London's Growth in Artificial Intelligence

Deep in the heart of Imperial College, London, a computer is learning how to play Pac-Man. Like many humans, it struggles to get the hang of the classic 1980s video game at first. With time though, experience helps it decide which manoeuvres will allow it to evade the clutches of a relentless gang of animated ghosts.

This is just one of dozens of artificial intelligence (AI) projects slowly transforming the UK into the global hub for a technology that elicits fascination and fear in equal measure.

The point of teaching a computer to master Pac-Man is to help it “think” and learn like a human. That is a prospect not everyone feels comfortable with. Fears have been voiced by scientists as eminent as Professor Stephen Hawking that computers could become so clever that they turn against their makers.

Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial, believes that while we should be thinking hard about the moral and ethical ramifications of AI, computers are still decades away from developing the sort of abilities they’d need to enslave or eliminate humankind and bringing Hawking’s worst fears to reality. One reason for this is that while early artificial intelligence systems can learn, they do so only falteringly.

For instance, a human who picks up one bottle of water will have a good idea of how to pick up others of different shapes and sizes. But a humanoid robot using an AI system would need a huge amount of data about every bottle on the market. Without that, it would achieve little more than getting the floor wet.

Using video games as their testing ground, Shanahan and his students want to develop systems that don’t rely on the exhaustive and time-consuming process of elimination – for instance, going through every iteration of lifting a water bottle in order to perfect the action – to improve their understanding.

They are building on techniques used in the development of DeepMind, the British AI startup sold to Google in 2014 for a reported £400m. DeepMind was also developed using computer games, which it eventually learned to play to a “superhuman” level, and DeepMind programs are now able to play – and defeat – professional players of the Chinese board game Go.

Shanahan believes the research of his students will help create systems that are even smarter than DeepMind.

This has had a snowball effect as the tech industry in London and the South East is growing faster than in California.

Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley for a reason. Once a tech hub starts to develop more and more firms get an incentive to relocate to this place as well.

With the money and the brains now concentrated in London, the city's built a reputation for itself. Young ambitious people from all over Europe are flocking to the British capital thinking it's the best place to get noticed.

It's not hard to see why. The big players have invested heavily in UK technology companies in recent years.

Google paid £400m for artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepMind, Microsoft acquired keyboard app company SwiftKey for £177m, while Twitter wrote off £102m to get hold of Magic Pony Technology, which specialises in machine learning.

Interestingly, these British businesses are all working in AI. As big multinationals' interest in this field grows, London is emerging as its global centre.

It's a lucrative development considering AI is expected to become a $70bn industry by 2020.