Eye'll Be Back Click

on five people on Thursday night in which acid was sprayed

on their faces in order to steal their motorbikes.

Now on BBC News, it's time for Click.

The cyborgs are coming, the eyeborgs are watching,

the bar staff are serving, and Lara photographs a banana!

This is Adam Jensen, star of the video game

Set in 2027, the poor chap has to undergo extensive

cybernetic modifications after being severely injured.

Well, just ten years before those events might occur,

that plot line doesn't seem that far off.

For years now people have been body hacking,

giving themselves extra abilities and, as our understanding

of robotics has advanced, so has our creativity.

Meet Rob Spence, like the cyborg in the video game,

It doesn't have Terminator vision like this, yet,

Inside a prosthetic eye, which is an odd shape,

they're not a sphere, a prosthetic eye, they're actually

Inside that is a battery, a video camera and a video

transmitter all attached to a circuit board so they can

The camera is turned on and off with a magnet.

It doesn't look at all comfortable, is it in anyway comfortable?

The first consideration that looks the most uncomfortable,

it looks like a 90s iMac, you can see all the goods inside.

Like the battery and the wires, but that's covered by smooth

I don't have open wires and batteries, you know.

That kind of made my stomach drop a little bit when I saw that.

Rob damaged his eye when he was nine and in 2009 began exploring

As a film-maker himself, he was fascinated with the idea

It's like an absurd toy for a one-eyed film-maker.

I used to watch the Bionic Man when I was a kid, The $6 Million Man.

I had the action figure, you looked through the back of his head,

I was looking at my Nokia flip phone at the time I was like -

That's in fact who I called, I called Nokia.

They said - well, we'll call the camera module people in China.

It's very small, it's very challenging.

It does visual dropouts, which is the visual language

of all video from the future, including Princess Leia

Since the initial prototype, Rob and his engineers have gone

He now has one eye that glows red when it films and another camera eye

I get calls from and emails from mom's whose kid has just lost

an eye because it's some sort of fun thing to show a kid this maniac

running around on videos and glowing red eye cameras and stuff.

They're now looking working on ways to transfer the technology to other

We're doing 3D scans of those now and then that creates a space that

you can take into software to map on the technology that we're

Some people golf, I like to make fake eye cameras and, you know,

Right, that's the eye upgraded - now let's do the rest of the body.

MIT's media lab is home to some of the most innovative tech

research in the world, but there's one room here I find

The mission of this lab is probably one of the most

important goals of our time, they're trying to essentially

They want to make it so that if you lose a limb,

it won't have any impact on your quality of life and they're

So we work on everything from creating new motors and designs

for ankles and knees and artificial joints, all the way to marrying

these biomechatronic devices with the human body through novel

Evidence of this work can be seen with people like Ryan Cannon,

complications after a broken leg left him needing an amputation.

What's special about his new robotic leg is that it's doing something

the human body can do instinctively, but it's extremely

The motor is able to work in such a way that simulates a real

It uses on board sensors to interfere whether the leg is,

for example, in the air or on the ground and perform actions

that to the person feel much more like real walking

than they would get from a passive prothesis.

For amputees like Ryan such innovations are life-changing.

I can move in a more rhythmic, symmetrical way and being able

to move in that manner allows me to walk at a faster pace

for a longer distance and to do more activities during the day.

This is not relying just on straight physics and mechanical design,

Not all of the research here is about solving disability,

this exoskeleton project is about augmenting humans.

It allows the body to use much less energy when running or walking.

It improves your ability to walk by 25%.

So what that means is, if you were to walk 100 miles,

it would only feel to you that you walked 75.

We're able to do that today, right and those are devices that

I would expect to see rolling out commercially in the

We're already beginning to see this kind of technology deployed

US retail chain, Lowes, is experimenting with kitting

out its staff with exoskeletons, designed in Virginia,

which could give their employees more stamina at work.

With this in mind, the lab at MIT is now looking

to the next huge question - how close are we to the point

where people might actually want these kind of prosthetics instead

I definitely think that we are entering an age in which the line

between biological systems and synthetic systems

But what might be some of the drawbacks of having these

As there's widespread uptake, that they might only be available

to people who have the financial ability to pay for them.

Welcome to the week in Tech. This week saw some interesting activity

on Facebook, and saw Wiz Khalifa take over as the most watched

YouTube video. It has been viewed a staggering 2.9 million times. Elon

Musk launched a new vehicle, it is supposed to be more affordable than

the previous efforts, which cost $200,000. Faraday future have

scrapped plans to build a plant in Nevada, which leaves questions about

their new vehicle. And this is not a digital version of the Ministry of

silly walking, but this is artificial intelligence attempting

to learn how to walk. So far, research is being led in virtual

environments, but it could help robots learn how to navigate

unfamiliar spaces. And, finally, a former scientist built a super

Psycho which can fire a jet of water at over 200 mph. At least you'll see

it coming -- super-soaker. It says - fashion, style,

outfit, that's you. Sometimes it's not that easy to put

into words what you want to search for online, and that's why companies

are working on ways of us being able to take a simple picture and then

search using that image. Pinterest is a place

all about images and ideas, they've had a form of visual search

for a couple of years now, allowing you to focus

in on a particular object Through a combination of image

recognition and the data points attached to that image,

including the hundreds of thousands of boards it may

have been pinned to, This January, they upped their game,

though, launching Pinterest Lens, a way of being able to search

through a photo with no other data And from that search term,

it aims to come up with similar There we go, we've got a picture

and something is emerging. Right, those are definitely

shoes, but they don't Black shoe with blue

laces, some men's shoes. So there are two parts

to visual search. The first is computer vision,

which is a way of translating the information coming

in through the camera into words. The second is the data

set and the data set So with Pinterest Lens,

when you point your camera at something in the real world,

the computer inside the phone translates that image into text

and then it takes the text and it takes the image and runs a search

against 100 billion pins on Pinterest to find the ones that

seem the most relevant. OK, it knows it's a lemon,

that's definitely a good start. OK, I think you scroll through it

and some of the results make sense, which is sort

of like when you search with words because often you search then

and a lot of the things don't make And having come up with those words,

I've got a series of recipes So we've got a lemon drizzle cake,

a lemon polenta cake. We've now got some

artwork of lemons. It's a lot better than it did

on my boots and this's probably because this is a very simple image

to recognise and understand. Pinterest Lens is also powering

Vision, the image search function in Samsung's Bixby

which is currently only available And so today we're announcing

a new initiative called Google Lens. Google Lens is also

due for release soon. The company says it'll be a new way

of the computer being able to see and even act on its surroundings

whilst you're talking Also working in this space

is a chat bot called Glamix, which is a way of photographing any

item that you like, sending it to them via Facebook messenger

and receiving a response that should tell you where you can

buy a similar item. So let's give this a go

on my boots to start with. It works with pictures found

on Instagram or your phone, eventually allowing you to narrow

down results based on price The bot uses artificial

intelligence, machine learning and what it calls 'content based

image recognition' to search As well as shopping for individual

items, it aims to be able to help Making clicking through to items

so easy is of course amazing for retailers,

but also if you're So if someone passes

you by and they're wearing something you really like,

you need to be quick. Having spent a while testing both,

the results were sometimes surprisingly accurate, and other

times, kind of questionable. But it is early days and the more

this sort of technology is used, the more data it collects

and the more reliable Well, that explains

the weird birthday present Now, earlier we looked

at human beings attempts to become more robotic,

but there's a whole lot of research that's attempting

to make robots more human. It's not actually taking place

at a robot art school like this, but it's nice to think it might

be, isn't it? There is a long way to go

in robotics, just picking up all those weirdly shaped everyday

objects is still an enormous challenge, requiring a robot

to recognise a given object and to decide how

exactly to pick it up. But a team at Berkeley says that

Dex-Net here is the most effective When not playing with Lego,

it's being taught and building up a huge database of 3D objects

by its masters. When something new comes along,

it uses its 3D sensor to compare it to this list,

it then uses its neural network to figure out the best way to grasp

it and it is said to get it right The springy legs of this creature

were 3D painted at UC San Diego, they're designed to be able to more

easily traverse difficult environments, such

as disaster areas. As we know, even walking

on flat surfaces is still Well, I say ouch, but of course

these things don't feel pain. That said, there are those of us

who are asking whether even feelings might one day be part

of a robot's mind. At the simplest level it makes

sense, robots are pretty expensive, you don't want them to run

willy-nilly into fire and acid But at a more complex level,

we're looking ahead to a time when robots might interact with us

on a more personal level as companion robots for the elderly,

for those who are sick or are in pain and perhaps maybe

they need to understand the similar sort of experience and perhaps

develop something like Pain is not just about us

saying ouch, there's an emotional element to this

as well, isn't there? So are we actually talking about

programming some kind of emotions We don't really understand

what emotions are in human beings. Like you say, you might assume

there's some sort of phenomenon that So hypothetically if we developed

systems that worked like pain, might emotion develop off the back

of that as well? There are those robots that

do look so life-like, the Boston Dynamics' Big Dog

and the walking robots, we actually feel quite sorry

for them when they fall over or even When those videos were released

online the reaction was like - oh no, you're bullying them,

don't hurt them. They don't at this stage have

that technology at all. There's no suggestion they do feel

pain, but the human reaction So is that going to inform

how we behave towards Is that where you're looking

at applying our sympathies? I mean, I think science fiction

model of a human-like entity There may be more kind

of cute models we've seen already of robots that,

sort of, pull on our heart strings in a more child-like way and there's

those that suggest that we shouldn't have anything that looks human-like

at all because it's disingenuous, it's cheating and it's tricking us

into treating them like they're The doctor thinks that appearing

to feel pain may make us treat Of course what many people

are worried about is how much respect the robots will have for us

and, most of all, our jobs. Last week Caterpillar invested

seven million in this Australian Now robots can build houses

at the rate of 1,000 bricks an hour. Ambition in the area

is huge and for the first time out of the lab,

ETH in Switzerland is working on much more ambitious structures

like this undulating wall which has Now an increasingly robotic

workforce raises a number of issues and along with the worry

of what jobs will actually be left to us in the future,

there is another one. Fewer workers earning a wage,

means fewer workers paying income tax on their earnings and that means

less money going into the economy. Now some tech brains,

including that of Bill Gates, are calling for a robot tax

to counter that and Cat Hawkins went Almost everyone in the world

who works pays tax on the money they earn, but at this restaurant

in San Francisco there are no waiting staff

and robots plate the food. That work is currently not taxable

and politician Jane Kim is now looking into how this is changing

the city's economy. So what we're seeing

is after automation that you can hire less people in order to deliver

products maybe quicker But it's one of the questions

that we have, it's true this is really convenient,

but at what cost? It's not just restaurants, this

picture is now seen across the city, from hotels and hospitals

to the latest addition to the autonomous family,

self-driving cars. Policy makers have noticed, every

time a robot take as human job, The research is showing us that jobs

are going to get lost over the next ten years and if before

the Great Depression we could have predicted

what would come afterwards, if government could have prepared

for the job loss that occurred, That is the level at which we are

looking at potentially over the next ten years,

in terms of job loss Estimations of how many jobs will be

wiped out vary widely from study to study,

but a recent report especially has It's estimated that robots

will replace 37% jobs in the United States

by the early 2030s. So the biggest concern

is mass job displacement, lack of true, meaningful,

high wage work. We are already seeing a decrease

of that in San Francisco where we have the fastest growing

income gap in the country and a wealth gap that is akin

to the country of Rwanda, and so we have a shrinking

middle-class and we have this growing imminent threat that

many of our meaningful, working-class and even

middle-class jobs may go away At Cafe X, again a human worker has

been replaced by a robot. An Americano with milk,

served by a robot. Now, the human has a different role,

advising on coffee beans and showing customers how to use the tablet

to operate the robot. The owner is not sure about the idea

of a tax on the replacement. I guess I find it a little odd

because what robots are supposed That means it allows a shift

in labour from doing highly repetitive, low productivity tasks

to more useful things. So in order to have this machine

operate, there has to be a lot of engineers on software,

hardware and manufacturing to build Jobs like this require training

and that's what Supervisor Kim wants If you're a childcare worker

or you're an in home support services worker,

working with a senior or individual with disability,

you often work three or four hours So one of the ideas was,

why not tax robots and invest in these poverty jobs and make them

truly living wage This would mean a robot tax

potentially subsidising low paying, but essential jobs,

so that the human employees Currently, many people are working

but not earning enough to live, leading several politicians around

the world to float the idea This would be expensive

for governments and Supervisor Kim is suggesting an automation tax

could be a solution. If there's one thing that

San Francisco is known for, it's leading the conversation

on technology and innovation, but as harder and harder questions

are asked about automation and what this really means

for people's jobs it seems appropriate that this city,

which has added so much to the problem, is also grappling

with what could be the solution. But the rise of robotic workers

is playing out on a global scale and San Francisco is not the only

place trying to lead In the EU, a proposal to tax robot

was voted down earlier in the year and one of the Commissioners who did

so says robots will create more They are worried because they say

robots they will take their jobs, Progress always created more jobs

than progress used to destroy. The train is moving and speed

is high and now it's up to us to be on that train or to stay and to wave

to the leaving train. Concerns about automation replacing

human jobs has been felt sense the Industrial Revolution and more

recently workers in the manufacturing industry

have seen jobs disappear As the issue of a robot tax

begins to spread further, a fundamental question still needs

to be answered - In the context of robots of course

automation is much broader They gave this definition

more than 100 years ago. Politicians can no longer

ignore the robots creeping into the workplace and while many

of the big questions are still being thrashed out,

it's clear that the issue of robot workers is becoming more

and more of a political one. Yeah, really interesting

issues, aren't they? That was Cat Hawkins

and this's it for this week. You can follow us on Twitter

@BBC Click throughout the week and like us

on Facebook, too. Thanks for watching

and we will see you soon. Some decent, dry, and also for some

sunny weather around this weekend. But there will be a lot

of cloud around at times, threatening some rain,

particularly on Saturday. And throughout Saturday,

the air gets warmer and more muggy.