They call this the wooden
house district of Helsinki.
These beauties were built back in the early 1900s
so that the workers of Finland
could have nice places to live
and nice gardens to tend.
They're symbolic of Finland's famed
social support system that has made Finns
some of the happiest people on Earth.
Bless you, Finland, and your wheelbarrow gardens.
Of course, progress often has its own plans.
The workers here, for example, have been
replaced by artsy hipsters
seeking a trendy neighborhood.
And, soon enough, workers and hipsters all over the world
might be replaced by robots that don't care
about social systems or pretty gardens at all.
Hello robot overlords.
Here at Helsinki's most scenic garbage dump
are some hard-working robotic arms
from a company called ZenRobotics.
The Zen part obviously being some bizarre marketing ploy
because there's nothing calming about these things.
Their mission is to divvy up industrial trash,
sorting things like wood and metal into their own piles.
How do you get the robot to see that it's not wood,
that it's a piece of steel, a plastic bag?
All this stuff is so amorphous and different.
We use cameras, we use metal detectors,
we use 3D sensors, and we use also near infrared sensors.
The A.I. is able then to predict, okay,
what kind of material?
We tried to understand how is a human operator
sorting waste, and he is not picking it
and putting it here.
It picks and throws.
Yeah.
And we simulated the same movements,
so our robot opens the grip and lets the object fly.
And what do we know about
how accurate the robots are?
Depending on the different kind of waste,
we can go to a purity up to 90%.
Can we go take a closer look at the robots?
Yes, for sure, yes, let's go.
So, the waste comes up, goes on this conveyor belt,
and then this is where it's getting scanned--
Yes.
And then in this moment where it's getting scanned,
it's telling the robots down the line,
there's gonna be an object coming that I want you to grab.
Yes.
And then the arms start to go to work.
Yes.
The robot gets to pick which waste
and to throw it in which bin.
I mean, it does a really good job to me
of picking up these objects that are such different sizes.
Yep.
You can believe there are many man hours invested
to really develop a gripper, what is
able to grip totally different kind of sizes,
shapes and waste.
And I think that was one of the biggest challenges.
ZenRobotics recently put its robots
to work right here in the heart of Silicon Valley
at this massive garbage processing facility in San Jose.
Artificial Intelligence and trash
commingling in harmony.
Just the way nature intended.
Back in Finland, I took a drive from the dump to Espoo.
It's a city about 25 minutes outside of Helsinki
that is something of a tech suburb.
Nokia's once glorious headquarters are here,
and so too are its more sedate current headquarters.
And the Angry Birds are here too.
But I have not come to Espoo for disgruntled birds
or airborne pigs.
I have come to see some satellites.
This is the headquarters of Iceye.
It is one of a handful of start-ups that have built small
satellites that take constant pictures
of what's happening on Earth.
How many satellites have you guys put up today?
The commercial constellation that we operate right now
is three satellites.
Three satellites.
And then, your satellites, they're mini fridge sized?
The famous mini fridge, yeah!
And then you also want to try and surround
the earth with dozens, hundreds of these things?
Right, yeah.
So, we really want to make the system,
that allows you to sort of reliably, and accurately,
and objectively see everything at all times.
It's almost like having a sort of a MRI scan
for the earth.
Iceye satellites travel from pole to pole
every 45 minutes.
Rather than cameras, their three small sats
use something called synthetic aperture radar,
or SAR, to pound the earth with microwave signals
from low earth orbit.
They then use signals that are reflected back
from the earth to build images of the surface.
Unlike cameras, SAR can see through the cloudiest of days
and the darkest of nights.
Iceye combine this radar technology
with advanced image processing and computer vision
software to create highly detailed pictures.
Can we peak at some of these images, and--
Sure.
Walk through what you guys do?
So, this was an example of the hurricane Dorian,
in the Bahamas.
We were able to image this exactly when
the hurricane was on top of the island.
This is the island as it normally is.
And then, in the afterwards,
the land border used to be here.
And I think here, the really dramatic thing is that
all of these red dots are buildings fully submerged.
This is exactly what becomes insurance information to--
Yeah, so, you have proof that all
of this stuff flooded, and--
Yeah.
And proof is one thing, and then, of course,
just the ability to react.
Like, now what if you could trigger the payment
to these guys automatically?
So that people get to rebuild their lives,
and so forth.
Much more quickly, yeah, yeah.
Now here, we're looking at a large tanker, The Grace One.
It relates to the sanctions to Iran.
It became this big story, when it was impounded
in Gibraltar, when it was said that it was headed
towards Syria, with a tank full of Iranian oil.
This is an image from a while back
where we're able to see the Grace One ship here,
in the Iranian shores in January.
So, maybe the US knows where this tanker is.
The NSA knows, the CIA.
And they can choose to make public what they want.
But, basically, with you guys, there's a democratization
to all this, where anyone who's willing to pay
for your imagery, you know?
Yeah.
It's not just in the hands of these few governments now.
It's like everybody can know what's going on.
Yeah, I think that's part of the big story here.
In the case of this tanker, what was really interesting is,
was it full or was it not full?
How full was it? And so forth.
If it's full of oil, it's down in the water,
and you're getting something on the depth,
from like a shadow off the water, or something like that.
Yeah, exactly like this.
And then this is a mine, it's an open pit mine.
So, the more mundane use case here is just that
you monitor the progress of the mining activity.
But, of course, the safety of, is there some
displacement that is likely to cause landslides?
Or, is there some underground mining that
is likely to cause collapses?
When it started in 2014,
Iceye was the very first company
to build a commercial satellite in Finland.
Since then, it's raised more than 65 million dollars
from investors and plans to launch a constellation
of 18 small satellites in the next couple of years.
Right now, we're fully booked with customers.
So, there will be some governments.
There will be some insurance, some finance.
I mean, there's a ton of positive use cases
to all this stuff.
I do think some people, though, would be creeped out a bit,
about this all-seeing eye,
that is keeping track of what people are doing.
I think, as far as the sort of creepiness,
and sort of personal level,
I think a lot of the mobile phones, internet,
Google type services, they tend to track you
to much higher precision, than we ever,
so, like we never would never really
be in the business of identifying humans.
We don't image faces.
The resolution is way lower than that.
For us, it's about objectivity,
of being able to provide as neutral
a source of information as possible.
AI robots and super fancy satellites
are all well and good.
Probably?
But no visit to Finland would be complete
without exploring its oldest and most famous tech:
the sauna.
Or, as they say it here, the sauna.
And since Finland is a tiny place full
of accommodating people,
I was able to find not just a sauna
but the sauna.
And not just any sauna companion
but the sauna companion.
Finland's most famous actor, Jasper Paakkonen.
Along with having an outstanding six-pack,
Jasper owns this beauty.
He joined me at about 11 p.m.
to teach me the art of the sauna
and what it means to the Finnish people.
When you walk into a sauna, you're stripped down
from your clothes, you're stripped down from
all the titles, your wealth.
You leave your wallet outside
and it's just a bunch of people at their most bare
state of being.
And it's really hard to not be honest
when you're so exposed and so bare.
Yeah.
So, this is a pretty common thing,
is to come in here and hash things out?
Yeah.
Sauna is the only word from Finnish language
to travel to other languages as a common word
to use and saunas are more common in Fin,
it's more common to own a sauna than it is to own a car.
Which means every single person has a sauna.
Yeah.
Everybody has these saunas, but the ones here
are very traditional and what is the
classic Finnish sauna?
The real sauna would always be a wood-heated sauna
because the burning of the wood gives the sauna its,
this very distinct flavor or this loyly.
Loyly the word means like the spirit of the sauna
and the feel when you throw water
onto the sauna heater's rocks.
That's loyly and you just get much better loyly
when you heat it with wood.
Loyly. Loyly.
Perhaps unimpressed by my grasp
of the Finnish language,
Jasper decided it was a good idea
to complete the sauna experience
by subjecting me to a ritualized form of icy torture.
We just lower ourselves down to our necks,
and then we take a few deep, kind of just easy breaths.
Try not to hyperventilate.
Okay.
Takes a second to settle in.
I feel good.
Wooh!
Okay, that's refreshing.
All right, man.
See now, you start feeling this tingling, warm...
Definitely able to breathe now, so that's positive.
And you don't feel cold, right?
No, I feel good actually, yes.
Once you do it a few times, first you get used to it,
and then you get addicted to it.
So, how many times would you do that
during the course of a sauna session?
I usually do it four times back and forth.
So, sauna, swim, sauna, swim.
And then you end it with the swim.
I often say that sauna is like the church
for a normal, average Finn.
If he or she goes to the sauna,
you're in silence and you sweat out the daily sorrows,
both mentally and physically.
There's something church-like.
Sadly, I feel like our version
is like a football game or something!