Inside the United Kingdom's Tech Renaissance

this is Colossus it came to life here in England at Bletchley Park in 1943 the machine raced to decrypt German messages by analyzing thousands of words of coded text every second with its mix of vacuum tubes wires and switches Colossus emerged as the first electronic programmable computer its arrival gave the Allies a huge edge in world war two and save thousands of lives it also marked the start of the Information Age England built ten of the Colossus machines and they became the heart of its booming computing industry actually no this is a replica of Colossus the real machines were destroyed after the war so that the pesky Russians wouldn't find out about the technology the metaphor then is a simple one England dismantled decades of pioneering computing work because it seemed like the proper thing to do and it suffered the consequences ever since I doubt many of you can name a single tech product or startup that hails from this country what you'll see next then may come as a real shock because in its very subdued self-effacing way england has in fact given rise to a handful of tech companies that have impacted the world on an immense scale I'm heading from London to Cambridge and into the English countryside to find the best technology that England has to offer along the way there will be adorable children building computers fancy hair dryers an AI infused software so little my name is sofa what is your name and of course there will be a spot of tea all on this episode of hello world Silicon Valley may be home to some of the biggest tech giants in the world but it's being challenged like never before crazy tech geniuses have popped up all over the planet making things that will blow your mind my name is Ashley Vance I'm an author and journalist and I'm on a quest to find the most innovative tech creations and meet the beautiful freaks behind them if you tried to design the perfect University town you would probably fail to think of something as idyllic as Cambridge it's a city filled with temples to learning and young privileged brainiacs hop on a bike and you can go on a ride through academic history from Newton's apple tree right on up to the pub where Watson and Crick drink to celebrate the discovery of DNA's double helix if that seems boring you can also be ritually abused at the old Cambridge market Thanks oh it's like sour soap today Cambridge also serves as the heart of england's tech industry with its research centres startups and massive biotech firms outside of the university the biggest reason for Cambridge's technology success is a company called arm it designs chips and they're the brains at the center of almost every iPhone and Android smartphone in short the modern world runs unarmed I've met up with my old friends an arm co-founder Mike mother to share a warm British beer and find out how this happened we're in a pub what is a meant arm over its history we met our first CEO in a pub we are in the pub that's about a hundred yards away from where we actually started and in those days we used to come here every lunchtime so yeah it's played an important part in the business right arm started on something of a whim its first major customer was Apple which needed a chip for its upcoming Newton handheld device instead of making a screaming fast super hot chip like everyone else arm decided to make a low-power energy-efficient chip soon enough making low power chips became arms thing it took a while for the bet to pay off but once mobile phones and then smartphones arrived arm ended up as a major force lifetime our partners are shipped over 80 billion different chips and last year there was about two per person on the planets as about 15 billion ARM chip ships so there in everything phones printers anti-lock brakes televisions Wi-Fi Reuters cloud servers medical devices I could keep going traditionally you know the big powerhouses of the chip industry made their chips they branded themselves they very boastful about it all you guys have been happy to stay in the background yeah and maybe that's because we're at I'm slightly British slightly understated and have been quite happy to work in partnership with people and let them stand up and shout out about their products sometimes you walk down the street and think well nobody actually knows who we are or what we've done and that's what the business model about partnership is you let other people innovate around what you do and take take the glory Tomales point one of the most innovative and glorious things built around an ARM chip is raspberry pie it might not look like much but this $35 assembly of electronics is a fully functioning computer there's the ARM chip right here tons of USB ports and Ethernet port even an HDMI port with this teeny little thing you can do just about anything released in 2012 the PI has inspired near religious devotion among geeky hobbyists and inventors some of them show off their PI creations at things called raspberry jams I went to see David pride who has a shrine to the low-cost personal computer at his home in Gloucester what is this little device meant to you it's changed my life I was very happy very stable dad a nice well-paid job that I was very very bored and I realized that boy ever wanted to do something different this was this was the opportunity to learn the skills that I'd always wanted to learn electronics robotics coding his house is littered with pie creations from motorised cars to robots greetings to everyone watching hello world that's a nice touch his most famous invention though is the four bytes an AI infused machine that plays a mean albeit slow game of Connect four that is cool how long did it take you to make this about three months of evenings and weekends connect four is actually quite a complex game there's an awful lot of mathematics behind the AI that runs the system so it makes it you you know oh I have to go you make your move but it is now thinking about the movies taken oh you bastard you've just lost I feel ashamed I feel like I should've done more for the humans to really understand the soul of the Raspberry Pi I had to head back to its birthplace in Cambridge and dig deep into the city's traditions this met humiliating myself through something called punting which is like canoeing except dumber and more frustrating whoa all right whoa June so you pull it all the way out yeah yeah how do people deal is that he's pretty intuitive my punting coach is a Ben Upton easy he's the Cambridge computer scientist who invented the pie around 2007 Evan grew alarmed by the declining number of computer science students in England and decided to try and inspire the youngsters with a new approach I've always assumed Cambridge is the best place in the world to study could be a science and certainly the best place in the UK and we saw this collapse and a number of people applying to study computer science at the University of Cambridge which is crazy as their computing industries blow yeah yeah your computer's playing obviously it's a beautiful it's a beautiful environment to come and to come and study in the theory we came up with was that most of us who were arriving in the mid-90s like I did I had grown up with cheap programmable 8-bit microcomputers you grew up using the BBC micro my grads what got you again I said I had a BBC micro school to start in the corner of the classroom and those are beautiful machines supported by the UK government the BBC micro gave many students their first taste of coding and the possibility of what computers could do I screw holding the pie has very much followed in this tradition and emerged as a consumer hit along the way it's now the third best-selling computer of all time behind the Mac in the PC our lifetime dream volume was 10,000 units now we're closing them on 10 million but as that's happened we just got war ambitious we just got more greedy I guess about what we're trying to accomplish we've gone from can we move the needle from 200 to 600 people applying to computer science at Cambridge - yeah can we do the same for other universities can we do the same for other countries could we do the same for other subjects think big Jason Statham impersonator think big coming up next hi Daisy oh I interview a baby about the future of artificial intelligence the intellectual underpinnings of computing began here in Cambridge in 1833 the Cambridge Train mathematician Charles Babbage built a prototype of this thing the difference engine it could solve equations with the turn of a crank and some gears and is considered the first mechanical computer a hundred years later in the 1930s another Cambridge mathematician named Alan Turing devised the concepts behind the modern-day computer he proved that a machine can be programmed to calculate just about anything decades after Turing and Babbage Cambridge is still at the cutting edge of computing companies like Microsoft placed their research centers here to tap into the local academic talent and to explore their most ambitious ideas Chris Bishop runs this lab and oversees research in a number of areas one of the most compelling and frightening areas is artificial intelligence this is not just an amazingly exciting time in artificial intelligence more and more tasks are becoming solved in image understanding in speech recognition and so on so though we've got a very long way to go before we get to the the full capabilities of the human brain there is a sense that for some kinds of tasks sort of the barriers have been removed computer scientists have dreamed of creating a true artificial intelligence for decades they've been hunting for a machine that can equal or surpass humans recently people like Bishop have started to make real headway thanks to an approach called machine learning if you go back to the time of cheering computing is about logic is about determinism and the the code the instructions which the computer runs are created by a human what we're seeing in the machine learning is something very different instead of programming the computer to solve the task you program the computer to learn for an experience and then we train the computer by showing it also examples giving it lots of data AI powers a ton of experiments here including this computer vision simulation Microsoft's Kinect sensor used to struggle to make out a hand and now it can pinpoint the movement of fingers there's also an AI powered movie recommendation algorithm for Xbox that does a pretty good job at figuring out my eclectic taste in movies you know actually I mean I did like twister okay let's see what happens this time so now we see a big change this lab isn't just about entertainment though they're actually saving lives with the program that can tell the difference between cancerous brain tissue and healthy tissue in an MRI what you see here is a pretty nasty brain tumor that oh it's not a good show it's not great it's not great so what the machine learning is doing now is it's labeling it according to whether it's tissue that's already died or whether it's tissue that is cancerous and proliferating this is really important because this is used to design treatment so we'll fire in radiation from lots of different directions and we'll tune up the amount and direction of the radiation to try and kill as much of the cancer as possible but to do as little damage to the normal tissue as we can down the street from Microsoft there's a start-up that already has its AI technology in the wild it's called audio analytic and you can think of it as a type of Shazam for real-world sounds we use artificial intelligence to allow smart home devices to recognize a whole range of different signs that happen inside your houses it can make your house a bit secure by detecting glass windows being broken and then turning a light to scale where in the burger I should take an active protection of you know things you care about so what do we have here what what is those um so we've got a couple of devices that make the sounds that this detects smoke along see it's detected smoke alarm on there nobody's at home so it's now sending a iMessage another sound this is glass break yeah that that off you can see it says window broken yeah what is the science by louis we have to do a whole bunch of innovation in terms of understanding sounds how to detect them and to have a machine understand them even if we take a simple sound like a smoke alarm good beep well now we've got two of them go beep at different times with a whole bunch of background noise going on that's a big AI problem to solve computers have to be trained to distinguish one sound from another and to learn the unique signature of say glass breaking audio analytic trains it software by presenting it with examples of a particular noise of course no two breaking windows sound exactly alike so these guys get to relieve stress by breaking a lot of glass how many windows have you had to break windows we literally build warehouses for it on months on end different sizes different thicknesses different type of glass how many smoke alarms smoke alarms we literally bought all smoke alarms you can find on the market place and then index to all those that was a huge undertaking logistically the software can also recognize the sound of a baby crying hi Daisy oh hi and as luck would have it we found a cute hungry baby on which to experiment so you can see on the screen is detecting the baby cry audio analytics software already ships inside a number of smart home products and the company plans on adding many more sounds but for now it's the perfect technology to discover when an angry baby has thrown a smoke alarm through a window I'm sorry we have to do that she was very sweet well done the first TV show next up I head to London to explore more serious matters like getting the perfect hair day I feel like I'm two inches taller down I arrived in England at the height of brexit mania the tourists were happy because the entire country had gone on sale some of the locals were morose and some of them just didn't care like the people drinking these $20 cocktails at a fancy hotel bar nothing says hello to financial ruin like sipping rum from an elephant made of Legos or gin from whatever this is you know who else doesn't care about brexit people willing to pay $400 for a hair dryer Dyson as we all know has perfected suck now it's on to blow meet the supersonic according to the ample Dyson propaganda this is the smartest hair dryer ever built it uses an electric digital motor to produce an intense stream of air and then sensors to make sure that air never gets too hot as a result your hair comes out shinier and healthier than ever before I feel like I'm two inches taller down to see how Dyson built this thing I had to leave London and head to the company's headquarters in the picturesque town of Malmesbury James Dyson founded this company in 1991 and has created his very own engineering paradise the Dyson campus is littered with his toys of course you have a plane in the cafeteria and made up of a handful of invention factories my first stop is with someone who leads a constant battle to come up with ideas for brand new products and reinvent some old ones hair drawers just haven't changed in sort of 60 years if we look at this this cutaway here you see they've got a very large motor inside like that but that weight you're holding you know for 20 minutes half now where you're drying your hair and very very noisy so we thought it's a really good product for us to get into Dyson spent four years in 71 million dollars to bring the supersonic to life and as you might expect they're obsessive-compulsive when it comes to him we felt that we had to learn everything about how the science of hair we had to put our own laboratory to learn about how for ourselves and know what causes damage what causes shine what makes your hair look lovely hi Matthew hi welcome to lap 61 oh did you very much ask you to put a lap go on because this way there's gonna be kept spotless Matthew child is Dyson's electric motor wizard he spent more than a decade developing the core of so many Dyson products the vacuums have big motors and the hairdryer has this tiny thing a miniature turbine this is more tuned to a jet engine you find on a commercial airliner than anything else how fast does it spin around one hundred and fifteen thousand rpm so that's about eighteen hundred revolutions every second yeah it seems almost impossible it's possible through very fast electronics and a mechanical system that is able to take the stresses the strains for hundreds of hours at full speed the electric motor technology will be key to Dyson's continued push into new product areas some people say it's secretly working on an electric car what types of things would this be useful in people at the moment we've applied it to the hairdryer to weigh and see what comes next I knew you would say that can only say that and with that it was time to head back to London for one last visit with the pie people and a startup called Ken Oh founded in 2013 kena took the idea of bringing Raspberry Pi to kids very much to heart it's built a series of do-it-yourself computers based on the PI to teach children how to make electronics from scratch and how to code these three lovely children agreed to be our DIY guinea pigs and to take a crack at making a can oh well should we let you guys get to it you want to start building yeah take it away is it fun to build your computer instead of just grabbing an iPad yeah what's fun about it Oh if teaches you about BEC why do you like tech cuz I want to be an inventor when I grow up it's a typist the dude floating around the office is Alex Klein a co-founder of the company he's a former journalist who decided to give up on the most noble profession imaginable to help kids get their hands dirty with computing November of 2012 we were playing around with the Raspberry Pi you could do so many things with it at the time developers were sending it into space they were sending it under the ocean but we were having trouble getting started so you want to make a kit that was simple enough for a kid to build themselves yeah exactly this generation they have only experienced computers in the post jobs era you know perfectly polished constrained consumption devices the notion of counter was to break it apart and let a young person build a computer from the inside out what do you think cycle yeah for Alex it's all about creating tools that inspire and encourage creativity you know they're building apps that are worth millions you know they're solving local problems in ways that their elders could never comprehend if you give them something that's as powerful as you know a main lung developer something that can make a robot something that can make a server you'll see what this generation can do they really have the power to make something that does your cooking cleans up your rooms and fixes your stuff inside of the children doing chores that would be amazing with that as these children will soon learn it's basically considered rude to be successful here England's beloved cynicism runs counter to the hype filled optimism that dominates the tech industry the Brits do a fine job at promoting a pub lunch but do less well at spurring on entrepreneurs and inventors it's clear enough though that when the English really gets stuck into something they do it well it's not hyperbole to say that armes chips have changed the world or the raspberry pie may well have altered a generation for the better and if you're inclined to try and think big there remains no better place to do it than in Cambridge where you can meditate in peace among the cows up next on hello world I head to Japan and wake from a fever dream to find this this and whatever this is

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

Views: 533,467

Rating: 4.7512507 out of 5

Keywords: Bloomberg, UK, Great Britain, technology, startups, cambridge, Raspberry Pi, Brexit, Bletchley Park, Ashlee Vance, Hello World

Id: OHF2xDrq8dY

Length: 28min 26sec (1706 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 28 2016