Edition 441 - Fevzi Turkalp
First of two podcasts released for the Easter weekend - London-based Tech guru Fevzi Turkalp on how technology can help us beat coronavirus - and live in a post-lockdown world...
First of two podcasts released for the Easter weekend - London-based Tech guru Fevzi Turkalp on how technology can help us beat coronavirus - and live in a post-lockdown world...
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained. | |
Well, here I am. | |
It's evening time and it's quiet as I record this and that kind of makes me drop my voice to be more quiet. | |
Because in these lockdown times, I don't know, it's a very peaceful and contemplative time. | |
Of course, there is all kinds of chaos going on outside in the world, which we see on the news at the moment. | |
And I hope that you're getting through and that you're okay wherever you are. | |
But in this quiet, it makes you think, doesn't it? | |
You know, at the moment I'm looking out across the park close to where I am, there's an empty sky. | |
The air is clear. | |
And at the moment, the road outside does not have a single car on it. | |
How things have changed. | |
Thank you very much for all of your wonderful emails that you've been sending me. | |
It's really marvelous because I'm here, as I said on the radio show last Sunday night, you know, I am here in complete seclusion. | |
I've always been a bit of a hermit anyway, but even more so. | |
So when I've finished recording or when I finish on the radio show, I turn off all the equipment and then suddenly there is this stunning silence. | |
It is a remarkable time and it's a time when I think an awful lot of us, and I know I've said this before, are going to think again about the way that we live and how we're going to live our lives in future. | |
Thank you very much to Adam at Creative Hotspot for getting the show out to you and for maintaining the website. | |
The website is, of course, theunexplained.tv. | |
You can go to the website, send me an email, and thank you if you have done recently. | |
And if you've made a donation recently through the website, theunexplained.tv, thank you very much for that. | |
Very, very kind of you. | |
And if you haven't made a donation, please do consider doing that to allow this online work to continue. | |
Loads of emails recently. | |
I'm just going to mention one here. | |
Alan Hume in Edinburgh sends me a really nice email. | |
And he says, it's really helped me to be able to tune into your show these last couple of weeks of the lockdown. | |
I know he does the podcast and the radio show. | |
I really do appreciate you for soldiering on. | |
Well, look, Alan, that's very, very kind. | |
Thank you so much for your words that really make me feel so good inside. | |
And thank you if you sent me an email. | |
But my efforts here doing this and having created a little sort of home broadcasting console are nothing compared with the efforts of the emergency services workers in every country here in the UK, the NHS, the National Health Service staff, the pharmacists, the police who are keeping an eye on everything. | |
All of those people are doing vital work, you know, and just providing podcasts and doing radio shows, really, and then staying in lockdown and doing what the government says. | |
These are astonishing times. | |
But like I say, I hope everything's okay with you wherever you are, in the darkness as I am tonight, or in the near darkness, or whenever you're hearing this. | |
Thank you very much for being part of this. | |
Now, the show that we're about to do is partly about coronavirus, also about artificial intelligence and how that dovetails with coronavirus and might help us get through this. | |
Also a little bit about fake news in this era and other topics that are related with that. | |
Technology expert Fevzi Turkalp is here, my old friend. | |
Fevzi is a regular, somebody who's helped me out so many times and a guy who's so intelligent with his insights about all of these things. | |
So Fevzi Turkalp, coming up in just a second. | |
Thank you very much, wherever in the world you are for your nice messages and for staying in touch with me. | |
We all have to stay together. | |
We all have to be a family, I think, in the middle of all of this. | |
Okay, let's go from the south of London, where I am, to the north of London now and cross to the gadget detective, Fevzi Turkup. | |
Fevzi, thank you very much for coming back on the show. | |
Absolute pleasure. | |
So Fevzi, how are things with you in these straightened times when we're all locked in, hunkered down and all the rest of it? | |
Well, you know, actually, not that much for me has changed because I, you know, as you know, I don't have any friends. | |
I didn't used to go out very often anyway. | |
It's not very nice being told you can't go out, but in practice, it makes little difference to me. | |
Right. | |
So you're the man who said lockdown, what lockdown? | |
Yeah, exactly. | |
It took me two weeks to notice. | |
Being serious about it, though, and you know, we can, you and I always joke around odd air, but being serious about this situation, it has taught people to be resourceful in a way that I think a lot of people didn't think, including me, they could be. | |
Yeah, I mean, you've solved all sorts of problems, haven't you, about broadcasting, you know, from a different location. | |
That's something that you probably wouldn't have solved if you hadn't had to. | |
Yeah, I think so. | |
But just other things, you just have to, when there are problems that occur, technically, rather than go out to the shop and see if you can buy a solution, you have to see what you've got. | |
Yeah, no, it's true. | |
It's true. | |
And I've started not wanting to waste food either. | |
Not that I particularly wanted to waste food, but now, you know, something is on the edge. | |
I just eat it quickly. | |
I'm talking to a man here who, before I started this, I had a cup of coffee and a piece of carrot cake that if the box was to be believed, I shouldn't have eaten after Saturday. | |
And I'm recording this on Monday. | |
But you know, in the UK, of course, we have best before and used by. | |
So best before is just that. | |
It just means it's going to be not in optimal condition, but it's nothing that will poison you. | |
Use by, however, should not go beyond a used by date. | |
Oh, well, that sounds like me. | |
I'm not in optimal condition either. | |
So look, we're going to talk a lot about technology here, and we'll talk about how technology is tangential with the coronavirus. | |
In other words, how technology can perhaps assist us in not only the world that we face now, this scary, uncertain world for these next weeks that we're in lockdown, but the world that comes after, you know, when we have to rethink the way that we do things. | |
So we'll do that in a little while. | |
But just briefly before we start doing all of that, your thoughts about this situation that we find ourselves in and people being... | |
Now they have to be. | |
Yes, but I think we can and are learning to use it in different ways. | |
So for a lot of people, particularly older people, but not only older people, we have these sort of immensely powerful devices in our smartphones And tablets and so forth. | |
And we were just using them for the most basic functionality. | |
And now we've often have the time and the need to create new solutions. | |
So, for example, how do we keep in touch with an elderly relative who maybe isn't well enough or so forth to work out how to install Skype and or use FaceTime and even answer a call? | |
And to sort of use technologies that were perhaps designed for home security to be able to look in on a loved one and be able to communicate with them and drop in on them. | |
So you're literally virtually dropping in on them instead of dropping in at the door, you're dropping in digitally. | |
So the fact that we've got, for the most part, devices that can already do a lot of these things, but we haven't been using the software fully or haven't had the right software. | |
So I think that there's great opportunities. | |
And once we've all learned how to do this and the benefits of doing it, I do think that things won't be quite the same again. | |
I'm kind of minded of the Second World War when typically men went to war and then the women had to come out of the home and work in munitions factories and land girls in the farms and all the rest of it. | |
And after the war, it didn't go back quite to how it was before. | |
More women stayed in the workplace. | |
That change permeated through and brought us to where we are now. | |
And I think in a similar way, what you're going to find is that not everyone is going to commute back to their desk in order to sit at a computer somewhere else. | |
And companies and businesses will have learned how to manage a home-based workforce, and maybe will get over their fears that people will take advantage of it and develop ways of stopping that from happening. | |
So I do think that this is part of a change that will accelerate probably what was going to happen anyway, which is that there'll be less physical traveling going on. | |
I think you're right. | |
And, you know, I, at the moment, can't go into London to work because we've been told that we shouldn't. | |
So I've developed a way of doing everything from here using a technology called IPDTL, which basically allows you to broadcast on the internet if you have reasonably reliable broadband. | |
You know, I don't have the best broadband, but I'm doing that. | |
But because I'm at home and because I've engineered what I'm doing, I actually feel now that part of me doesn't want to go back to working in a radio station where, you know, everything is as good as it can be on an average for everybody. | |
Here, I have everything optimized for me. | |
And I think a lot of people, if you magnify that millions of times for all of the people who are working from home right now, a lot of people are going to feel the same. | |
Yeah. | |
Yeah. | |
And it will also mean, you know, working for a wider variety of employers. | |
So, you know, this idea that, you know, you belong to one station, I think that will, you know, for broadcasters, that will become less. | |
You know, people will use that technology and they'll be doing voiceovers or, you know, other types of broadcasts and so forth. | |
And insofar as their contracts allow it, you know, there'll be more of the gig economy going on for different types of workers now because the technology will allow employers to use people on a more ad hoc basis and equally those people to connect up with employers on a more ad hoc basis, a wider range of them. | |
So I think it's a good thing. | |
I think the only thing I would say is that we are social beasts. | |
That's one thing that we have learned in this is that we do need physical contact. | |
And Skype, FaceTime, Zoom, House Party are better than nothing, but they're not the same. | |
And one thing, and just before we get on to the technology and how it will interface with coronavirus or the coronavirus era. | |
This is really, I don't know, the people that you know, but from the people that I know, it's definitely separated people into two different types. | |
There are people who are, I mean, look, I was always a bit of a hermit anyway. | |
So it's just an amplification of where I was before. | |
But I've got friends who've actually changed. | |
Their personality seems to have changed because they're finding it hard to be indoors. | |
It really is making a big difference, even if they've got FaceTime and everything else. | |
Yeah, no, it's true. | |
I mean, and that's why I'm, you know, although I'm not very comfortable walking outside, I do sort of, frankly, I do worry about it a little bit. | |
But at the same time, you know, taking a long walk is a good thing, you know, for mind and body. | |
And I hope that we don't lose that ability because I do rather fear that, you know, morons amongst us will spoil it for everybody, as it were, and cause the government to lock us down even further. | |
Well, I saw some good news. | |
I hope that's not true. | |
Well, yeah, I think it might be. | |
Yeah, I saw some good news today, though, that hospital admissions has started to plateau. | |
So, you know, that's the beginning because it will start with, you know, the benefits of a lockdown will start with hospital admissions and, you know, confirmed diagnoses. | |
The last thing to turn the corner will be the death rate, because obviously there's a lag between when someone's infected and when that disease runs full course, whatever that is. | |
But, you know, that's an encouraging sign. | |
I just hope that people don't take that as a cue to further flout the rules, which is there for all of our protection. | |
But everything is changing every few days as we record this. | |
The Prime Minister went into hospital last night. | |
We're recording Monday. | |
This will be heard at the end of the week. | |
But the whole situation could have changed. | |
We had on Monday close on, I think, 5,000 deaths. | |
That figure, sadly and inexorably, will rise. | |
It is a very worrying situation that we're in, and it's worrying for other reasons too, because it seems to have lit the blue touch paper on a whole raft of... | |
We talk about conspiracy theories, but there is a time and a place and there is an appropriateness. | |
And a lot of these theories, things to do with 5G that are just, you know, some of them wacko and out there. | |
And a lot of these other things are just wrong now. | |
And the government's aware of that. | |
This is a time when we have to Find ways of controlling some of this fake news, I think. | |
But then, how do you do that without curbing people's freedom to speak? | |
Well, you know, freedom of speech is not an unlimited freedom, and we recognize that. | |
And, you know, we have laws against making bomb threats, and we, you know, we have laws of libel and slander and so forth. | |
So there are already limits on freedom of speech. | |
And, you know, there's a number of things that are important about this. | |
You know, you and I have spoken before about, for example, Finland. | |
In Finland, they view fake news or more correctly termed misinformation as a communicable illness. | |
And you can get outbreaks of it like you do with viruses very topically. | |
And their solution to it in Finland is to try and immunize as much of their population as is necessary against fake news. | |
And the way they do that is they educate them. | |
They essentially educate them with similar tools to the skills that are learned by journalists when they evaluate information that they're given. | |
They try and establish the source. | |
They try and get more than one source for the story, you know, these sorts of things. | |
And, you know, they look into who wrote the article, what else have they written, who is the publication, all these sorts of things. | |
And by giving people those skills, they actually try, and if you do about 60% of the population, they think they can immunize themselves to a large extent against fake news. | |
So that's number one. | |
We need to be better educated. | |
The fact that we're unable to tell, you know, the provenance of information, the importance of that, is a problem. | |
Beyond that, and I've long since said this, I think that what we need to do is hold social media companies jointly responsible for what's published on their site. | |
So the person who writes it or says it should obviously be responsible, but that responsibility should be equally shared with the platform. | |
And even the directors of that company could be taken. | |
And we have things like corporate manslaughter and things like this. | |
It's possible for corporations to be held legally liable. | |
And it doesn't really cut it. | |
This argument that they make that they are just conduits in the way that BT is not responsible for conversations held over its copper wire. | |
But that's not the same. | |
These companies, they make money out of it. | |
They have algorithms that push more conspiracy theories. | |
So if I show an interest in one conspiracy theory video, it will offer me far more. | |
Of course, they say, and there have been quite celebrated instances of this. | |
They say whenever this is brought up, and there is evidence that this is the case, that they have hired more people. | |
They are spending more money to spot dodgy content and remove it. | |
Yeah, but this will never be solved by hiring just more people because the whole model of these websites is that they allow pretty much anything up. | |
There's one or two exceptions to that, but anything goes up. | |
And then when it gets flagged by enough people, they may deign to hold it in breach of their terms and conditions and then may take it down after the event, by which time that's been copied and promulgated all over the internet. | |
And a good example of that was a live streaming of a mass murder. | |
Yes, a terrorist act. | |
And he live streamed it. | |
And although they pulled it back down again, by then that stream had been copied all over the place. | |
And the cat was out of the bag, as it were. | |
So I think what we do is hold them legally responsible. | |
What that will do is cause them to invest in a technological solution. | |
There's no way on earth that they could pay enough people to read everything before it appears. | |
However, intelligent, artificial intelligence, AI that actually works, which isn't quite with us yet, but AI that actually works, could make decisions about the suitability of what's going up. | |
And that's the way to go. | |
Either they need to do that or they need to pre-vet it with human beings, but that's going to cause such a delay being possible. | |
So the solution to this AI and the way that you get those AI products coming into being is you make the directors of the company legally responsible for the content. | |
And these things are the same way. | |
You know, they're doable because in broadcasting in America, they have the FCC working in a different way. | |
We have Ofcom over here, which is a regulator. | |
So is the FCC in the US. | |
So you would just have to build a code that applied to the internet. | |
Yes, it's a daunting task and lawmakers would have to draft the legislation, but it can be done. | |
And that's the other problem, Howard, that each social media platform is left to come up with their own rules and enforce them. | |
And even within a single platform, the rules are not consistent and they're certainly not consistently enforced. | |
Yes? | |
And this is the problem. | |
So it comes back to this liability. | |
The liability will focus the mind. | |
Just in the same way, credit card companies hate Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act. | |
And every year, they secretly lobby politicians to try and weasel their way out of it. | |
And that piece of legislation says that the credit card company is as responsible for the success of the transaction as the vendor is. | |
So, for example, if a vendor fails and takes money but doesn't supply the goods or doesn't provide a refund when one is due, the credit card company has to do it. | |
And they hate that. | |
But the principle is that they facilitated that transaction by providing the credit card and therefore they have a joint responsibility. | |
In a similar way, social media platforms facilitate the spreading and I would say encourage by their algorithms the spreading of misinformation across their networks and they have to be held responsible, jointly responsible with the person who wrote it. | |
So it's rather like if I sold you a car and that car had just one bolt bolting the steering wheel to the steering mechanism instead of four and the steering wheel came off when you were on the highway and you had an accident and I knew that I'd sold you the car in that condition. | |
I can't say, well, you know, it's a car and it's nothing to do with me. | |
Well, of course, it's everything to do with me. | |
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. | |
and, you know, they should have processes in place. | |
I mean, they do look, this sort of technology begins to exist because there is AI used by social media platforms to stop child pornography, for example. | |
And they have, you know, admittedly, you know, their systems are fairly rudimentary, but what they do is they create a digital fingerprint for every known image, you know, child porn image, and they filter them out before they hit. | |
And the same could be done, albeit you'd need a more sophisticated system, but the same could be done. | |
If you had an AI that was more, you can't just have something that's looking for keywords. | |
That's not good enough because then something that says, you know, fake news about 5G is terrible, then that would get pulled down as well. | |
But if the AI gets smart enough, and every indication is that it will and can do within a few short years, then we could stop that stuff appearing. | |
And then if someone felt that they'd been wronged by having their thing pre-vetted, they'd always have the possibility of appealing that. | |
But better that it doesn't go up and they are left to appeal than it does go up and Google or Facebook or Twitter is then looking to try and bring it down as a rear-guard action. | |
That's the wrong way around. | |
And the people who post the worst kinds of stuff, the most damaging, especially at a time like this and worrying stuff, they need to be brought before the courts. | |
Although the courts are busy right now and sittings of the courts are somewhat curtailed, I think, because of the coronavirus. | |
But they need to be brought before the courts and need to explain themselves. | |
And if they fail all the tests under examination in the court, then they must face the highest penalties, especially at a time like this. | |
We don't want to sound draconian or anything like that. | |
That's not what I'm about. | |
This is just about common sense, and it's also about decency in a time when people are scared. | |
Yes. | |
And this sort of, I mean, this is, you know, in many cases, it's willful ignorance in my view. | |
You know, some people are just mischief-making. | |
And, you know, it's not dissimilar to delivery trucks being, you know, attacked, food delivery trucks being attacked. | |
And there was some of that going on a couple of weeks ago. | |
These are, in my view, these are criminal offences. | |
They are. | |
Promulgation of fake news. | |
If it is not, it should be criminal. | |
And that's not to say that we should not have freedom of speech. | |
But as we've said, shouting fire in a crowded theatre is an abuse of freedom of speech. | |
And our laws already do not allow unfettered speech. | |
It's not protected even to the extent that it is in the United States. | |
In the United States, there's limitations. | |
And these companies are hiding behind freedom of speech. | |
But what they're really not wanting to do is invest in making their system something for good. | |
Facebook is afraid of being split up. | |
That's why it's integrating all its systems. | |
That's why it's causing WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and Instagram. | |
They're giving them all the same code base. | |
So when the governments around the world get around to trying to split them up, they're going to say, we can't. | |
These are just different brands of the same product. | |
How are we meant to split it? | |
But they're rushing to do that to make it hard for them to get broken up. | |
But I think if they don't behave, they should be broken up. | |
And of course, if I was on the radio, I would be saying to you, as I'm saying now, they would say we're moving as fast as we can. | |
And I know that you would say they're not moving nearly fast enough. | |
And part of that reason is the sheer amount of money that would have to be spent and invested in this. | |
So I think it's a debate that we have to have increasingly. | |
Yeah, I mean, I would just say I'm reminded of a story that was not so long ago about a company of fact checkers that was hired by one of the social media companies. | |
And the fact checkers quit. | |
And when they were asked why they quit, they said because the company that had hired them was more concerned about the PR benefits of having been seen to hire fact checkers than really interested in having the truth on their platform. | |
I'm not going to name the platform now for obvious reasons, but sometimes with these companies, it's about appearances and trying to do just enough not to get yourself split up and over-regulated in their view. | |
But we also have to say that this technology that allows us to communicate and express ourselves, everybody has an opinion and I've become a podcaster and you can work from home. | |
The technology has empowered us. | |
So we have to do all of these things and bring in these controls whilst also accepting the liberation that the technology has allowed each and every one of us. | |
I could not go back. | |
I hate the idea now of being as constrained and confined and restricted as I was, say, 20 years ago. | |
That's true. | |
But we don't have to have this vision of the future. | |
And what I mean by that is we can have all the benefits of social media and communications technology and so forth without having these companies owning our digital souls. | |
Yeah? | |
We don't have to have that. | |
You know, the fundamental concept should be our data is ours. | |
By default, it belongs to us. | |
It does not belong to social media companies by default. | |
And they should come up with business models and they should be forced to come up with business models that are not based upon monetizing our digital essence. | |
They don't own this and they shouldn't be allowed to own this. | |
This goes back to a case a long time ago of a guy in the States and the mobile phone operator that he used his mobile phone with won a court case saying that they owned the data pertaining to His movements and were free to sell it or share it as they wish. | |
And this innocuous decision has led to a lot of what we see now, which is that by default, the corporations own the data that we shed and the metadata that we shed. | |
And that's wrong. | |
That's the fundamental thing that's wrong in all of this. | |
We should own our data and the information about our movements and so forth. | |
And that includes, you used the word metadata, that includes the metadata, which is the raw data, not of what the content of, say, your conversations or journeys was, where you went. | |
This is basically the information about who you might have phoned or which particular store you might have gone to, but not what you did. | |
Yeah. | |
And the reason why that's important, because all this information, you know, on its own does seem inconsequential. | |
But when you combine it, you can actually develop a picture of someone, their political views, their sexual orientation, their fears, their beliefs. | |
Well, in journalism, we call it jigsaw identification. | |
Yeah. | |
But the difference is this now. | |
Companies are, you know, these companies are storing this data. | |
They're using it, but they're also storing it because they know full well, in short order, that there will be increasingly intelligent software that can deduce things from this, what will then be historical software, historical data about us, can deduce things that they cannot now deduce. | |
So this is just like a treasure trove for them, and they're storing it. | |
And, you know, they're going to go back in and use it in ways that we can't even predict now. | |
And, you know, it's interesting. | |
There's been a story recently about research into reading brainwaves and turning it into text. | |
He has to be literally able to have a machine reading. | |
Yeah, that was in the news about a week ago. | |
Yeah. | |
Yeah, exactly. | |
Now, what's interesting about that is one of the companies that are putting in a lot of money into this is Facebook. | |
Not that particular project, the other projects, they're researching it. | |
So how far do we go with this? | |
Because if our metadata is not our own, will our thoughts be our own, Howard? | |
Will we be entitled to any level of privacy in our lives anymore? | |
Or will we have to give them up to Google or Facebook or whoever? | |
At what point does this stop? | |
But equally, that technology would perhaps, I don't know, here's an example. | |
Somebody who's perhaps paralyzed. | |
If they wanted to write a great book, locked-in syndrome, they wanted to write a great book. | |
They had a great book in them that they thought they could never write. | |
They could never communicate it. | |
If you have a technology that can allow your brainwaves to be turned into text on a screen, that's a wonderful thing. | |
Howard, you know me. | |
You know I'm an advocate of the use and the benefits of technology. | |
But on what legal basis is that done? | |
Yes? | |
All of this should be, there should be a digital bill of rights that means that, you know, just as we should not be slaves, you know, and we have our basic human rights, to that should be made clear our rights in the digital domain, because increasingly we live in the digital domain and these companies should not have the right to collect and use this information. | |
You know, and this thing about, oh, with our consent, when was the last time that you didn't scroll down to the bottom and tick the box saying, I have read this? | |
There was a study done that said that if we actually, even assuming that we were quite skillful lawyers and could understand contracts that we're presented with, if we were to read all the contracts and understand them and then agree to them of all the services and things that we encounter through our lives, that we would do nothing else. | |
We would not sleep and there would still be not enough time to do that. | |
And in fact, there's a law that was passed supposedly for everybody's benefit. | |
But it's gone completely on its head because, yes, indeed, you do get these agreement forms and you are asked for your consent. | |
And, you know, you're told it is informed consent. | |
But it's only informed consent if you spend half an hour or an hour reading the fine print, which I think I suspect, maybe this is not true, it's just my opinion, that the companies know that you're not going to read all of the fine print. | |
Of course they do. | |
Look, these companies know exactly not just what websites you visit and what pages within it. | |
They know how long you spend, when you scroll down, how long you spent looking at any particular image on your screen. | |
They know, and they have the ability to know, and therefore should know, that you're not reading it. | |
It's impossible. | |
And they should not be allowing you. | |
And their get out is they allow you to export the contract to read it later. | |
But that's not right. | |
The basis of contract law is that a contract is an agreement which is represented between two or more parties, which is a meeting of the minds. | |
That is to say that there is a common understanding of that which is being agreed to. | |
In these cases, there is no meeting of minds. | |
There is just a box that's ticked to just get on and do what you want to do. | |
And they know it, but it's a legal get out. | |
But these contracts, you know, if these companies were not as powerful as they are, these contracts, in my view, wouldn't be enforceable. | |
But who's got the money to go up against the monoliths? | |
Well, it will be an interesting test, but a lot of these terms and conditions, sometimes I have a look at them just for fun, really. | |
And some of them, you really do have to be a barrister, you know, very senior lawyer, to make your way through them, which is why most people like you say scroll all the way down. | |
And I'm surprised that this isn't talked about more. | |
It isn't. | |
It isn't talked about. | |
I mean, obviously, we've got coronavirus now, so we're not talking about anything else for obvious reasons. | |
But before coronavirus, it wasn't being debated. | |
People said, oh, we've got a lot more curbs and controls and things, and you have to give your consent before they just use your data and all the rest of it. | |
Well, it's not quite as clear-cut as that. | |
But equally, I love the benefits that having this technology confers upon you. | |
You can have both, but they have to change their business model. | |
Look, Facebook, if it charged me money, I pay them money for their service. | |
I don't want to be monetized. | |
If you promise not to monetize me, then I will pay you. | |
And this is one of the problems. | |
I mean, because even when you pay, like take YouTube, which is owned by Google, if you pay a subscription to do away with the ads, they're still collecting data on you and they're still monetizing you. | |
In fact, now they know that you're a person who's liable to pay for these sorts of services as well. | |
So that makes you even more marketable. | |
Donate to a charity and then they sell the payments or you get scammed and then they put you on a list of people who are easily scammed. | |
Oh, you know. | |
Well, this is a debate we have to continue at another time, I think. | |
But I think our lawmakers need to be talking more about this. | |
And I'm talking both in the US and the UK. | |
Let's talk about coronavirus now and the new world that we are entering. | |
Not only this world that's rather scary, it's almost like a limbo we're in now, where we're, you know, most of us around the world were locked down in some form or other. | |
You know, unless you're in Taiwan, I don't think they've got a lockdown. | |
I may be wrong about that, but they dealt with the virus very adroitly, very quickly, very well by the looks of it. | |
We were well behind the curve here by the looks of it. | |
But at the moment, for example, technology is empowering people to do their jobs. | |
Those people who haven't lost their jobs or been put into suspension, it's allowing people to do their jobs from home. | |
All of that depends, of course, on the robustness of our technology. | |
And so far, and there goes very sadly an ambulance going past where I'm recording this going to the local hospital. | |
We're getting a lot of those now. | |
But a lot of this depends on the robustness of our technology. | |
And we're only a couple of weeks into the lockdown. | |
We are not going to know yet how it all copes. | |
How do you think our technology will cope? | |
Well, you know, I think it will be a mixed picture. | |
And I think that there's a number of factors. | |
So in the short term, you're talking about whether our sort of technological infrastructure will sustain an increased load. | |
Okay, so there's been a lot of talk about, you know, whether the internet will hold up or whether it will all come grinding to a halt because everyone's using Netflix at once. | |
And certainly, you know, those streaming companies, Netflix and YouTube and others, have decided to broadcast in a lower bit rate, which will mean less strain on the internet because internet streaming of video is one of the biggest chunks of total bandwidth use across the whole internet. | |
So there is that. | |
Will it hold up to that? | |
And so far it is doing so. | |
And all things being equal, I suspect it will continue doing so. | |
I think the problem may be in the slightly longer term because a lot of companies, including the electricity companies, supply companies, are not doing the routine maintenance that they're used to. | |
And they're obviously going to have a lot fewer staff. | |
And what you might find, for example, is you might start getting power outages in areas because outages that would have been prevented by maintenance are then not always going to be prevented by maintenance. | |
I heard a story of a friend of a friend who had a power outage the other night. | |
Now, it may just have been something not connected with all of this, but I suspect we might well be seeing, as you say, more reports like that. | |
Yeah, so you've got that. | |
You've got the fact that there is more strain on the system generally. | |
I mean, but are we going to be able to generate enough electricity? | |
Will our power plants or the power plants from which we buy electricity continue? | |
If this is going on in months' time, will they have the resiliency to build in? | |
And I think that there will be slips where they drop the ball and certain services will go away for periods and then come back. | |
Hopefully, it won't go on so long that everything becomes completely unmaintained. | |
If this situation were to go for two years or something like that, and I don't mean two years exactly as we are now, but with lockdown being eased a bit and then tightened a bit and eased a bit, a bit like a thermostat. | |
With a thermostat, you choose the temperature that you want your house to be and then the system monitors the temperature. | |
And then when it gets too hot, it switches off the heating. | |
When it gets too old, it switches it back on again. | |
So it's always hovering around there. | |
In the same way, we may see that the government, if there's no vaccine for this, just tries to get enough infections to move things forward without overwhelming our hospital. | |
And this is that sort of, you know, herd immunity idea as well, which Holland, for example, the Netherlands is experimenting with. | |
So in Netherlands, they've done what they call an intelligent lockdown, you know. | |
And so if this were to go on for two years with easing and tightening and easing and tightening and, you know, there's still no vaccine, then you might find that you have more systemic problems at that point, you know, things that have just fallen apart over a period of time and haven't been upgraded or maintained. | |
But I think in the short term, we'll be relatively okay. | |
And I think in countries like the UK, we're very lucky because we have contingencies and systems and, you know, we have a fair degree of sophistication. | |
My fear is for countries like, for example, South Africa that I know well, that they were having problems with their electricity supply grid. | |
Before all of this, they had a thing called load shedding where people would be on a rotor for power cuts. | |
Those are the places that I worry about. | |
And, you know, I just hope that they will be okay. | |
And maybe, and this is a philosophical point more than anything else, that we have to come together, I think, as a human species more than we ever did before. | |
But I'm not going to hold my breath for that to happen, Febzi. | |
I'm not. | |
Yeah. | |
Well, it's the thing about coronavirus and all these other risks, you know, you get certain risks that could wipe out humanity or be a terrible event. | |
I mean, I'm not saying coronavirus is going to wipe out humanity, but it's certainly a terrible global event. | |
And these things, they have large consequences, but they are unusual. | |
And it's very hard to get governments to invest in solutions to those things. | |
So five years ago, you had Bill Gates. | |
You can see the video on YouTube. | |
I mean, Bill Gates gave a speech about the need to prepare against the next global pandemic. | |
Now, they suspected it was going to be influenza. | |
Influenza might be the next one. | |
But, you know, his idea was that we have to prepare, just like we've invested all this money in a nuclear protection deterrent, you know, to try and prevent nuclear annihilation. | |
We need to invest to prevent pandemics. | |
And what he said that was really interesting was not that we just have to improve the healthcare in our country. | |
So we shouldn't run an NHS which just about manages with no headroom. | |
You know, this idea of just in time, this and that, that has to go. | |
But also, you know, we are only as strong as the weakest global link. | |
So we have to make sure that every country in the world, even the poorest countries, have the resources provided to them to be able to detect, monitor, and stamp out anything that starts up in those countries. | |
Because this is not like, oh, why are we giving money in international aid? | |
This is an insurance policy. | |
It's a bit like the reason why the Americans put nuclear missiles in Europe as a defense for the United States. | |
So they could strike earlier. | |
And that was seen as an effective thing. | |
And in a similar way, I think we have to spend money. | |
And maybe after all this is over, we will. | |
Or maybe we'll just forget what happened and carry on, those of us that are left. | |
Well, let's just hope that we learn from this. | |
I think a lot of people on a personal level, certainly it goes for me, will never be quite the same. | |
I view what's important to me totally differently. | |
Maybe you've had this epiphany too, but I've had plenty of time to think about it when I haven't been working from home, that I'm not going to work and I'm not going to exist the way that I did before. | |
Certain things that I put up with and accepted are not going to, and I want to change the way that I work. | |
So from that level, if I manage to survive all of this, then I'm going to have a big change. | |
And on a personal level, I think coronavirus is affecting all of us in terms of the plans that we had, that we've had to put on hold. | |
I mean, for example, my little apartment I've talked to you privately about many times, it is desperately in need of a refurb, and I was going to do it this year. | |
And it's the kind of thing that you'd have to move out for, really. | |
It's a tiny little place, and probably I'll have to get out. | |
And I'd been given the name of a builder, and I wanted to go ahead with it. | |
Now, of course, who knows when that can happen? | |
You multiply that across a lot of people in the economy here and a lot of people in other economies. | |
And you have a whole lot of dilemmas and a whole lot of problems that are being stored up, not on a governmental level, but on personal levels. | |
All of those things and things like, I don't know, everything from getting your hair cut to having your teeth fixed to all of those things that are going to come avalanching down the mountainside when this is relaxed or when it ends. | |
I want to talk about AI and how it may help in ways that I hadn't thought of until I started doing some research. | |
It may help the fight against or the containment of coronavirus. | |
Number one, for example, things like identifying and forecasting outbreaks and diagnosis. | |
AI could help with those things. | |
So AI is particularly good at spotting patterns in noise. | |
So you can have all sorts of infectious diseases around the world, but sometimes those diseases are misdiagnosed and are shielding something else. | |
So something that's shown as a heart attack, for example, could have had an underlying infective reason for that heart attack. | |
So AIs are good at spotting patterns and therefore they can be used globally as long as data is available and that's what AI is really good at is crunching huge amounts of data. | |
And it can come to conclusions and it can spot patterns that human beings can miss and usually do. | |
So in that sense, I think it's a very important tool. | |
It's something that's going to get more useful as the algorithms get more sophisticated, as they teach themselves more. | |
You get this thing about antagonistic AI algorithms where one AI produces something and the other one checks it. | |
And it goes back in this sort of feedback loop between them. | |
And between the two AIs, they actually improve the outcome of what they're trying to do. | |
So it's like it trains itself. | |
You just need to give it enough data. | |
So if we set up these systems where we actually start compiling data from around the world, then we can predict what's happening. | |
We can spot patterns of behavior that led to other outbreaks and so forth. | |
But also, once it's happened, we can actually predict better how it will spread, how it will develop, how that will be a different story in each case. | |
And, you know, this is going on at the moment. | |
So when the government talks about modeling, you know, when it talks about, you know, its models feeds into the decisions that they're making, then some of that is AI tools that they're using. | |
At the moment, you know, a lot is said about AI, and it's a technology that shows great promise of big data and machine learning and all of those buzzwords. | |
But these things are all in their infancy at the moment. | |
And what they will be capable of, certainly within our lifetimes, hopefully, will be amazing compared to what we can do now. | |
It will be truly amazing. | |
And there'll be great benefits to be had. | |
AI systems will also be used and are being used to track people's movements. | |
And normally that sounds quite sinister and so it should. | |
However, there is a benefit to the Chinese state being able to track to see whether people are respecting curfews and lock-ins and quarantines, whether they're getting too close to other people, what their status is. | |
Are they someone who's likely to be infected? | |
Are they someone who's actually been infected and now carry a certificate saying that they've got antibodies and so forth? | |
And that sort of thing. | |
And then being able to actually enforce against those people. | |
Now, that sort of technology could save lives, will save lives, has saved lives. | |
The problem with it is that it requires the entrusting of our rights To the state. | |
So in China, that's already largely the case that people don't have the same freedoms that we have in most Western countries. | |
But I am minded of the fact that the American government took special powers after 9/11, and that 19 years later they haven't relinquished those powers and they continue to use them. | |
Now, you can have a discussion about whether it's correct and that, you know, are they being used correctly or are those powers being abused? | |
But it is human nature that, you know, freedoms are hard won and easily lost. | |
And once you trade away a freedom, it's very hard to get it back. | |
But equally, we have to do another calculation. | |
So many calculations being done. | |
And the calculation is how many lives do you save by tracking where people are going versus how many lives would be lost if you didn't. | |
Yeah, no, that's absolutely true. | |
But if you take that too far, the question is, what is the value of the lives that you're saving if those people don't have freedom? | |
So there's a balance to be struck. | |
And when the government, for example, in this country, just over a week ago, passed the Coronavirus Act, or the bill that became the Act, they wanted to take powers that would give them control, these sort of quite strong controls, for up to two and a half years. | |
And there was some opposition to this, and in the end, they said that they would review it every six months. | |
But you have to make sure that these powers are not abused. | |
For example, if we were still in lockdown after a year and people wanted to take to the streets and protest, they could be arrested under these new powers. | |
So, you know, these certain rights that we take for granted. | |
Now, and the best time to take rights away from people, and don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying that, you know, these rights, that these powers were not needed by the state. | |
I believe that they were. | |
But the best time to get people to give up their rights is when they're most frightened. | |
And you see that after terrorist attacks, you know, when we give up freedoms. | |
And you see it in this case when people are frightened because they think that they or their loved ones may die. | |
You see, I take the view that these things had to happen. | |
They do. | |
I mean, for example, you talked about people potentially protesting. | |
Well, in a situation where there's coronavirus around, provably still claiming lives, you can't have people gathering for protests. | |
So you have to put the cap on that. | |
I think it's just a question of regulating the regulators, keeping an eye on those who make the laws. | |
Yeah. | |
Well, you also have to, whenever you make these laws, Howard, you have to think about not the government you have now, but what's the next government that you may have and how may they abuse it? | |
I always think, you know, what would Hitler have done with those powers and this technology? | |
You know, what could he have achieved? | |
And that's quite dark thought. | |
So again, this is not, you know, an either-or situation. | |
You can have these changes, but you have to have proper safeguards in there. | |
No, I guess the point you're making through all of this conversation, what you're saying is that when we do such things and when there are reasons for doing such things, which there are now, in my view, you have to do it mindfully. | |
You don't trade away any freedoms without fully debating it. | |
And that at least is one of the great benefits of having a parliament of the kind that we have here, which is a huge debating chamber where all points of opinion are aired on a regular basis. | |
So we just have to keep an eye on all of this. | |
Back to the AI. | |
Diagnosis. | |
Diagnosis, there's a company in China I heard and read, and they've teamed with Alibaba, which is like the Asia version of eBay, to build an AI-powered diagnosis system that they're claiming is 96% accurate. | |
Yeah, so again, you know, and we already see the use of AI in diagnosis. | |
IBM has got an AI system that can be applied to different problems. | |
One of the problems is called Watson, by the way, after Sherlock Holmes' system. | |
And one of the tasks that they've put it through is to put it to is the diagnosis of cancer and the creation of personalized treatment plans for each diagnosis. | |
And Watson is now outperforming consultants in terms of the diagnosis and the creation of plans. | |
Its outcomes are better than humans. | |
So that is definitely a good thing. | |
And another great benefit of this, of course, is sadly we have a rising count of medical staff here who have been dying because they've been into contact with coronavirus. | |
And that is a heartbreaking aspect of all of this. | |
This technology can take some people out of harm's way. | |
That's right. | |
So rather like, you know, we use remote-controlled robots for bomb disposal, for example, and mine sweeping and things like that, and going into nuclear power plants that are in danger of melting down. | |
We've used robots for all of these things. | |
Now it's time to start using robots to do some of the basic nursing functions in hospitals and nursing homes. | |
So the ability of these things to, for example, distribute medication, to take people's temperature, to measure their oxygen saturation levels, to even do mou swaps can be done. | |
And some of these devices are essentially, you know, remote control robots, and that's, you know, if that's what need be. | |
But the smarter ones work it out on their own. | |
They can navigate a ward, go from patient to patient, speak and interact and do some of the things that need to be done. | |
They're not yet a replacement for human beings, but they can do some of the things that need to be done, which will reduce the risk to frontline nursing and other medical staff. | |
And in the long run, we will see that carers, human carers will be replaced by machine carers, and a lot of the functions of nurses and even doctors will be replaced. | |
And we often think of AI and things, replacing, you know, robots in car factories and things like that. | |
But now, the new wave of AI will do away with a whole range of different types of jobs, including some of the professional medical jobs. | |
But in the context of coronavirus, that's a good thing. | |
In the longer context, we have to work out how we will live when the number of useful jobs that exist are much smaller than the population. | |
So, in fact, you talked about jobs being lost, but actually in the coronavirus era and whatever follows coronavirus, if there are any other threats like this, we are going to need more people and we won't have the trained people. | |
So that is exactly the gap that artificial intelligence can fill. | |
Yeah, yeah, exactly. | |
And also, as you say, keeping people out of harm's way. | |
I mean, carers is one of the big problems, isn't it? | |
Most countries have an aging population. | |
So you have more people in need of care, be it through sickness or just old age and the comorbidities that go with that. | |
But fewer people of an age, you know, leave out the disposition of an age that, you know, they're young enough to do that. | |
There's not enough younger people to look after the older people. | |
And the economics don't support it either because, you know, carers, although they're not paid much, are very expensive, you know, per patient because of the amount of care that some people need. | |
And therefore, this idea that machines will do that caring and medical care as well is attractive. | |
And it's the same argument, it's the same reason why Uber is investing in driverless cars. | |
What do you think it's going to do with that technology? | |
It's going to get rid of all its drivers. | |
In the same way, care homes will be staffed with machines. | |
And I don't necessarily even think that's a bad thing because I think the sophistication of the machines that will be doing that care will mean that some people will prefer to be cared for by a machine. | |
I don't think they'll get better care. | |
From some of the things, There are also some who are just doing a job and are not doing a very good one. | |
And it's not me saying that. | |
Read the papers. | |
So if you were to ask me, if I were to end up in that situation of having to be cared for, I would rather have a machine do it. | |
And that's, you know, and I'm thinking about my own father. | |
I'm thinking, actually, he was well cared for. | |
So that's a bad example because he was, but he was in a care home. | |
If it was me in the situation that my dear dad was in, I would rather have something automatic that did regular things on a regular basis, you know, rather than have to face, for example, you know, somebody having to shower me and that kind of thing. | |
So this is the new world that we're entering. | |
Yeah, I mean, there's that. | |
And also the fact, don't forget that before people develop their illnesses to the point where they need care in, say, a nursing home or professional carers coming in, they are often looked after by their children, by family members. | |
That still happens a lot. | |
And a lot of people become unpaid carers. | |
And frankly, you know, depending on the illnesses that they're coping with with their parents, it can be devastating on the children's lives. | |
And many parents would not even want that for their children. | |
They feel guilty. | |
This is why some older people, you know, would rather not be here because they don't want to be, in quotes, a burden. | |
But just imagine when that in quotes burden is taken up by a machine that is going to do a better job of it. | |
And, you know, they could look after the whole family. | |
You know, if the older person is still in a family unit, they can look after the whole family and provide for the special care needs as well. | |
And I think that that will happen. | |
You know, these machines will be companions to us. | |
They'll be friends. | |
They'll be carers. | |
There'll be so much more than that. | |
And I think that's an exciting future. | |
And I think in this time of coronavirus, just imagine how much easier it would be to keep people, you know, isolated from each other if they're not having to care. | |
Because one of the problems is when someone's sick, you know, you have to provide them with care. | |
How do you do that without putting yourself at risk? | |
It's like sending somebody over the top of a trench in World War I. I've thought of that only recently. | |
You know, there are some tremendously wonderful, dedicated people risking their lives to keep things going. | |
There was a person that I was aware of recently who was terribly worried about getting medical supplies that, you know, were routine medical supplies, but, you know, drugs for asthma, for example, that you have to keep getting on a regular basis. | |
And, you know, this goes for a lot of people. | |
They're not sure about how they're going to be able to get them. | |
Of course, I hadn't thought that artificial intelligence, as much as I hate the idea of drones delivering stuff to where I live, artificial intelligence could take vital medications from a pharmacy center to somebody's home without human intervention. | |
Yes. | |
And again, in the coronavirus context, you then don't have the fear. | |
You know, some people are afraid now when their doorbell rings, they're afraid to open the door. | |
So they worry about, you know, people coming to their door and breathing into their premises and all that. | |
You know, they make them take six steps backwards. | |
One of the interesting things about that, and one of the things that, you know, AI and robotics is starting to provide solutions to, is the last sort of 50 yards of the journey. | |
So, you know, Amazon are very good at, you know, transferring things from a warehouse in another country all the way to your street. | |
But in the end, it still needs a human being to get it out of the van, walk up the steps, walk along the path, push your doorbell. | |
I've now seen robots that are capable of unloading the right box from the back or side of a van, working out where the entrance to a particular property is, getting upstairs, ringing the doorbell, putting the box down and going. | |
Now, again, for jobs, that's not a great thing. | |
Hopefully we can replace those jobs with better quality, more rewarding jobs. | |
But in terms of safety, it's a great thing. | |
If you're in the middle of a lockdown, you don't really want people coming up to your door. | |
I don't know. | |
I had a delivery this morning, something that I'm going to need for what I'm doing from home at the moment. | |
And it was delivered by my cheery postperson, Astrid, who's a wonderful human postperson who's got a fantastic sense of humor, even at the moment. | |
And she says every day is like Christmas right now because of the level of deliveries. | |
I'd rather have Astrid delivering my mail than having a robot, to be perfectly frank. | |
You'll have Astrid the Android at some point, right? | |
I don't think Astrid the Android would be as funny as the real one. | |
Finally, supercomputers. | |
This I hadn't thought about until I read into it. | |
Supercomputers, this must be happening now. | |
This is not something for the future. | |
Number crunching and data crunching vaccines and treatments. | |
Yes. | |
And we see the use of supercomputers in other aspects of our lives, for example, weather forecasting, where there are so many variables and so much data to crunch that you don't want a computer that's going to take two weeks to tell you what the weather's going to be like tomorrow. | |
In the same way, you need computers that will have sufficient speed and capacity to do virtual experiments and even just to collate the data from other experiments and studies that have been done to draw new conclusions. | |
And you don't want those taking a year to crunch the numbers and come up. | |
So we use supercomputers and we come up with answers. | |
And again, it's this idea of AI being able to spot patterns and make inferences that human beings just are not in a position to make. | |
I mean, sometimes we use sort of intuition and experience and we use these slightly woolly terms designed to separate our abilities from that of intelligent machines. | |
But actually, you know, the machine that beat the world champion at the board game Go could not win by winning in the way so a chess computer, when a chess computer wins a game, it works out every permutation and combination from any particular position that is possible and therefore works out the path that's most likely to give rise to a win for the machine. | |
You can't do that with Go because there are so many permutations and combinations that it would take the age of the universe for it to be able to crunch them all. | |
So instead, the program has a form of a gut feel, experience, intuition, whatever you want to call it. | |
It starts to behave in ways that at least on the outside appear to be human, intuitive. | |
And we will see that more as the computers get faster and the amount of data that they have to crunch upon is more. | |
You will see that happening. | |
And I think that it's a good thing, but it's the dawning of a new era for us as human beings and the need to share, not necessarily to be the greatest intellect on the planet anymore. | |
Anymore. | |
And we've been brought to that position by coronavirus. | |
Nobody's really said that yet. | |
We've been brought to a position that we might have been getting to in five or ten years' time. | |
We've actually been accelerated down that road precisely because of this international threat. | |
Yeah, and I think that I think you hit the nail on the head. | |
That's the common thread that's running through all the change is that many of these changes would probably have happened anyway, but have been accelerated. | |
Other things will happen that were not going to happen, but we're moving more towards the future. | |
And as you say, it's also because we think more in these difficult times about our lives and what's important to us. | |
And we may decide that there are certain jobs that we don't want to do and that we would like to have more leisure time. | |
And then we have to, the challenge is not just technological, but also economic. | |
How do you construct an economy where the majority of people are enjoying leisure time? | |
We're having a little experiment in that at the moment, aren't we? | |
Well, yes, yes, exactly. | |
So these are difficult questions. | |
You know, some countries, even before all this, were experimenting with universal basic income. | |
Yes, so not just a benefit, as it were, but a salary for not working, enough to live a reasonably good life or not, you know, universal benefits where people will struggle. | |
But the question is, how do you make that happen? | |
Do you, for example, tax the companies that use robot labor instead of human labor and then use those taxes to pay? | |
Because if you think about companies that manufacture goods and services, it's not in their interest to have their customers without money because how would they buy their goods and services? | |
So they've got to buy into the, you would think that they wouldn't want to buy into this, but of course they will have to. | |
Yeah. | |
At the moment, people get paid in exchange for labor. | |
But if that labor is largely replaced by machines that are not, at least in the beginning, not paid, although that may change. | |
If it's replaced with this sort of form of cheap labor or free labor or slave labor, then maybe you have to tax those companies such that they give away the money in taxes that goes to citizens who then buy the products and the money goes in a slightly different circle. | |
It's not in exchange for labor, but it's in exchange for existing and buying and consuming. | |
So there's a lot to be hopeful for. | |
The future has come somewhat faster than a lot of us expected, but then that is in the nature of life. | |
And I have a very hopeful feeling that we will find an answer to coronavirus, but we will come out of it very, very different. | |
This is not going to be the future that we thought we were going to have. | |
One final thing, and just to end on an upbeat note here, I love the story. | |
I'm sure you saw it because you love electronic music. | |
In Israel, there's a guy who's invented, or a team who've invented, a composing and singing, I believe, robot called Shimon. | |
Have you seen that? | |
I didn't see. | |
I saw something similar, but not that particular story. | |
Tell me. | |
Well, Shimon apparently does. | |
I'm hoping to get an interview with the people who did that on the radio show, but it just struck me that Shimon was, you know, a vision of the future. | |
There was a video of Shimon singing, and if that was Shimon who composed and sang what Shimon was singing, it was quite remarkable and might well be better than some of the rap that we have today. | |
But that's just me being controversial. | |
Yeah, no, I think, look, for a long time, computers have been able to compose music, and sometimes they compose it in the style of well-known composers, classical or contemporary. | |
But, you know, sometimes they may complete the original works. | |
And, you know, they can produce music within certain parameters. | |
And all musicians do that. | |
You know, they write a song within a certain key. | |
A computer can not only be taught to do that, but can learn for itself how to write music. | |
And singing shouldn't be too much of a problem. | |
We have, you know, the ability to program into computers the concept of keys and melody and pitch. | |
And therefore, you know, speech synthesis being what it is, I'm not surprised. | |
I haven't heard it sing. | |
Does it sing well? | |
Well, on the video, if the video was what I thought it was, maybe I've got it all wrong, but the video was pretty good and certainly a long way away from daisy, daisy. | |
That's all. | |
Hey, listen, we normally have to... | |
And they had the cat essentially singing, which is kind of fun. | |
Gee, well, there are some people who've had hit records doing something very similar. | |
Pempsey, normally we have to wrap things up because we always run out of our allotted five minutes or whatever it is. | |
It's nice to be able to have a more relaxed and more interesting conversation and really get into the meat of things. | |
Now, look, one of the things that you do is you help people with their technical problems. | |
If they have an issue, quite often they can get in touch with you. | |
If you're still doing that, would you like to tell us how? | |
Yeah, so I'm doing my best to keep up with that. | |
So if you go to Twitter and look me up at Gadget Detective, you can follow or you can send a message. | |
And if you've got a problem, ask it and I'll do my best to help. | |
One thing I would ask is, although if it's a very confidential type thing that you don't want to share, then all means you can direct message me. | |
But if it's not a confidential problem, then please ask the question as a message that everyone can see as a general tweet, because then other people may benefit from any reply that I'm able to provide you with. | |
And, you know, I think that's a good thing because I can't answer everybody's questions. | |
But, you know, some questions, you know, what's troubling you technologically is probably troubling others as well. | |
And other people can benefit from your question and hopefully from the answer. | |
So Twitter at gadget detective, come say hello and come ask your question. | |
Duly noted, sir. | |
Febzi, lovely to talk with you as ever and nice to have, you know, some good time to do it. | |
Cheers. | |
Be well. | |
Keep well and I hope I'll speak to you soon. | |
You will. | |
Take care. | |
Thank you. | |
Bye. | |
A lot of food for thought there from Febsi Turkhalp. | |
Thank you very much to him as ever and thank you to you for being part of this show. | |
If you've got a guest suggestion, if you want to just shoot the breeze or send me a message or whatever, I'd love to hear from you. | |
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv and when you get in touch, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show. | |
More great guests in the pipeline here are the unexplained from my bunker. | |
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes. | |
This has been The Unexplained Online and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay home, stay calm, and please stay in touch. | |
Thank you very much. | |
Take care. |