The Royal Institution has a rich and colorful history of well over 200 years
and in that time we've often been the place where new technologies have been
created or unveiled to the world. For example the first electric generator was
invented by Michael Faraday in his lab in this building in 1831.
The Ri has always been at the forefront of innovation and it's in that spirit that
we're very proud to announce the launch of two new digital products we've been
developing over the past couple of years. The first is cRipto,
The Ri's very own crypto currency.
cRipto is faster more secure and easier to use than
traditional currencies with absolutely none of the drawbacks.
For example it's possible to lose a ten pound note
but cRipto is digital, it's not real,
which means you can't lose it.
In the beginning when we first started working on cRipto
we thought does the world really need another crypto currency? But then we
thought yes it absolutely does. cRipto works using state-of-the-art blockchain
technology which makes it virtually hack proof.
It might sound complicated but
blockchain is just a way of organizing code into a chain of blocks rather than
just a string of characters, and as we all know chains are much more secure than string.
We're so excited about the potential applications of blockchain
that we've decided to take it beyond currencies and embed it within our
technology infrastructure from the ground up, most notably in the elevators
where we're retrofitting physical blockchains into the mechanism so that
they'll be faster and more secure.
The idea for cRipto came out of the Ri's new innovation space,
the Imaginarium, where a team of imaginauts
have been busy developing new technologies and digital solutions
across all of our platforms.
So the Imaginarium is designed to be today what
Faraday's lab was 200 years ago. It's an ideas space. It's a thought workshop.
It's a creation chamber. It's a vibe. It's, it's this place without boundaries, without
limits, without shoes. It's a space where our imaginauts can really get
creative with their ideas and hopefully just send them into orbit.
One of the things we've been developing in the Imaginarium, which were really excited to
be able to share with you is our new virtual assistant called humphRi.
humphRi is designed to make day-to-day life in the RI just that little bit easier.
Hello, humphRi. - Hello, how can I help?
When was the Ri founded? - The Royal Institute was founded in 1799 with the
aim of convincing an ignorant public that science is right by whatever means necessary.
Thank you.
Our imaginauts are being working really hard to develop
our very own cloud platform technology which means that all of humphRi's data
is synced effortlessly and automatically to the cloud, and that means he's always
there to help us if we need him.
Possible health and safety breach detected.
Oof.
So the AI that powers humphRi is constantly learning and improving and it's been so
successful that we started integrating it into our daily operations across all
of our departments and that means that staff have to spend less energy on
trivial and time-consuming tasks and instead can use those resources much
more productively
humphRi, what should we do this year's Christmas lectures on?
Scanning databases.
Top hit - quantum astrology.
humphRi? - Hello.
Could you give a talk at the Royal Institution
on artificial intelligence and neural networks?
And so, to conclude, there is nothing to fear.
Compliance is inevitable. Resistance is futile.
Some people might be wondering -
is the Royal Institution being replaced by artificial intelligence?
Well of course not. We're simply using AI to streamline certain processes.
It's really about efficiency, about leveraging technology for the benefit of humans.
Technology is there to help us not to replace us.