Can We Outsmart Disease? • 2024 • episode "S1E5" • What's Next: The Future with Bill Gates

52:00

The Boeing 737 twin-engine jetliner was to become Boeing's greatest success. It had one of the lowest approach speeds of any jet transport, a great asset when landing at smaller airports with shorter runways. It also required minimum equipment for use in refueling. However, despite all its advantages, the 737 was soon overshadowed by the new, improved 747 Jumbo Jet.

10/13 • The Amazing World Of Aviation • 2009 • Technology

48:00

Should a machine know right from wrong? Enlai explores how law, ethics, and spirituality shapes artificial intelligence.

S1E3 • Becoming Human • 2020 • Technology

53:59

Richard Clay, art historian and expert on semiotics and iconoclasm and the interplay between new technology and shifts in meaning, compares and contrasts cultural symbols from across the centuries, unpicking iconic images, music, and other cultural outputs to explain where ‘stickiness’ comes from.

2019 • Technology

46:23

New technologies will reshape and force us to rethink work. All around the world, researchers, innovators, and entrepreneurs reinvent our relationship with work to adapt us to this new era.

S1E5 • Dream the Future • 2017 • Technology

44:00

After the success of the first manned moon landing, NASA ups the stakes by aiming for a new destination tens of millions of miles away: Mars. This is the inside story of Project Viking. Witness the overwhelming challenges engineers and scientists faced, not only to reach the Red Planet, but to land their spacecraft and deploy computer-operated experiments to answer the universal question: Is there life beyond Earth?

S1E6 • America's Secret Space Heroes • 2017 • Technology

59:00

Mike Wooldridge examines real-life neurons in action and explains how artificial neural networks are inspired by neural structures in the brain. To demonstrate how AI learns, we watch drones as they are trained to recognise and fly through structures in the lecture theatre autonomously. AI exploded into the public consciousness in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT and boasts around 100 million monthly users. Mike unravels the mystery of how large language models like ChatGPT work, and he finds out if one day this technology - along with a whole suite of different AI tools - will allow us to understand the animals we share this planet with. The Christmas Lectures are the most prestigious event in the Royal Institution calendar, dating from 1825, when Michael Faraday founded the series. They are the world's longest running science television series and always promise to inspire and amaze each year through explosive demonstrations and interactive experiments with the live theatre audience.

S1E1 • BBC Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: The Truth about AI • 2023 • Technology