The Airplane • 2019 • Breakthrough the Ideas that Changed the World

58:49

Dr Hannah Fry explores how science and technology transformed Britain in the 1890s, giving rise to the modern world - and many present-day anxieties.

S1E1 • Victorian Sensations • 2019 • Technology

47:42

Our cultural heritage is one of humanity’s most precious assets: how can we pass it on to the future? It’s a crucial challenge: sharing it with the greatest number but also help it stand up against threats of destruction. New technologies and virtual reality open up unprecedented perspectives.

S2E6 • Dream the Future • 2018 • Technology

59:00

Mike Wooldridge reveals the huge role AI already plays in our daily lives – sometimes without us even realising its role. Mike investigates how games like chess and Go have become a training ground for AI, helping to bring about key advances we are now seeing in the field, and he reveals how simple methods of learning, like rewarding success, have been used to train AI in spectacular ways. We also feature some of the revolutionary innovations that AI has brought about in healthcare, from the use of AI tools in planning cancer treatment, to monitoring Parkinson's. Mike is joined by members of DeepMind's AlphaFold team, who use AI to predict the structures of large numbers of proteins, which will revolutionise the creation of new drugs across the world. We also reveal the huge impact AI has had on our creative lives – as it is able to write songs and create artworks in seconds. With the help of artist Eric Drass (aka shardcore), the audience creates a collaborative artwork and discovers how image generation works. Mike explores the thorny question of who the creator is – the AI itself, the human who set it to work, or the creators of the art that AI has learned from? 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.

S1E2 • BBC Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: The Truth about AI • 2023 • Technology

51:51

This episode will reveal how new technologies will transform music by 2050 new robotic and intelligent instruments, intuitive composition software, virtual artists, collaborative composition and more. Tomorrow, music will be capable of adapting to our moods and offer us more than just entertainment.

S2E4 • Dream the Future • 2018 • Technology

42:33

The world's most iconic buildings were built in the heyday of the American century, and as New York became the capital for these innovative new skyscrapers, experts used cutting-edge tech to push engineering to new heights.

S1E2 • Skyscrapers Engineering the Future • 2019 • Technology

94:43

Explores state surveillance and digital social control in China by following the experiences of two families and a journalist. Zijuan Chen is fighting for the release of her imprisoned husband, human rights lawyer Weiping Chang, while trying to keep his memory alive for their son. Wenzu Li and her newly freed husband, Quanzhang Wang, struggle against surveillance that is not only stopping him from being able to work but also affecting ordinary tasks like taking their son to school. Journalist Sophie Xueqin Huang, a pivotal figure in bringing the Me Too movement to China, is at constant risk of arrest. Chinese film-maker Jialing Zhang gives an exclusive and previously impossible intimate insight into the interior of China and tells a deeply disturbing story of how the state uses technology to control its citizens as well as propaganda to convince its people to trust it.

2024 • Technology