Slovakia Today, English Language Current Affairs Programme from Slovak Radio

For the past 10 years or so we’ve been hearing a lot about the problem of ‘antibiotic resistance’ – namely that bacteria have been evolving in a way that makes them resistant to the antibiotics we currently have, potentially leaving us more vulnerable to infectious disease than we’ve been since before the invention of penicillin. What’s worse is that there’s been no news from big pharma companies about any new antibiotics currently being developed. But there are people working on the problem, including Jonathan’s guest Pavol Jakubec of the Slovak University of Technology and the small team of scientists he’s part of. Repeat: Will the robots of the future be so human-like that it will be hard to tell them apart from real human beings? Stefan Benus, a researcher in Linguistics at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, believes that at least in the field of spoken human-to-machine communication, this future is not so far away from becoming reality.