At least we've cleared up the group sex thing...

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2:27Hello. Hello. How are you? I'm good, how are you? I'm all right. I feel that today should be Thursday. I do sort of know what you mean. What's happened to this week? Why is it concertina? Why did it feel like a very big Monday? It did feel like a big Monday. Maybe it's because you are flying so low. sometimes that makes the day go quicker and there's nothing i can say in response to that that's going to sound great eve you do realize that i've put you in a bit of a corner there you are going to be off on thursday aren't you yes so we've got a very short week so in fact this is basically a bit discombobulating you are flying solo this week but that has not stopped jane from um getting in touch and getting involved so all the way from bordeaux hi eve i hope you can hear this and this can be passed on to listeners to offer i'm very very grateful for the interest i just want everyone to know not only am i here i've eaten an enormous amount of cheese i've even had some chicory the french have been curiously welcoming i don't know what it is about this part of france but they're quite nice to the british i don't know uh anyway yes it's been very hot i'm not sure this is my natural habitat but um i've settled in quite well which is a shame because I'm coming home tomorrow anyway, love to all bye okay, good I'm grateful for being dressed

3:54would it be okay with you if I didn't send one from my holiday? that is so loud is that okay? that is so loud, Jane did offer, didn't she? so I thought I'd make the most of it and see how she's getting on see if she made it to Bordeaux in solid form without melting yeah we know now that she did um and yeah she's she's already heading back but she's not back until next week i'm so confused and all i know is i've got to turn up for work tomorrow yep and then i don't turn up until the monday after next correct correct yep yes by which point i'll actually be gone are you really oh this is like this is jumping across lily pads isn't it how How long are you off for?

4:38I'm just off for a few days. I'm doing a long weekend in France for Bastille Day. Okay, lovely. Yes, so yeah, I'll be back. All right, so when are we all back together again then? Who the hell knows? Two weeks. North Berwick? North Berwick, okay. Oh, now we should say, North Berwick, tickets still available. Limited supply. It would be lovely to see you there. Jan Ravens is going to be our guest. She's such a superb impersonator, impressionist. I never know what the difference is and which one's derogatory. but she's a wonderful guest and we will be highly highly entertained and i think it's quite a nice morning session isn't it yes yeah which i like very much indeed yeah then we wandered over to different food stores and got some delicious lunch um and then we were we're all wrapped up by the afternoon yeah i like the food stores i like the setup i like the fact that you can wander out of the tents and see the sea it's a beautiful part of the world beautiful um just a reminder not berwick not berwick no and also if you're going to edinburgh i just couldn't recommend north berwick as an escape from edinburgh for a little while because the festival is wonderful but it's i find edinburgh during the festival really you you become overwhelmed very quickly i find so just hop on the little train to North Berwick.

5:58It's only 33 minutes. Last summer, it was definitely the off-air transit, wasn't it? There were just old carriages, fantastic, fantastic women, all musing on life on whatever it would be from Waverley to North Berwick. Yes, that was a very good energy on the train. So we will look forward to that very much indeed. Can I literally just separate this pile of emails and just give many of them to you? You may. and this one actually you can start you could start eve if you'd like to if you'd like to with that one because i think don't you have those shoes we started something with my condemnation velcro sandals it's caught my eye as well this is from juliet it was about our discussion yesterday yeah about trainers and skirts and what's right in summer hi both thought i'd pass on my discovery of the adidas mary jane a pretty take on the sneaker that works beautifully with skirts and dresses they have a lovely range of colors they are super comfy I really want another pair that's from Juliet and she has sent in she could be a foot model it's a beautiful slender ankle yes she has sent in a photo of her they're sort of like pumps trainers velcro strap across I have also had my eye on these I do have a similar pair you've got a puma pair yes I do I do and I find they are quite a nice middle ground but i have been i've been looking at these mary james because i like the big velcro strap that goes across your foot that's a nice detail yeah so we're not anti velcro no on this podcast at all and we're not anti comfort no and susan sent an email i think she was thoroughly upset by the condemnation mainly mine of the velcro sandal it wasn't those that i was aiming at susan so i can completely understand the practicalities of that and especially if you swim or you're on a beach they're absolutely marvellous what i meant with it and i think they are called ugly sandals aren't they did i mean they're deliberately called that so they're this season's massive great big kind of uh i mean they're they they're like a block of shoe just under a normal sandal so they don't have the tapering that usually a sandal wedge has so I just think they must be very odd to walk in they would be like having kind of breeze blocks attached to the bottom of your feet those are the ones that I was taking aim at they look like when you go swimming and you hold the boards yes exactly that yes one of those they're quite popular in your neck of the woods aren't they they are so you've probably been seeing quite a lot of them you're probably just sick of the sight of them yeah I'm sick of the sight of lots of things in Dalston at the moment Eve there was a guy who was cycling up the street this morning I was doing some early morning ironing from my little laundry cupboard, which looks out over the road.

8:45It's just the most fantastic spy hole, basically, for everybody else's lives. I would say to the pub, it'd be great if you could open the door in the morning to deliveries, because there was a poor guy who was trying to deliver their fruit and veg boxes over these very spiky railings into their front garden. And there was a point at which I thought, please, please, please, it's just too early. The ambulance service are busy. this is just going to end absolutely terribly and he'd tip the box over so then it's been half an hour chasing all of these oranges and lemons down the street so that was i mean high excitement 7 30 in the morning but then there were a couple of guys cycling down the road on line bikes having a conversation i mean i don't think that they would have been registered deaf but they were just so loud what time of morning was this about 7 30 just just got the energy to chat at that time And actually we're going to talk about noise on the afternoon show today because there is a story about residents near Heathrow being offered mental health counselling by the people who are doing the Heathrow third runway expansion because they know it's just going to be so noisy.

9:55It's such a noisy place to live anyway and they're going to have massive construction work and then obviously they're just going to have many, many more planes landing over them. and noise is a is a pollution as well as lots of other things and i just think our levels of the expectation of what type of noise we should be able to put up with these days has really really changed and trying to find silence uh in a city is nigh impossible now and it just affects all of us because the louder it gets the louder we all have to become i think you almost don't realize that till maybe you go away for a weekend or you step away from it and you can just suddenly think clearly and you go oh that's actually really nice and you hadn't realized how much it was grating on you subconsciously very much so and i know that lots of our listeners will live in far far quieter parts of the world gosh i mean i envy that i think it's it's liquid gold these days but peace and quiet uh so the afternoon show when does that happen eve i'm going to just have to rely on you to stand into corporate kathy's uh well well Actually, Jane favours a sandal, isn't she?

11:03So step into Jane Garvey's sweaty sandals and corporate catharsise yourself. I'd really rather not, but the afternoon show is available 2 till 4pm on Times Radio, Monday to Thursday. You can get the app or it's on DAB. You just have to retune your radio, assuming you haven't previously done that, which you should have, because you've said it enough. Yeah, I think that's absolutely beautiful. Excellent. You will get a raise. this in from carolyn uh thank you for your coverage of ai that's what we've been talking about on the afternoon program for the last couple of days we're doing it again today we're talking about transport talking about autonomous vehicles don't trust them i think it's important says carolyn that we examine it critically from multiple angles i don't consider it a bad thing per se but i feel it's been expanding at the speed of light in an unchecked way there are privacy concerns and ethical concerns.

11:55But above all, I think we need to hear a focus on the environmental applications of AI in its current format. Our planet cannot afford its current consumption, let alone contemplate further expansion. Take a look at Erin Brockovich's work on this and the number of US countries now banning data centre developments in their local areas. I'm most understanding of the use of AI for our global social betterment, faster pickup of cancers on scans, pattern recognition of a mass scale for health and travel etc but surely we have to consider our use of it focusing on its utility not just use it indiscriminately for novelty and fun and actually without even knowing we're using it at all there's an evidence-based argument emerging that the instant gratification ai provides i.e for research and inquiries dumbs down the individual we're just not using our brains in the same way.

12:50It's such a huge topic. It's great to hear you tackling it. Let's keep this conversation going. Thanks, Carolyn. It's a serious and thoughtful email and we're absolutely here for those ones as well as all the other stuff that we do, Eve, aren't we? We are indeed. And actually, a couple of people have said, God, I don't think I do want to get particularly involved in AI, especially right at the beginning. Why don't we just wait until, you know, it's better, it's more evidence-based it doesn't have so many holes in its facts and all that kind of stuff but I suppose we just felt that we don't want to ignore it until a time at which we have no say in how it's been formed yeah and I understand all arguments because it is so huge but ultimately it is happening the the autonomous driving thing I find fascinating so you'll hear it in this podcast I think it really makes me think and I haven't given enough time to thinking about this before there's such a excitement around entrepreneurship and I think that we're kind of encouraged to think that these people are revolutionary disruptors and changing the world and we must all look to them and all that kind of stuff we already know that the power that they get is being used very unwisely but also there's such a friction between celebrating those people for all the stuff that they create and the jobs that they create and then not being able to hold them accountable because they're entrepreneurs for all of the other stuff that they cock up for us and in autonomous cars and it's a very simple thing isn't it you just think well their argument is it's going to be safer a they're extrapolating safety from tiny numbers of journeys at the moment so we don't know that yet do we no i don't think we do i'm not sure i heard enough an official statistic in your interview no and and just the kind of it's that ease and convenience of getting around it's just like well sometimes it's just quite good to be busy with driving if we create yet more time when we can just be looking at our phones or indulging in leisure activities, is that a good thing?

15:12There's no evidence that that's a helpful thing at all. I think driving somewhere for me at the moment is just quite a good daily or weekly part of my life. I don't need more time to, you know, flick through stuff on a phone and buy shirts I don't need. Can I just say thank you to Michelle, who has said hello from steamy Brooklyn. It's not as hot here as it was for you lot last week but your musings about whether london would need to open cooling centers in light of climate change maybe want to write in obviously we have a lot wrong over here but at least in myc the city opens cooling centers whenever there's a period of extreme heat they're predominantly for seniors but i think anybody in need can access them and all of the city libraries are air conditioned so they end up being de facto cooling centers as well so just out of interest i clicked on your little uh link there to see where all of the cool options were and petco which i think is one of america's largest pet suppliers they open all of their air-conditioned stores to anybody who needs to go into them even if you don't have a pet see you would never make it to work well i just thought good on you yeah that's just fantastic and and of course it's sensible isn't because while you're there, you're going to buy a little treat.

16:31It's true, actually. They're enticing you in. Yeah, but very sensible as well, because so many pets die in the heat. Michelle listens every day whilst walking her flatulent pug Sunday. Oh. And she often laughs out loud whilst pottering around in Prospect Park. Well, a very good afternoon to you. I think pugs are notoriously windy little buggers, aren't they? Yes. Yeah. The national anthem. Louise has enjoyed watching the Paraguay team absolutely belt out their lively anthem. I confess I didn't quite catch the lyrics, but they seemed very passionate. I'm not a fan of the royal family, so it's never been my thing singing the national anthem here.

17:12But the anthem sticks in my throat even more than it did when singing about a queen. I'm in my 40s, so I've seen many mediocre men rise to positions of power, and increasingly I find I resent the idea of singing about another one reigning over me. the reason I hadn't thought about that how do you feel about the national anthem? well I just can't honestly remember the last time I sang it no because I'm I mean it's it's wrong I'm not in the England squad no I haven't sent my country something for forever I never have so I don't know when was the last time you sang the national anthem? I could not tell you and I do find it quite uninspiring as an anthem an anthem feels a stretch yeah uh i i think we probably sang it at school a couple of times i'm not even sure we did maybe on the silver jubilee or something yes that probably was it for me yeah but but when i see them singing it and it's always just very unfortunate isn't it when the camera pans across a squad they've got other things to be thinking about a lot of them don't really know the words it's just like they're lifting their jaws up and down and up and down I don't think they're saying the actual words.

18:23But I'm kind of with them on that. And the funny thing is with a lot of those young men at the moment at the World Cup, you can definitely, definitely lip read other things they say when they're playing the game. So it's not that they just have those kind of mouths that aren't easy to lip read. It's not wide, no. If it begins with F and it ends with F, we can tell what you're saying. Yes. Have you got another email? I do. This comes from Jennifer. And this is on the subject of teachers, which we were discussing yesterday. Teachers I've known. Just a contribution to today's appreciation of teachers.

18:58I went to a very formal and pretty pretentious girls' grammar school and found it very stressful and, in retrospect, abusive in some aspects. There are a few younger, encouraging and creative teachers, but small irritations like being banned from a school trip to the Tate because I wore a CND badge dulled my desire to learn. However, I then transferred to a sixth-form college in London and really experienced an inspirational learning environment. A state college, free and liberal, we worked hard, we went mudlarking in the Thames or hung out at the Royal Festival Hall and were treated respectfully and thoughtfully by staff.

19:33I eventually went to university, English and philosophy, and taught in various settings for decades, subsequently trained as a psychotherapist and eventually trained others in that field. I was very indebted to some teachers, especially that brilliant and kind Eileen B. However, there was a day perhaps 10 years ago when I realised my teachers would have all been over 90 and older by then and felt a real sense of loss and gratitude for many of them. So thanks to their memory and to the current cohorts mostly doing their best. Apologies for the lengthy mail, such a rich scene to explore. Thank you, Jen.

20:08Yeah, it is a rich scene. And it is sad, isn't it, when you realise that they would all have gone by now. And then And sometimes if you go back to your school, it's definitely the opposite of sad to see them nodding away there on the front bench. It's still wearing the same clothes. When you do go back, it's like really things do never change. It's a mixed bag because I think we've all had very positive and some really negative experiences. but the positive ones do tend to stick more in your mind which is nice because i don't think that applies to all aspects of life no but i'm not sure about that actually i think about i think a bad teacher can crush you i mean like really maybe i actually haven't had any really truly negative experiences i think some some schools where cruelty has been a baseline thing i think the sadism involved in teaching was apparent i mean i hope it's a thing of the past i suspect it's not in quite a few places but i think some teachers have just ruined kids lives actually which is why we should celebrate the good ones yes really really celebrate the good ones um spare a thought for the working woman in ppe says josie catching up on episodes from the hot weather last week i in brackets a woman work in a lab and have to wear a lab coat gloves and lab specs at work as well as wearing trousers and cover shoes for safety in case of a chemical spillage whilst it's usually not too bad temperature wise because of good air con i'm jealous of the floaty sundresses and skirts i see other people wearing to work in heat waves i seem to be constantly searching for smart lightweight trousers and when it's really hot i wear sandals to commute and change into trainers at work so i can let my feet breathe for a small part of the day well Josie we do completely hear you and actually you really really felt in the latest heat pump didn't you for all of the paramedics all of the policemen all of the uniform people who aren't actually allowed to take stuff off they have to keep that on all the time wearing a stab proof vest when you're walking the streets of London or any major city in 37 degrees yeah and you have to you literally have to be outside there's no air con there's there's the heat beating down on the pavements yeah and you're in that so we were lucky we must never complain again at being at the coal face of news two and a half hours a day we shouldn't but i suspect we might yes i think i think you're right there i do think you're right well spotted uh now into the summer exhibition goes caroline priestly now we love caroline priestly because uh she did some portraits of our pets and look very closely you'll see it on the set of our youtube you certainly will uh display beautifully and caroline huge congratulations how absolutely fantastic she says if you're going to the royal academy summer exhibition this year i have a drawing on their cat wall it's called fur coat no whiskers the drawing depicts how i think my cat ruby sees the two of us there are many beautiful cats on the wall and in other parts of the gallery there is a reclining giant black cat sculpture and also the famous Palmerston sitting on a set of photographer's steps.

23:26I'm not sure it's not a real stuffed cat. So well worth a visit. So, I mean, it's well worth a visit anyway, but massive congratulations. I think the summer exhibition is just one of those wonderful British eccentricities that must never, ever stop. And in fact, it makes so many people go to the Royal Academy who don't usually go to the Royal Academy. I mean, it's a joyful, joyful thing. Do you go every day? Well, we do try to, yes. And actually my beautiful, wonderful, talented sister had one of her songbird etchings in the summer exhibition last year. And it was such a source of pride for all of us.

24:05So we did go, the whole family, tipped up in various different formations and stuff. And I've just got one of those pictures of the kids and my sister and I, you know, standing in front of this little picture. She's a very, very talented artist and gardener. And I just hope that that gets, you know, passed down through the generations. It was an incredible feeling to be part of it by connection. Actually, Eve, I think it's a stellar thing. Yeah, it sounds like a wonderful thing. And like you said, everyone's traipsing in who maybe wouldn't necessarily have done. and then you so many people get the opportunity to feel connected yeah totally totally to things that you just think oh my goodness that's only for you know strange buffon haired masters yes and i'm not the only one who actually says about the royal academy sometimes the best thing is just the color of the walls because they've got these really exotic really kind of full timbre colors that they hang all the bouffant masters against.

25:11Art's not really my thing, so I apologise if I've upset people. I don't mean to upset people at all, but that just seems to keep happening while hey. Broken link or new show. This comes in from Nicholas, who says, greetings from Singapore. Oop. Where you've both kept me and my partner entertained doing the housework since stories told when the microphone is off was your tagline. Yes, that long. he's off doing his PhD in Cambridge Nicholas I'm so sorry that was ease I turned my mic down it didn't help she was guzzling the last bit of her iced coffee so I'm very sorry about that let's rejoin Nicholas he's off doing his PhD in Cambridge now yes he's the clever one between us don't put yourself down so I'm doing all the housework these days and I miss him loads but luckily you're putting out oodles of content and that really helps.

26:04Yeah, we do put it out, don't we? I decided to try your visualization thing earlier this week, but to my consternation, when I clicked YouTube, it said no such thing. On closer inspection, I noticed the Apple podcast link points to a show called Off Air with Jane and Four.

26:25Is this a mistake or have you accidentally leaked an upcoming reality show where Jane is at the center of a menage à cinq. Talk about creative new formats, but where does she get the energy? Jane is the least likely person on the planet to ever indulge in group sex. Please do put me out of my misery here. She won't mind me making that clear. Please do put me out of my misery here. I'm on the edge of my seat. Nicholas, I don't know what's happened there. But do you know what? I mean, it's a very tiny name, Fee, but it just goes wrong all the time. I can see what's happened. What's happened? And it's my fault.

27:03Is it? Eve. And they only, this actually only came to my attention last night. So there's lots of information in our description. And, you know, it says our next book club pick is this. It says you can check out our YouTube channel. And then there's the link. Yes. And then there isn't a space before it then says our new playlist. So it says there's the link to the YouTube and it's merged with our. Okay. So it's become one big thing, and it's going to be rectified. Okay, Nicholas, thank you very much indeed for pointing that out. But at least we cleared up the group sex thing, because a lot of people would have been worried about that.

27:45God, when Jane gets up to him Bordeaux. Yes, stays in Bordeaux. Please, dear God, make us stay. Sydney Musings. Now, this is from Jackie Says, who just wants to inform us I can't have sheep in a suburban gather, gather you can't have sheep in a suburban backyard Jackie says I grew up on a farm and the bleat from sheep was loud I imagine your neighbours would not take too kindly to the noise a rooster also might not be appropriate if you were considering one Jackie also says I was banned from ever thinking about playing hide and seek in our chest freezer because of the tight fitting lid every time I see a chest freezer or I hear my mother voicing the warnings.

28:30How about Kevin or Julia as call-out names after our two feuding Labour Prime Ministers of the past? That's Rudd and Gillard. I think Julia would love that, being a proud and vocal supporter of all of the feminists amongst us. Well, no, it's definitely going to be an Eve thing. We just haven't quite hit on the form of words, but we're going to have to mention you. It's going to be very overwhelming. Yeah. In the nicest possible way, I don't think it'll happen that often. and I'm saying that against ourselves I'm not saying that against you also it's you know I hear the word sleeve sleeve you must get that quite a lot they kind of e I do yes yeah no I have had that in the past in fact I was doing an outside broadcast on the south bank for GLR many many many years ago and they had optimistically erected some crash barriers around the DJ area that we were broadcasting from.

29:23And one person walked past them at about 9.30 in the morning. Nobody else would come along. We were doing a breakfast show. It was very odd to expect lots and lots of people to turn up. I think so. I like that optimism. Yes, it was optimistic and also quite embarrassing. And this guy walked past and he said, what are you doing? So this was, you know, when we were playing a tape out or something. So I explained, you know, we were doing a live outside broadcast. And he said, oh, OK, what's your names? And so I said, you know, feed, love, and so on. And he just went, Steve, that's a funny name for a girl, and just walked off.

29:56And that was it. That was my interaction. Just let him go about his day thinking that. It's this very odd, tiny woman on her own with crash barrels around her, great big headphones and a microphone, talking to herself called Steve. I loved local radio. And actually, one of the fantastic things at the moment, we're having our studio rebuilt at times radio and it's going to be all super woofing jangling led blazing with branding but it's not ready yet so we're broadcasting from talk sports kind of second studio man cave man cave yep which is up on the 17th floor it's got no windows it's down a corridor it's next to a kitchen that doesn't have a sink so there's this very strange bin It all sounds like it makes perfect sense to me.

30:47That you have to pour liquids into if you haven't quite finished your coffee or something. And that makes me feel ill every day when I walk past that. It's just wrong, isn't it? How do you even collect the... I don't know. How do you gather that at the end of the day? Just put a sink in, mate. Anyway, we're broadcasting from that studio. It smells like local radio. It looks like local radio. It doesn't really work, which is very much like local radio. and Jane and I both feel so at home. You're quite enjoying it, aren't you? Really, really loving it, which is not to say once the great big new studio arrives we won't embrace that because of course we will.

31:24Did you ever think that we would have to drag for you kicking and screaming from the talk sports studios? I know, it's odd to feel so at home there. I mean, there is a pheromone in that studio. There definitely is. It's a pheromone you cannot escape, Right, but it's making us broadcast quite well, Eve. What does that mean? Maybe that's your calling. Yeah, well, that's a very, isn't it? All the chat we've had so far about football, I'd maybe say potentially not. No, not really. Do join us, though, on the afternoon show for... If you can't join us for the whole two hours, then join us just before 3.30 every day because Les Snowden, who's a fantastic sports journalist, former sports editor of quite a few very, very important newspapers in the UK, he's doing a notebook from the World Cup which is a little bit about football but in fact he's not going to he's Scottish he's not going to the England matches and following England through the tournament he's followed Scotland but you know they've left already but it's a notebook about the World Cup and it's so beautiful it's so good and his musings about he's one of those fantastic journalists who just talks to people wherever he goes and because he's got a lovely demeanour and I think he's quite an empathetic human being.

32:41Lots of people are just telling him lots of things. So he just brings this amazing kind of postcard of humanity to us every day. It's really lovely, isn't it? It's so warm and just energised and it's such a lovely chat. It is a really good lesson. Yeah, and then he just throws in very surprising things. Like yesterday he informed us that he'd had a pedicure and that he's got very high arches. No man has ever shared that with me. And I felt special. And now I want to see them. How high are they? You want to see us freshly measured. I do, but I'm actually not brave enough. That will be one for the YouTube.

33:22I'm not going to ask a colleague on Instagram because he sent me a message last night and I resisted the urge to ask him for a picture because I'm not that kind of girl. You'd find yourself in HR. I so would. but I think if he posts it up himself then we can all just have a look I just don't want to receive it privately I think a massive klaxon goes off somewhere in the building if body parts are shared on private emails and that's right that's how it should be but never make that change right and this has ended up just being a salacious addition what's gone wrong shall we talk about the guest?

34:02yeah do you know what There's a very professional introduction coming your way. And so I think we'll just leave it at that. We'll separate it with an ad break. Yes. Thank God for commercials. Then I thought, what if I've scaled businesses? What if I scaled my philanthropy? What if I did as much in one year as I've done in my whole life? See how your wealth could have even greater meaning at creativeplanning.com slash impact. Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text.

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35:55Delivering local experiences and memorable stays while being backed by the quality, reliability and Marriott Bonvoy benefits travelers know and trust. Experience the destination without the compromise. Series by Marriott is part of Marriott Bonvoy. Book direct at Marriott.com or on the Marriott Bonvoy app. Now, how do you feel about driverless cars, dynamic pricing on flights, planes that practically fly themselves? all are AI in motion and the speed at which the technology is changing how we travel has never been faster. In a moment we're going to take a deep dive into who's regulating these changing times but first a closer look at the change that will revolutionise our towns and cities.

36:40It's already doing so in many parts of China and in the States. The autonomous vehicle is upon us. James Peng is co-founder and CEO of Pony, one of the most ambitious driverless car companies. It currently holds licenses to operate in China. It had a license in California, but that was suspended after a crash. It can operate cars with safety drivers in them, though. I started by asking James where his zeal for the self-driving car had come from. Oh, I think the biggest driver certainly is for safety. Actually, that's definitely the most important reason that prepared me to start Pony. because think about more than 94 % of the accidents were caused by a human error, right?

37:26We either drunk driving or we get nervous or we may just simply ignore some of the other road agents. While autonomous driving, because of 360 degree sensor coverage, it's much, most of the majority of the human caused accidents can be avoided because of the autonomous driving. Of course, there's all the other benefits, like more efficient road will be much cleaner and all the other benefits. Of course, cost is also a very important reason. It's autonomous driving is much, much cheaper than the human drivers. I think as a society as a whole, it increased the efficiency of our mobility systems.

38:14Sure. I'll come back to the drivers in a second, if I may. But safety is obviously the key factor here. And I hear you when you say that autonomous driving could be safer. But that's all it is at the moment. It's a it could be safer. You are extrapolating huge figures about safety from a very small number of journeys. And surely there is a possibility that technology fails. There have been some incidents of that happening already. I think all of the driverless taxis in Wuhan ground to a halt because of a technology failure. There have been fatalities in crashes with self-driving cars already. So how do we know that ultimately they will be safer?

39:01No, we actually already have real operation data to prove that it is safe. It is actually safer. According to our own data, it is close to a magnitude safer than a human driver. Of course, it currently is still confined in certain regions. It's not as generic as possible. Or as you mentioned, there also could be like in the rare occurrence that there could be even bigger incidents of unexpected behavior. But overall, it is improving. Think about just from a higher level, human drivers as a whole, our safety stays the same. Or I would argue, a lot of people would argue it's declining because cell phone usage and the distraction and short attention span and all that.

39:55But the safety of autonomous mobility is consistently improving. So even you argue that it's not generally enough, it's not a lot safer than the human drivers yet, but it actually has the potential to be much safer and much efficient. How much of the world do you think will be operating autonomous vehicles as a kind of regular standard mode of transport by, let's say, 2050? 50. I think majority of the modes of transportation would be autonomous because it's just simply much safer and much more enjoyable for rides. I think human driving probably still in existence, but will be probably just recreational or in a, let's say, in a very rural area or in a small locations.

40:45Are you a good driver yourself? I am actually an awesome driver. Are you an awesome the driver okay knock on wood i never had any any accidents knock on wood okay that's what never happens okay no points on your license and so so talk to me about that because you know a lot of people just really really enjoy driving and actually you made the point about it will be cheaper to have autonomous vehicles but it's cheaper to a company that currently employs humans, that's not always great for society when a whole swathe of jobs disappear. So what are your thoughts about that balance? Yeah, that's actually, let me probably answer in two angles, just from society as a whole point of view.

41:32I mean, technology always displays jobs, and society as a whole always find a way to resolve the job loss, right? For example, the textile industry, right? He used to be a big employer of the laborers and now it's pretty much all automated. I think society as a whole has always a way to resolve this. And on individual level, we're actually, I mean, although we are not having one-to-one job replacement, but we are creating new jobs as well. For example, the fleet operation, the remote assistance, we are creating different types of jobs, a much better working condition for the employees. Because think about the drivers has to be sitting in the car for 10 hours a day, whereas in our case, they are sitting in an air-conditioned room monitoring the fleet or maintaining the cars.

42:29So we're trying to do whatever we can, but as a society, if the total transportation costs lowered, it increases the efficiency of the whole society. So, I mean, we are creating values from other ways that potentially can have job creation as well. You're an entrepreneur, so I'm not putting this responsibility on you. I can see what you're doing in growing your company and seeing your vision through. But when you say that society has always managed these huge revolutions in employment, everything kind of works out. there is a feeling that this time around with artificial intelligence, that will not be the case, and that governments and the background of society is ill-prepared for what's coming down the line.

43:25So if you use your entrepreneurial vision, how do you make sure that all of the people who lose their jobs to AI can genuinely find something valuable to do with their lives? Yeah, I agree with you. It's a much more complicated issue than we're just discussing in 10 minutes. I think the autonomous driving, and as you said, in a broader sense, the AI revolution, the way it is that it may divide the society into haves and have-nots, right? I think it creates the total wealth of the society, but it might not distribute them, I wouldn't say even evenly, but probably even much more loopsiding. So I think it has a lot to do with how we distribute the wealth, how we create new jobs.

44:21It's certainly, I think as an entrepreneur, I can do as much as I can, but it certainly needs a lot of the regulations, the societal change, tax, how we spend the tax dollar and a lot of other things. Final question, and this has always intrigued me about autonomous cars. When we're driving on the roads, we have all kinds of human signals, don't we, to other drivers, where you nod somebody into traffic or perhaps you use a hand signal or a gesture to imply what your emotions are and what the permissions are to the other driver. How will your cars replicate that? Great question. In fact, the AI had advanced to such a good, great stage.

45:11We can recognize pretty much all the hand signals, all the standard policeman signals. We actually recognize them. I think what we haven't done yet is the eye contact. On the four-way stop sign, a lot of drivers also do eye contact. That we haven't done yet. But what we can compensate is the intention of a driver back to the four-way stop scenario. The other car on the side street might nudge a little bit, which indicates they want to go. So we take a lot of other signal and driving behavior into account to compensate the fact that we haven't recognized eye contact yet. I'm still terrified. Dr.

45:55Jack Stilgo is a professor in science and technology at University College London, where he also researches the governance of emerging technologies. The perfect person to talk about all of this with. I suppose the big question is about safety, isn't it? And are we right to worry that these huge projections about how safe autonomous vehicles can be are based on relatively few journeys at the moment? Well, I think there's two points to that safety question. The first one is about the safety of the new objects themselves and how we know, which is absolutely the right question to ask. The second part of that is about the claims that the people selling the technology are making for how safe current driving is, and therefore whether or not they will be able to solve the problem with their new technology.

46:51On that first one, we do now have some data from some parts of the world where this technology has been used for getting on for millions of miles with thousands of vehicles operating in places like San Francisco and other American cities. at the moment we're relying on the companies that are doing that to sort of mark their own homework which isn't great if we want to make good decisions about the technology in other places just because it works in one place does not mean that it's going to work in another place so we still lack good evidence to make that sort of safety calculation and then when we're thinking about whether the technology might solve problems of safety for us you know we we have to think well where are those dangers currently experienced so we are currently thinking about autonomous vehicles in london because a few companies want to bring and indeed are testing their their their cars on the streets at the moment london is central london is one of the safest road networks in the whole world, right?

48:04It's so much safer than most American cities, in fact, much safer than any American city. And the reason it's safer is not because we have lots of robots, right? It's because of lots of policy changes that have made our streets safe and slow, which doesn't suit, you know, people who want to drive a Ferrari through the middle of London, but it does make the place extremely safe. Okay, so if you're the entrepreneur who's trying to get a licence in London at the moment, you can't really use the argument of I am bringing safety to a city. We can quite clearly see that what they want to bring is success for a company.

48:43And that's a very interesting interface at the moment, isn't it? Touched on there with James Peng. The gap between the dreams of an entrepreneur and the wellbeing of most of us seem to never have been greater. Would you agree? I think we are more and more people are realising when it comes to artificial intelligence that a particular version of progress that's being sold largely by Silicon Valley does not equal social progress for the rest of us. And I think it's right to say that that gap is becoming larger and that tech companies have to work harder to convince us that what they're selling is good for us.

49:25Or what will actually happen is that the people buying the technology will have to do the work in order to make the technology work for them. And that's sort of that's what we've always done when it comes to ways of getting around cities, for example. And how competent do you think our government is at the moment in balancing those two pressures? Because you do want this to be a country where people want to come and build businesses. It's very important that we don't lose that kind of fertile ground. But protecting our jobs, personally, I find it very difficult to imagine that everybody who's currently driving for a living would manage to find decent, well-paid work when they're replaced by a robot?

50:16Yeah, I think so. In the case of driving and driving jobs, I'm actually not that worried about it simply because the world, the real world, the concrete world is so complicated that scaling up the use of robot cars in an environment as complicated as a city is just going to take a long time. And it will take a long time in London because there are multiple modes of transport all competing for public space. The world will get in the way. Entrepreneurs have to tell you that the utopia is just around the corner because that's the timescale that their investors operate on, right? It will be more complicated than that, which means that impacts on jobs for if you drive for a living are not going to be anywhere near as radical as they were, for example, with the arrival of Uber.

51:11If you were a black cab driver, your, you know, your livelihood was jeopardised more by Uber than it will be by autonomous vehicles in the short term. But there are lots of areas where we've seen, you know, AI having real impacts on jobs already. If you're a creative worker, if you're a musician, if you're an illustrator, and you suddenly find that it has become extremely easy for people to generate text and images and sounds that do a, you know, a sort of decent enough copy of what you used to do for a living, then that does look pretty existential. So it's likely to be really, really specific depending on what domain you're working in.

51:51So let's broaden the conversation out and not just talk about autonomous vehicles. If we look to other areas of transport, what do you see as being the key areas where people might lose their jobs? So I think, I mean, in transport, I think we're likely to see various forms of transport that do use types of automation. You know, the sort of boring answer that I give quite often given that I live in London, is that we have had automated transport in London for a very long time, in as much as 40 years. The Docklands Light Railway, the Victoria Line, a couple of the other tube lines are in effect driverless.

52:34And they work because of elaborate controlled infrastructures that keep people out of the way. We could certainly see forms of transport that are genuinely useful and that use automation. So, you know, the obvious response would be something like a driverless bus. I, you know, if you're a bus driver and we demonstrate autonomous bus technologies in years to come, then that maybe looks like a worry. But I think we can claim that there is a clear social benefit there. The argument that James Peng was making, interestingly, when he was talking about the efficiency of streets from this sort of technology, it's pretty easy to push back against that sort of claim simply because the last thing that you want if you're a city like London is more vehicles on your streets.

53:29At the moment, we have a problem with single occupancy vehicles. The only thing worse than that for a city is zero occupancy vehicles adding to the traffic and causing a gigantic problem. So we've always got we've got competing values here. We've got what's good for the city, what's good for the employees within the city, what's good for the people who want to move about the city. And then we've got competing concerns about safety and speed of movement and traffic and all the rest of it. And how do you think our government or specific city governance is doing in foreseeing the problems and regulating everything to serve us best, not serve the entrepreneurs best?

54:09So I think we have a real opportunity in London at the moment. London could become the test case for a new way of dealing with this stuff. In the US, in most cases, cities have slightly felt that this is being done to them rather than being done by them. Our government have put in place laws that give local authorities a say on whether or not they want these things on their streets, which means that Transport for London are faced with an interesting set of questions about what the conditions should be that govern the rollout of autonomous vehicles on the streets. Now, whether they do that well or not remains to be seen, but the legal framework is there and it's in place.

55:01So hopefully, I mean, fingers crossed, it goes well and we see something that is an alternative, where we see the best bits of the technology and we mitigate some of the potential hazards. For those of us who are very, very scared about hacking happening on a major scale, do we not make our cities incredibly vulnerable by having so much autonomous AI stuff going on? Well, this is, yeah, this is an issue with the debate about AI and automation. And James Peng characterised the debate in these terms. The easy way to run that debate is to say what humans used to do, machines will do. And you can sort of balance off the benefits and the risks against one another.

55:46And we all know that humans are terrible drivers. And so the mental model that we have is a perfect robot replacing the human and everything's fine. Now, the reality is one in which elaborate digital systems are being created with their own invisible infrastructures, which will have new types of risk, right? You've got risks of vehicles all being connected together. We saw it, as you mentioned, in Wuhan a few weeks ago, where, you know, this isn't the risk of a good or a bad driver. It's about the fact that these systems are dependent on digital infrastructures that might fail for various reasons.

56:28They might fail just because computers fail or they might fail because they have bad cybersecurity and somebody hacks into them. And, I mean, the bad actors are just out there. There was a recent case that I'm sure you were across with two very, very young guys who hacked into TFL, costing TFL£39 million. I mean, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that a system can be infiltrated, And I'm not saying that teenagers would do that, but they might. I mean, they've proved that they can. Yeah. And in the past, the problem with technology is that we often realise those things once something goes wrong.

57:06Right. So TFL would, I'm sure, now say, oh, that's not going to happen again. In the same way as when aeroplanes crash, you know, we make very sure that whatever went wrong doesn't go wrong again. then this is why I think we need to put in place, we need to not assume that something is going to be perfect, right? Because that's the first problem that you get into is assuming that something is going to be safe and secure. But when things do go wrong, how you respond to them becomes absolutely vital. And there, it's about making sure that the companies that are selling the technology share the data with government because they will be embarrassed and they won't want to share the data.

57:47So we have to force them to. And that's what we did with aeroplanes. And that's why aeroplanes are so much safer now than they were 50 years ago. Have you been in a driverless car? And if so, was it fun? I have. And no. I mean, part of the trouble with trying to sell this technology is if it's working, it's exceptionally boring. Right. Because if it's working, it's exactly like being driven by a very competent, very boring driver that always sticks to the speed limit. so any slight sense of novelty or slight sense of magic that you would get from seeing a steering wheel moving with nobody touching it that magic in my experience goes quite quickly which and then you're left to evaluate well how is this different from just getting an uber from one side of london to the other well i'm so glad you said that because on our podcast young eve and i were discussing exactly that what you then do with the extra time that you gain by not driving because you are always the passenger in a car.

58:47And we are pretty sure that you're not always looking out at the window, you know, wondering about the historical context of the streets that you're zooming through. You know, it's probably more time to just doom scroll on Instagram.

59:05You heard from James Peng, who is CEO and co-founder of Pony, and Dr Jack Stilgo from UCL. We'd love your thoughts on this. It is Jane and Fee at Times.radio. It's Jane and Eve for... No, it's not, is it? One more day. Yeah, but I'm Fee. Oh, my God. Just wrap it up, I think. Yeah. We'll talk to you tomorrow. Yes, we will talk to you tomorrow. It'll get better. Let's do some deep breathing, Eve.

59:53Congratulations. You've staggered somehow to the end of another Off Air with Jane and Fee. Thank you. If you'd like to hear us do this live, and we do do it live every day, Monday to Thursday, 2 till 4 on Times Radio. The jeopardy is off the scale. And if you listen to this, you'll understand exactly why that's the case. So you can get the radio online on DAB or on the free Times Radio app. Off Air is produced by Eve Salisbury and the executive producer is Rosie Cutler.