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NewsScienceThe mathematician hopes to show the strengths and weaknesses of algorithms in this year's Royal Institution shows, she tells Rachael Pells

Monday, 23rd December 2019, 5:12 pm

Driverless cars, robot butlers and reusable rockets if the big inventions of the past decade and the artificial intelligence developed to create them have taught us anything, its that maths is undeniably cool. And if youre still not convinced, chances are youve never had it explained to you via a live experiment with a pigeon before.

We are trying to demonstrate how artificial intelligence works by pitting a kid against the pigeon, to see who can understand our instructions the quickest, she says. I hope to interview both of them after Well see how that goes.

The experiment is one of several wacky ideas to feature in this years lecture series airing on BBC Four, Secrets & Lies: The Hidden Power of Maths, through which Fry aims to demonstrate how maths, data and algorithms are at the heart of just about everything we do.

Humanising science

The reason for this particular experiment is to demonstrate how machines learn by way of reward which she hopes in turn will help to humanise AI.

Fry is only the third mathematician and the first female one to present the Christmas Lectures since their beginnings in 1825. Being asked to do so was incredibly exciting, she tells i. If you are a scientist and a communicator, this really is the pinnacle the thing that everyone wants to do.

A key theme across the seriess three talks will be the issue of uncertainty, and Fry wants to use the platform to encourage more public discussion around the use of algorithms, about where we want the limit of that to be.

What Fry hopes to achieve with her lectures

The lectures are designed to be immersive and fun; in lecture one, for example, Fry busts some myths about the idea that lifes big events come down to luck, and even claims to have found a mathematical formula for predicting how and when a person will fall in love.

But with AI taking centre stage, common cynicism and fears over a data-led future make an inevitable appearance. Lecture two reveals how data-gobbling algorithms have taken over our lives, while the final talk sets out to explore the limits of human control, including examples of calculations gone wrong and the algorithms behind fake news.

I want to be honest about the awesome power of these mathematical ideas, but also [demonstrate] the very real limitations of something that doesnt understand what it means to be human, she explains.

Algorithms are now so far advanced that they can be used to diagnose cancer by looking at an image, for example, which is amazing, really impressive but AI also makes mistakes, and that can have a really damaging effect, she says. The problem is we treat algorithms almost as though theyre the [ultimate] scientific determinism. She agrees that many of our misconceptions of AI come down to a lack of understanding of how it works, or even thinking that it is magical, and can answer every question hence the pigeon experiment.

Do we need to worry about AI?

As someone who does understand the calculations behind this mysterious beast, does she worry about AI? Is it true algorithms are controlling us?

The answer, she says, is that AI is both better and worse than imagined. For example, a lot of people are absolutely convinced their phones can listen to their conversations, but they cant not for any reason other than to do it technically is incredibly difficult and were not at the stage yet.

Our smartphones may not be secretly monitoring what is being said around them, but we are largely oblivious to the connections that algorithms can make about our lives, she caveats. You may never have Googled that mattress that is stalking you around the internet, but you may have searched back pain or poor sleep and the algorithms make the connection.

While the use of personal data for advertising in this way is something that makes Fry uncomfortable, she believes we have to accept that we made a kind of deal if we want a free internet.

She hopes that viewers will come away from the lectures armed with information but that they will also feel reassured. I think that narrative of humans versus machines is absolutely the wrong story, Fry concludes. The future of all this is going to be a partnership between humans and machines thats the only possible way that it can work.

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Christmas Lectures presenter Dr Hannah Fry on pigeons, AI and the awesome power of maths - inews