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
In this Lecture, Mike will examine real-life neurons in action, and he’ll explain how artificial neural networks are inspired by neural structures in the brain. And to demonstrate how AI learns, we’ll watch drones as they are trained to recognise and fly through structures in the Lecture theatre autonomously.
The professor investigates how the games like chess and Go have become a training ground for AI – helping to bring about key advances we’re now seeing in the field. He’ll reveal how simple methods of learning – like rewarding success – have been used to train AI in spectacular ways.
And, as AI gets ever more intelligent; how should we treat it? How does our audience feel about kicking an AI robot dog? This lecture will address the big question of AI: can it ever truly be like us, or are humans unique? As AI advances, it seems these ethics questions are destined to get ever more complex…
| Series Producer | Zara Powell |
| Executive Producer | David Dugan |
| Director | David Coleman |
| Production Manager | Felicity Chapple |
| Assistant Producer | Jack Henry Adams |
| Researcher | Abigail Merchant |
| Production Coordinator | Joe Bidmead |
| Production Executive | Alex Barraki |
| Editor | Todd Dalton |