PassWord – 17th February 2016

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to Password on Resonance FM in the station’s fundraising month. Over the next couple of programs, we are going to be offering up a range of goodies, books, and experiences from the world of the high-tech as part of an auction to help support the station that The Independent called a glorious experiment that everyone in the country deserves to hear. And of course they can, because Resonance FM is available via the web and via DAB. But all of that costs money, which is why we are appealing to you to dig deep into your pockets to fund the station that The Telegraph says puts the BBC and its vast budgets to shame. In this week’s programme, why some of our top surgeons have launched a competition to find the best surgical robot. A new report says that in the next 100 years we will live in city buildings 10 times the size of the Shard. We interview Jim McNeill, the producer of legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s last documentary on the interconnected future. And a revolution in art that can let you buy inexpensive original work for your home. And finally, music is good for your sex life. And your life generally. Listen to music and you have twice as much sex as people who do not, and you are more sociable. So what better reason to dig deeper into your pockets in our auction to pay for the aphrodisiac that is Resonance FM? But first, be scared, be very scared. In June of this year, the first Robotics Week is coming to London when the latest developments being made by our tin friends will be on show in the capital.. And as part of that, a competition has been launched to find the best robotic doctor. Professor Guanzhong Zhang, Director of Imperial College’s Hamlyn Centre and Chair of the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council’s Robotics and Autonomous Systems Network, tells us why they want to find RoboDoc.

Speaker C: For the surgical robot challenge, what we are looking for, of course, that it can be a generic platform, can be used for a range of surgical procedures. But for most of the teams, actually, they are starting to develop those surgical platforms that can be used for addressing specific challenges. For instance, for pediatric surgery, which you have a very small area, restricted access, and requires very dexterous movement. So how do we do that? So it all depends, and we, in fact, for the challenge, we have 3 categories. The first one is called the minimally invasive surgical essentials, so what we call the MIS essentials. So these are the robot be able to perform those essential maneuvers that’s required for minimally invasive surgery. The second one is that you require people to develop robots that can maneuver navigate, and also operate in a very tight space. So, for instance, for pediatric surgery.

Speaker D: Right. I mean, surely it would make more sense to actually have a generic robot that could carry out all of those things, that had the dexterity of the pediatric robot, and yet could do anything.

Speaker C: Yes, it is more desirable to do so, but you also need to think that for having a generic robot be able to do everything, what will be the cost implication?

Speaker D: Well, that’s an interesting point, isn’t it? Because I’m looking here at a study of the future that’s just been carried out on behalf of Samsung. And one of the things that they’ve predicted is that people will, in their homes, have home MediPods that will confirm if you’re ill, provide a digital diagnosis, and supply medicine or a remote surgeon if needed. I mean, that’s going to be terribly expensive.

Speaker C: Yes, I mean, it’s, you know, as a kind of future outlook maybe, but the technological innovation, you have to really put your feet on the ground. What is affordability? What is accessibility? And also the legal ethical issues and safety issues. In fact, what we are pushing for is really to make the robots to be more accessible through this Surgical Robot Challenge, what we really want to do is, of course, we want to push the technological frontier as far as we can, but at the same time, is really to develop what we call appropriate technologies. Okay. So one of the areas we are trying to push for, for instance, that rather than develop a robot that will be able to do everything, can you develop a robot that will be able to do part of the procedure that the human can?

Speaker D: Okay, now quick final question, ’cause I know you’ve pushed your time. What about insurance in all of this? I mean, one of the things that everybody is going to start to look at in this new age of robot innovation, whether it be robot cars or robot surgeons, is it’s got to work, hasn’t it? It’s got to be perfect. There can’t be a mistake, otherwise people are going to start saying, or they’re going to start rattling their robot lawyers at you.

Speaker E: Yes, yes.

Speaker C: So the legal ethical framework needs to be in place. That’s why the direction we want to push for is the robot actually is surgeon’s assistant, or surgical— that’s why we call it the robot-assisted surgery. So therefore, the procedure is under the firm command of the surgeon, and the robot is there to perform the task that is required by the surgeon, and the whole purpose is to improve consistency, safety, accuracy, and all this. I think with this, you know, in mind, I think the legal framework and also the ethical consideration is a lot easier to deal with.

Speaker B: But what of the robot’s bedside manner? Professor Guanzhong Yang on the hunt for the surgical robot. Now, according to space scientist Dr. Maddy Adderin-Pocock and researchers at Westminster University who were commissioned to carry out a report into the next 100 years by Samsung, We will be living in huge skyscraper cities, or underground, or in the sea, or on the moon, and going on holidays that we have flown to by drones in a world that is run by artificial intelligence and where the robot surgeons operate on us at home. So no more sickies, but then you won’t want to because you’ll be on a 3-day week as the robots will do most of the work. Here’s Tim Burgess, an architect from Westminster and one of the authors of the report, to tell us why it it’s science fact, not fiction.

Speaker F: Our research, academic research, has been focused in the last 5 years at Westminster University on speculating on future scenarios. So we’re breeding new— we’re breeding the architects of the future, not the architects of right now. And in doing so, we want them to, you know, look and speculate on how technology and the integration of technology into our lives will affect how we live, how we organize our cities, how we organize our kind of cultural activities, how we organize our homes in the future. So that’s where our kind of interest in this report comes from.

Speaker D: And you’re talking about giant skyscrapers that can house entire cities. I think Le Corbusier spoke, talked about that ages ago and lots of people said that it didn’t work. They said it was a failure. They said that people didn’t like it.

Speaker F: Yes, I think there were definitely failings in Corbusier’s kind of ambitions or that kind of bore themselves out as failures. I think the difference— I mean, we lived in a very different world then. I think we’ve learned a lot since then. We’ve probably learned a lot about how a building can be organized so that it’s got a— Gropius was talking about machine habitations as machines to live in. What we’re interested in is what Buckminster Fuller’s theories were, which was thinking about the spaceship as planet Earth. So we’re really more interested in the kind of closed-loop systems, the kind of systems that you might use to move to another planet and set up out there, so a building that you can grow your own food in, that you can make your own electricity in, that you can harvest your own water within, and then you can reuse those systems inside the building, a building you can go to work in. And so it’s a bit, you know, it’s a— we feel a development on Corbusier’s ideals.

Speaker D: And you’ve got this fascinating idea of an earthscraper, buildings that are built into the ground. Again, I mean, obviously you seem to be interested in science fiction writers, but HG Wells and The Time Machine, wasn’t that a bit worrying because the Morlocks started living underground and then they started eating people?

Speaker F: Yes, we, I mean, science fiction and science fact, I think there’s definitely a dynamic, a kind of a relationship between the two. We, and whether that’s, and also how, you know, the public might see something in a science fiction movie, but then there’s a kind of a general psyche move to want that thing. Let’s think about the screens in Minority Report, the kind of touchscreens. So I think science fiction starts to inform, A, what people want, but it also informs what scientists are looking into. Science fiction, on the other hand, is and always has been, you know, has been based on scientific research. It’s never been kind of wild speculation, but it’s always been looking at what’s current in the scientific movement at that particular moment and speculating on how those things might develop. For instance, the gravity waves that have just been discovered, or confirmed rather, We don’t know what those gravity waves will mean to technology in the same way that when they discovered radio waves, they had no idea that we’d use those radio waves to communicate across the ocean, to send photos on our mobile phones. So I think, yeah, those things are really— our research is always informed in science, and we feel that science fiction always also informs our research, so we sit somewhere in between.

Speaker D: Okay, so that’s where you get these virtual work meetings, the ability to work from anywhere, attend as an avatar or a hologram. I mean, those things are definitely coming. We’ve been talking about these on the program all of the last year. The avatar is with us now.

Speaker F: So the avatar is almost with us now. It feels like we’re on the cusp sometimes when you have an app that can overlay a different image onto your face and you’re looking at yourself on the phone and it looks, it’s matching you and you’re moving your face. It’s matching. Now it’s quite easy to speculate that that phone-based technology will soon actually make the, not just kind of exploratory leap that things, that some companies have released, but actually embedded technology whereby you would be able to walk around you and whoever you want to have, whichever face you want projected on the people around you, you have projected. You walk into your home and it may just be that it’s a very kind of clean base, you know, white walls, but actually because you programmed it in there, the projection, the thing that you see, is based on whatever kind of, you know, vision you have. So a wallpaper or a burning fire or a TV that’s on there.

Speaker B: Tim Burgess of Westminster on our dizzy future. It’s a subject that has been preoccupying Werner Herzog, the German film director described by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential figures on the planet.. He’s just made a new documentary on the connected world which has received rave reviews ahead of its launch, which coincides with the London Robotics Week in June. Here’s Jim McNeill, the executive producer of Lo and Behold, who commissioned Herzog on behalf of the digital infrastructure company Netscout on why they wanted to make the film.

Speaker G: We’re going to develop a computer that’s going to have the ability to, you know, take over the entire web. And that’s going to happen in my lifetime and your lifetime. Danny Hillis, who’s a member of our film that we interview, I love his line. He says, well, he goes, do I think that perhaps artificial intelligence has manifested itself inside of the web? He said, well, I don’t know because if it had, it wouldn’t necessarily reveal itself.

Speaker D: Well, that’s a very interesting point, isn’t it? This is a point that many computer scientists have said that there’s you talking about the company that you work for that wanted to pay for this and that that monitors the behavior of computers within the web, there’s all of these failsafe computers that run our utilities. You’ve told them to be failsafe. They may have actually already developed some sort of intelligence to actually get around some problem that they’ve encountered because they know they can’t turn themselves off.

Speaker G: Well, I think— I actually think it’s premature to believe that. That’s my own personal opinion. I’ve been a computer science guy since, you know, the early ’80s. What I do believe we’re on the precipice of is as you move towards this huge conversation on business transformation, when you create an API for virtually every function in a company, and those APIs are part of a large enterprise bus and they’re discoverable, and there’s a stated contract that this is how you do X, Y, or Z, and you can look them up and you can find them and you can tap into them and you can talk to them and you can arrange them in very interesting ways, As computers become more and more sophisticated, as we develop more algorithms. Now think about it, we’ve already got amazing algorithms in the artificial narrow intelligence space. You know, voice recognition, we have translation, Google Translation, which is pretty amazing. I can talk into my phone in English and it can come out in Swiss, which is pretty cool. These are very narrow categories, but as these things kind of get wider and broader, and we have vision, and we have cognition, and we have other skills that we teach computers to do, And they have the ability to tap into all these various APIs that control commerce, that control the way cars move through cities, that control traffic lights, you know, that control air systems, you know, what gate you go to when you land at the airport. That’s pretty interesting, and I think it’s important that we think about what happens if a supercomputer or even a super, you know, well-plugged-in, you know, government, you know, tries to take control of that stuff.

Speaker D: Okay, so those are the issues that you wanted to look at. And you suddenly decided to get Werner Herzog. I mean, I’ve just looked him up on Wikipedia. It says considered one of the greatest figures of the new German cinema. François Truffaut called him the most important film director alive. What did he bring to this? Why did you want him and what did you do?

Speaker G: Those who know Werner understand that he’s a man of truth. He’s always looking for the truth in every topic that he pursues. And he’s a wonderful storyteller. And we are living in an age where the signal-to-noise ratio is so incredibly high, trying to get above the volume of static To get to someone’s eyeballs and get their attention and get them to focus for more than 2 minutes on a topic requires a novel approach. And when someone watches this film, they are engaged for 98 minutes in a conversation about the current state of the connected world and where it’s going and what it means. And people are willing to sit down patiently and take this stuff in if it’s done in an entertaining and compelling fashion. And so that’s why I hired Vern.

Speaker D: Filmmaker.

Speaker G: He loves what he does, he’s good at it, and people trust him. And he builds beautiful films. We submitted it to Sundance. We were one of 12,000 films submitted but one of 125 selected. There were less than, you know, 30 documentaries. We had the premiere position, 8:30 Saturday night, and we had 800 news articles written about it and wonderful reviews, including The Guardian that gave us 4 out of 5 stars. And people liked it. And they thought it was provocative. And the best compliment I got when I was out at Sundance was from the head of the International Narratives group for Sundance documentaries. And she said that she liked Lo and Behold because of all the films that she screened, it was the one that kept making her think about, you know, where we are and where we’re going. And I think that’s a huge success. But I think that The interesting thing with Werner has been to kind of get him up to speed in exploring and watching the healthy curiosity that he has, you know, as a filmmaker to dig into these topics and look at them through fresh eyes. I mean, it’s like inviting a friend, you know, to London who’s never been there and you show them around the town and you show them things that you’ve seen 100 times before, but when you see it through their eyes, it’s almost like you’re seeing it for the first time.

Speaker B: Jim McNeill on the making of Lo and Behold, the new documentary on the digital future due out in June. We’re working on getting some tickets to the showing that will go into Resonance FM’s auction, but more of that in next week’s programme. First, how’d you like some original art on your walls? For a week, we’re offering a lucky winner the opportunity to mount a super-resolution screen on their wall that can display artworks from some of the world’s leading artists. It’s part of an incredibly successful idea from Artfinder, a company that is giving young artists a chance to sell their works online without having to deal with the intimidating and pretentious art world, and more importantly, putting their work in front of people who would not dare set foot in a gallery. Here’s Michael Szczesny of Artfinder to tell us what’s behind the idea.

Speaker H: I think the The world of art is in general perceived by people as something that’s intimidating and not for them. Obviously, there is a small selection of those who already enjoy it and appreciate it and they can understand it and so on and so forth. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to allow everyone to enjoy this feeling and enjoy this joy of having something that’s unique and created by the artist, a piece that has a story that you can actually learn and it resonates with you because maybe you share the same experiences as the artist who created it.

Speaker D: So something that means something to you and yet it’s unique, it’s something that you’ve bought and you relate to.

Speaker H: Absolutely, I think the difference between owning an original piece of art that you ordered from the artist directly and you unbox it and it gives you goosebumps when you open it and you see the texture and you can smell the paint and you can compare it with picking up a print that’s pre-framed in IKEA and you know that hundreds of thousands of people around the world have the same piece. So you have this kind of easy route or the one that is a bit more exciting, a bit more challenging, but it gives you rewards because ultimately when someone visits your home, I can guarantee that when an original painting hangs above the table, everybody will comment, and I had that myself, that revelation myself when I bought my first painting.

Speaker D: Okay, so I mean, in a sense it’s really interesting, isn’t it? What you’re doing is you’re saying, this says something about me. You’re actually making an expression yourself and you’re getting engaged in the art in doing so.

Speaker E: Absolutely.

Speaker H: I think we’re used to expressing our style by choosing the type of clothes that we wear, whether it’s a vintage style or whether it’s a sporty style or casual. We’re used to accessories. Accessorizing our homes as well, but not everyone’s comfortable with the idea of putting a statement piece on their wall for a variety of reasons. First of all, we believe in general that this is expensive, so it’s inaccessible, which obviously isn’t true, but also because we’re not that comfortable of our own style yet. So what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to help people be comfortable with buying art by making sure that they can choose what they want, don’t feel judged, pay very little, even pay in installments if it’s a painting that’s above £300. But also we give that guarantee that if you don’t like it, you can just return it and there is no fuss, no risk to you nor to the artist.

Speaker D: Okay, so how does it work? I mean, is it successful? Are people taking up this new access to the art world?

Speaker H: Yes, I think it’s been quite a ride since we first started as a marketplace. We’ve launched with around 600 artworks. We now have nearly 200,000 from artists in nearly 100 countries all over the world. The buyers give us fantastic feedback. They love the ability to contact the artist directly, to be able to sometimes even negotiate the price or order a custom artwork based on their particular requirements. And you can just read the reviews. I think it’s a fantastic platform that we’re very, very proud of, and I’m sure the future is very bright. And it gives a brand new voice to the artist community all over the world.

Speaker B: Michael Chesney of Artfinder on the way the web is opening up art to the world. Now, if music be the food of love, play on, let me have excess of it. Once more Shakespeare gets it right. Research on behalf of the speaker manufacturer Sonos has found that playing music improves our relationships with everyone and even increases sexual activity. Well, there’s a thing. High Court judges have known that for ages when they sanctioned those terrible activities. I kid you not, I once heard a judge say about a fight that all of the ingredients were there: alcohol, loud music, and women. Still, in reasonable doses, in the privacy of your home, music has a significant effect upon us. Daniel Mullensyfion, head of the Music Mind and Brain Embassy at at Goldsmiths College, analyzed the data for Sonus.

Speaker E: So the study Music Makes It Home that Sonus commissioned wasn’t really about the sex life. It was about playing music out loud and what other behaviors or attributes that is associated with in personal life. So we looked at life satisfaction, we looked at satisfaction in a relationship, in how many meals people would have at home, and we also asked them in a survey in the survey how many times they would have sex per week. And what we found is that people who play more music out loud, so more days and for longer periods, are also higher on almost all of these pro-social activities, which was a really interesting finding. And then in a second step, we said, okay, this is a survey, so it’s just an association. We can’t really establish cause and effect. But what we can do is run a proper experiment where we have the same 30 households and we test them in 2 different weeks or observe them in 2 different weeks. First, we take all music away so they have a complete silent week. And then in the second week, they’re equipped with a Sonos smart speaker system as well as an Apple Music account to choose from almost all recorded music in the world.— we compared the behaviour from week 1 to week 2, and the same results came out. So people spent more time at home, spent more time in the same room, and even came closer together physically. So the average distance between people in the room was smaller in the music week.

Speaker D: So do you think that that’s what all of this is about? Is that, you know, maybe the music’s playing and people decide to dance, and somebody dances in a funny way and somebody laughs, offset them.

Speaker E: It breaks barriers. Yeah, absolutely. So when the music is on, we observed that there were all sorts of invitations for social interaction. So people would spontaneously sing along together, or would dance together, or would at least turn to each other and see how the other person reacts to the music. So all these behaviors came up when the music was on, but of course they weren’t observed when the music wasn’t playing.

Speaker D: Now, of course, when it’s silent though, I mean, surely what you’re saying is any interaction is good, so therefore people should watch television together, talk about the program that they’re watching, or interact in some way. Do you think it’s just music or is it other things?

Speaker E: Well, music is special in a way, so I think What did happen is that in the silent week the TV was on more and people watched more television, but that doesn’t really invite for interaction because television is, well, it’s a one-way communication and you’re generally not interacting very much with the other people in the same room, which is different to music, which is, well, has many opportunities to engage with another person.

Speaker D: Okay, so if those are your findings, what is your advice then? Is it that we should play certain sorts of music, or is it that we should just play music?

Speaker E: I think it’s just playing music out loud and together when other people are around. So it seems— and that was one of the reasons for starting the study in the first place— it seems that over the last 10 or 15 years slightly lost the opportunity to listen to music together. So with the rise of smartphones and iPods where music listening is very much individualized and you listen to often low-quality audio files over low-quality headphones just on your own, many people have kind of forgotten about how good it feels to listen to music together, being in the same room, and what kind of atmosphere that can create, which in many homes, it can create or change the atmosphere similar to turning the heating on or to changing the lighting, for example. And music can do much more than that, so it can definitely change our emotions and our mood as well.

Speaker B: That was Daniel Mullins-Syfian of Goldsmiths, on the research that have found that music makes your world go round. You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM, and if you’ve just joined us, I’m afraid you’ve missed it, but we’ll be here again next week when we’ll be bringing you more news about Resonance FM’s fundraising spectacular, when you’ll be able to bid for an incredible range of items ranging from records and art to tech that reflects the sheer diversity of the shows that Resonance FM brings things to you. Password is a joint production between Future Intelligence and the Cybersecurity Research Institute, and if you want to find out more about what we do, then log on to our website at www.futureintelligence.co.uk.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening. Goodbye. This program has been brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you liked what you heard and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.