Transcripts For BBCNEWS Click 20171119

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this week, a phone is born and we are exclusively behind the scenes. can artificial intelligence block the bullies? and...driving monsters. just across the water from hong kong, on the chinese mainland, lies a city at the heart of the country's technological revolution. welcome back to shenzhen. this is where stuff gets made. when you think of china's electronic scene, this might be what you think of. thousands of factories and millions of people mass—producing billions of devices. more than 70% of the world's mobile phones are manufactured in china. their components, also made locally, are sourced from the city's famous giant electronics market, where everything is for sale. but all that industry is taking its toll on the city. as the buildings go up to accommodate the influx of businesses, the smog has come down to remind everyone of the price you pay for a rapidly expanding industrial economy. the middle—class here is also consuming more power, as well as demanding something else — good quality home—grown products. and chinese brands are rising to the challenge, with names like zte, xiaomi and huawei even breaking out of china and becoming recognised and desired worldwide. one such brand is oneplus. now, despite only being four years old, it's already turned out a number of phones that have been compared favourably to the top end samsungs and iphones and this week it unveiled a brand—new handset, the st, with all the fanfare that a big phone launch gets these days. are you all excited? the secrecy that surrounds these new phones‘ prelaunch is intense and, let's be honest, it's part of the hype. look, it's another black rectangle! but as such it's really rare to get a look behind the scenes at the design, the manufacture and the launch of a new device. but in shenzhen, two weeks before the unveiling, we were given exclusive access to the inner workings of the production line on the run—up to d—day. now i'm qualified to serve you pastries. they make loads of different types of phones in this factory, so to keep the st as secret from all the other workers, everything happens behind the blue shroud of secrecy. are you ready? thank you. come in. welcome to production line 27. the phone starts life as just a tiny camera there and then it's gradually assembled around this u shaped production line, which means by the time it gets to the end it's a fully featured phone, just about there. this is the reason china has come to dominate electronics manufacturing. a ready supply of a disciplined, relatively low—cost workforce. each person here has one uniquejob which requires concentration, speed and precision. a single speck of dust caught in the camera lens and the finish phone will be rejected. what i found most surprising about this is it's all people. i would have thought with this kind of high precision job, these phones would have been built solely by machines, but it's pretty much all humans. each line can produce more than 90 phones an hour. it's exhausting just watching this. fortunately, the staff get a two—hour lunch break and also, suddenly at 3pm... bell rings this might look weird, but having seen how intense this job is and how much concentration you need, this ten minute eye break is invaluable. i think if i was doing thisjob i'd just want ten minutes to get my head down and close my eyes and reset my brain too. wow! now, these people are bringing to life a design that has been anguished over, squeezed for efficiency and ultimately compromised to keep costs down. i'm meeting with one of the designers to get the inside track on how he's made this black rectangle ever so slightly different from all the others. for every new phone, you come up with lots of different designs, like this. 200. oh, my word! do you think we've achieved peak design now? in the end, these are all physics. so what interferes with that, what does not is something that you simply can't change. we are still making some choices, some sacrifices, in favour of the beauty of the exterior, still a little bit. such as? well, such as, actually the best place for this would be leaning directly on the corner. in our design, we have this angle here, so that doesn't allow us to put this directly here. if you could get rid of one part of the phone, to make your camera part better, what would it be? i won't tell anyone. maybe the shell? laughs that's the best answer! back at the factory, simon would be horrified by what happens to his design. dramatic screaming this is where an unlucky few phones are pulled off the production line to check extreme tolerance. oh, that breaks my heart. it's not being dropped flat, is it? no. with five degrees, you can test the phone in a more cruel environment. the components will be shaken little bit, more hard. elsewhere, other test phones escape that big plunge, but instead are dropped 5,000 times each. others have their charging ports wiggled and buttons pressed 10,000 times. and then there's the tumble dryer. only when about 70% of the sample phones start surviving this vigorous testing will a build be deemed successful. for me this is a fascinating look at how a phone is born and now that it's being launched this small preproduction line can expand, once the company has an indication of how many orders it will get. and that's the secret. not to produce more than you can sell. so when 0neplus decided to take on the big brands, which can all afford to fail, it decided to sell its first phone by invitation only. what was the thinking behind that? ‘cause i would have tried to make it as available as possible. so being a brand—new company and not making such a complicated product as a smartphone and being based here, we didn't really have the opportunity to test the product in all the countries where we sold it and adding to that we didn't know how many phones to make. if you end up having too many phones in your warehouse that you can't sell, it's over. with the launch over, 0neplus will nervously await the first reviews and, more importantly, the advance orders. and they will decide whether these people will be joined by hundreds more or not. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that us bot makers boston dynamics showed off this horrifyingly agile back—flipping monster! what?! facebook announced it's testing out a trust indicated to help stop fake news and mario could be destined for hollywood! nintendo are in talks with the animation studio behind despicable me, about bringing the gaming legend to the big screen. let's hope it was better than last time! videogames publisher ea was in hot water this week with its star wars battlefront ii title. to unlock characters like luke skywalker and darth vader, gamers originally had to pay large sums of credit, purchasable either with real cash or earned by spending tens of hours playing. due to complaints, ea originally reduced the number needed by 75%, but has now put a hold on all real—world transactions. finally, in competition with amazon and google, chinese search engine giant baidu revealed its own voice—controlled smart speaker. the raven h has a detachable remote that comes with an led display, so see you can see that wherever you are in the room. there's also a robotic arm version too. the uk's anti—bullying week is now coming to an end, but behind closed doors, computer screens and even smart phones, the bullying that some encounter in the school playground still lives on after—hours. after i did come out, i then received online anonymous messages from an account set up to message me, telling me i should kill myself, because obviously they didn't agree with my sexuality. it destroyed me because not only was the bullying happening at school, it had followed me to my home. it followed me to my room, my safe space where i feel happy and i am myself, isuddenly couldn't be any more. thomas moved schools and went on to become one of facebook‘s anti—bullying ambassadors, a scheme funded by the social network to train up pupils to provide peer—to—peer support within secondary schools. it's really important to have someone there because it's someone they know they can come to as well. and with the ambassadors being their generation, children are more likely to come to us and know that they're there for them. because we are their age, we have similar interests so they can come to us much easier. but with so many different places to communicate, the problem is hard to police, hard to monitor and hard to solve, as those at the frontline of dealing with cyber bullying attest. 0ur concern is just how awful the things are that people write. it's very sad, but we do regularly see those sorts of comments about "everybody hates you, go kill yourself". those sorts of things, which i can't imagine would happen in a face—to—face environment. as the big and small players try to overcome the issue, one british company has big ambitions. they want to get their software on every single child's device before they use it for the first time. safetonet don't like to refer to their software as parental control because they feel that could put people off. some of the functions, though, could be considered that. for example, monitoring the amount of time that your children are online and limiting that however you see fit. you can block devices and websites, but it also is planning on upping the game of what these sorts of products can do by adding a bit of artificial intelligence. by later this year, it's going to be aiming to track the behavioural changes, so they can pre—empt any bullying before it actually happens. it aims to understand context, providing triggered alerts for parents, rather than letting them actually spy. one of the ways that we identify when children are trending sad and maybe even depressed is they stop posting selfies of themselves because they've lost that self—confidence. so our software is designed to be able to pick up those trends and recognised, again, there's a change in behavioural patterns. so we are identifying cyber bullying, abuse, aggression, sextortion, grooming and other predatory risks. great if it works, but of course it's all really about human behaviour. culturally we obviously do have an issue that young people believe that you can behave this way online. we need to send a clear message, you don't, and i think it takes all of us to work together, educators, parents and tech companies, to make sure children understand that. so whilst none of the solutions may be foolproof, maybe these ideas together could make cyber bullying a lesser problem in the future than it is today. apple has been massively popular here in china but that popularity has started to wane, and that's mainly thanks to an increase in good—quality chinese smartphones. now, that's caused a problem for the thousands of small businesses here that have become dependent on china's obsession with iphones. danny vincent has spent some time with one of the country's unofficial genius bar workshops who've become dependent on apple's success. these are migrant workers from southern china. 10 years ago, they moved to beijing to join china's tech boom. for this family—run business, their fortunes are linked to the rise and fall of the popularity of the apple iphone. they fix more than 10,000 iphones a year. translation: we can basically fix every problem, big or small. we fix apple products. our main business is to upgrade iphone storage. we have seen many customers. many do not want to change their phone yet, but they want to upgrade the storage. china and apple have had an on—and—off relationship. this is the second biggest market for the american tech firm. but apple has lost much of its lustre in china. until recently, they faced back—to—back declining sales. it's losing ground to chinese competitors. translation: other brands have taken certain market share from apple. that's why apple sales are not as good as they were. one possibility is that it's much more expensive than chinese brands. at the same time, chinese brands are also made well, of good quality, so many people choose chinese brands. this means fewer customers for the family. translation: it's just too expensive. iphone 8 is the same as iphone 7. the only difference is wireless charging. others are more or less the same, so iphone eight isn't popular. iphone 7 isn't that popular either. apple generates 35% of its profit in china. —— apple generates 25% of its profit in china. the launch of the iphone 10 marked a return of growth in the country. but chinese—made apps are dominating the market. apple has struggled to integrate into china's ecosystem. many users are now opting for cheaper chinese brands equipped with high—end features. translation: people in cities that have low consumption, four—tier cities or cities below, would choose cheap chinese brands, cheap phones, mostly. like the city i am from, people tend to choose lower ones like huawei. apple is still the fifth best selling phone in china, but now chinese phones are moving into the international market. i feel some chinese brands are selling overseas. for example, huawei, they are quite good. two years ago, china was expected to overtake the us, becoming apple's biggest market. workers are hedging their bets. translation: how big a market share apple will take in china is difficult to predict. if apple can keep its system and looks, and at the same time, change to be more attractive to customers, it will still have quite a big market share. no—one can live without a phone. so, if you work in the phone industry, you will still have a market. even back when china was just known for manufacturing the devices for other countries, it was still growing some pretty strong tech brands to serve its own enormous population. take wechat, it's an app used by nearly 900 million people in china. now, it's a bit like whatsapp, but you can do so much more with it. you can order a taxi, or a food delivery. you can even take part in a spot of dating, tinder—style. but what's amazing is, when you might struggle to use a credit card here, even the smallest shops will accept credit payment through wechat, even if they don't take cash. this is the easiest peer—to—peer payment system i think i have ever seen. to pay someone, you just someone else to generate a qr code which the other person scans and the money is transferred from your account to theirs. behind wechat is one of the biggest tech companies in china, tencent, probably the biggest company you've never heard of. and just like facebook and google in the west, tencent are trying to make sense and make use of all of the interactions, words and pictures that are shared on the service every second. the brand—new artificial intelligence lab here in shenzhen is full of young minds trying to apply machine—learning research to understanding images. and they have come up with similar results to those we have seen previously from companies in the west. this app identifies different objects in a picture, at the moment, just rectangular books. but here's one that tries to work out what you're wearing, presumably so it can sell you more of the same. you see, as soon as you can isolate objects within the image, you can give them special treatment. now, that could be for novelty reasons, a bit like what we see snapchat do, or for more useful things, like intelligently applying different effects to different parts of the image, maybe to darken the background and lighten the subject. in a video chat, it's faces that are surely the most important part. by spotting and isolating them, they can be turned into 3d models which might form your avatar for times when the video link will not work. in fact, they're working on the whole body here, identifying limbs and joints which can also form part of a 3d reconstruction. just don't ask to see the raw data. hmm, delightful. and for times when the video is not clear or it's too compressed, here's some work to increase the resolution, adding back in missing detail by looking for clues of what was lost over several frames of video. but this laboratory wants to go further. translation: before the plane was invented, people couldn't imagine flying. only after its invention do we understand it is possible. so, the same thing needs to happen with al. instead of just improving efficiency, we need a big breakthrough going beyond imagination. if nothing else has impressed you, here is a new feature which will analyse your photos, write a description of them, and then rap them. yes, rap them. word to your mother. it seems that tencent is working really hard to catch up with the west, exploring lots of ai innovations in many areas at once. these lunchtime power naps are commonplace in china and probably necessary to enable them to keep working late into the evening. and they will certainly need a lot of energy, because tencent is trying to break out of china. it's bought a stake in snapchat and also in tesla, which is itself working heavily on image processing to help its fleet of semi—autonomous cars to understand the world around them. and i'm notjust talking about semi—autonomous cars, no — tesla now has a new truck! here's dave lee in los angeles. you've really got to hand it to elon musk. when people are telling him he can't do something, or that he's doing too much, he goes and launches an enormous electrical truck. and here it is. the tesla semi. he says it will go 500 miles in a single charge, carrying the heaviest loads on the roads, doing 0—60 miles per hour in 20 seconds. on the left, the thing that looks like it's not moving, is a diesel truck. as you might expect, it comes filled with a host of tesla technology, including autonomy. this thing will change lanes on its own. now, a diesel truck is twice as expensive as a tesla semi. if you move from diesel to electricity, which is significantly cheaper, these trucks will be significantly cheaper, and they could pay for themselves in just a few years. other companies are trying to pull off the electric truck. cummins is a truck firm that has been around for more than 100 years and it unveiled its own electric truck recently. but that one has only 100 miles per charge — of no interest to any serious trucker. in classic steve jobs style, elon musk had one more thing for the tesla faithful. so, the tesla fans that came here today certainly expected to see a lorry. what they weren't expecting to see was a new roadster, and that certainly has got this energetic crowd extremely excited. the bad news for tesla fans is that the roadster won't be on the road until 2020. and that's it from china for the moment. there's absolutely no doubt that we will be back here pretty soon. in the meantime, you can catch all of the backstage fun on facebook and the bbc twitter for bbc click. thanks for watching and we'll see you soon. hello there. part two of the weekend will be cold again. a colder start if you are stepping out first thing this morning and it is no surprise that we had a beautiful day across the north. we had clear skies and temperatures have plummeted. in the south, not so clear. we began with dank and grey weather but that gradually eased out of the way. the harshest frost will be in rural areas in northern and eastern parts of the uk but frost is likely elsewhere and it means that it will be a lovely sunny start to the day for most of us. however, where we have had the legacy of damp weather across southern england, parts of wales and those areas more prone to fog, again, if you travel this morning you will hang around at this time of year until the middle of the morning so it will be quite cold and grey. promising across scotland for sunshine. fewer showers and the gale force winds that have been for three days now should begin to ease. that is not to say that it's not a cold start. these towns and cities in the countryside will be below freezing and you will scrape the ice off the cars. fog issues across the southern half of the uk possibly northern ireland, and the weather front is never too far away from the south—west of wales and northern ireland. will tend to topple back into cloud through the afternoon turning skies a little grey that you will feel cold. the wind won't be quite so strong in the east, given such a cold start, the temperatures will be lower than they were yesterday. struggling to five or six degrees but not too bad in the sunshine and there should be some around in the late afternoon for watford and west hampshire. they willjust be cold although fine and dry and temperatures will fall away quickly as they will in scotland. cold if you are heading out to any sporting events through the course of the day ahead. through this evening and overnight, we could see snow across the hills of scotland, possibly even at lower levels as we start to see a change. we will watch that for the rush—hour and it may cause disruption. there will be heavy rain for a time before it gets blown away by the brisk westerly wind coming in off the atlantic. a real change of type and feel i think by the time we reach monday. not necessarily in the north. that cold air really does stagnate and holds on across the north and east of scotland. a question of how far that cold air comes back but at the moment it looks like the mild air will win through for much of the week and could bring with it further rain. severe gale force winds potentially late in the week. hello and welcome to bbc news. i'm tom donkin with our top stories... two meetings in the next few hours could decide the political future of zimbabwe's president mugabe. the search for the missing argentine submarine gets some good news as possible signals are detected. malcolm young — co—founder of the australian heavy rock band ac/dc has died at the age of sixty—four. it's the annual monarch butterfly migration — but this time mexico is turning conservation into a money—spinner... hello and welcome to bbc news.

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