Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an engineer. He doesn't build bridges or power stations, but machines that can work like the brain.

He was born in the former Yugoslavia, but fled from the Nazis and ended up in South Africa studying

electrical engineering.

In the late 50s he came to Britain where working on what was regarded as the lunatic fringe

of computer science, he developed wizard, a machine which could

recognize patterns or faces in a crowd. Then in 1990 came Magnus, a computer which could think

a form of artificial consciousness.

Inevitably his work has attracted criticism but he doesn't mind the flack and

refuses to bow to the prevailing British view which he says wants engineers to know their place

and stick to fixing washing machines. He is the Garbore professor of electrical

engineering at Imperial College London, Igor Alexander. Would you be any good, I wonder, Professor, at fixing

washing machines?

I've always thought that perhaps it's something I should have learned and I'd be a much richer

person these days if I could fix a washing machine. Any attempts I've had as it

were absolutely hopeless. What you do though effectively is cross the line you move

from your electrical engineering into neuroscience and that's what

upsets people isn't it? I think it's also to do with the fact that most of the

people who work in things like consciousness, psychology,

neurobiology, feel that they don't really

want to mess with mathematics and engineering.

...