but you know a lot of times you may have a question that a teacher is better at answering or also keeping you motivated is a big big things i think the combination of the two is most most useful i know that when you were embarking on creating dual language you read a bunch of books on the theory of language acquisition to figure out for example whether the cheek blue rules before adjective so by first and you know ultimately ended up running those tests on your own users i wonder how does the language learning reality differ from the language learning theory it differs a lot with that's one of the things we have found before before i started the lingo i read a lot of books about how to best teach a language and i realised that a lot of them contradict each other usually it's because they're not based on much data they're just based on somebody else one person's method or something so what we did is we launched dueling go and then because we have we have hundreds of millions of students we can watch them learn and and because we can watch them learn we can find better ways to teach that

a lot of times are not what what people are using in classrooms for example when teaching in english a lot of classrooms in many countries in the world teach the pronouns personal pronoun pronouns like he she you they also teach the one that's it that one's much harder for a lot of people so one of the things we started doing with dylan was when we teach the personal pronouns we don't teach that when we teach or much later and that's we we've found the way to do that based on the data for use is we found that it was better to start doing that now one of the major obstacles that people learning a foreign language have is social anxiety is the fear of practicing a foreign language and the fear of looking incompetent i know that you will follow your own very elegant i think i'm very easy simple easy solution for that chad but it's but as easy as it may seem don't you think that those conversational skills come at the expense of social and cultural skills that you also acquire when you learn to like. which from another individual yeah i think learning

a language i think ultimately you learn a language to talk to another individual that's the that's the end goal but one of the things we have found and it's not just us other people have found this. one of the hardest things about learning another language is when you when you practice with another human there's a lot of anxiety in fact the u.s. army you know the u.s. army tries to teach people languages in particular lately they're very interested in teaching people arabic for obvious reasons they used to they used to try to pick some soldiers to teach them arabic and they have found that for some of them it is possible to be to marry very easily whereas for others it was very difficult and they didn't know what the difference was so they developed a test to figure out which ones are better at learning a language and they found before they thought that maybe intelligence had to do with it the biggest factor that had to do whether you're good at learning a language or not is whether you are ok sounding stupid absolutely but when you are

delegating that practicing capacity to chat box that here that executive doesn't disappear in fact it may become even stronger you may be a very comfortable talking to a child yeah so what we have found is that what people do so we develop the chap what for two illegal and the idea is that you get to talk to the computer and not to another human so you don't feel anxious what we have found is that that is a very good thing to do at the beginning and then that gives you enough confidence to go and try to talk to somebody else it's like training wheels with bicycles it's just it just gets you started and we have found that that actually helps later when you go talk to a real human you feel you feel more secure of yourself and what about the cultural aspect of language learning is there any way to incorporate that into your program yeah we're trying to do that we haven't done it as much i mean i think that that's one of the things that where we want dueling go to get better at teaching you the culture of also the countries when you travel i mean there's there's a lot there and the english would be bitching that american culture or the british culture they get to do. we get it we're going to use that would be the idea and

similarly when people are learning spanish there are you know there is like twenty five different countries that speaks spanish you would get to choose and we're starting to do that but we haven't quite done it i mean for example slang terms very very much between different countries and a lot of people really want to learn those so we're going to add that's not really there yet on the lingo but we're going to do that so you know you already mentioned that you think that the best the ways to have you know the best of the two worlds to come by teachers and the application in yourself benefited from having great teachers in life. change your ph d. under the guidance of professor manual glow who later became you know co-founder or co-invented could invent a brother so i just wonder from your own personal experience which learning tasks you think about it delegated to algorithms and which still required the meeting of minds the human to human interaction yeah that's a great question i don't know the full answer to that i do know that computers are really good i'm giving you repetition so whenever you need to learn something by

repetition computers are very good because they don't get bored whereas the teacher may get bored. computers are also really good when one to one interaction is required because if a computer can do that to yourself where is the teacher usually has to teach many people at the same time what i think computers are not yet good act is keeping you motivated it's amazing how motivating another humanness just the presence of another human gets you to do all kinds of things so that's one thing that i think computers are not you're good at and the other thing is answering general questions so if you know that the computer may be teaching me but if i am confused and i just have a general question that that does not fit what the computer is trying to teach me about it's stuck where as a teacher you know and can actually answer that now speaking about professor blum the product of your collaboration with here was capture and recapture applications which you sold to google a few years ago and to a rookie like myself like very very simple need. ideas that one has to wonder why

did it take so long to develop them a why they cost google so much money what was the hardest thing to figure out about that yes so the captures of if you haven't seen this is this distorted characters that you have to type whenever you're trying to get out an e-mail account or something in retrospect that seems like i don't know grain or like a no brainer and the idea by the way the reason that's there is to make sure that a computer is not getting the account that it's a human that is actually getting that and not on a computer it seems like a no brainer but you know nobody had thought of it and it took us months to think things over it and a lot of times some of the best ideas seemed like a no brainer i don't know what the hardest the hardest part was really coming up with with a task that was easy for humans but hard for computers. and it well and also that it was easy for computers to grade so the computer needs to be able to know whether you enter the right answer but i don't exactly should not be able to answer it itself now one word that often pops up in your speeches is the war and.

efficiency and i think what you mean by fission sees essential deriving value from things that we didn't think have value before for example like you know the time you spend typing that rick up towards and i'm sure many people would be interested in how you train yourself to spot those up the changes do you start with looking for that wasted energy or do you start with a project where that way so that as you could be applied i start with a wasted energy so i start with things that people are anyways doing so in the case of a capture it started out as a security mechanism where people had to type things and then surely we realized that a lot of hours were being wasted with that if you if you think about it it's about two hundred million times a day somebody types one of these guys just and each one tastes about ten seconds and if you multiply two hundred million by ten seconds humanity as a whole is way wasting five hundred thousand hours every day typing. so that all that time the. first step was ok there's

a lot of time there how can we use it. that's when i came up with the idea that you could be using that type of help a time to help digitize books. so this is this is the recapture project and that was what google bought the idea that books are being digitized in order to digitize a book first you take a photograph of every page then on the computer he says the cipher all of the words and then the unfortunately it cannot read all of the words but the words that i don't read where you're using human started typing and after the help was read those words and i think that's a very ironic to some extend idea because you are using value added coude sourcing to fide against another form of malevolent crowdsourcing which spanned really is and maybe that's again another roky question but do you think crowdsourcing is a technology is it more of a minimal to positive pro-social applications or is it more likely to be or has more opportunities to be used in negative ways i mean everything knowledge you can

be use also they're not going to leave the pen's on what you use it for but i would say most of the applications that i have seen of crowd sourcing have been very positive i mean you can think of wikipedia as a crowdsourcing effort there have been a lot of applications about trying to find missing people or and there is a recapture of helping to digitize books i think most of the things have been pretty positive but life with everything i think it can be used for negatively but now both capture recapture and i think initially do a lingle was based on the new economic model it's essentially a swap model which limits or eliminate the need for money as a transaction facilitator at least for the for the users of the platform not speaking about the inventor of the of the platform is that how sustainable is that do you think that. has any potential as far as e-commerce is concerned is it possible to eliminate money altogether as some people in this country once health i

i don't know i don't think it's actually possible to eliminate money altogether but definitely on the internet you're seeing i mean this is not a new thing for the last five to ten years we have seen a lot of examples of people basically trading non-monetary value i mean a search engine like google for example gives you the entire thing for free and what you're exchanging is you're exchanging the data that you're giving them and also every now and then you click on an ad. so there's definitely a lot of non-monetary exchanges in the internet a lot of the economy of the internet is non-monetary exchanges ok well we have to take a very short break now but they will be back in just a few moments they can't. this

is an amazing story because there were say real geo political impact of that going on a g. twenty country g seven countries japan actually the spending power they called it the rise a big point in the millions of people who are buying it in japan the multi billion dollars that they've appreciated in value is causing a genuine effect in their economy and this is going to be the year twenty eighteen where are they going to keep their currencies have this geo political influence. i had a great education a good job and a family that lope me. i'd never have to worry about how i would be where i would sleep. but i'm facing christmas alone on the streets of london. well you know. i clipped the bully like you go to school you know too silly to still give a brief for the kids.

you don't really feel like you could be that. and then. the guy just came over to be soon be in charge of this book. he. told them back to worlds apart thread louise on on the c.e.o. and founder of dual lingo. the ultimate for form of crowdsourcing is democratic governance at least in theory and i think there are major issues in both developed

and developing countries with how power and governance are practiced and applied do you think technology can or will ever change the way our societies are not only organized by how they are governed. i think it will is very hard to say exactly how that'll happen but i think it will and i think it's starting to happen we're starting to see i mean we're starting to see a lot of the very nascent efforts but we're starting to see people for example there are programs where people can report. problems in their neighborhood all with with computers and eventually they get to the government so we're starting to see some of that. i don't know what the ultimate thing is but i'm sure if acknowledge i mean technology is already part of most of the things in the world i'm pretty sure it'll it'll get to the governments i don't know if you would agree with me but i think at the root of bad governance is actually institutionalized inefficiency because there are many powerful corporate actors around the world who have a personal interest in keeping the system inefficient and they essentially it's

a tissue allies those inefficiencies. if you were asked to approach that algorithmically what would you start that's a great question i mean i am i myself was born in a country that has a very very terrible government i'm from guatemala the government in one of my lists entirely incompetent i would say in a country like one of my probably would start by starting from scratch just started the government again from scratch but when he tried to start from scratch you still have to start somewhere you know it's like starting a company a lot of times i think it you start with. you start with the main services that you want to provide in the case of a government i don't know them and services are probably health and education and you start with those and you get really good at that and then grow from there are you also pro need a really good tax collection service as you need to monetize you know as i was preparing for this interview i came across a very interesting poll about people's attitudes towards replacing judges with computerese to minimize corruption and the influence of bias and it turns out that the stronger the country support system is the lower is the percentage of people

who are in favor of that in russia or i see why the malo the majority of people would rather be judged by computer is than judges and again the question is technological not political gain a thing you can ride an algorithm for something like the application of law i think so yeah that's already it's already the case that there are computer programs that are giving advice in many legal issues better than lawyers i mean that's already happening this is not for all things but there are many cases where there are for example i.b.m. watson is being used to give legal advice then i saw a study that was starting to become more more accurate than legal and human lawyers advice for certain types of law so over time i think that i think that will happen over time well i think it all boils down to the same question your had to face bit captioned recapture whether some tasks. how to do what have to be completed by by

the humans or better to be delegated to the computers and when it comes to the society can you really ride an algorithm pull power of government because philosophically i think that's. very interesting i think yes i think i mean i i think it's only a matter of time i don't know how long but i think it's only a matter of time that computers will be able to do everything that humans can now speaking about russia i mentioned before and i know that your community here has roughly six million years or so which frankly speaking is not that much but i heard that russia was the first country within the dual lingle family to deliberate a community generated language course that's how did it come about when we started doing ghost the courses that we had we talked spanish and we talked german those were generated by us inside that building a company. but at some point because we got we got asked for so many different languages we decided that it was better to allow different communities around the world to create courses the first one was in fact the course to learn english for

russian speakers and that was generated entirely by community members the way that came about i mean the we left when we opened up this program called the dual lingual language incubator which is where the new courses are created the russian the russian team was the first to apply. organized team war just the community of users there they they are now an organized team but they didn't know each other they had different people applied and now the you know now they know each other and there's a clear there's a clear leader of the team and they are organized so initially it was a grassroots operation initially it was aggressive operation of people who applied who didn't even know each other they apply to us and we say we found about five different ones that were some of them lived in russia some of them lived in the united states but they were native russian speakers. and we put them together as a team and they have worked very well together well it's interesting you say that because in this kind. we often lament the bill lack of sort of citizens' activity

and the passivity on the part of the fraggle are what it is but it seems to me that what you're saying is that there is some extra exceptions to that yeah yeah and we're very happy when the russian team has still to this day this was about four years ago that they created the course still to this day they're working on improving it so they lasted a long time now i know that the one you just launched lingo you relied on the crowdsourcing to source translations for various google pages and or other websites and i know that the international association of professional translators and interpreters was very unhappy with that kind of efforts because they they were afraid. to lose their own livelihoods do you have any sympathy for their argument because i know you stop sourcing the translations but do you think something like this will replace that professions yeah i mean i there are many tasks that there's a spectrum of tasks that are about how hard they are you know to do by computers

some are already entirely done by computers they weren't done before for example i don't know one hundred years ago the first computers were actually. people who were hired to do you know additions or multiplication and they did that i mean there's a whole story about how you know the space agencies had entire rooms full of people doing the dishes and multiplications that's gone that is now done entirely by computers unfortunately i think translation is not yet there but it is one of the easier things to do by computers that will be gone in the next in the next twenty years most translators will probably be out of a job i mean i'm sorry for them but this will just happen this is inevitable i just want out of curiosity why did you then have to drop the service so we did not drop it because of their arguments we dropped it because for us we were when we when we started doing well the main thing we wanted to do was to language. the translation

was a side business to try to monetize the teaching of the language one of the two language for free and we the idea was that if people were learning a language some of them would be doing translation for us. at some point we realized that this is a lot because that's where the money came in a lot of our effort was being spent on translation and we didn't want to do that we actually wanted to teach so we stopped doing that and we decided to come up with other business models that were more related to teaching rather than translation that's interesting now another profession that feels the pressure from tech interpreters like yourself is that oh the driver i know that you used to be driving and perhaps still driving a tesla. how far do you think we from cell driving. cars very close i mean i think the thing that will take the longest is probably adoption you know people have to buy their cars get rid of the old one so there's a whole cycle of that which may take ten to fifteen years but the technology is very very close so i think that will happen now tesla c.e.o.

elon musk recent they generated a lot of publicity it with his warnings about artificial intelligence a lot of c.e.o.'s weighed in on that i also want to ask you whether you consider his warnings perhaps a form of alarmist marketing or did indeed share his concerns i think there are a number of concerns i mean i think you may be a little a little alarmist but i there are a number of things i mean one of the biggest ones is over time more and more people are going to be left without a job and that's a big problem in a lot of our society they get meaning out of life from their job that's not going to happen anymore you know in the future and we need to figure out as a society how should we deal with that and i am you know i'm not too concerned about countries say like the united states because a lot of the artificial intelligence produced there so they're deriving value i mean for example a company like google or a company like facebook is they're writing a lot of value for this which if they pay taxes to the government the government is going to have enough money to you know pay to everybody but poorer countries where

they're not developing this technology they're going to be in trouble because a lot of times the economies for example an economy like my country were demolished . our economy is based on cheap labor that's what our economy is based on and if cheap labor starts going away and we are also not deriving any value out of artificial intelligence there's going to be a major problem so i do think i do think we need to think about that another concern i heard many analyst was with regards start to officially intelligence is that. in a way it would be similar to. i government structural or some sort of a social order because sooner or later you will have to make ethical decisions about how to prioritize human lives and again is that the kind of for example if you're using a driverless car that gets into an accident you have to prioritize let's say the life of what driver or the life over the lives of the pedestrians is that another

capture moment is that something that a computer can deliver a judgment on or is that something to be left to the to the society an individual decision making i think it's going to be done by computers and i'm glad that it's going to be done by computers because a lot of times. a lot of these decisions when they're done by humans they're not fully thought out i mean a lot of times when you are driving as a human and you're faced with one of these decisions you usually do not have the time to think about all the implications yet in fact that there are lots of studies which show that people tend to prioritize that whole lives over the lives of even passengers will in most of the accidents people tend to go to the right side reaching dangerous the passenger gets priority to the driver so right i'm not just i mean a lot of times they just you know a lot of these this is i just think are not well thought out whereas i think if we were to put this in an algorithm at least we would be able to a society come together and say ok in this case what is the best thing that could

happen but then the other is it fair to prioritize a society over an individual can consumer in such a way because when you buy something of value you buy it for yourself it's well that's that's exactly i think the question that we're going to have to deal with i mean what is that what is the right priority but what i'm saying is a good thing is that. we'll be able to make that decision as opposed to now where you know the decisions just be made in this in a in a half a second at least if we put it into an algorithm we will come together and come up with a good answer for everything i mean it may not be there may not be a perfect answer but there will it will be one that we at least them a credit to agree on. now your answer is somewhat similar to the wand that was given by mark zuckerberg facebook c.e.o. who also suggested the theories of artificial intelligence was maybe a little bit exaggerated but he was immediately accused of not being able to come up with an algorithm that would. be growth of the so-called fake news and i want to

ask you the last algorithmic question of whether you believe it's possible to develop such an algorithm and how would you define fake use in terms of you know writing a program to eliminate them b yeah that's very hard to that's a very hard question because. i mean if i knew the answer i would have done it already have you looked into it have you thought about i have not thought much about it i mean i i thought about it as much as a lot of kind of computer scientists have thought about it but not not specifically why would it be so difficult because it seems the fake news is a very commonly used term especially in the american the environment why is it so difficult to come up with a definition a technical definition for it well i mean maybe a definition is just news that is not true but the problem is truth is very hard to define. why so i mean even you know defining it as one thing finding it is just very hard i mean i can just say anything i want because i have a lot of followers on facebook some people will believe it we are we are currently

having that problem with the president of the united states who just this it seems whatever he wants and some people believe it and it's hard you know are you claiming that the new york times is failing if you look at the actual graph of the new york times revenue is in fact going up but as a good fraction of the population believes the new york times is failing just because he says that it's very hard this is it's very hard to change your feel for mr zuckerberg after i do i don't know how to how to you know i don't know how to fix it well anyway we have to live in there really really appreciate your time with us please share your comments on our twitter facebook and youtube page just i hope to see you again same place same time. well the part.

in the heart of the swiss alps is a place probably more secretive than the pentagon more mysterious than the cia and better guarded than for knox customs are here permanently all the science is controlled by them and they impose the openings on the opposite it is from is all plus the procedures in place of the strictest in all europe must to pieces by artists like pecan so and modigliani i can't boards unsold inside this warehouse that's where the report comes in it covers up deals which are naturally discreet commercially discreet step but also discreet because they concern fraud. some of those paintings are linked to dog secrets nobody knows how many of these secrets kept inside the geneva freeport system you'll never obtain an inventory of all the

works in the freeport who knows how many there are three hundred three thousand three hundred thousand is it a matter of confidentiality only is it the world's black box of the art business. in two thousand and sixteen the panama papers shocked the world with the tax haven secrets two trillion united states dollars pass through most. in the amount of time that we've been in the panama papers exposure that's what it shows a lot of money it really is. journalism it's a fact of journalism looking at things that people want to keep secret and asking why would they want to keep these things secret. millions of. documents were examined. the only people we basically have tried to get an advantage out of this sort of newspaper. and probably other

politician which were. other politicians the media were quick to find targets such as the kings of morocco and saudi arabia the president of argentina several prime ministers. and russian president vladimir putin of course. oh my god i've had so i have sued so many newspapers for defamation some things don't just happen by chance it was very striking there were no one american special. walks off people from the brics countries specially brazil russia and china that their special project reveals what was missed in the media coverage. the panama chronicles. the.

like them of this isn't. easy. will you. be u.s. army wants to help us that wants to help develop software that can read both foreign social media accounts and even responds to the. wiki leaks chief julian a star has been issued an ecuadorian i.d. cards but the country's push to resolve his long term case is being met with resistance from the u.k. government. a new u.n. report says iraqi refugees are being forced to return home by the country's security forces.