london and head to the company's headquarters in the picturesque town of malmesbury. james dyson founded this company in 1991 and has created his very own engineering paradise. >> [horn honking] ashlee: the dyson campus is littered with his toys -- of course you have a plane in the cafeteria -- and made up of a handful of invention factories.

my first stop was with someone who leads a constant battle to come up with ideas for brand-new products and reinvent some old ones. matthew: hairdryers haven't changed in sort of 60 years. if we look at this cutaway here, you see they got a very large motor inside like that. that weight you are holding for 20 minutes, half an hour, while you are drying your hair, and very, very noisy, so we thought it was a good product to get into. ashlee: dyson spent four years and $71 million to bring the supersonic to life, and, as you might expect, they are obsessive-compulsive when it comes to hair. matthew: we felt that we had to learn everything about hair. the science of hair. we had to build our own laboratory to learn about hair

for ourselves, to know what causes damage, causes shine, what makes your hair look lovely. ashlee: hi, matthew. matthew: hi! welcome to lab 61. ashlee: thank you very much. matthew childe is dyson's engineer. he has spent more than a decade developing the core of so many dyson products. the vacuums have big motors, and the hairdryer has this tiny thing, the miniature turbine. matthew: this is more attuned to a jet engine you find on a commercial airline than anything else. ashlee: how fast does it spin around? matthew: 150,000 rpm, so that is about 1800 revolutions every second. ashlee: yeah. that seems almost impossible. matthew: it is possible through very fast electronics and a mechanical system that is able to take the stresses, the strains for hundreds of hours at full speed. ashlee: the electric motor technology will be key to dyson's continued push into new product areas. some people say it is secretly

working on an electric car. what types of things would this be useful in? matthew: at the moment, we have applied it to the hair dryer. we will have to wait to see what comes next. ashlee: i knew you would say that. matthew: i can only say that. ashlee: the drive to invent and salesmanship present dyson is something of an anomaly here. england's beloved cynicism runs counter to the hype-fueled optimism that dominates the tech industry. the brits do a fine job at promoting a pub lunch, but do less well at spurring on entrepreneurs and inventors. it is clear enough, though, that when the english really get stuck into something, they do it well. it is not hyperbole to say that arm's chips have changed the world, or that raspberry pi may well have altered a generation include for the better. and, if you are inclined to try and think big, there remains no

better place to do it than in cambridge, where you can meditate in peace among the cows. >> [cow mooing] ashlee: up next on "hello world," i head to japan and wake from a fever dream to find this, this, and whatever this is. ♪

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♪ >> the thrill of living well is in the pursuit, the pursuit of the rarest experiences, the pursuit of the finest products, the pursuit of quality in everything you do. and in all of these pursuits, you need the best intelligence to make the best decisions. >> we know that she sells for a lot, but what makes her important? >> it isn't easy. it is difficult work. >> welcome to "bloomberg pursuits," where you find information that helps you to follow your inspiration. in this edition, how to make the most of a visit to mumbai.