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2023: Professor Mike Wooldridge - The Truth about AI: 2. My AI Life
Professor Mike Wooldridge reveals the huge role AI already plays in our daily lives – sometimes without us even realising its role. \n\nMike 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. \n\nMike 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. \n\nWe 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? \n\nThe 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.
Source: BBC 4
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Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
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Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
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Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
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BBC 4
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
2023: Professor Mike Wooldridge - The Truth About Ai: 3. The Future Of Ai: Dream Or A Nightmare?
Professor Mike Wooldridge grapples with the future of AI in the third and final Christmas lecture. \n\nMike takes a ride in a driverless car. Autonomous vehicles, once a science ...
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Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
2023: Professor Mike Wooldridge - The Truth About Ai: 2. My Ai Life
Professor Mike Wooldridge reveals the huge role AI already plays in our daily lives – sometimes without us even realising its role. \n\nMike investigates how games like ch ...
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BBC 4
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
2023: Professor Mike Wooldridge - The Truth About Ai: 1. How To Build An Intelligent Machine
Professor Mike Wooldridge asks: what is artificial intelligence? He compares how AI works and learns with how the human brain functions. \n\nExploring the roots of AI, Mike reve ...
02-01-2024
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Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
2022: Dame Sue Black: 3. Living Body
The final lecture in the series begins with a ‘heist’. A jewel thief steals a precious man-made diamond from the Royal Institution’s collection. Can forensic e ...
28-09-2023
BBC 4
Most popular episodes of Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
2025: Maggie Aderin-pocock - Is There Life Beyond Earth?: 1. Destination Moon
Scientists in 2025 detected the 'strongest hint yet' of biological activity outside our solar system on exoplanet K2-18b, sparking growing excitement about the real possibility ...
28-12-2025
BBC 4
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
2025: Maggie Aderin-pocock - Is There Life Beyond Earth?: 2. Searching The Solar System
In this lecture, Maggie continues her journey, this time in a search for life in the rest of our solar system. From the ancient Greeks’ first observations of 'planetai' (w ...
29-12-2025
BBC 4
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
2025: Maggie Aderin-pocock - Is There Life Beyond Earth?: 3. To The Stars And Beyond
In her final lecture, Maggie takes her audience beyond our solar system, deep into the Milky Way galaxy, and yet further out into the universe, where the chances of finding life ...
30-12-2025
BBC 4
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
2023: Professor Mike Wooldridge - The Truth About Ai: 3. The Future Of Ai: Dream Or A Nightmare?
Professor Mike Wooldridge grapples with the future of AI in the third and final Christmas lecture. \n\nMike takes a ride in a driverless car. Autonomous vehicles, once a science ...
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Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
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29-12-2021
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Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
2022: Dame Sue Black: 1. Dead Body
Professor Sue Black has been dubbed the ‘corpse whisperer’ for her role in deciphering the messages hidden within a dead body. In this first lecture in the Royal Ins ...
13-09-2023
BBC 4
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
2024: Chris Van Tulleken - The Truth About Food: 2. How Food Makes Us
In this lecture, Dr Chris van Tulleken investigates how we get energy from our food and how what we eat makes us who we are. He reveals how combustion engines get their energy i ...
30-12-2024
BBC 4
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
2017: The Language Of Life: 3. The Word
One skill in particular seems to give humans an advantage over all other animals - our superior talent for language. We have the power to express exactly what's on our minds thr ...
28-12-2017
BBC 4
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
2024: Chris Van Tulleken - The Truth About Food: 1. From Taste Buds To Toilet
Dr Chris van Tulleken follows the extraordinary journey food takes through our bodies – from the very first moment we see and smell a potential meal... until it finally em ...
25-12-2025
BBC 4
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
2016: Supercharged - Fuelling The Future: 1. Let There Be Light!
26-12-2016
BBC 4