Can AI fix Britain's broken statistics? | with Arthur Turrell
#What if a government wearable camera could work out exactly how you spend your day just from a photo? What if the same technology that reads 2,000-year-old Roman scrolls buried by Mount Vesuvius could also fix the way we measure the economy?Statistics are quietly running out of road. Survey response rates are collapsing (most people would rather watch Netflix than fill in a 30-page government form) and the modern economy has moved from counting identical widgets to valuing poems, haircuts and legal advice, none of which fit neatly into a spreadsheet. Get the numbers wrong, and the consequences are real: school funding, tax bands, and regional investment all ride on data that's getting harder to collect accurately.
In this talk, statistician Arthur Turrell puts artificial intelligence to the test live on stage, including an AI trying to identify objects held up by audience volunteers, and an experimental wearable-camera model trying to guess what a volunteer is doing in real time. He shows how AI is already being used well beyond the lab: tracking traffic through CCTV during the Covid-19 pandemic, spotting new housing developments from satellite images in the US, and helping historians read scrolls that have been unreadable for two millennia.
But Arthur's message isn't blind optimism. AI is only "stupidly smart" — brilliant within the narrow patterns it's been trained on, and easily fooled the moment it steps outside them. The question isn't whether AI can help fix our statistics. It's whether we're asking it the right questions in the first place.
Filmed at the Royal Institution, London, on 11 July 2026.
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/uE9i4ZuDPSg
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Chapters:
00:00 – Welcome, and the blindfolded "human dungeon" navigation game
01:19 – Why bad data leads to bad decisions
07:21 – Meet statistician Arthur Turrell
09:41 – How your council's funding is decided: the Index of Multiple Deprivation
13:24 – 1,000 years of UK wages, and the Black Death pay spike
17:04 – Why it's harder to count poems than pineapples
23:22 – The collapse of the survey response rate
26:03 – What AI actually is: pattern recognition, explained
28:41 – Live demo: putting AI object recognition to the test
31:07 – AlphaFold, fusion reactors, weather forecasts, and reading burnt Roman scrolls
34:46 – Teaching AI to classify jobs automatically
36:54 – "Statistics from space": tracking US housing starts by satellite
38:28 – How CCTV and AI tracked movement during Covid-19
41:07 – The attention economy and the problem of measuring how we spend time
42:54 – Live demo: can AI guess what a volunteer is doing?
50:01 – Forecasting regional economic growth 14 months early
51:58 – What this means for you — and how AI could win you millions
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