Ayatollah Ali harmony he has been the focus of much anger in the anti-government protests of the past 2 days that have spread to at least half a dozen cities on social media there are calls for more antigovernment protests later today in a number of towns and cities calls that have been made anonymously the president of Zambia at go along who has ordered the military and police to help deal with an outbreak of cholera in the capital Lusaka which is killed 41 people over the past 3 months this report from James read the cholera outbreak began in densely populated districts of Lusaka where poor sanitation and a lack of clean drinking water have helped spread the disease the government says it has now reached other areas and is being propagated by contaminated food a spokesman for the Zambian president said he had called in the security forces to clean up the capital because he feared the outbreak could become a rampaging epidemic he said restaurants and markets that posed a risk of further cholera transmission would be closed until they met hygiene standards European security sources have told the Reuters news agency that Russian tankers of recently supplied few to North Korea in breach of United Nations sanctions the owner of one of the ships denied smuggling oil to North Korea so he long isn't so according to 2 senior European security sources quoted by the Reuters News Agency Russian vessels transferred oil to North Korean tankers that see on at least 3 occasions in October and November the unnamed sources cited naval intelligence and satellite imagery of vessels operating out of Russian Far East imports from the Pacific young young relies on imported oil to keep it struggling economy functioning and to feel its missile and nuclear programs the Supreme Court in Russia is hearing an appeal by the Russian opposition politician Alexina Vonnie against the Central Election Commission's decision to bar him from the presidential election in May. Arch Mr Nirvana contends that the 5 years is spent did send got last February from Besley money from a forestry firm was concocted with the express purpose of disqualifying him from running against President Putin world news from the b.b.c. China says it's punished nearly $450.00 people for misusing property and levy ation funds the authorities of also recruit more than $100000000.00 of misappropriated money in a 3 month nationwide investigation over recent years China has made poverty reduction one of its main domestic goals spending on health education and infrastructure projects a course in Cairo has sentenced the us did Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi to 3 years in prison for insulting the judiciary the former Islam is leader is currently behind bars awaiting a retrial after his death sentence was overturned also sentenced today was 17 co-defendants including the political blogger a lot of the Fatah and the broadcaster Tawfiq Akasha. New poll says band solo climbers from scaling its mountains including mine terrorists in an attempt to reduce accidents by Tourism Ministry officials at the law have been revised to make man to nearing safer Here's under us Senator Rajan thousands of climbers go to Nepal each spring and autumn when a clear weather provides opportunities to scale some of the world's tallest mountains the government sees it is introducing new rules to ensure the safety of some of the mountaineers will enjoy the challenge of climbing alone a well known Swiss climber Uli stick died in April this year when he fell from a steep bridge during a solo climb to a peak neighboring Everest the government also approved its earlier decision to ban double amputees and visually impaired climbers from scaling Everest there's Jillian rugby star Karmichael Hunt has been charged with possessing drugs after police allegedly fined him in Brisbane on Saturday with a white powder Rock The Australian said as he launched an investigation in 2015 he received his 6 weeks is that engine under $25000.00 fine for cocaine possession b.b.c. News. Hello and welcome to Tech tent your weekly guy to all the hottest technology news and trends I'm Rory Catherine Jones and this week we've a special program devoted to the subject that obsesses the tech business at the moment artificial intelligence will look at AI's impact on health and transport I will discuss the ethical implications of allowing computer algorithms to run ever more aspects of our lives and I've got 2 very special guests to help us through this complex story top of the Goldstar He's co-founder of cognition x. And Ai consultancy. Good to have you here as emails are runs on in French a weekly newsletter all about Ai called exponential view welcome as the other that we will be putting you to do a lot of work over the next 20 minutes or so here's a flavor of what's to come I think that people do have a very big misapprehension about what the books are going to do to the world of work and what their own job might be facing in the future and what you might find when using changed. Trained on that road actually quite likes to drive pointer each hole of that coming up but 1st things 1st I want to get my 2 guests to explain one thing very briefly what exactly do we mean by artificial intelligence type of the Goldstar you go 1st so that it's worth noting that everyone has a different definition of Ai and it's been changing constantly since the sixty's the moment that I really understood artificial intelligence was actually when I thought about the fact these systems learn like a child does with the experiences that it has and if you look at something like Facebook which a lot of people obviously using the experiences that are given into a machine like Facebook can start to detect the difference between your face and my face because it's given many many many many many images and lots of data of both of our faces the key to the next stage is understanding that there's a I can't then an arbitrary question like which of us went on holiday more or who. Or dress better so ai is very good at doing it define task better than a human but still isn't able to understand the logic that a baby would pretty narrow at the moment. What about you what's your definition Well I think the learning from experience is a critical part of Ai systems and what we're trying to do with them now is get these computer systems to pursue more complex goals in more complex environments all the computer systems we've had hitherto have been very very simplistic they could do the one thing and if you tried to get him to do something else that probably wouldn't do it that well so for me complex goals complex environments learn from experience Ok we'll discuss how far we are along that path now one of the most promising areas where artificial intelligence researchers hope to make progress is in delivering better health care although so far I think it's fair to say there's been a lot more talk than action but a scientist who led I.B.M.'s Watson Ai division and is now chief executive of the European firm benevolent ai is confident that we're just at the beginning of a revolution in health care 0 percent he has been telling me how his company is transforming the costly and lengthy process of discovering new drugs. Instead of scientists coming up with ideas and then pushing them through and trying to validate them we have a machine actually scouting all the literature are there all the patents all the in for interesting information and coming up with new ideas new basically making isms for treating diseases at that point the scientists would validate what this is rather than you know coming up with the ideas and trying to bury them a why is that a fruitful way forward one 1st because in accelerate the process you know and coming up with new ideas is usually going to tedious and serendipitous in this case you can have a machine actually generating a list of things from which you can start it's a much much faster process also it allows a scientist not to be I'm going to say emotionally attached to the idea is right one of the problem in drug discovery is that people tend to be attached to and years and push them through even if some time the evidence goes against it and you know as you may know in discovering the problem of the cost of drugs is because there are many many failures late in the game that are very very costly so in our case we generate a lot of ideas through the machine and then a scientist but he did them and we tried to kill the ideas as fast and as quickly as possible and push the one that are very very promising is this just a nice tool to have in the process of discovery or is it fundamentally changing it I think it's fundamentally changing it's really changed the process of you know coming up was discovering you know trying to surely it's a very ad hoc process you know people will actually go through the literature themselves they would be on idea and here our science is really tall as you know it's just that's a game changer and I don't have to think through this I just have to start from the list and the ideas come from there you know it makes the process much much faster much more systematic if we look more widely at the impact Ai could have on health or a huge claims being made about that right now. It's not a bit overblown the challenge with ai is it's easy to pretend in ai that you're doing something when you're not but I believe there's a lot of improvement have been made in the past 10 and 10 years and there's a lot of data in healthcare large available data has not been exploited so there's a lot of low hanging fruit for improvements and I do believe that many of these improvements are real for example in diagnostic imaging you know understanding interpreting images and or sending you know if you have a skin cancer or not is proven through peer reviewed research that you can create Sistan that match human or even surpass human accuracy knowledge challenges you know how do you get that adopted you know how do you get people to trust the machine that's just a drone for some tea as. I was being a bit skeptical this thing's been a lot of hype around health care you track advances in artificial intelligence what have you seen recently that lead you to believe that the it's going to have a big impact in the sector. Well I'm very optimistic and health care is a sector where in order to get these innovations into markets it has to go through certain types of regulation regulate rechecks and it also has to get get get through the system of the n.h.s. And those things will to national interests national health service not health service right but there are also other things that are happening in our lovely application cardiogram which just takes your data from your Apple Watch your fitness tracker and it can use machine learning ai to figure out where you're going to have some kind of heart condition in the near future now that's extremely powerful because many millions of us carry these trackers on us all the time and we now have this public health data set that turns into personalized warnings of health conditions so I'm optimistic let's not be too tough on the short term when I think the long term benefits are going to be come very soon for the goals though it is going to be a big issue of trust though people trusting their data to these companies before that kind of progress can be made and I think trust is going to be the most important thing that we can get over to enable the benefits to actually be be seen and the best way to have trust is to explain these things and making sure that we are open with what the data will be as to how I know you you can be confident in that in your doctor being replaced by a computer or is it going to be a tool for your doctor rather than a replacement and having their labor my doctor spend a little bit more time talking to me and spending time thinking about what my options are rather than the king scans and detecting things with with with machines that actually have to hopefully have more bedside manner then then they do at the moment briefly as emu 2 you're going to trust your trust your doctor did you say I wisely Well I think my doctor is going to get superpowers and she will be able to rely on these systems to give me a quicker more effective diagnosis and spend much more time making me feel good about the steps we have to take to treat are some excellent food. You're listening to tech tent on the b.b.c. World Service with Rory Catherine Jones in a moment how far has Ai really traveled on the road to the driverless car. Now just as excitement is growing about the potential of artificial intelligence to transform society says anxiety about the ethical implications of this technology a recent conference in London organized by the industry body technique a set out to consider this issue from many angles now there are some big tech figures including Professor Stephen Hawking and eat on Musk We see intelligent machines as potentially a threat to our very existence when they realise that humans frankly a surplus to their requirements but that the conference the philosopher professor Luciano for reading from the Oxford Internet Institute tell me that worrying about the existential threat was a waste of time there's a distinction to be made here between possible and possible it is possible for example that every time I buy a lottery ticket I win the lottery possible is he possible not at all so he's a I don't mean in the world as it should be in touch as possible as in the lottery ticket winning yes possible not out not a chance we shouldn't waste our time is a total destruction so what exactly are people worried about and why math alone Fox a former dot com entrepreneur and a director of Twitter these days spends most of her time campaigning for a fairer Internet people do actually can more than perhaps we realized that the impact technology is having in their lives my think tank that everyone's just Denson research that shows that only 20 percent of people actually trust the technology sector at the minute and I think that people do have a very big misapprehension about what their books are going to do to the world of work and what their own job might be facing in the future so they're going into this Ai era with a low level of trust what are the risk. They will encounter I think it's many fold firstly the complexity with which technology is taking over our daily life can sometimes feel impossible right now and this is 2017 it's hard to break down all the different bits of that impact that you feel whether it's where your data is being used to you know what are the products and services that feel quite visible because you buy them on your computer are they affecting the environment are they paying their workers properly so you've got all of this stuff being amplified even more in the world of Ai which is more invisible which will be hidden you won't see the machines doing clever bits of learning it will just miraculously happen that when you're on the Internet now know more about you they'll suggest they might even bias things towards you they might be biasing things wrongly towards you so I just really want to see us all having the opportunity to have a deeper understanding and that starts at the top I think that our political class need to understand technology better than they do currently I think industry needs to not just feel as though it's got a problem sorted but work in a more collaborative way with civil groups with people working in charities to try and help raise the bar so that there's more comprehension of the ways this affecting us not just sleep walking into the future but actively owning it have you seen evidence of a sleep walking into difficult situations are there other concrete examples would use look I think that worries me but I think of a very real right now it is what happened with all the fake news and the bots and that is they are it's just a kind of clunky form of Ai than perhaps we're talking about no one was expecting this sort of smart technology that enables you to rapidly do a bunch of us on the Internet very very layman's term explaining it to therefore be used to set up a whole load of complete nonsense content that was going to start undermining democracy you're the director of a major Silicon Valley company Twitter a major force in our lives is there an awareness on those boards across a bit in value of these issues or does it all get lost in the race to stay ahead. Competitors I think that each company's very specific you know I can really only talk to Twitter pretty comes from a place of openness wanting to share information as Jack and Ev Williams the Cofan have said repeatedly they're all things that have happened as a result of that have been far from perfect but they are trying to work to rectify that we published our timeline of product releases that we're going to improve safety and abuse in trolling and some of the extremism on the platform so I think in speaking to Twitter very much aware of all the stuff and I really hope that that's the case now the boardrooms of those make the companies that's Martha Lane folks have the Goldstar of some specific examples there but there are personal impacts of Ai that should worry is out there I mean for instance bias in algorithms I think if we look at how algorithms are created from the data that they're given and the goals that are sat by the people that make them bias can creep in all 3 of those stages and the challenge that we have is to make sure that we check that bias and that we are conscious and putting practical steps in place to ensure that we don't increase the existing bias we have in today's society and end up with a moment such a mistake by a century more racist both systems and therefore therefore society and every company has to own those practical steps themselves do they really care about or they say they care about of a surety that they're massively engaged in pouring billions of dollars into this research and you know they need it to work out for them and you know the ethical implications can can wait. I don't think they can wait any longer and the best way to to explain to a company that they can't wait is by showing how it will affect their bottom line so how why would people spend with a company that wasn't ethical why would they stay with a company that was biasing against them and I think the tide will start to change as a result we've got a global competition. In Ai at the moment the Chinese are pouring huge sums in and by some accounts or ahead of the u.s. For example in developing the technology and they're going to have a different attitude to the morality of for instance things like facial recognition technology than than the west and you know absolutely and the Chinese have a number of structural advantages a large population as well their Let the less squeamish about questions of of privacy which is allowing them to develop new technologies and put them into place and so we're already starting to see extremely accurate facial recognition across cities to help city governments manage those cities but we're also starting to see things that I think would feel a bit uncomfortable in in the u.k. Like scoring people based on their behavior and then denying them access to certain types of services because of that and that's all being done algorithmically in China now we started that discussion with you Jonathan really saying the whole kind of you know a I will threaten our very existence thing is is massively irrelevant it isn't a lot of people when people hear the rapid progress made by things like the mines go computer type of are. They right to be a bit scared. I definitely don't think it's irrelevant I think fear is probably the wrong emotion we have to take precautions we have to take control of it we have to not b