The Digital Human is pausing to focus on what everyone's talking about - AI. Join Aleks and her co-host Kevin Fong for The Artifical Human from BBC Radio 4, listen on BBC Sounds ..read more

‘I asked myself this very question after a family member was affected by dementia. In her later years, the only person my grandmother still remembered was her husband – but he had passed away several years earlier. She asked about him every morning and finding out that he had died always upset her greatly.’ - Thomas Nørmark.Thomas Nørmark Dementia is a cruel and complex illness, one that robs individuals of their cognitive abilities, independence, and memories. The NHS website reports that in the UK alone, there are now over 944,000 people living with dementia, and this number continues to ris ..read more

Aleks Krotoski explores a story which sought to be forgotten, but wasn't. Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), was published in 1992. It was a book designed to decay from its very first use. It was an unusual conceit, and played into our fears about malfunctioning technology ahead of the dawning millennium. The book was created by publisher Kevin Begos Jr, artist Dennis Ashbaugh and writer William Gibson. The writing – a 302 line poem – was stored on a floppy disc within the publication. It would lock after play, meaning the user could experience the work only once. Dennis Ashbaugh’s art work was sim ..read more

There are many ways in which the taint of prejudice, outdated ways of thinking and plain old human error can enter our artificial intelligence systems. The weakest link is always where the sticky handprints of humans are most visible. To train AIs, systems need two things: computer vision, to precisely identify images, and machine learning algorithms. But they also need a person to label images over and over and over again, so when the AI perceives that image, they learn what it is. In this episode, Aleks Krotoski takes a look at affect recognition and explores how it became part of a multi-bi ..read more

Dr Charu Smita, a media researcher in Delhi explains how as the social contract between middle class Indians and the Government, to provide medical assistance, crumbled, people realised they'd need to mobilise to help save lives. Anirudh Deshmukh is a musician from Mumbai and when the second wave of Covid hit India and he saw the urgent tweets and posts from people searching for oxygen and hospital beds for loved ones he decided to do something about it. Using a combination of social media, WhatsApp and the meet up platform Clubhouse Anirudh began finding strangers hospital beds and oxygen. He ..read more

What’s going on when we scroll through our social feeds finding momentary happiness in the mishaps of celebrities or politicians whose views we dislike? Or delight in the stupidity of everyday people on 'epic fail' sites? Aleks Krotoski explores whether our digital habits, alongside increasingly polarised attitudes, have ushered in a new age of schadenfreude... and asks if this is always a bad thing? Aleks hears from author Tiffany Watt Smith who suggests that, whilst schadenfreude is not a new emotion, online platorms may create the perfect conditions for it to flourish; Dr Lea Boecker sugges ..read more

Illustration by Seonaid MacKay The history of early cinema, radio, and television has suffered from a mass loss of material. Lon Chaney’s vampiric grin and Betty Balfour’s joyful dances were melted down for the silver. Canisters full of voices from radio’s early days cast aside. Doctor Who and Dad’s Army fans still scour basements and attics in the hope of finding episodes lost decades ago. When a new technology creates a new artform, we seem to make the same mistake - not seeing the value, and ditching parts of our cultural history. The same mistake was made with video games. Compounding this ..read more

Aleks was once asked by a friend to track down an invisible man - a character with no digital footprint at all. How does someone not exist in this media-saturated moment, and why does that make it seem like he has something to hide? Find the right balance between personal privacy and personal transparency, Aleks speaks with information security professionals who hunt for bad guys by puzzling together the pieces of leaked databases and hacked accounts, digital analysts who peer into our devices to catch us out when we’re acting out of character, and undercover operatives who build believable on ..read more

Every time we seek treasure and eventually find, we get a hit of endorphins that tickles the happy parts of our brains. There are tales of extraordinary discoveries; King Tut’s tomb, The Mona Lisa, Viking gold. Incredible things that took ingenuity and dedication to uncover. Wouldn't it be remarkable to strike it lucky and find real treasure buried for hundreds or even thousands of years? Every rabbit hole we go down, every mystery we try to solve scratches that itch. It might be offline, or on. What does it look like? How do we find it? And is it wise to do so? Archaeologist Peter Reavill tel ..read more

The internet began as an academic tool, made to share information, bring people together and spur on advances that would benefit humans across the world. When it was shared with the masses, the dream was that with enough shared information, enough connection from human to human, we would be able to put aside differences, solve global problems, and prosper more as a species. That didn’t happen. Over the the ten years of Digital Human, we have observed communities sharing harmless, odd beliefs and tongue-in-cheek hoaxes for fun, not realising the same technology would be used to share the kind o ..read more