Instant Genius - How AI is going to transform the classroom

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

The Royal Institution has been putting on the science spectacles for children known as the Christmas Lectures almost every year since 1825. For 200 years, the shows have inspired young science lovers ...in subjects sweeping from chemistry and astronomy through to psychology and climate change. This year, they turn to artificial intelligence. Delivering the 2023 Christmas Lecture is Mike Wooldridge, professor of computer science at the University of Oxford. In this episode, Mike gives us a sneak peak at his take on the lecture’s iconic use of props – plus an insight into how he thinks AI is going to change the world for children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:02:21 known as the Christmas lectures, almost every year since 1825. For 200 years, the shows have inspired young science lovers in subjects sweeping from chemistry and astronomy right through to psychology and technology. climate change. This year, they turn to artificial intelligence. Delivering the 23 Christmas lecture is Mike Wildridge, a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford. In this episode, Mike gives us a sneak peek at his take on the lecture's iconic use of props, plus an insight into how he thinks AI is going to shape the world for children. Mike, we're coming to the end of a year in which AI has probably been one of the main topics of conversation and households.
Starting point is 00:03:06 across the world. Why, given its long history before now, has AI been this year's buzzword? So I've worked in artificial intelligence for a long time since 1989. I got my undergraduate degree in computer science, and I went straight into studying for a PhD and advanced degree in artificial intelligence, and that was 1989. And for most of the time since then, it's been a very quiet life. Progress in AI was really quite slow. Actually, it was very, very slow. And so an AI was a little bit of a scientific backwater. Not many people were really working in it. It wasn't very fashionable.
Starting point is 00:03:42 So it was a rather quiet existence. But what's happened over the last roughly 10 years is there's been rapid progress in AI. And this is why we hear about AI so much in the press and on social media and so on, because there's been progress in AI. So why has there been progress in AI? Well, we've already heard that to build AI systems, You use these neural networks and you train those neural networks with data.
Starting point is 00:04:10 Well, what's happened in the last 10 years is we've entered the age of big data. Data is abundant. Every time you upload a picture of yourself to social media, you are providing training data for the AI algorithms of Silicon Valley companies. So there's lots of data now in the world, abundant data. And also, the other ingredient that was really needed was computer power. The computer power that you need to be able to configure these neural networks is now very abundant and very cheap as well.
Starting point is 00:04:41 So that's what happened about 10 years ago that really kickstarted AI. It was abundant data and very, very cheap computer power and those were the key ingredients that you needed to build neural networks. But then the unexpected thing, the really unexpected thing, is over the last 18 months. And what's happened over the last 18 months is a program. that I'm sure many of your listeners will have played with, chat GPT. And chat GPT is a type of AI program that we didn't expect a lot of progress in for some time. So they spent 10 times more than people were expecting in order to build that model. And it turned out to be very, very good.
Starting point is 00:05:23 And we were very surprised when we saw it at just how good it was. And that, of course, went viral. It attracted 100 million users within just a few weeks, the most rapidly adopted online tool in history. And that's why this year in particular, there's been such a frenzy around AI. So, Mike, are you using chat GPT at work or even to help you plan a holiday or write a shopping list? Do you use chat GPT? I use it, but I use it mainly for research at the moment. And one of the things that we, that is really interesting is that one of the old ideas, for example, in artificial intelligence is the idea of what's called the Turing Test. So in the Christmas lectures, we're going to play a live Turing test and see what happens.
Starting point is 00:06:08 And I don't know what the answer is. I don't know how it's going to come out, but we're going to play a Turing test. So what is the Turing test? So this goes back to Alan Shuring, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, a British scientist, died tragically young in the 1950s. But in 1950, he came up with the following idea. He wanted to answer the question, can machines be intelligent? And more specifically, can machines understand?
Starting point is 00:06:31 in the same way that people do. So he invented a test that we now call the Turing test in his honor. And this is how it works. You have a judge, a human judge, who's interacting with something, just typing on a keyboard, a computer keyboard, and getting answers via a screen, a computer screen, an ordinary computer keyboard, an ordinary computer screen. And the judge is talking to something via the keyboard on the screen,
Starting point is 00:06:56 but the judge doesn't know whether it's a person or a computer. So it could be either of those two things on the other end. And the judge can type anything they want. They can ask it what it had for breakfast in the morning. They can ask it which football team it supports. They can ask it where it lives. They can ask it what was the last movie it saw and so on. They can ask anything they want and they just get the answers shown to them on the screen.
Starting point is 00:07:20 Now what Turing said is suppose that after, let's say, 15 minutes, The judge can't tell the difference between the thing that they're interacting with and a human being. That is they can't reliably distinguish this thing from a human being. In that case, we say this thing passes the Turing test, and it's doing something that we can't tell the difference from human intelligence. We can't distinguish that from human intelligence. So Turing said in that case, just accept that this thing is behaving in a way that's indistinguishable from human intelligence. So until very recently, and just until the last couple of years, we did not have computer programs that looked like they could realistically pass the Turing test.
Starting point is 00:08:08 It just didn't look like a reasonable question at all. And then all of a sudden, just in the last couple of years, we've got programs that look like they could plausibly pass the Turing test and many other tests for intelligence as well. And so as an AI researcher who's been working in this field for so long to suddenly have that opportunity that now I can actually experiment on this thing. I can do the Turing test and many, many other tests for intelligence as well. That's just enormously exciting. So that's what my research group, for example, at the moment, are busy looking at. They're experimenting. They're using CHAPGPT, not to ask it for shopping lists or to draft essays or anything like that,
Starting point is 00:08:48 but actually we're doing the science of trying to understand what this AI is really capable of. So how did it feel to be selected as the speaker for this year's Christmas lecture, given the prestige and the legacy of the role at the Royal Institution? Yeah, I was stunned, flabbergasted. Have they contacted the wrong person? These were all feeling that I had. I can remember watching them. It was one of the treats over the Christmas period for me.
Starting point is 00:09:13 I was a very, I was really into science as a young kid. And I can remember watching them in the 1970s. I can remember watching Carl Sagan, which would have been, I think, something like, 1970s. 78, who is an astrophysicist, who was talking about the planets, and being absolutely entranced by Sagan's lectures. And then more recently, you know, we've had David Attenborough, I give the lectures, David Attenborough, you know. And to be following in those kind of footsteps, and if you go back a century or so, you know, they were the great names in science. So following in their footsteps is really quite something.
Starting point is 00:09:48 But more than that, so many British computer scientists, so many British scientists, so many British scientists, I should say, that I know had the same feelings about the lectures as me. This is how they got exposed to science. And this was one of the things that kindled their interest in science. And so to be part of that is just astonishing. But also, this is the longest established science lecture series in the world. You know, this goes back 199 years. I go back to 1824. You know, Queen Victoria wasn't even on the throne in 1824. You know, that's how long ago it was. It was before Queen Victoria. So to be part of that legacy is amazing.
Starting point is 00:10:29 It is also, I have to say, rather daunting. I really hope I don't mess it up. But I've got a great team at the Royal Institutioner who are helping me put them together. So I think we're going to get some great lectures. The Christmas lectures are famous for using props to demonstrate scientific concepts. And perhaps many of our listeners
Starting point is 00:10:46 will have seen some of their favourites in the past. And these are particularly exciting for kids. So you mentioned you'll be doing a live cheering test. Could you tell us about some of the other props that you're going to use in the talk to engage your young audience on the topic of AI? Well, the first thing they told me when I met the team from the Royal Institution is it is a tradition in the Christmas lectures that you have to have an explosion and you have to have a dog.
Starting point is 00:11:10 Ideally, at different times in the lectures, you don't want an exploding dog, obviously. So there will be an explosion and there will be a dog. I'm not saying any more than that, but they will appear in the lectures. We're going to see demos, which will show us, I've already talked about neural networks, we will see some demos of how individual neurons actually work, and then how collections of neurons come together to be able to do things like recognize faces. So we will see some demos of those kind of things. We're going to see lots of demos of how AI works in games.
Starting point is 00:11:45 Obviously, for this audience, playing games on computers is a lot of what they're going to be doing in their leisure time, and they may not realize that there's a lot of AI behind the scenes in computer games. So we're going to see right from some of the world's cutting-edge teams developing AI for computer games. And I'm hoping that we're going to get some kids out of the audience who are going to get to play with some AI computer games, and they're going to get advanced access to the most sophisticated AI computer game technology in the world. You lucky kids. So these are some of the demos. We're going to see lots and lots of demos like that. I say the aim is to demystify all of this.
Starting point is 00:12:22 So we'll also play some games that explain how chat GPT works. And after we've played those games, not only will you understand how chat GPT works, but actually you'll look at it in a different way and you'll realize that actually it's a really, really good AI system and it's really useful, but you're not talking with a mind when you talk with chat GPT. You're not talking with a person. So demystifying it is going to be showing people what's going on. under the hood of these AI programs. And I say I hope to really demonstrate that there's nothing
Starting point is 00:12:56 to be afraid of with this technology. It's really just a tool. And that's what the demos are going to show us. They're going to show us how AI actually works. This age group, the 11 to 17 year olds that you'll be speaking to, are growing up in a different world from the world which any of us who are older than that age group have grown up in. So how do you think that these children's relationships with AI are kind of forming in the first place and how that these relationships will change over the coming years. So I think the opportunity to give the lectures this year is incredibly important because these kids are going to be the generation, which for the first time grows up with AI as part of their environment. And there is this expression to describe what are
Starting point is 00:13:42 called digital immigrants and digital natives. So I'm 57. I didn't get access to to the internet until I was in my 20s, well in my 20s, and it was just a university. Universities only were the first people to have access to the internet. And the World Wide Web didn't happen until I was nearly 30 years old. So I didn't grow up with the Internet and the World Wide Web. So I'm a digital immigrant. I moved into this area later in life. I discovered it.
Starting point is 00:14:09 I encountered it later in life. My kids, I have two kids, have just grown up, not just with the Internet, but they've grown up accustomed to absolutely. ubiquitous internet access. They just assume that they can use the internet wherever they are any time of day or night. And in particular, at home, there's always fast Wi-Fi available for them to be able to stream YouTube or play games with their friends and so on. So the point is, they've grown up with the internet. So they are digital natives. They grew up in the digital world. So the generation that we're going to be talking to in the Christmas lectures are AI natives.
Starting point is 00:14:47 It's the first generation that's going to grow up with tools like chat GPT that are just there around them all the time. And they are going to think of weird and wacky and wonderful ways to use this technology that us old fuddy-duddies can't even begin to imagine now. They're going to do amazing things with this technology. And all I can hope to do is prepare them for that so that they go in to when they encounter AI, that they go in with their eyes open, that they understand the nature of the technology that they're dealing with, that I get them excited about the possibilities as well as aware
Starting point is 00:15:26 of what the risks are. But I say, this is the first generation that are going to be AI natives. They're going to grow up with this technology. And they're going to do amazing things with it. Should we be preparing them for future careers that we don't know exist? Should we be working it enter the curriculum and training them to write prompts? I think training to write prompts is something which is quite big now, but I'm not sure it's going to last very much longer because the technology is going to be better and you're not going to need special training to be able to convince CHAP GPT to do something for you. But there are going to be opportunities. So let me give you an example. So when YouTube was invented when it first came online in around about 2005, nobody predicted
Starting point is 00:16:13 that YouTube would be used in that way. Nobody predicted YouTube influences. Nobody predicted that people would make a living by just talking over playing a game. Nobody predicted that YouTuber was going to be a living at all. But this technology, YouTube made that possible. And it made all of those industries possible. And there are a whole bunch of industries now connected around YouTube and preparing videos for YouTube. And the fact that we all, I'm sitting in front of a fancy microphone here and my kids have fancy microphones at home because of the need to be able to high-quality audio technology
Starting point is 00:16:54 for preparing YouTube videos and the like, didn't predict any of that was going to be necessary. Now, AI is going to be exactly the same. People are going to use it for things that we can't predict. They're going to use it in ways that we can't. imagine. And just as we've seen the arise of YouTubers and the like and YouTube influencers, we're going to see exactly the same kind of things in AI that we just have no idea about right now. Now, what are they going to be? I don't know, but they're going to be there.
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Starting point is 00:19:14 an unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. What are some of your speculations? Are you having kind of wild ideas, you and your colleagues, about what there could be, or is it really just a question of waiting to see? If I knew exactly what they were going to be,
Starting point is 00:19:39 that I wouldn't be talking to you now, I'd be going and form a Silicon Valley company to build it. But we have some ideas. So, for example, virtual reality, so some of your listeners may have virtual reality headsets already. There's an Oculus. Oculus are probably the best known brand, but there are others. And Apple are releasing some what they call augmented reality technology quite soon. So the technology is being kind of there for a while, but nobody's perfected it and no company has perfected it. And it's never really massively taken off. But I think at some point, virtual reality technology will take off. And the kind of thing that AI is going to do is you're going to be able to go into your virtual reality headset and you're going to be
Starting point is 00:20:23 able to say, okay, give me a mashup of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. And generative AI will generate for you stories, videos, immersive virtual reality worlds that are a mashup of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Now, just like the YouTube videos that I think just look immensely boring, they may not be Hollywood standard, but they're going to be incredibly diverting. If you can create something which is just tailored to your taste, to the thing that you are most interested in, then that may be just perfect for you. So that's kind of where the technology is going to be going. And in particular, the AI terminology that's used is what's called multimodal. So chat GPT just works with text, ordinary written text. You type questions for it in ordinary English.
Starting point is 00:21:16 GPT4, a follow-on system, can deal with images and text. Where it's going to go is producing videos and be able to analyze videos so you can upload a video to some future generation GPT and ask it questions about what happens in the video or it can provide a description of what goes on in the video for you. So that idea of endless diversion might actually be quite worrying to some parents who already don't enjoy their children watching these, as you call them, boring kind of game watching videos. But there's also the worry about the use of chat GPT in kind of homework and creative tasks that kind of take away some of the creativity, arguably, and then later, in a later stage of life for kind of university essays and then possibly even in work.
Starting point is 00:22:05 Is there something that worries you? And what? would be your advice to these parents to kind of alleviate their fears? Well, I think fears about technology and new things being very scary and being a threat to civilization and nothing new. And people genuinely thought that Elvis was the end of civilization. And they thought the same thing about the Beatles, about the Beatles, for goodness sake, in the 1960s. And, you know, they thought when I was a 10-year-old, they thought the same thing about punk rock music. They thought the same thing about rave music, when rave music. People thought the same thing about television, the goggle box, that it was it was dumbing down society. And it didn't. And, you know, people still form
Starting point is 00:22:48 ordinary human relationships. You know, my kids that spend, in my view, far too long watching these videos, they go out with their friends and they go for walks with their friends and they take the dog for a walk and they go for walks in the woods and they enjoy going to parties. And so I don't, in exactly the same way, I think those fears about, you know, what AI might do to youth, I think are a little bit overblown. I think I'd be surprised. And all the evidence is, and there are countless historical examples, some of which I've given, but there are many more.
Starting point is 00:23:21 It might frighten the parents, but actually, that's what the kids want to do, is to frighten the parents. That's the purpose of this new stuff from a point of view of a kid is to freak your parents out. Turning to education, so there are concerns about, for example, I mean, basically, the summary concern is that kids, you know, they get set a homework essay about the origins of the French Revolution and they just go to CHAPGT and say, write me a 2,000 word essay about the origins of the French Revolution. And by the way, chat GPT has read in its training data, there has been so much information
Starting point is 00:23:55 about the French Revolution that it probably does quite a good job with something like that. It will give you a bland and generic, but nevertheless perfectly competent, I suspect, essay on that. So that's the headline concern that parents have, that educators have. So the first thing to say is, I can remember again from the 1970s when pocket calculators became widely available and people had exactly the same fears that kids would just not learn how to do mathematics or arithmetic a bit more precisely that they would just go home and do all their homework on the calculator. But mathematics didn't collapse. You know, it wasn't the end of mathematical civilization. Pocket calculators. What pocket calculators did for us is they just relieved us of a very tedious burden.
Starting point is 00:24:42 Most people don't find it easy to do arithmetic and they make lots of mistakes. And pocket calculators just enable them to do that stuff that they don't greatly enjoy doing much more quickly and much more reliably. Now, my guess is that basically in the long run, that's exactly what will happen with AI technology. It will just be another tool in the same way that pocket calculates. are tools. So let's turn to the teachers there. How could AI help teachers? You mentioned already that in your Christmas lecture, you'll be using educational videos to explain AI using AI. So could AI be
Starting point is 00:25:20 used as an educational tool or even helping teachers with marking? I'd be nervous right now about using it for marking. I think that would be, I think right now that would be a misuse of the technology and it would be a misuse because powerful as this technology is, it gets things wrong a lot. Could it ultimately be helpful in marking? I think yes, it could do ultimately, but I think human judgment is very, very important for marking. And I don't see AI markers replacing teachers anytime soon. But it is a powerful tool, and I think it will have its place in the classroom. And for example, certainly for university level students, I mean, I think one view that many of my colleagues is, look, we need to acknowledge that the students are going to use this technology. So let's let them do that. But with one golden rule, and the golden rule is that the students have to be clear. They have to be transparent with us about how they used it. And they should never, ever, ever pass off something that was created by AI as their own work.
Starting point is 00:26:27 How will that be monitored and tracked to make sure that that's not happening as kind of plagiarism? This is where we require teachers and educators to be alert to the fact that their kids have access to it. So this is where we require teachers to be able to relate to their kids and to understand their kids and to spot when something doesn't look right and to be able to question kids. Okay, talk me through this part in your essay when you're arguing that inequality was one of the main parts of one of the main causes of the French Revolution, that what we call a Viva Votchi exam, which just means an oral exam, is going to become important again, questioning kids about that. But in nearly 200 years, I don't think education has changed that much. Fundamentally, in terms of the role of a teacher and what they do, understanding their kids and guiding them through the learning process. And I do not see AI replacing that, but it will be another power. tool. I'm sure a lot of existing and potential teachers will actually be possibly disappointed to hear that the one part that they might want to be taken away, the marking part will still be there.
Starting point is 00:27:38 Let's pick up on how it could be used as a powerful tool, fun uses of AI in the classroom from games to, I don't know, kind of educational films. Is that already in development? Do you see that becoming a big focus? Yes, absolutely. But with some big caveats, which is that I say the technology at the moment is has to be used with a great deal of caution. But there are some ways, for example, that I think some very harmless ways in which the technology could be used now that could be really useful. One of the unexpected benefits of tools like chat GPT is that they're really good for what's called brainstorming. So what brainstorming is, is when you need to generate lots of ideas about how to deal with the topic. So how might a teacher use it? You might say, I'm teaching the French
Starting point is 00:28:25 revolution and I want to be able to teach the French Revolution in a way which is different and exciting for my children. Can you suggest some ways in which I can do that? And the technology can produce those ways and it can give you just more and more ideas. And some of them will be junk. Some of them will be meaningless. But the point is to prime the teacher and give them ideas about how to present things in new and interesting ways. The technology, feels like a kind of encyclopedia at the moment. That is, you can go on to chat GPT and you can ask it about quantum mechanics, or you can ask it about the French Revolution, or you can ask it in any other subjects.
Starting point is 00:29:07 And it comes back with very detailed answers. The dream of AI in education is that what we end up with is AI tutors. That is, that you end up with something like chat GPT that takes the role of a teacher. Now, I say, I don't see, I think teachers are. safe in their jobs for the foreseeable future. We've seen endless new technology in teaching, but I say fundamentally, teaching is a very, very similar thing now to what it was, you know, 200 years ago and further back. So I don't see it replacing teachers anytime soon. You mentioned there about children needing to be aware of the fact it gets things wrong. And one
Starting point is 00:29:49 thing that we've seen a fair amount of this year is deepfakes. So I was wondering what you think about the role of these in children's understandings of the world, kind of growing up in a world where you possibly can't trust anything, at least not anything online. So are you worried about this again? Or do you think that they will adjust more easily than we worry that they will to this? No, I do worry about. Actually, this is one of the big worries that I have about AI generally. I don't worry about chat GPT crawling out of the computer and taking over the world. I mean, some people have concerns like that. That doesn't worry me.
Starting point is 00:30:26 And actually, in the Christmas lectures, when you see how the technology works, then you won't be worried about that either. But AI can produce deep fakes and deep fakes pictures or videos which look completely realistic, but which are just completely created by the computer. We're going to need to develop new skills to be able to spot that and deal with it. So do you think we should be forming emotional relationships with AI or see them more as a pocket calculator or Excel spreadsheet? This is a difficult one and there are two views.
Starting point is 00:30:59 And I think there is a gut reaction to this idea which goes as follows that there is something demeaning about the idea of a human being that doesn't have relationships with other human beings but forms its chief relationship with something which is not a mind, which is not understanding, which can't empathise. So you can have a conversation with, chat GPT and you can tell it that you're miserable and it might sympathize with you in the sense of comes back. I'm sorry to hear that. That's really sad. But it has no sense whatsoever of what
Starting point is 00:31:31 that means. Another human being can not just sympathize with you in the sense of saying, oh, I'm really sorry to hear that, but can empathize, can feel your pain. And that's the crux of human relationships. So there is one view that forming relationships with a computer in that way is kind of demeaning because it's entirely one-sided. You're the only thing that's feeling anything. But the other view is as follows. And I'll use the example of elderly people. So elderly people who may be in firm, who are not mobile, who aren't able to get out into the world, maybe in care homes, who maybe don't have too many friends left in the world, should we deny them comforts that they might get from forming such a relationship. And there may be comforts available.
Starting point is 00:32:24 You know, in the future, the idea of having a virtual chat GPT that they can have a conversation with and that maybe that chat GPT is the persona of one of their teenage friends from the 1970s or something, would it be wrong to deny them that comfort? I mean, there is an argument that it's actually quite cruel to do that. If this is not harming anybody, this is just, just giving them some comfort that they would not otherwise have. I think I have sympathy with both of those positions. I lost both my parents during the pandemic and both of them were in a care home.
Starting point is 00:32:59 And because of the pandemic, inherently, they were very, very, very isolated. And I felt very acutely their loneliness at that time and the fact that they weren't able to get out and socialize and to meet people and that the last few years of their lives were blighted, by the pandemic in the ways that so many people's lives were blighted by the pandemic. And so I think I have a lot more sympathy for that argument at this point.
Starting point is 00:33:25 You know, if my mum, you know, an extreme example, if my mom who died nearly 90 years old, if she could go and relive a party from her teenage years that was created by generative AI, would that be such a bad thing? I mean, I'm not so sure it would. But there are, you know, there are different opinions on this. And I say some people find that idea completely abhorrent. I'm really sorry to hear about your parents there, Mike. That sounds really difficult. But I'm glad that we're investigating the ways that AI could help to ease that loneliness and help adults form friendships.
Starting point is 00:34:01 Let's turn to children and AI friendships. Some studies have started to look into how children's attitudes to smart speakers like Alexa impact their psychology, so depending on whether they're rude to them or they speak to them as a friend. And for those who've read the book, Clara and the Sun by Kazu Shoguri, you'll be familiar with these. Similar questions on the ethics and sentience of AI when it comes to children communicating with AI. So do you think that we should be encouraging children to see AI as potential friends, or more like these tools that we've been talking about previously, like calculators and spreadsheets? So on the one hand, I think this technology is just a tool.
Starting point is 00:34:45 swearing at an Excel spreadsheet, actually this is something I do most days, swearing at an Excel spreadsheet is not something which is intrinsically wrong. And actually for the same reason, swearing at chat GPT is not something which is intrinsically wrong. Where it becomes difficult, I think, is if the AI is presented in a human persona. So abusing an Excel spreadsheet doesn't feel wrong, but how would you feel about abusing a humanoid robot? That is a robot which had two arms, two legs, something which looked like a human head and human eyes and so on, that was presented as in a female persona. Would it then be okay to abuse that? I think most of us would feel, at the very least, we would start to feel uncomfortable about that because it's being presented
Starting point is 00:35:37 to us in a human persona. And it somehow takes it. a lot closer to abusing human beings. So I think the answer is, I think one of the important principles about AI is that it should never be presented as if it were a human being, as if it were a person that you're interacting with, that it should always be presented as basically as a tool and that you should never be allowed to believe that you are dealing with an AI. And if we are clear that it's a tool, then we form the same relationship with it that we form with an Excel spreadsheet. This is me navigating around the issue without saying anything very concrete about it,
Starting point is 00:36:21 because I think the truth is we just don't know yet. I definitely think this is something that we need to keep an eye on and be aware of. So, Mike, what are you most excited for when you deliver your Christmas lectures? I think for any British scientist to give the lectures, the Christmas lectures, is a huge honour. it's such an iconic part of British science culture. But to be giving the lectures on AI in 2023, which is a watershed year in AI history, I think arguably, well actually not arguably,
Starting point is 00:36:51 certainly the most important year in the history of AI, in the nearly 80 year history of artificial intelligence, to be giving the lectures this year is just an amazing opportunity. And we've got an absolutely unprecedented opportunity in the Christmas lectures to show people the reality of AI, to show them how it really works, what the opportunities are, how they see it in their lives, even though they don't see it, they don't realize that they see it at the moment, how it's actually already so ubiquitous throughout our lives, and to get a glimpse of where this is going. I think in 2023 to be doing
Starting point is 00:37:30 that, it's just an amazing opportunity. You've been listening to Computer Scientist, Professor Mike Wildridge, talking about where the future of AI will meet the younger generations. Mike's lecture series on AI will be broadcast on BBC 4 and IPlayer between Christmas and New Year. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine. By the latest issue of science focus in your local shop, or visit us online at sciencefocus.com. name audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship,
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