Their quest is to discover whether the items we throw away today have any value for tomorrow's world. In a unique science experiment, Dr George McGavin and Dr Zoe Laughlin chronicle the history of rubbish and explore how what we throw away tells us about the way we live our lives. With unprecedented access to one of the UK's largest landfill sites, the team of experts spend three days carrying out tests all over the site, revealing the secret world of rubbish. They also carry out three other 'archaeological' digs into historic landfills to chart the evolution of our throwaway society. Is mining trash for something valuable really viable? McGavin concluded: 'The idea of landfill mining is a pretty compelling vision of the future.'
Explore how Artificial Intelligence will change your job as new research shows how much of what you do could be done by robots. From truckers to lawyers & doctors, we bring affected workers face to face with AI experts. How can we prepare for the coming changes to the world economy? We are on the precipice of another technological transformation. The last industrial revolution turned society upside down. It ultimately delivered greater prosperity and many more jobs, as well as the eight hour day and weekends.
But the transition was at times shocking and violent. The question is, can we do better this time? We don't realize that the future is not inevitable. The future is the result of the decisions we make today. These technologies are morally neutral, they can be used for good or for bad.
There's immense good things they can do, they can eliminate many disease,
they can help eliminate poverty, they can tackle climate change. Equally, the technology can be used for lots of bad. It can be used to increase inequality,it can be used to transform warfare. It can be used to make our lives much worse. We get to make those choices.
In Los Angeles, a remarkable experiment is underway; the police are trying to predict crime, before it even happens. At the heart of the city of London, one trader believes that he has found the secret of making billions with math. In South Africa, astronomers are attempting to catalogue the entire cosmos. These very different worlds are united by one thing - an extraordinary explosion in data. Meet the people at the forefront of the data revolution, and reveals the possibilities and the promise of the age of big data.
Artificially intelligent machines are taking over. They’re influencing our everyday lives in profound and often invisible ways. They can read handwriting, interpret emotions, play games, and even act as personal assistants. They are in our phones, our cars, our doctors’ offices, our banks, our web searches... the list goes on and is rapidly growing ever longer. But how does today’s A.I. actually work—and is it truly intelligent? And for that matter, what is intelligence? The world’s brightest computer programmers are trying to build brighter machines by reverse-engineering the brain and by inventing completely new kinds of computers, with exponentially greater speed and processing power. The documentary looks at how far we’ve come and where machines are headed as their software becomes ever more... cerebral. How close are we from a world in which computers take over—from diagnosing cancer to driving our cars to targeting weapons? If we place more and more of our lives under the control of these artificial brains, what are we putting at risk?
Science fiction has long anticipated the rise of machine intelligence. Today, a new generation of self-learning computers is reshaping every aspect of our lives. Incomprehensible amounts of data are being collected, interpreted, and fed back to us in a tsunami of apps, smart devices, and targeted advertisements. Virtually every industry on earth is feeling this transformation, from job automation to medical diagnostics, from elections to battlefield weapons. Do You Trust This Computer? explores the promises and perils of this developing era. Will A.I. usher in an age of unprecedented potential, or prove to be our final invention?
Is mining trash for something valuable really viable? McGavin concluded: 'The idea of landfill mining is a pretty compelling vision of the future.'