Kate Darling: Social Robots, Ethics, Privacy and the Future of MIT
嘉宾：Kate Darling
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本篇目录21 章节
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- I think that animals are a really great thought experiment
when we're thinking about AI and robotics,
because again, this comparing them to humans
that leads us down the wrong path,
both because it's not accurate,
but also I think for the future, we don't want that.
We want something that's a supplement.
But I think animals,
because we've used them throughout history
for so many different things,
we domesticated them not because they do what we do,
but because what they do is different and that's useful.
And it's just like,
whether we're talking about companionship,
whether we're talking about work integration,
whether we're talking about responsibility for harm,
there's just so many things we can draw on in that history
from these entities that can sense, think,
make autonomous decisions and learn
that are applicable to how we should be thinking
about robots and AI.
- The following is a conversation with Kate Darling,
her second time on the podcast.
She's a research scientist at MIT Media Lab,
interested in human robot interaction and robot ethics,
which she writes about in her recent book
called "The New Breed",
what our history with animals reveals
about our future with robots.
Kate is one of my favorite people at MIT.
She was a courageous voice of reason and compassion
to the time of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal
at MIT three years ago.
We reflect on this time in this very conversation,
including the lessons it revealed about human nature
and our optimistic vision for the future of MIT,
a university we both love and believe in.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Kate Darling.
Last time we talked a few years back,
you wore Justin Bieber's shirt for the podcast.
So now looking back, you're a respected researcher,
all the amazing accomplishments in robotics,
you're an author.
Was this one of the proudest moments of your life?
Proudest decisions you've ever made?
- Definitely.
You handled it really well, though.
It was cool, 'cause I walked in,
I didn't know you were gonna be filming.
I walked in and you're in a fucking suit.
- Yeah.
- And I'm like, why are you all dressed up?
- Yeah.
- And then you were so nice about it.
You like made some excuses.
You were like, oh, well, I'm interviewing some,
didn't you say you were interviewing
some military general afterwards to like--
- Oh yeah, that was--
- Make me feel better?
- CTO of Lockheed Martin, I think.
- Oh, that's what it was.
- Yeah.
- You didn't tell me, oh, I was dressed like this.
- Are you an actual Bieber fan?
Or was that like one of those T-shirts
that's in the back of the closet
that you use for painting?
- I think I bought it for my husband as a joke.
And yeah, we were gut renovating a house at the time
and I had worn it to the site.
- Got his joke and now you wear it.
Okay, have you worn it since?
Is this the one time?
- No, like how could I touch it again?
It was on your podcast.
Now it's framed.
- It's like a wedding dress or something like that.
You don't, you only wear it once.
You are the author of "The New Breed,
What Our History With Animals Reveals
About Our Future With Robots."
You opened the book with the surprisingly tricky question,
what is a robot?
So let me ask you, let's try to sneak up to this question.
What's a robot?
That's not really sneaking up.
- It's just asking it.
- Yeah.
- All right, well.
(laughing)
- What do you think a robot is?
- What I think a robot is,
is something that has some level of intelligence
and some level of magic.
That little shine in the eye, you know,
that allows you to navigate the uncertainty of life.
So that means, like autonomous vehicles to me in that sense,
are robots because they navigate the uncertainty,
the complexity of life.
Obviously social robots are that.
- I love that.
I like that you mentioned magic 'cause that also,
well, so first of all,
I don't define robot definitively in the book
because there is no definition.
That everyone agrees on.
And if you look back through time,
people have called things robots until they lose the magic
because they're more ubiquitous.
Like a vending machine used to be called a robot
and now it's not, right?
So I do agree with you that there's this magic aspect
which is how people understand robots.
If you ask a roboticist,
they have the definition of something that is,
well, it has to be physical usually.
It's not an AI agent.
It has to be embodied.
They'll say it has to be able to sense its environment
in some way.
It has to be able to make a decision autonomously
and then act on its environment again.
I think that's a pretty good technical definition
even though it really breaks down
when you come to things like the smartphone
because the smartphone can do all of those things.
And most robotists would not call it a robot.
So there's really no one good definition.
But part of why I wrote the book is because people have
a definition of robot in their minds
that is usually very focused on a comparison
of robots to humans.
So if you Google image search robot,
you get a bunch of humanoid robots,
robots with a torso and head and two arms and two legs.
And that's the definition of robot
that I'm trying to get us away from
because I think that it trips us up a lot.
- Why does the humanoid form trip us up a lot?
- Well, because this constant comparison of robots to people,
artificial intelligence to human intelligence,
first of all, it doesn't make sense
from a technical perspective
because the early AI researchers,
some of them were trying to recreate human intelligence.
Some people still are,
and there's a lot to be learned from that academically,
et cetera, but that's not where we've ended up.
AI doesn't think like people.
We wind up in this fallacy where we're comparing these two.
And when we talk about what intelligence even is,
we're often comparing to our own intelligence.
And then the second reason this bothers me
is because it doesn't make sense.
I just think it's boring to recreate intelligence
that we already have.
I see the scientific value
of understanding our own intelligence,
but from a practical,
what could we use these technologies for perspective,
it's much more interesting to create something new,
to create a skillset that we don't have
that we can partner with
in what we're trying to achieve.
- And it should be in some deep way similar to us,
but in most ways different
because you still want to have a connection,
which is why the similarity might be necessary.
- That's what people argue, yes.
And I think that's true.
So the two arguments for humanoid robots
are people need to be able to communicate
and relate to robots,
and we relate most to things that are like ourselves.
And we have a world that's built for humans.
So we have stairs and narrow passageways and door handles.
And so we need humanoid robots to be able to navigate that.
And so you're speaking to the first one,
which is absolutely true.
But what we know from social robotics
and a lot of human robot interaction research
is that all you need is something that's enough
like a person for it to give off cues
that someone relates to,
but that doesn't have to look human or even act human.
You can take a robot like R2-D2
and it just beeps and boops.
And people love R2-D2, right?
Even though it's just like a trash can on wheels.
And they like R2-D2 more than C3PO, who's a humanoid.
So there's lots of ways to make robots
even better than humans in some ways
and make us relate more to them.
- Yeah, it's kind of amazing the variety of cues
that can be used to anthropomorphize the thing,
like a glowing orb or something like that.
§02Transcript · 08:08–17:06
Just a voice, just subtle basic interaction.
I think people sometimes over-engineer these things.
Like simplicity can go a really long way.
- Totally.
I mean, ask any animator and they'll know that.
- Yeah, yeah, those are actually,
so the people behind Cosmo, the robot,
the right people to design those is animators,
like Disney type of people versus like roboticists.
- Robotists, quote unquote, are mostly clueless.
It seems like--
- They just have their own discipline
that they're very good at and they don't have--
- Yeah, but that, don't, you know.
I feel like robotics of the early 21st century
is not going to be the robotics of the later 21st century.
Like if you call yourself a roboticist,
it'd be something very different.
'Cause I think more and more you'd be like a,
maybe like a control engineer or something,
controls engineer, like you separate,
because ultimately all the unsolved,
all the big problems of robotics
will be in the social aspect,
in the interacting with humans aspect,
in the perception interpreting the world aspect,
in the brain part, not the basic control level part.
- You call it basic, it's actually really complex.
- It's very, very complicated.
- And that's why, but like, I think you're so right
and what a time to be alive, because for me, I just,
we've had robots for so long
and they've just been behind the scenes.
And now finally robots are getting deployed into the world.
- They're coming out of the closet.
- Yeah, and we're seeing all these mistakes
that companies are making because they focus so much
on the engineering and getting that right
and getting the robot to be even be able to function
in a space that it shares with a human.
- See what I feel like people don't understand
is to solve the perception and the control problem.
You shouldn't try to just solve
the perception control problem.
You should teach the robot how to say,
"Oh shit, I'm sorry, I fucked up."
- Yeah, or ask for help.
- Or ask for help or be able to communicate the uncertainty.
Yeah, exactly, all of those things,
because you can't solve the perception control.
We humans haven't solved it.
We're really damn good at it.
But the magic is in the self-deprecating humor
and the self-awareness about where our flaws are,
all that kind of stuff.
- Yeah, and there's a whole body of research
in human robot interaction showing like ways to do this.
But a lot of these companies haven't, they don't do HRI.
They like the, have you seen the grocery store robot
in the Stop and Shop?
- Yes.
- Yeah, the Marty, it looks like a giant penis.
It's like six feet tall, it roams the aisles.
- I will never see Marty the same way again.
Thank you for that.
- You're welcome.
But like, these poor people worked so hard
on getting a functional robot together.
And then people hate Marty because they didn't at all
consider how people would react to Marty in their space.
- Does everybody, I mean, you talk about this,
do people mostly hate Marty?
'Cause I like Marty.
- Yeah, but you like Flippy.
- Yeah, I do.
- And actually like--
- There's a parallel between the two?
- I believe there is.
So we were actually gonna do a study on this
right before the pandemic hit, and then we canceled it
because we didn't wanna go to the grocery store
and neither did anyone else.
But our theory, so this was with a student at MIT,
Daniela Di Paola.
She noticed that everyone on Facebook, in her circles,
was complaining about Marty.
They were like, "What is this creepy robot?
"It's watching me, it's always in the way."
And she did this quick and dirty sentiment analysis
on Twitter where she was looking at positive
and negative mentions of the robot.
And she found that the biggest spike of negative mentions
happened when Stop and Shop threw a birthday party
for the Marty robots, like with free cake and balloons.
Like, who complains about free cake?
Well, people who hate Marty, apparently.
And so we were like, "That's interesting."
And then we did this online poll.
We used Mechanical Turk, and we tried to get at
what people don't like about Marty.
And a lot of it wasn't, "Oh, Marty's taking jobs."
It was, "Marty is the surveillance robot,"
which it's not.
It looks for spills on the floor.
It doesn't actually look at any people.
It's watching, it's creepy, it's getting in the way.
Those were the things that people complained about.
And so our hypothesis became, "Is Marty a real-life Clippy?"
Because I know, Lex, you love Clippy,
but many people hated Clippy.
- Well, there's a complex thing there.
It could be like marriage.
A lot of people seem to like to complain about marriage,
but they secretly love it.
So it could be, the relationship you might have
with Marty is like, "Oh, there he goes again,
"doing his stupid surveillance thing."
But you grow to love the,
I mean, bitching about the thing
that kind of releases a kind of tension.
And there's, I mean, some people, a lot of people,
show love by sort of busting each other's chops,
like making fun of each other.
And then I think people would really love it
if Marty talked back.
And there's so many possible options for humor there.
One, you can lean in.
You can be like, "Yes, I'm an agent of the CIA,
"monitoring your every move,"
like mocking people that are concerned,
you know what I'm saying?
Yes, I'm watching you because you're so important
with your shopping patterns.
I'm collecting all this data.
Or just any kind of making fun of people, I don't know.
But I think you hit on what exactly it is
because when it comes to robots or artificial agents,
I think people hate them more
than they would some other machine or device or object.
And it might be that thing,
it might be combined with love or like whatever it is,
it's a more extreme response
because they view these things as social agents
and not objects.
And that was, so Clifford Nass
was a big human-computer interaction person.
And his theory about Clippy was that
because people viewed Clippy as a social agent,
when Clippy was annoying and would like bother them
and interrupt them and like not remember what they told him,
that's when people got upset
because it wasn't fulfilling their social expectations.
And so they complained about Clippy more
than they would have if it had been a different,
like not a virtual character.
- So is complaining to you a sign
that we're on the wrong path with a particular robot?
Or is it possible, like again, like marriage,
like family, that there still is a path
towards that direction
where we can find deep, meaningful relationships?
- I think we absolutely can find
deep, meaningful relationships with robots.
And well, maybe with Marty.
I mean, I just would,
I would have designed Marty a little differently.
- Like how?
Isn't there a charm to the clumsiness, the slowness?
- There is if you're not trying to get through
with a shopping cart and a screaming child.
You know, there's, I think,
I think you could make it charming.
I think there are lots of design tricks
that they could have used.
And one of the things they did,
I think without thinking about it at all,
is they slapped two big googly eyes on Marty.
- Oh yeah.
- And I wonder if that contributed maybe
to people feeling watched
because it's looking at them.
And so like, is there a way to design the robot
to do the function that it's doing
in a way that people are actually attracted to
rather than annoyed by?
And there are many ways to do that,
but companies aren't thinking about it.
Now they're realizing
that they should have thought about it.
- Yeah.
I wonder if there's a way to,
if it would help to make Marty seem like an entity
of its own versus the arm of a large corporation.
So there's some sense where this is just the camera
that's monitoring people versus this is an entity
that's a standalone entity.
It has its own task and it has its own personality.
The more personality you give it,
the more it feels like it's not sharing data
with anybody else.
§03Transcript · 17:07–26:12
Like when we see other human beings,
our basic assumption is whatever I say to this human being,
it's not like being immediately sent to the CIA.
- Yeah, what I say to you,
no one's gonna hear that, right?
- Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
- No, I'm kidding.
- But you forget it.
I mean, you do forget it.
I mean, I don't know if that even with microphones here,
you forget that that's happening,
but for some reason, I think probably with Marty,
I think when it's done really crudely and crappily,
you start to realize, oh, this is like PR people
trying to make a friendly version of a surveillance machine.
But I mean, that reminds me of the slight clumsiness
or significant clumsiness on the initial releases
of the avatars for the metaverse.
I don't know, what are your actually thoughts about that?
The way the avatars,
the way Mark Zuckerberg looks in that world,
in the metaverse, the virtual reality world
where you can have virtual meetings and stuff like that.
How do we get that right?
Do you have thoughts about that?
'Cause it's a kind of,
it feels like a similar problem to social robotics,
which is how you design a digital virtual world
that is compelling when you connect to others
there in the same way that physical connection is.
- Right, I haven't looked into,
I mean, I've seen people joking about it on Twitter
and posting whatever.
- Yeah, but I mean, have you seen it?
'Cause there's something you can't quite put into words
that doesn't feel genuine about the way it looks.
And so the question is, if you and I were to meet virtually,
what should the avatars look like
for us to have similar kind of connection?
Should it be really simplified?
Should it be a little bit more realistic?
Should it be cartoonish?
Should it be more,
better capturing of expressions
in interesting, complex ways
versus like cartoonish, oversimplified ways?
- But haven't video games figured this out?
I'm not a gamer, so I don't have any examples,
but I feel like there's this whole world in video games
where they've thought about all of this,
and depending on the game, they have different avatars,
and a lot of the games are about connecting with others.
The thing that I don't know is,
and again, I haven't looked into this at all.
I've been shockingly not very interested in the metaverse,
but they must've poured so much investment into this meta.
And why is it so bad?
Like, there's gotta be a reason.
There's gotta be some thinking behind it, right?
- Well, I talked to Carmack about this,
John Carmack, who's a part-time Oculus CTO.
I think there's several things to say.
One is, as you probably know,
that I mean, there's bureaucracy,
there's large corporations,
and they often, large corporations have a way
of killing the indie kind of artistic flame
that's required to create something really compelling.
Somehow they make everything boring,
'cause they run through this whole process
through the PR department,
through all that kind of stuff,
and it somehow becomes generic through that process.
- 'Cause they strip out anything interesting
because it could be controversial, is that, or?
- Yeah, right, exactly.
Like, what, I mean, we're living through this now,
like, with a lot of people with cancellations
and all those kinds of stuff,
people are nervous, and nervousness results in,
like usual, the assholes are ruining everything.
But, you know, the magic of human connection
is taking risks, of making a risky joke,
of, like, with people you like who are not assholes,
good people, like, some of the fun in the metaverse
or in video games is, you know, being edgier,
being interesting, revealing your personality
in interesting ways.
In the sexual tension or in,
they're definitely paranoid about that.
- Oh, yeah. - Because, like,
in metaverse, the possibility of sexual assault
and sexual harassment and all that kind of stuff,
it's obviously very high, but they're,
so you should be paranoid to some degree,
but not too much, because then you remove completely
the personality of the whole thing.
Then everybody's just like a vanilla bot that,
like, you have to have ability
to be a little bit political, to be a little bit edgy,
all that kind of stuff,
and large companies tend to suffocate that.
So, but in general, just forget all that,
just the ability to come up
with really cool, beautiful ideas.
If you look at, I think Grimes tweeted about this,
she's very critical about the metaverse,
is that,
you know, independent game designers
have solved this problem
of how to create something beautiful
and interesting and compelling.
They do a really good job.
So you have to let those kinds of minds,
the small groups of people, design things
and let them run with it, let them run wild
and do edgy stuff, yeah.
But otherwise you get this kind of,
you get a clippy type of situation, right?
Which is like a very generic looking thing.
But even clippy has some, like,
that's kind of wild that you would take a paperclip
and put eyes on it.
- And suddenly people are like, oh, you're annoying,
but you're definitely a social agent.
- And I just feel like that wouldn't even,
that clippy thing wouldn't even survive Microsoft
or Facebook of today, meta of today.
'Cause it would be like, well,
there'll be these meetings about why is it a paperclip?
Like, why don't we, it's not sufficiently friendly,
let's make it, you know.
And then all of a sudden the artist
that with whom it originated is killed
and it's all PR, marketing people
and all of that kind of stuff.
Now, they do important work to some degree,
but they kill the creativity.
- I think the killing of the creativity is in the whole,
like, okay, so what I know from social robotics is like,
obviously if you create agents that,
okay, so take for an example,
you'd create a robot that looks like a humanoid
and it's, you know, Sophia or whatever.
Now, suddenly you do have all of these issues
where are you reinforcing an unrealistic beauty standard?
Are you objectifying women?
Why is the robot?
Why is it white?
So you have, but the thing is,
I think that with creativity,
you can find a solution that's even better
where you're not even harming anyone
and you're creating a robot that looks like,
not humanoid, but like something
that people relate to even more.
And now you don't even have any of these bias issues
that you're creating.
And so how do we create that within companies?
Because I don't think it's really about,
like, 'cause I, you know, maybe we disagree on that.
I don't think that edginess or humor or interesting things
need to be things that harm or hurt people
or that people are against.
There are ways to find things that everyone is fine with.
Why aren't we doing that?
- The problem is there's departments
that look for harm in things.
- Yeah.
- And so they will find harm in things that have no harm.
- Okay.
- That's the big problem
because their whole job is to find harm in things.
So what you said is completely correct,
which is edginess should not hurt,
doesn't necessarily, doesn't need to be a thing
that hurts people, obviously.
Great humor, great personality doesn't have to,
like Clippy.
But yeah, I mean, but it's tricky to get right.
I'm not exactly sure.
I don't know.
I don't know why a large corporation
with a lot of funding can't get this right.
- I do think you're right
that there's a lot of aversion to risk.
And so if you get lawyers involved
or people whose job it is, like you say, to mitigate risk,
they're just gonna say no to most things
that could even be in some way.
Yeah.
Yeah, you get the problem in all organizations.
So I think that you're right, that that is a problem.
- I think what's the way to solve that
in large organizations is to have Steve Jobs
type of characters.
Unfortunately, you do need to have, I think,
from a designer perspective,
or maybe like a Johnny Ive,
§04Transcript · 26:14–35:13
that is almost like a dictator.
- Yeah, you want a benevolent dictator.
- Yeah, who rolls in and says,
cuts through the lawyers, the PR,
but has a benevolent aspect.
Like, yeah, there's a good heart and make sure,
like I think all great artists and designers
create stuff that doesn't hurt people.
Like if you have a good heart,
you're going to create something
that's going to actually make a lot of people feel good.
That's what like people like Johnny Ive,
what they love doing is creating a thing
that brings a lot of love to the world.
They imagine like millions of people using the thing
and it instills them with joy.
That's that, you could say that about social robotics,
you could say that about the metaverse.
It shouldn't be done by the PR people,
should be done by the designers.
- I agree, PR people ruin everything.
- Yeah, all the fun.
(laughs)
In the book, you have a picture,
I just have a lot of ridiculous questions.
You have a picture of two hospital delivery robots
with a caption that reads, by the way,
see your book, I appreciate that it keeps the humor in.
You didn't run it by the PR department.
- No, no one edited the book, we got rushed through.
(laughs)
- The caption reads, two hospital delivery robots
whose sexy nurse names Roxy and Lola
made me roll my eyes so hard they almost fell out.
What aspect of it made you roll your eyes?
Is it the naming?
- It was the naming.
The form factor is fine, it's like a little box on wheels.
The fact that they named them, also great.
That'll let people enjoy interacting with them.
We know that even just giving a robot a name,
people will, it facilitates technology adoption,
people will be like, oh, you know,
Betsy made a mistake, let's help her out
instead of the stupid robot doesn't work.
But why Lola and Roxy?
Like--
- Those are to you, too sexy?
- I mean, there's research showing that
a lot of robots are named according to gender biases
about the function that they're fulfilling.
So, you know, robots that are helpful and assistance
and are like nurses are usually female-gendered.
Robots that are powerful, all wise computers like Watson
usually have like a booming male coded voice and name.
So, like that's one of those things, right?
You're opening a can of worms for no reason, for no reason.
- You can avoid this whole can of worms.
- Yeah, just give it a different name.
Like why Roxy?
It's because people aren't even thinking.
So to some extent, I don't like PR departments,
but getting some feedback on your work
from a diverse set of participants,
listening and taking in things
that help you identify your own blind spots.
And then you can always make your good leadership choices
and good, like you can still ignore things
that you don't believe are an issue,
but having the openness to take in feedback
and making sure that you're getting the right feedback
from the right people, I think that's really important.
- So don't unnecessarily propagate the biases of society.
- Yeah, why?
- In the design.
But if you're not careful when you do the research of,
like you might, if you ran a poll with a lot of people
of all the possible names these robots have,
they might come up with Roxy and Lola
as names they would enjoy most.
That could come up as the highest.
- As in you do marketing research and then,
well, that's what they did with Alexa.
They did marketing research and nobody wanted the male voice.
Everyone wanted it to be female.
- Well, what do you think about that?
If I were to say, I think the role of a great designer,
again, to go back to Johnny Ive,
is to throw out the marketing research.
Like take it in, do it, learn from it.
But if everyone wants Alexa to be a female voice,
the role of the designer is to think deeply
about the future of social agents in the home and think.
Like what does that future look like?
And try to reverse engineer that future.
So in some sense, there's this weird tension.
Like you want to listen to a lot of people,
but at the same time, you're creating a thing
that defines the future of the world.
And the people that you're listening to
are part of the past.
So like that weird tension.
- Yeah, I think that's true.
And I think some companies like Apple
have historically done very well at understanding a market
and saying, you know what our role is?
It's not to listen to what the current market says.
It's to actually shape the market
and shape consumer preferences.
And companies have the power to do that.
They can be forward thinking
and they can actually shift
what the future of technology looks like.
And I agree with you that I would like to see more of that,
especially when it comes to existing biases that we know.
I think there's the low hanging fruit
of companies that don't even think about it at all
and aren't talking to the right people
and aren't getting the full information.
And then there's companies
that are just like doing the safe thing
and giving consumers what they want now.
But to be really forward looking and be really successful,
I think you have to make some judgment calls
about what the future is gonna be.
- But do you think it's still useful to gender
and to name the robots?
- Yes, I mean, gender is a minefield,
but people, it's really hard to get people
to not gender a robot in some way.
So if you don't give it a name
or you give it a ambiguous voice,
people will just choose something.
And maybe that's better than just entrenching something
that you've decided is best.
But I do think it can be helpful
on the anthropomorphism engagement level
to give it attributes that people identify with.
- Yeah, I think a lot of roboticists I know,
they don't gender the robot.
They even try to avoid naming the robot
or naming it something that can be used
as a name in conversation kind of thing.
And I think that actually that's irresponsible
because people are going to anthropomorphize
the thing anyway.
So you're just removing from yourself
the responsibility of how they're going
to anthropomorphize it.
- That's a good point.
- And so you want to be able to,
they're going to do it.
You have to start to think about how they're going to do it.
Even if the robot is a Boston Dynamics robot
that's not supposed to have any kind of social component,
they're obviously going to project
a social component to it.
Like that arm, I worked a lot with quadrupeds now
with robot dogs.
You know, that arm, people think is the head immediately.
It's supposed to be an arm,
but they start to think it's a head.
And you have to like acknowledge that.
You can't, I mean--
- They do now.
- They do now?
- Well, they've deployed the robots
and people are like, oh my God,
the cops are using a robot dog.
And so they have this PR nightmare.
And so they're like, oh yeah.
Okay, maybe we should hire some HR people.
- Well, Boston Dynamics is an interesting company,
or any of the others that are doing a similar thing
because their main source of money
is in the industrial application.
So like surveillance of factories and doing dangerous jobs.
So to them, it's almost good PR
for people to be scared of these things
'cause it's for some reason, as you talk about,
people are naturally for some reason scared.
We could talk about that, of robots.
And so it becomes more viral.
Like playing with that little fear.
And so it's almost like a good PR
because ultimately they're not trying
to put them in the home and have a good social connection.
They're trying to put them in factories.
And so they have fun with it.
If you watch Boston Dynamics videos,
they're aware of it.
- Oh yeah.
- They're, I mean, I was--
- The videos for sure that they put out.
- It's almost like an unspoken tongue in cheek thing.
They're aware of how people are going to feel
when you have a robot that does like a flip.
Now most of the people are just like excited
about the control problem of it.
Like how to make the whole thing happen.
§05Transcript · 35:15–44:12
But they're aware when people see.
- Well, I think they became aware.
I think that in the beginning,
they were really, really focused on just the engineering.
I mean, they're at the forefront of robotics,
like locomotion and stuff.
And then when they started doing the videos,
I think that was kind of a labor of love.
I know that the former CEO, Mark,
like he oversaw a lot of the videos
and made a lot of them himself.
And like, he's even really detail-oriented.
Like there can't be like some sort of incline
that would give the robot an advantage.
They're very, like he was very,
a lot of integrity about the authenticity of them.
But then when they started to go viral,
I think that's when they started to realize,
oh, there's something interesting here that,
I don't know how much they took it seriously
in the beginning, other than realizing
that they could play with it in the videos.
I know that they take it very seriously now.
- What I like about Boston Dynamics and similar companies,
it's still mostly run by engineers.
But, you know, I've had my criticisms.
There's a bit more PR leaking in.
But those videos are made by engineers
'cause that's what they find fun.
It's like testing the robustness of the system.
I mean, they're having a lot of fun there with the robots.
- Totally.
Have you been to visit?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's one of the most,
I mean, 'cause I have eight robot dogs now.
- Wait, you have eight robot dogs?
What?
Are they just walking around your place?
Like where do you keep them? - Yeah, I'm working on them.
That's actually one of my goals
is to have at any one time always a robot moving.
- Oh. - I'm far away from that.
- That's an ambitious goal.
- Well, I have like more Roombas that I know what to do with.
The Roomba that I program.
So the programmable Roombas.
- Nice.
- And I have a bunch of little, like I built,
I'm not finished with it yet,
but bought a robot from Rick and Morty.
I still have a bunch of robots everywhere.
But the thing is, what happens is
you're working on one robot at a time
and that becomes like a little project.
It's actually very difficult to have
just a passively functioning robot always moving.
- Yeah.
- And that's a dream for me
'cause I'd love to create that kind of a little world.
So the impressive thing about Boston Dynamics to me
was to see like hundreds of spots.
And like there was a,
the most impressive thing that still sticks with me
is there was a spot robot walking down the hall
seemingly with no supervision whatsoever.
And he was wearing, he or she, I don't know,
was wearing a cowboy hat.
It was just walking down the hall
and nobody paying attention.
And it's just like walking down this long hall.
And I'm like looking around, is anyone,
like what's happening here?
So presumably some kind of automation was doing the map.
I mean, the whole environment is probably really well mapped.
But it was just, it gave me a picture of a world
where a robot is doing his thing, wearing a cowboy hat,
just going down the hall,
like getting some coffee or whatever.
Like I don't know what it's doing, what's the mission.
But I don't know, for some reason it really stuck with me.
You don't often see robots that aren't part of a demo
or that aren't, you know, like with a semi-autonomous
or autonomous vehicle, like directly doing a task.
This was just chilling.
- Yeah. - Walking around.
I don't know.
- Well, yeah, you know, I mean, we're at MIT.
Like when I first got to MIT, I was like,
okay, where's all the robots?
And they were all like broken or like not demoing.
So yeah.
And what really excites me is that we're about to have that.
We're about to have so many moving about too.
Well, it's coming.
It's coming in our lifetime
that we will just have robots moving around.
We're already seeing the beginnings of it.
There's delivery robots in some cities, on the sidewalks.
And I just love seeing like the TikToks
of people reacting to that.
Because yeah, you see a robot walking down the hall
with a cowboy hat.
You're like, what the fuck?
What is this?
This is awesome and scary and kind of awesome.
And people either love or hate it.
That's one of the things that I think companies
are underestimating that people will either love a robot
or hate a robot and nothing in between.
So it's just, again, an exciting time to be alive.
- Yeah, I think kids almost universally,
at least in my experience, love them.
Love legged robots.
- If they're not loud.
My son hates the Roomba because ours is loud.
- Oh, that, yeah.
No, the legs, the legs make a difference.
'Cause I don't, your son,
do they understand Roomba to be a robot?
- Oh yeah, my kids, that's one of the first words
they learned.
They know how to say beep boop.
And yes, they think the Roomba's a robot.
- Do they project intelligence out of the thing?
- Well, we don't really use it around them anymore
for the reason that my son is scared of it.
- Yeah, that's really interesting.
- I think they would.
Even a Roomba, because it's moving around on its own,
I think kids and animals view it as an agent.
- So what do you think, if we just look at the state
of the art of robotics, what do you think robots
are actually good at today?
So if we look at today.
- You mean physical robots?
- Yeah, physical robots.
- Wow.
- Like what are you impressed by?
So I think a lot of people, I mean,
that's what your book is about,
is maybe not a perfectly calibrated understanding
of where we are in terms of robotics,
what's difficult in robotics, what's easy in robotics.
- Yeah, we're way behind where people think we are.
So what's impressive to me, so let's see.
Oh, one thing that came out recently
was Amazon has this new warehouse robot,
and it's the first autonomous warehouse robot
that is safe for people to be around.
And so it's kind of, most people I think envision
that our warehouses are already fully automated
and that there's just robots doing things.
It's actually still really difficult
to have robots and people in the same space
because it's dangerous for the most part.
Robots, because especially robots
that have to be strong enough to move something heavy,
for example, they can really hurt somebody.
And so until now, a lot of the warehouse robots
had to just move along like preexisting lines,
which really restricts what you can do.
And so having, I think that's one of the big challenges
and one of the big exciting things that's happening
is that we're starting to see more cobotics
in industrial spaces like that,
where people and robots can work side by side
and not get harmed.
- Yeah, that's what people don't realize,
sort of the physical manipulation task with humans.
It's not that the robots wanna hurt you.
I think that's what people are worried about,
like this malevolent robot gets mad of its own
and wants to destroy all humans.
No, it's actually very difficult to know where the human is
and to respond to the human and dynamically
and collaborate with them on a task,
especially if you're something like
an industrial robotic arm, which is extremely powerful.
Some of those arms are pretty impressive now
that you can grab it, you can move it.
So the collaboration between human and robot
in the factory setting is really fascinating.
Do you think they'll take our jobs?
- I don't think it's that simple.
I think that there's a ton of disruption that's happening
and will continue to happen.
I think speaking specifically of the Amazon warehouses,
that might be an area where it would be good for robots
to take some of the jobs that are,
where people are put in a position where it's unsafe
and they're treated horribly.
And probably it would be better if a robot did that.
And Amazon is clearly trying to automate that job away.
So I think there's gonna be a lot of disruption.
I do think that robots and humans
have very different skillsets.
So while a robot might take over a task,
it's not gonna take over most jobs.
I think just things will change a lot.
§06Transcript · 44:16–53:52
Like, I don't know, one of the examples
I have in the book is mining.
So there you have this job that is very unsafe
and that requires a bunch of workers
and puts them in unsafe conditions.
And now you have all these different robotic machines
that can help make the job safer.
And as a result, now people can sit in these
like air conditioned remote control stations
and like control these autonomous mining trucks.
And so that's a much better job,
but also they're employing less people now.
So it's just a lot of,
I think from a bird's eye perspective,
you're not gonna see job loss.
You're gonna see more jobs created because that's,
the future is not robots just becoming like people
and taking their jobs.
The future is really a combination of our skills
and then the supplemental skillset that robots have
to increase productivity,
to help people have better, safer jobs,
to give people work that they actually enjoy doing
and are good at.
But it's really easy to say that
from a bird's eye perspective
and ignore kind of the rubble on the ground
as we go through these transitions,
because of course specific jobs are going to get lost.
- If you look at the history of the 20th century,
it seems like automation constantly increases productivity
and improves the average quality of life.
So it's been always good.
So like thinking about this time being different
is that we would need to go against the lessons of history.
- It's true.
- And the other thing is I think people think
that the automation of the physical tasks is easy.
I was just in Ukraine and the interesting thing is,
I mean, there's a lot of difficult and dark lessons
just about a war zone.
But one of the things that happens in war
is there's a lot of mines that are placed.
This one of the big problems for years
after a war is even over
is the entire landscape is covered in mines.
And so there's a demining effort.
And you would think robots would be good
at this kind of thing.
Or like your intuition would be like,
well, say you have unlimited money
and you wanna do a good job of it, unlimited money.
You would get a lot of really nice robots.
But no, humans are still far superior.
- Or animals. - At this kind of tech.
Or animals.
But humans with animals together.
- Yeah. - You can't just have--
- That's true. - A dog with a hat.
(both laughing)
- That's fair.
- But yes, but figuring out also how to disable the mine.
Obviously the easy thing,
the thing a robot can help with
is to find the mine and blow it up.
But that's gonna destroy the landscape.
That really does a lot of damage to the land.
You wanna disable the mine.
And to do that because of all the different,
all the different edge cases of the problem.
It requires a huge amount of human-like experience,
it seems like.
So it's mostly done by humans.
They have no use for robots.
They don't want robots.
- Yeah, I think we overestimate what we can automate.
- Especially in the physical realm.
- Yeah. - It's weird.
I mean, it continues that the story of humans,
we think we're shitty at everything in the physical world,
including driving.
We think everybody makes fun of themselves
and others for being shitty drivers,
but we're actually kind of incredible.
- No, we're incredible.
And that's why Tesla still says
that if you're in the driver's seat,
like you are ultimately responsible.
Because the ideal for, I mean,
I mean, you know more about this than I do,
but like robot cars are great at predictable things
and can react faster and more precisely than a person
and can do a lot of the driving.
And then the reason that we still don't have
autonomous vehicles on all the roads yet
is because of this long tail of just unexpected occurrences
where a human immediately understands
that's a sunset and not a traffic light.
That's a horse and carriage ahead of me on the highway,
but the car has never encountered that before.
So like in theory, combining those skill sets
is what's gonna really be powerful.
The only problem is figuring out
the human-robot interaction and the handoffs.
So like in cars, that's a huge problem right now,
figuring out the handoffs.
But in other areas, it might be easier.
And that's really the future is human-robot interaction.
- What's really hard to improve,
it's terrible that people die in car accidents,
but I mean, it's like 70, 80, 100 million miles,
one death per 80 million miles.
That's like really hard to beat for a robot.
That's like incredible.
Like think about it, like the, how many people?
Think just the number of people throughout the world
that are driving every single day,
all of this, you know, sleep deprived, drunk,
distracted, all of that, and still very few die
relative to what I would imagine.
If I were to guess, back in the horse,
see, when I was like in the beginning of the 20th century,
riding my horse, I would talk so much shit about these cars.
I'd be like, this is extremely dangerous,
these machines traveling at 30 miles an hour
or whatever the hell they're going at.
This is irresponsible, it's unnatural,
and it's going to be destructive to all of human society.
But then it's extremely surprising
how humans adapt to the thing,
and they know how to not kill each other.
I mean, that ability to adapt is incredible,
and to mimic that in the machine is really tricky.
Now, that said, what Tesla is doing,
I mean, I wouldn't have guessed
how far machine learning can go on vision alone.
It's really, really incredible,
and people that are, at least from my perspective,
people that are kind of critical of Elon and those efforts,
I think don't give enough credit
at how much incredible progress
has been made in that direction.
I think most of the robotics community
wouldn't have guessed how much you can do on vision alone.
It's kind of incredible, because we would be,
I think it's that approach, which is relatively unique,
has challenged the other competitors to step up their game.
So if you're using LiDAR, if you're using mapping,
that challenges them to do better, to scale faster,
and to use machine learning and computer vision as well
to integrate both LiDAR and vision.
So it's kind of incredible.
And I'm not, I don't know if I even have a good intuition
of how hard driving is anymore.
Maybe it is possible to solve.
So all the sunset, all the edge cases you mentioned.
Yeah, the question is when.
- Yeah, I think it's not happening
as quickly as people thought it would,
because it is more complicated.
- But I wouldn't have, I agree with you.
My current intuition is that we're gonna get there.
- I think we're gonna get there too.
- But I didn't before, I wasn't sure we're gonna get there
without, like with current technology.
So I was kind of, this is like with vision alone,
my intuition was you're gonna have to solve
like common sense reasoning.
You're gonna have to solve some of the big problems
in artificial intelligence, not just perception.
- Yeah.
- Like you have to have a deep understanding of the world,
is what was my sense.
But now I'm starting to like, well, this,
I mean, I'm continually surprised how well the thing works.
Obviously Elon and others, others have stopped,
but Elon continues saying we're gonna solve it in a year.
- Well, yeah, that's the thing, bold predictions.
- Yeah, well, everyone else used to be doing that,
but they kind of like, all right.
- Yeah, maybe we'll.
- Maybe let's not promise we're gonna solve
level four driving by 2020.
Let's chill on that.
- Well, people are still trying silently.
I mean, the UK just committed 100 million pounds
to research and development to speed up the process
of getting autonomous vehicles on the road.
Like everyone can see that it is solvable
and it's going to happen and it's gonna change everything.
And they're still investing in it.
And like Waymo, low key has driverless cars in Arizona.
Like you can get, you know, there's like robots.
It's weird, have you ever been in one?
- No.
- It's so weird.
It's so awesome.
'Cause the most awesome experience is the wheel turning
and you're sitting in the back.
It's like, I don't know, it's,
§07Transcript · 53:57–1:02:15
it feels like you're a passenger with that friend
who's a little crazy of a driver.
It feels like, shit, I don't know.
Are you all right to drive, bro?
You know, that kind of feeling.
But then you kind of, that experience, that nervousness
and the excitement of trusting another being,
and in this case, it's a machine, is really interesting.
Just even introspecting your own feelings about the thing.
- Yeah.
- They're not doing anything in terms of making you feel
better about, like at least Waymo.
I think they went with the approach of like,
let's not try to put eyes on the thing.
It's a wheel, we know what that looks like.
It's just a car.
It's a car, get in the back.
Let's not like discuss this at all.
Let's not discuss the fact that this is a robot driving you
and you're in the back.
And if the robot wants to start driving 80 miles an hour
and run off of a bridge, you have no recourse.
Let's not discuss this.
You're just getting in the back.
There's no discussion about like how shit can go wrong.
There's no eyes, there's nothing.
There's like a map showing what the car can see.
Like, you know, what happens if it's like
a HAL 9000 situation?
Like, I'm sorry, I can't.
You have a button you can like call customer service.
- Oh God, then you get put on hold for two hours.
- Probably.
But you know, currently what they're doing,
which I think is understandable,
but you know, the car just can pull over and stop
and wait for help to arrive.
And then a driver will come
and then they'll actually drive the car for you.
But that's like, you know, what if you're late for a meeting
or all that kind of stuff.
- Or like the more dystopian, isn't it the fifth element
where, is Will Smith in that movie?
Who's in that movie?
- No, Bruce Willis?
- Bruce Willis.
- Oh yeah, and he gets into like a robotic cab
or car or something.
And then because he's violated a traffic rule,
it locks him in and he has to wait for the cops to come
and he can't get out.
So like, we're gonna see stuff like that maybe.
- Well, that's, I believe that the companies
that have robots, the only ones that will succeed
are the ones that don't do that.
Meaning they respect privacy.
- You think so?
- Yeah, because people,
'cause they're gonna have to earn people's trust.
- Yeah, but like Amazon works with law enforcement
and gives them the data from the ring cameras.
So why should it, yeah.
Oh yeah.
Do you have a ring camera?
- No.
- Okay.
- No, no, but basically any security camera, right?
I have a Google's, whatever they have.
- We have one that's not the data.
We store the data on a local server
because we don't want it to go to law enforcement
'cause all the companies are doing it.
They're doing it.
I bet Apple wouldn't.
- Yeah.
- Apple's the only company I trust
and I don't know how much longer.
- I don't know.
Maybe that's true for cameras, but with robots,
people are just not gonna let a robot inside their home
where like one time where somebody gets arrested
because of something a robot sees,
that's gonna destroy a company.
- You don't think people are gonna be like,
well, that wouldn't happen to me,
that happened to a bad person.
- I think they would.
- Yeah.
- 'Cause in the modern world, people are get,
have you seen Twitter?
They get extremely paranoid about any kind of surveillance.
- But the thing that I've had to learn
is that Twitter is not the modern world.
Like when I go inland to visit my relatives,
like they don't, that's a different discourse
that's happening.
I think like the whole tech criticism world,
it's loud in our ears 'cause we're in those circles.
- Do you think you can be a company
that does social robotics and not win over Twitter?
- That's a good question.
- I feel like the early adopters are all on Twitter
and it feels like you have to win them over.
Feels like nowadays you'd have to win over TikTok, honestly.
- TikTok, is that a website?
I need to check it out.
And that's an interesting one
because China is behind that one.
- Exactly.
- So if it's compelling enough,
maybe people would be able to give up privacy
and that kind of stuff.
That's really scary.
- I mean, I'm worried about it.
I'm worried about it.
There've been some developments recently
that are like super exciting,
like the large language learning models.
Like, wow, I did not anticipate those improving so quickly
and those are gonna change everything.
And one of the things that I'm trying to be cynical about
is that I think they're gonna have a big impact
on privacy and data security and like manipulating consumers
and manipulating people because suddenly
you'll have these agents that people will talk to
and they won't care or won't know,
at least on a conscious level,
that it's recording the conversations.
So kind of like we were talking about before.
And at the same time, the technology is so freaking exciting
that it's gonna get adopted.
- Well, it's not even just the collection of data
but the ability to manipulate at scale.
So what do you think about the AI,
the engineer from Google
that thought Lambda is sentient?
He had actually a really good post from somebody else.
I forgot her name.
It's brilliant.
I can't believe I didn't know about her.
Thanks to you. - Janelle Shane?
- Yeah, from Weird AI.
- Oh yeah, I love her book.
- She's great.
I left a note for myself to reach out to her.
She's amazing.
She's hilarious and brilliant
and just a great summarizer of the state of AI.
But she has, I think that was from her,
where it was looking at AI explaining that it's a squirrel.
- Oh yeah, because the transcripts
that the engineer released,
Lambda kind of talks about the experience
of human-like feelings and I think even consciousness.
And so she was like, oh cool, that's impressive.
I wonder if an AI can also describe the experience
of being a squirrel.
And so she interviewed, I think she did GPT-3
about the experience of being a squirrel.
And then she did a bunch of other ones too,
like what's it like being a flock of crows?
What's it like being an algorithm that powers a Roomba?
And you can have a conversation about any of those things
and they're very convincing. - It's pretty convincing, yeah.
Even GPT-3, which is not state of the art.
It's convincing of being a squirrel.
It's like what it's like.
I mean, you should check it out,
'cause it really is.
It's like, yeah, that probably is what a squirrel would--
- I would say. (laughs)
- Are you excited?
Like what's it like being a squirrel?
It's fun.
- Oh yeah, I get to eat nuts and run around all day.
- Like how do you think people feel
like when you tell them that you're a squirrel?
You know, or like, I forget what it was.
Like a lot of people might be scared
to find out that you're a squirrel or something like this.
And then the system answers pretty well.
Like yeah, I hope they'll,
like what do you think when they find out you're a squirrel?
(laughs)
I hope they'll see how fun it is to be a squirrel
or something like that.
- What do you say to people who don't believe you're a squirrel
I say, "Come see for yourself."
I am a squirrel.
- That's great.
- Well, I think it's really great
because the two things to note about it are,
first of all, just because the machine
is describing an experience
doesn't mean it actually has that experience.
But then secondly, these things are getting so advanced
and so convincing at describing these things
and talking to people.
That's, I mean, just the implications for health,
education, communication, entertainment, gaming.
§08Transcript · 1:02:19–1:10:35
Like I just feel like all of the applications,
it's mind boggling what we're gonna be able to do with this.
And that my kids are not gonna remember a time
before they could have conversations with artificial agents.
- Do you think they would?
Because to me, this is,
the focus in the ad community has been,
well, this engineer surely is hallucinating.
The thing is not sentient.
But to me, first of all,
it doesn't matter if he is or not, this is coming.
Where a large number of people
would believe a system is sentient,
including engineers within companies.
So in that sense, you start to think about a world
where your kids aren't just used
to having a conversation with a bot,
but used to believing,
kind of having an implied belief that the thing is sentient.
- Yeah, I think that's true.
And I think that one of the things that bothered me
about all of the coverage in the tech press
about this incident,
like obviously I don't believe the system is sentient.
Like I think that it can convincingly describe that it is.
I don't think it's doing what he thought it was doing
and actually experiencing feelings.
But a lot of the tech press was about how he was wrong
and depicting him as kind of naive.
And it's not naive.
Like there's so much research in my field
showing that people do this, even experts.
They might be very clinical
when they're doing human robot interaction experiments
with a robot that they've built.
And then you bring in a different robot
and they're like, "Oh, look at it.
It's having fun, it's doing this."
Like that happens in our lab all the time.
We are all this guy and it's gonna be huge.
So I think that the goal is not to discourage
this kind of belief or like design systems
that people won't think are sentient.
I don't think that's possible.
I think you're right, this is coming.
It's something that we have to acknowledge
and even embrace and be very aware of.
- So one of the really interesting perspectives
that your book takes on a system like this
is to see them, not to compare a system like this to humans,
but to compare it to animals, of how we see animals.
Can you kind of try to, again, sneak up,
try to explain why this analogy is better
than the human analogy, the analogy of robots as animals?
- Yeah, and it gets trickier with the language stuff,
but we'll get into that too.
I think that animals are a really great thought experiment
when we're thinking about AI and robotics,
because again, this comparing them to humans
that leads us down the wrong path,
both because it's not accurate,
but also I think for the future, we don't want that.
We want something that's a supplement.
But I think animals, because we've used them
throughout history for so many different things,
we domesticated them, not because they do what we do,
but because what they do is different and that's useful.
And it's just like,
whether we're talking about companionship,
whether we're talking about work integration,
whether we're talking about responsibility for harm,
there's just so many things we can draw on in that history
from these entities that can sense, think,
make autonomous decisions and learn
that are applicable to how we should be thinking
about robots and AI.
And the point of the book is not
that they're the same thing,
that animals and robots are the same.
Obviously, there are tons of differences there.
Like you can't have a conversation with a squirrel, right?
But the point is- - I do it all the time.
- Oh, really?
- By the way, squirrels are the cutest.
I project so much on squirrels.
I wonder what their inner life is.
I suspect they're much bigger assholes than we imagine.
- Really?
- Like if it was a giant squirrel,
it would fuck you over so fast if it had the chance.
It would take everything you own.
It would eat all your stuff,
but 'cause it's small and the furry tail,
the furry tail is a weapon
against human consciousness and cognition.
It wins us over.
That's what cats do too.
Cats out-competed squirrels.
- And dogs.
- Yeah.
No, dogs have love.
Cats have no soul.
They, no, I'm just kidding.
People get so angry when I talk shit about cats.
I love cats.
Anyway, so yeah, you're describing
all the different kinds of animals that get domesticated.
And it's a really interesting idea
that it's not just sort of pets.
There's all kinds of domestication going on.
They all have all kinds of uses.
- Yes.
- Like the ox that you propose might be,
at least historically,
one of the most useful domesticated animals.
- It was a game changer because it revolutionized
what people could do economically, et cetera.
So, I mean, just like robots,
they're gonna change things economically.
They're gonna change landscapes.
Like cities might even get rebuilt
around autonomous vehicles or drones or delivery robots.
I think just the same ways that animals
have really shifted society.
And society has adapted also
to like socially accepting animals as pets.
I think we're gonna see very similar things with robots.
So I think it's a useful analogy.
It's not a perfect one,
but I think it helps us get away from this idea
that robots can, should, or will replace people.
- If you remember,
what are some interesting uses of animals?
Ferrets, for example.
- Oh yeah, the ferrets.
They still do this.
They use ferrets to go into narrow spaces
that people can't go into, like a pipe.
Or like they'll use them to run electrical wire.
I think they did that for Princess Di's wedding.
There's so many weird ways that--
- Work is work.
- We've used animals and still use animals
for things that robots can't do.
Like the dolphins that they used in the military.
I think Russia still has dolphins
and the US still has dolphins in their navies.
Mine detection, looking for lost underwater equipment,
some rumors about using them for weaponry.
Which I think Russia's like, "Sure, believe that."
And America's like, "No, no, we don't do that."
Who knows?
But they started doing that in like the 60s, 70s.
They started training these dolphins
because they were like, "Oh, dolphins have
this amazing echolocation system
that we can't replicate with machines
and they're trainable.
So we're gonna use them for all the stuff
that we can't do with machines or by ourselves."
And they've tried to phase out the dolphins.
I know the US has invested a lot of money
in trying to make robots do the mine detection.
But like you were saying,
there are some things that the robots are good at
and there's some things that biological creatures
are better at, so they still have the dolphins.
- So there's also pigeons, of course.
- Oh yeah, pigeons.
Oh my gosh, there's so many examples.
The pigeons were the original hobby photography drone.
They also carried mail for thousands of years,
letting people communicate with each other in new ways.
So the thing that I like about the animal analogies,
they have all these physical abilities
but also sensing abilities
that we don't have and that's just so useful.
And that's robots, right?
Robots have physical abilities.
They can help us lift things
or do things that we're not physically capable of.
They can also sense things.
It's just, I just feel like,
I still feel like it's a really good analogy.
- Yeah, it's really strong.
- And it works because people are familiar with it.
- What about companionship?
And when we start to think about cats and dogs,
they're pets that seem to serve no purpose whatsoever
except the social connection.
- Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a newer thing.
At least in the United States,
like dogs used to have,
like they used to have a purpose.
They used to be guard dogs or they had some sort of function.
And then at some point they became just part of the family.
And it's so interesting how there's some animals
that we've treated as workers,
some that we've treated as objects,
some that we eat,
§09Transcript · 1:10:36–1:19:17
and some that are parts of our families.
And that's different across cultures.
And I'm convinced that we're gonna see
the same thing with robots,
where people are gonna develop
strong emotional connections to certain robots
that they relate to, either culturally
or personally, emotionally.
And then there's gonna be other robots
that we don't treat the same way.
- I wonder, does that have to do more
with the culture and the people or the robot design?
Is there an interplay between the two?
Like why did dogs and cats out-compete
ox and I don't know, what else?
Like farm animals to really get inside the home
and get inside our hearts?
- Yeah, I mean, people point to the fact
that dogs are very genetically flexible
and they can evolve much more quickly than other animals.
And so they, evolutionary biologists think
that dogs evolved to be more appealing to us.
And then once we learned how to breed them,
we started breeding them to be more appealing to us too,
which is not something that we necessarily
would be able to do with cows,
although we've bred them to make more milk for us.
So, but part of it is also culture.
I mean, there are cultures where people eat dogs still today
and then there's other cultures where we're like,
oh no, that's terrible, we would never do that.
And so I think there's a lot of different elements
that play in.
- I wonder if there's good,
'cause I understand dogs 'cause they use their eyes,
they're able to communicate affection,
all those kinds of things.
It's really interesting what dogs do.
There's a whole conferences on dog consciousness
and cognition and all that kind of stuff.
Now cats is a mystery to me
because they seem to not give a shit about the human.
- But they're warm and fluffy.
- But they're also passive aggressive.
So they're at the same time,
they're dismissive of you in some sense.
- I think some people like that about people.
- Yeah, they want to push and pull of a relationship.
- They don't want loyalty or unconditional love.
That means they haven't earned it.
- Yeah.
And maybe that says a lot more about the people
than it does about the animals.
- Oh yeah, we all need therapy.
- Yeah.
So I'm judging harshly the people that have cats
or the people that have dogs.
Maybe the people that have dogs
are desperate for attention and unconditional love
and they're unable to sort of struggle
to earn meaningful connections.
I don't know.
- Maybe people are talking about you
and your robot pets in the same way.
- Yeah, that's...
It is kind of sad.
There's just robots everywhere.
But I mean, I'm joking about it being sad
'cause I think it's kind of beautiful.
I think robots are beautiful in the same way that pets are,
even children, in that they capture some kind of magic
of social robots.
They have the capacity to have the same kind of magic
of connection.
I don't know what that is.
Like when they're brought to life and they move around,
the way they make me feel, I'm pretty convinced,
is as you know, they will make billions of people feel.
Like I don't think I'm like some weird robotics guy.
I'm not.
- I mean, you are, but not in this way.
- Not in this way.
I mean, I just, I can put on my like normal human hat
and just see this, oh, this is like,
there's a lot of possibility there of something cool,
just like with dogs.
Like what is it?
Why are we so into dogs or cats?
Like it's like, it's way different than us.
- It is.
- It's like drooling all over the place
with its tongue out.
It's like a weird creature that used to be a wolf.
Why are we into this thing?
- Well, dogs can either express or mimic a lot of emotions
that we recognize.
And I think that's a big thing.
Like a lot of the magic of animals and robots
is our own self projection.
And the easier it is for us to see ourselves in something
and project human emotions or qualities or traits onto it,
the more we'll relate to it.
And then you also have the movement, of course.
I think that's also really,
that's why I'm so interested in physical robots
because that's, I think the visceral magic of them.
I think we're, I mean, there's research showing
that we're probably biologically hardwired
to respond to autonomous movement in our physical space
because we've had to watch out for predators
or whatever the reason is.
And so animals and robots are very appealing to us
as these autonomously moving things
that we view as agents instead of objects.
- I mean, I love the moment,
which is I've been particularly working on,
which is when a robot like the cowboy hat
is doing its own thing and then it recognizes you.
I mean, the way a dog does.
And it looks like this.
And the moment of recognition,
like you're walking,
say you're walking in an airport on the street
and there's just hundreds of strangers,
but then you see somebody you know,
and that like, well, you wake up to like that excitement
of seeing somebody you know and saying hello
and all that kind of stuff.
That's a magical moment.
Like I think, especially with the dog,
it makes you feel noticed and heard and loved.
Like that somebody looks at you and recognizes you
that it matters that you exist.
- Yeah, you feel seen.
- Yeah, and that's a cool feeling.
And I honestly think robots can give that feeling too.
- Oh yeah, totally.
- Currently Alexa, I mean,
one of the downsides of these systems is they don't,
they're servants.
Part of the, you know,
they're trying to maintain privacy, I suppose,
but I don't feel seen with Alexa, right?
- I think that's gonna change.
I think you're right.
And I think that that's the game changing nature
of things like these large language learning models.
And the fact that these companies are investing
in embodied versions that move around of Alexa, like Astro.
- Can I just say, yeah, I haven't, is that out?
- I mean, it's out.
You can't just like buy one commercially yet,
but you can apply for one.
- Yeah.
My gut says that these companies don't have the guts
to do the personalization.
This goes to the, because it's edgy, it's dangerous.
It's gonna make a lot of people very angry.
Like in a way that, you know, just imagine, okay.
All right.
If you do the full landscape of human civilization,
just visualize the number of people
that are going through breakups right now.
Just the amount of really passionate,
just even if we just look at teenagers,
the amount of deep heartbreak that's happening.
And like, if you're going to have Alexa
have more of a personal connection with the human,
you're gonna have humans that like have existential crises.
There's a lot of people that suffer
from loneliness and depression.
And like, you're now taking on the full responsibility
of being a companion to the rollercoaster
of the human condition.
As a company, like imagine PR and marketing people,
they're gonna freak out.
They don't have the guts.
It's gonna have to come from somebody
from a new Apple, from those kinds of folks,
like a small startup.
- And it might.
- Yeah.
- Like they're coming.
There's already virtual therapists.
There's that Replica app.
I haven't tried it, but Replica's like a virtual companion.
Like it's coming.
And if big companies don't do it, someone else will.
- Yeah, I think the next, the future,
the next trillion dollar company
will be those personalizations.
'Cause if you think,
if you think about all the AI we have around us,
all the smartphones and so on,
there's very minimal personalization.
- You don't think that's just because they weren't able?
- No.
- Really?
- I don't think they have the guts.
- I mean, it might be true, but I have to wonder,
§10Transcript · 1:19:19–1:28:30
I mean, Google is clearly gonna do something
with the language, I mean.
- They don't have the guts.
(Donna laughs)
- Are you challenging them?
- Partially, but not really.
'Cause I know they're not gonna do it.
- I mean.
- They don't have to, it's bad for business in the short term.
- I'm gonna be honest, maybe it's not such a bad thing
if they don't just roll this out quickly,
because I do think there are huge issues.
- Yeah.
- And there's, and not just issues
with the responsibility of unforeseen effects on people,
but what's the business model?
And if you are using the business model
that you've used in other domains,
then you're gonna have to collect data from people,
which you will anyway to personalize the thing,
and you're gonna be somehow monetizing the data,
or you're gonna be doing some like ad model.
It just, it seems like now we're suddenly getting
into the realm of like severe consumer protection issues,
and I'm really worried about that.
I see massive potential for this technology to be used
in a way that's not for the public good,
and not, I mean, that's in an individual user's interest
maybe, but not in society's interest.
- Yeah, see, I think that kind of personalization
should be like redefine how we treat data.
I think you should own all the data your phone knows
about you, like, and be able to delete it
with a single click, and walk away.
And that data cannot be monetized, or used,
or shared anywhere without your permission.
I think that's the only way people will trust you
to give, for you to use that data.
- But then how are companies gonna,
I mean, a lot of these applications rely
on massive troves of data to train the AI system.
- Right, so you have to opt in constantly,
and opt in not in some legal, I agree,
but obvious, like show, like in the way I opt in
and tell you a secret.
Like, we understand, like, that, like,
I have to choose, like, how well do I know you?
And then I say, like, don't tell this to anyone.
(laughs)
And then I have to judge how leaky that,
like, how good you are at keeping secrets.
In that same way, like, it's very transparent
in which data you're allowed to use for which purposes.
- That's what people are saying is the solution,
and I think that works to some extent,
having transparency, having people consent.
I think it breaks down at the point at which,
we've seen this happen on social media, too,
like, people are willingly giving up their data
because they're getting a functionality from that,
and then the harm that that causes is on a,
like, maybe to someone else, and not to them personally.
So--
- I don't think people are giving their data.
They're not being asked.
Like, it's not consensual. - But if you were asked,
if you were like, tell me a secret about yourself
and I'll give you $100, I'd tell you a secret.
- No, not $100.
First of all, you wouldn't.
You wouldn't trust, like, why are you giving me $100?
- It's a bad example.
- But, like, I need, I would ask for your specific,
like, fashion interest in order to give recommendations
to you for shopping, and I'd be very clear for that,
and you could disable that, you can delete that.
But then you can be, have a deep, meaningful,
rich connection with the system
about what you think you look fat in,
what you look great in, what, like,
the full history of all the things you've worn,
whether you regret the Justin Bieber
or enjoy the Justin Bieber shirt,
all of that information that's mostly private to even you,
not even your loved ones, that, a system should have that,
'cause then a system, if you trust it,
to keep control of that data that you own,
you could walk away with,
that system could tell you a damn good thing to wear.
- It could, and the harm that I'm concerned about
is not that the system is gonna then suggest a dress for me
that is based on my preferences.
So I went to this conference once
where I was talking to the people who do the analytics
in, like, the big ad companies,
and, like, literally a woman there was like,
I can ask you three totally unrelated questions
and tell you what menstrual product you use.
And so what they do is they aggregate the data
and they map out different personalities
and different people and demographics,
and then they have a lot of power and control
to market to people.
So, like, I might not be sharing my data
with any of the systems because I'm like,
I'm on Twitter, I know that this is bad.
Other people might be sharing data
that can be used against me.
Like, I think it's way more complex than just
I share a piece of personal information
and it gets used against me.
I think that at a more systemic level,
and then it's always, you know,
vulnerable populations that are targeted by this,
low-income people being targeted for scammy loans,
or, I don't know, like, I could get targeted,
like, someone, not me,
because someone who doesn't have kids yet
and is my age could get targeted for, like,
freezing their eggs.
And there's all these ways that you can manipulate people
where it's not really clear that that came from
that person's data,
it came from all of us, all of us opting into this.
- But there's a bunch of sneaky decisions along the way
that could be avoided if there's transparency.
So one of the ways that goes wrong
if you share that data with too many ad networks,
don't run your own ad network.
Don't share with anybody.
- Okay, and that's something that you could regulate.
- That belongs to just you,
and all of the ways you allow the company to use it,
the default is in no way at all.
And you are consciously, constantly
saying exactly how to use it.
And also, it has to do with the recommender system itself
from the company, which is freezing your eggs.
If that doesn't make you happy,
if that idea doesn't make you happy,
then the system shouldn't recommend it.
It should be very good at learning.
So not the kind of things that the category of people
it thinks you belong to would do,
but more you specifically,
what makes you happy, what is helping you grow.
- But you're assuming that people's preferences
and what makes them happy is static.
Whereas when we were talking before
about how a company like Apple
can tell people what they want,
and they will start to want it,
that's the thing that I'm more concerned about.
- Yeah, that is a huge problem.
It's not just listening to people,
but manipulating them into wanting something.
- And that's like, we have a long history
of using technology for that purpose.
Like the persuasive design in casinos
to get people to gamble more.
It's just, I'm...
The other thing that I'm worried about
is as we have more social technology,
suddenly you have this on a new level.
If you look at the influencer marketing
that happens online now.
- What's influencer marketing?
- So like on Instagram, there will be some person
who has a bunch of followers.
And then a brand will hire them to promote some product.
And it's above board.
They disclose, this is an ad that I'm promoting,
but they have so many young followers
who deeply admire and trust them.
I mean, this must work for you too.
Don't you have ads on the podcast?
People trust you.
- Magic spoon cereal, low carb, yes.
- If you say that, I guarantee you
some people will buy that just because
even though they know that you're being paid,
they trust you.
- Yeah, it's different with podcasts
'cause well, my particular situation,
but it's true for a lot of podcasts,
especially big ones is, you know,
I have 10 times more sponsors that wanna be sponsors
than I have...
- So you get to select the ones
that you actually wanna support.
- And so like you end up using it
and then you're able to actually...
Like there's no incentive to like shill for anybody.
- Sure, and that's why it's fine
when it's still human influencers.
Now, if you're a bot, you're not gonna discriminate.
You're not gonna be like,
oh, well, I think this product is good for people.
- You think there'll be like bots essentially
with millions of followers.
§11Transcript · 1:28:32–1:37:32
- There already are.
There are virtual influencers in South Korea
who shill products.
And like that's just the tip of the iceberg
because that's still very primitive.
Now with the new image generation
and the language learning models.
And like, so we're starting to do some research
around kids and like young adults
because a lot of the research
on like what's okay to advertise to kids
and what is too manipulative
has to do with television ads.
Back in the day where like a kid who's 12 understands,
oh, that's an advertisement.
I can distinguish that from entertainment.
I know it's trying to sell me something.
Now it's getting really, really murky with influencers.
And then if you have like a bot
that a kid has developed a relationship with,
is it okay to market products through that or not?
Like you're getting into
all these consumer protection issues
because you're developing a trusted relationship
with a social entity, but it's...
And so now it's like personalized, it's scalable,
it's automated and it can...
So some of the research showing
that kids are already very confused
about like the incentives of the company
versus what the robot is doing.
- Meaning they're not deeply understanding
the incentives of the system.
- Well, yeah, so like kids who are old enough to understand
this is a television advertisement
is trying to advertise to me.
I might still decide I want this product,
but they understand what's going on.
So there's some transparency there.
That age child, so Daniela Di Paola, Anastasia Ostrovsky,
and I advised on this project, they did this.
They asked kids who had interacted with social robots,
whether they would like a policy that allows robots
to market to people through casual conversation,
or whether they would prefer
that it has to be transparent,
that it's like an ad coming from a company.
And the majority said they preferred the casual conversation.
And when asked why, there was a lot of confusion about,
they were like, well, the robot knows me better
than the company does.
So the robot's only gonna market things that I like.
And so they don't really, they're not connecting the fact
that the robot is an agent of the company.
They're viewing it as something separate.
And I think that even happens subconsciously with grownups
when it comes to robots and artificial agents.
And it will, like this Blake guy at Google,
sorry I'm going on and on, but like his main concern
was that Google owned this sentient agent
and that it was being mistreated.
His concern was not that the agent
was gonna mistreat people.
So I think we're gonna see a lot of this.
- Yeah, but shitty companies will do that.
I think ultimately that confusion should be alleviated
by the robot should actually know you better
and should not have any control from the company.
- But what's the business model for that?
- If you use the robot to buy, first of all,
the robot should probably cost money.
- Should what?
- Cost money, like the way Windows operating system does.
I see it more like an operating system.
Then like this thing is your window,
no pun intended, into the world.
So it's helping you, it's like a personal assistant.
Right, and so that should cost money.
You should, you know, whatever it is, 10 bucks, 20 bucks.
Like that's the thing that makes
your life significantly better.
This idea that everything should be free is,
like it should actually help educate you.
You should talk shit about all the other companies
that do stuff for free.
But also, yeah, in terms of if you purchase stuff
based on its recommendation, it gets money.
So it's kind of ad driven, but it's not ads.
It's like, it's not controlled.
Like no external entities can control it
to try to manipulate you to want a thing.
- That would be amazing.
- It's actually trying to discover what you want.
So it's not allowed to have any influence.
No promoted ad, no anything.
So it's finding, I don't know,
the thing that would actually make you happy.
That's the only thing it cares about.
I think companies like this can win out.
- Yes, I think eventually,
once people understand the value of the robot,
even just, like I think that robots
would be valuable to people,
even if they're not marketing something
or helping with like preferences or anything.
Like just a simple, the same thing as a pet,
like a dog that has no function
other than being a member of your family.
I think robots could really be that
and people would pay for that.
I don't think the market realizes that yet.
And so my concern is that companies
are not gonna go in that direction,
at least not yet, of making like this contained thing
that you buy.
It seems almost old fashioned, right,
to have a disconnected object that you buy,
that you're not like paying a subscription for.
It's not like controlled by one of the big corporations.
- But that's the old fashioned things
that people yearn for,
because I think it's very popular now
and people understand the negative effects of social media,
the negative effects of the data being used
in all these kinds of ways.
I think we're just waking up to the realization
we tried, we're like baby deer,
finding our legs in this new world of social media,
of ad driven companies and realizing,
okay, this has to be done somehow different.
- Yeah.
- Like one of the most popular notions,
at least in the United States,
is social media is evil and it's doing bad by us.
It's not like it's totally tricked us
into believing that it's good for us.
I think everybody knows it's bad for us.
And so there's a hunger for other ideas.
- All right, it's time for us to start that company.
- I think so.
- Let's do it.
- I think let's go.
- Hopefully no one listens to this and steals the idea.
- There's no, see that's the other thing.
I think I'm a big person on,
execution is what matters.
I mean, it's like ideas are kind of true.
The social robotics is a good example
that there's been so many amazing companies
that went out of business.
I mean, to me it's obvious,
like it's obvious that there will be a robotics company
that puts a social robot in the home of billions of homes.
- Yeah.
- And it'll be a companion.
Okay, there you go.
You can steal that idea.
Do it.
- Okay, I have a question for you.
What about Elon Musk's humanoid?
Is he gonna execute on that?
- There might be a lot to say.
So for people who are not aware,
there's an optimist, Tesla's optimist robot that's,
I guess the stated reason for that robot
is a humanoid robot in the factory
that's able to automate some of the tasks
that humans are currently doing.
And the reason you wanna do,
it's the second reason you mentioned,
the reason you wanna do a humanoid robot
is because the factory's built for,
there's certain tasks that are designed for humans.
So it's hard to automate with any other form factor
than a humanoid.
And then the other reason is because so much effort
has been put into this giant data engine machine
of perception that's inside Tesla autopilot
that's seemingly, at least the machine, if not the data,
is transferable to the factory setting, to any setting.
- Yeah, he said it would do anything that's boring to us.
- Yeah, yeah.
The interesting thing about that
is there's no interest
and no discussion about the social aspect.
Like I talked to him on mic and off mic about it quite a bit.
And there's not a discussion about like,
to me it's obvious if a thing like that works at all,
at all.
In fact, it has to work really well in a factory.
If it works kind of shitty, it's much more useful in the home
'cause we're much,
I think being shitty at stuff
is kind of what makes relationships great.
Like you wanna be flawed
and be able to communicate your flaws
and be unpredictable in certain ways.
Like if you fell over every once in a while
for no reason whatsoever,
I think that's essential for like--
§12Transcript · 1:37:34–1:46:26
- Very charming.
- It's charming, but also concerning
and also like, are you okay?
I mean, it's both hilarious.
Whenever somebody you love like falls down the stairs,
it was both hilarious and concerning.
It's some dance between the two.
And I think that's essential for like,
you almost wanna engineer that in,
except you don't have to
because of robotics in the physical space
is really difficult.
So I think I've learned to not discount
the efforts that Elon does.
There's a few things that are really interesting there.
One, because he's taking it extremely seriously.
What I like is the humanoid form,
the cost of building a robot.
I talked to Jim Keller offline about this a lot.
And currently humanoid robots cost a lot of money.
And the way they're thinking about it,
now they're not talking about all the social robotics stuff
that you and I care about.
They are thinking, how can we manufacture this thing cheaply
and do it like well?
And the kind of discussions they're having
is really great engineering.
It's like first principles question of like,
why is this cost so much?
Like, what's the cheap way?
Why can't we build?
And there's not a good answer.
Why can't we build this humanoid form for under $1,000?
And like, I've sat and had these conversations.
There's no reason.
I think the reason they've been so expensive
is because they were focused on trying to,
they weren't focused on doing the mass manufacture.
People are focused on getting a thing that's,
I don't know exactly what the reasoning is,
but it's the same like Waymo.
It's like, let's build a million dollar car
in the beginning, or like multi-million dollar car.
Let's try to solve that problem.
The way Elon, the way Jim Keller,
the way some of those folks are thinking is,
let's like at the same time,
try to actually build a system that's cheap.
Not crappy, but cheap.
And let's, first principles,
what is the minimum amount of degrees of freedom we need?
What are the joints?
Where's the control set?
Like how many, how do we, like where are the activators?
What's the way to power this
in the lowest cost way possible?
But also in a way that's like actually works.
How do we make the whole thing not part of the components
where there's a supply chain,
you have to have all these different parts
that have to feed us.
Do it all from scratch and do the learning.
I mean, it's like immediately certain things
like become obvious.
Do the exact same pipeline as you do for autonomous driving.
Just the exact, I mean,
the infrastructure there is incredible.
For the computer vision, for the manipulation task,
the control problem changes,
the perception problem changes,
but the pipeline doesn't change.
Do it.
And so I don't,
obviously the optimism about how long it's gonna take,
I don't share.
But it's a really interesting problem.
And I don't wanna say anything
because my first gut is to say that
why the humanoid form, that doesn't make sense.
- Yeah, that's my second gut too, but.
- But then there's a lot of people
that are really excited about the humanoid form there.
- That's true. - And it's like,
I don't wanna get in the way,
like they might solve this thing.
And they might, it's like similar with Boston Dynamics.
Like, why?
Like, if I were to, you can be a hater
and you go up to Mark Ryber and just,
like, how are you gonna make money
with these super expensive legged robots?
What's your business plan?
This doesn't make any sense.
Why are you doing these legged robots?
But at the same time, they're pushing forward
the science, the art of robotics
in a way that nobody else does.
- Yeah.
- And with Elon, they're not just going to do that,
they're gonna drive down the cost
to where we can have humanoid bots in the home potentially.
- So the part I agree with is,
a lot of people find it fascinating
and it probably also attracts talent
who wanna work on humanoid robots.
I think it's a fascinating scientific problem
and engineering problem,
and it can teach us more about human body
and locomotion and all of that.
I think there's a lot to learn from it.
Where I get tripped up is why we need them
for anything other than art and entertainment
in the real world.
Like, I get that there are some areas
where you can't just rebuild like a spaceship.
You can't just like,
they've worked for so many years on these spaceships,
you can't just re-engineer it.
You have some things that are just built for human bodies,
a submarine, a spaceship.
But a factory, maybe I'm naive,
but it seems like we've already rebuilt factories
to accommodate other types of robots.
Why would we want to just like make a humanoid robot
to go in there?
I just get really tripped up on,
I think that people want humanoids.
I think people are fascinated by them.
I think it's a little overhyped.
- Well, most of our world is still built for humanoids.
- I know, but it shouldn't be.
It should be built so that it's wheelchair accessible.
- Right, so the question is,
do you build a world that's the general form
of wheelchair accessible?
All robot form factor accessible?
Or do you build humanoid robots?
- I mean, it doesn't have to be all,
and it also doesn't have to be either or.
I just feel like we're thinking so little
about the system in general
and how to create infrastructure that works for everyone,
all kinds of people, all kinds of robots.
I mean, it's more of an investment,
but that would pay off way more in the future
than just trying to cram expensive
or maybe slightly less expensive humanoid technology
into a human space.
- Unfortunately, one company can't do that.
We have to work together.
It's like autonomous driving can be easily solved
if you do V2I, if you change the infrastructure
of cities and so on, but that requires a lot of people.
A lot of them are politicians,
and a lot of them are somewhat, if not a lot, corrupt,
and all those kinds of things.
And the talent thing you mentioned
is really, really, really important.
I've gotten a chance to meet a lot of folks
at SpaceX and Tesla, other companies too,
but they're specifically, the openness makes it easier
to meet everybody.
I think a lot of amazing things in this world happen
when you get amazing people together.
And if you can sell an idea,
like us becoming a multi-planetary species,
you can say, "Why the hell I would go to Mars?
"Like why colonize Mars?"
If you think from basic first principles,
it doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't make any sense to go to the moon.
The only thing that makes sense
to go to space is for satellites.
But there's something about the vision of the future,
the optimism laden that permeates this vision
of us becoming multi-planetary.
It's thinking not just for the next 10 years,
it's thinking like human civilization
reaching out into the stars.
It makes people dream.
It's really exciting.
And that, they're gonna come up with some cool shit
that might not have anything to do with,
here's what I, 'cause Elon doesn't seem to care
about social robotics, which is constantly surprising to me.
I talk to him, he doesn't,
humans are the things you avoid and don't hurt, right?
Like that's, like the number one job of a robot
is not to hurt a human, to avoid them.
The collaborative aspect, the human-robot interaction,
I think is not, at least not in his,
not something he thinks about deeply.
But my sense is if somebody like that takes on the problem
of human-robotics, we're gonna get a social robot out of it.
Like people like, not necessarily Elon,
but people like Elon, if they take on seriously these,
like I can just imagine with a humanoid robot,
you can't help but create a social robot.
So if you do different form factors,
if you do industrial robotics,
§13Transcript · 1:46:31–1:55:26
you're likely to actually not end up
like walking head into a social robot,
human-robot interaction problem.
If you create for whatever the hell reason you want to,
a humanoid robot, you're gonna have to reinvent,
well, not reinvent, but introduce a lot of fascinating
new ideas into the problem of human-robot interaction,
which I'm excited about.
So like if I was a business person,
I would say this is way too risky.
This doesn't make any sense.
But when people are really convinced,
and there's a lot of amazing people working on it,
it's like, all right, let's see what happens here.
This is really interesting.
Just like with Atlas and Boston Dynamics.
I mean, they, I apologize if I'm ignorant on this,
but I think they really, more than anyone else,
maybe with AIBO, like Sony,
pushed forward humanoid robotics,
like a leap with Atlas. - Oh yeah, with Atlas?
Absolutely.
- And like without them, like why the hell did they do it?
- Why?
Well, I think for them, it is a research platform.
It's not, I don't think they ever, this is speculation,
I don't think they ever intended Atlas
to be like a commercially successful robot.
I think they were just like, can we do this?
Let's try.
Yeah, I wonder if they, maybe the answer they landed on is,
because they eventually went to Spot,
the earlier versions of Spot.
So, Quadruped's like four-legged robot,
but maybe they reached for, let's try to make,
like, I think they tried it,
and they still are trying it for Atlas
to be picking up boxes, to moving boxes, to being,
it makes sense, okay, if they were exactly the same cost,
it makes sense to have a humanoid robot in the warehouse.
- Currently. - Currently.
- I think it's short-sighted, but yes,
currently, yes, it would sell.
- But it's not, it's short-sighted,
it's short-sighted, but it's not pragmatic
to think any other way,
to think that you're gonna be able to change warehouses.
You're gonna have to, you're going--
- If you're Amazon, you can totally change your warehouses.
- Yes, yes, but even if you're Amazon,
that's very costly to change warehouses.
- It is, it's a big investment.
- But isn't, shouldn't you do that investment in a way,
so here's the thing, if you build a humanoid robot
that works in the warehouse, that humanoid robot,
see, I don't know why Tess is not talking about it this way,
as far as I know, but that humanoid robot
is gonna have all kinds of other applications
outside their setting.
To me, it's obvious.
I think it's a really hard problem to solve,
but whoever solves the humanoid robot problem
are gonna have to solve the social robotics problem.
- Oh, for sure, I mean, they're already with Spot
needing to solve social robotics problems.
- For Spot to be effective at scale.
I'm not sure if Spot is currently effective at scale,
it's getting better and better,
but they're actually, the thing they did
is an interesting decision,
perhaps Tess will end up doing the same thing,
which is Spot is supposed to be a platform for intelligence.
So Spot doesn't have any high-level intelligence,
like high-level perception skills.
It's supposed to be controlled remotely.
- And it's a platform that you can attach something to, yeah.
- And somebody else is supposed to do the attaching.
It's a platform that you can take an uneven ground
and it's able to maintain balance,
go into dangerous situations, it's a platform.
On top of that, you can add a camera that does surveillance,
that you can remotely monitor,
you can record the camera, you can remote control it,
but it's not gonna-- - Object manipulation.
- Basic object manipulation,
but not autonomous object manipulation.
It's remotely controlled.
But the intelligence on top of it,
which is what would be required for automation,
somebody else is supposed to do.
Perhaps Tess will do the same thing ultimately,
but it doesn't make sense
because the goal of Optimus is automation.
Without that, but then you never know.
It's like, why go to Mars?
Why?
- I mean, that's true, and I reluctantly
am very excited about space travel.
- Why?
Can you introspect, like why?
- Why am I excited about it?
I think what got me excited was I saw a panel
with some people who study other planets,
and it became really clear how little we know
about ourselves and about how nature works
and just how much there is to learn
from exploring other parts of the universe.
So like on a rational level,
that's how I convince myself that that's why I'm excited.
In reality, it's just fucking exciting.
I mean, just like the idea
that we can do this difficult thing
and that humans come together to build things
that can explore space.
I mean, there's just something inherently thrilling
about that, and I'm reluctant about it
because I feel like there are so many other challenges
and problems that I think are more important to solve,
but I also think we should be doing all of it at once.
And so to that extent, I'm like all for research
on humanoid robots, development of humanoid robots.
I think that there's a lot to explore and learn,
and it doesn't necessarily take away
from other areas of science.
At least it shouldn't.
I think unfortunately a lot of the attention
goes towards that, and it does take resources
and attention away from other areas of robotics
that we should be focused on,
but I don't think we shouldn't do it.
- So you think it might be a little bit of a distraction.
Oh, forget the Elon particular application,
but if you care about social robotics,
the humanoid form is a distraction.
- It's a distraction, and it's one
that I find particularly boring.
It's just, it's interesting from a research perspective,
but from a like what types of robots can we create
to put in our world?
Like why would we just create a humanoid robot?
- So even just robotic manipulation,
so arms is not useful either.
- Oh, arms can be useful, but like why not have three arms?
Like why does it have to look like a person?
- Well, I actually personally just think
that washing the dishes is harder
than a robot that can be a companion.
- Yeah. - Like being useful
in the home is actually really tough.
- But does your companion have to have like two arms
and look like you?
- No, I'm making the case for zero arms.
- Oh, okay, zero arms.
- Yeah. - Okay, freaky.
- That didn't come out the way I meant it,
'cause it almost sounds like I don't want a robot
to defend itself.
Like that's immediately you project,
you know what I mean?
Zero.
No, I just think that the social component
doesn't require arms or legs or so on, right?
That's what we've talked about.
And I think that's probably where a lot
of the meaningful impact that's gonna be happening.
- Yeah, I think just we could get so creative with the design
like why not have a robot on roller skates or like whatever?
Like why does it have to look like us?
- Yeah.
- Still, it is a compelling and interesting form
from a research perspective, like you said.
- Yeah.
- You co-authored a paper as you were talking about
that for WeRobot 2022,
Lula Robot Consumer Protection
in the Face of Automated Social Marketing.
I think you were talking about some of the ideas in that.
- Yes.
Oh, you got it from Twitter.
I was like, that's not published yet.
- Yeah, this is how I do my research.
- You just go through people's Twitter feeds.
- Yeah, go, thank you.
- It's not stalking if it's public.
So there's a, you looked at me like you're offended.
Like how did you know?
- No, I was just like worried that like some early, I mean.
- Yeah, there's a PDF.
There's a PDF.
- There is, like now?
- Yeah.
- Maybe like as of a few days ago.
- Yeah.
- Okay, well.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Okay.
- You look violated.
Like how did you get that PDF?
- It's just a draft.
It's online.
§14Transcript · 1:55:27–2:03:40
Nobody read it yet until we've written the final paper.
- Well, it's really good, so I enjoyed it.
- Oh, thank you.
- By the time this comes out, I'm sure it'll be out.
Or no, when's Wee Robot?
- So basically, Wee Robot, that's the workshop
where you have an hour where people give you
constructive feedback on the paper
and then you write the good version.
- Right, I take it back.
There's no PDF.
I don't know what I-- - It doesn't exist.
- I imagine, but there is a table in there
in a virtual imagined PDF that I like,
that I wanted to mention, which is
like this kind of strategy used
across various marketing platforms.
And it's basically looking at traditional media,
person-to-person interaction, targeted ads,
influencers, and social robots.
This is the kind of idea that you've been speaking to.
And it's just a nice breakdown of that,
that social robots have personalized recommendations,
social persuasion, automated scalable,
data collection, and embodiment.
So person-to-person interaction is really nice,
but it doesn't have the automated
and the data collection aspect.
But the social robots have those two elements.
- Yeah, we're talking about the potential
for social robots to just combine
all of these different marketing methods
to be this really potent cocktail.
And that table, which was Daniela's idea
and a really fantastic one,
we put it in at the last second, so.
- Yeah, I really like that.
- I'm glad you like it.
- In a PDF that doesn't exist.
- Yes.
- That nobody can find if they look.
- Yeah.
- So when you say social robots, what does that mean?
Does that include virtual ones or no?
- I think a lot of this applies to virtual ones too.
Although the embodiment thing,
which I personally find very fascinating,
is definitely a factor that research shows
can enhance people's engagement with a device.
- But can embodiment be a virtual thing also?
Meaning like it has a body in the virtual world.
- Maybe.
- Makes you feel like,
'cause what makes a body?
A body is a thing that
can disappear, has a permanence.
I mean, there's certain characteristics
that you kind of associate to a physical object.
- So I think what I'm referring to,
and I think this gets messy
because now we have all these new virtual worlds
and AR and stuff, and I think it gets messy,
but there's research showing that something on a screen,
on a traditional screen,
and something that is moving in your physical space,
that that has a very different effect
on how your brain perceives it even.
- So, I mean, I have a sense that we can do that
in a virtual world.
- Probably.
Like when I've used VR, I jump around like an idiot
because I think something's gonna hit me.
- And even if a video game on a 2D screen
is compelling enough,
like the thing that's immersive about it
is I kind of put myself into that world.
Those, the objects you're interacting with,
Call of Duty, things you're shooting,
they're kind of,
I mean, your imagination fills the gaps
and it becomes real.
Like it pulls your mind in when it's well done.
So it really depends what's shown on the 2D screen.
- Yeah.
Yeah, I think there's a ton of different factors
and there's different types of embodiment.
Like you can have embodiment in a virtual world.
You can have an agent that's simply text-based,
which has no embodiment.
So I think there's a whole spectrum of factors
that can influence how much you engage with something.
- Yeah, I wonder, I always wondered if you can have like
an entity living in a computer.
Okay, this is gonna be dark.
I haven't always wondered about this.
So this is gonna make it sound like
I keep thinking about this kind of stuff.
No, but like, this is almost like black mirror,
but the entity that's convinced
or is able to convince you that it's being tortured
inside the computer and needs your help to get out.
Something like this.
That becomes, to me,
to me suffering is one of the things
that make you empathize with.
Like we're not good at, as you've discussed in other,
in the physical form, like holding a robot upside down,
you have a really good examples about that
and discussing that.
I think suffering is a really good catalyst for empathy.
And I just feel like we can project embodiment
on a virtual thing if it's capable
of certain things like suffering.
- Yeah. - So I was wondering.
- I think that's true.
And I think that's what happened with the Lambda thing.
Not that, I don't, none of the transcript
was about suffering, but it was about
having the capacity for suffering and human emotion
that convinced the engineer that this thing was sentient.
And it's basically the plot of Ex Machina.
- True.
Have you ever made a robot scream in pain?
- Have I?
No, but have you seen that?
Did someone?
Oh yeah, no, they actually made a Roomba scream
whenever it hit a wall.
- Yeah, I programmed that myself as well.
- Yeah? - 'Cause I was inspired by that.
Yeah, it's cool. - Do you still have it?
- Oh, sorry, hit a wall.
I didn't--
- Whenever it bumped into something,
it would scream in pain. - Yeah, yeah.
No, I, so I had, the way I programmed the Roombas
is when I kick it, whenever I,
so contact between me and the robot is when it screams.
- Really?
Okay, and you were inspired by that?
- Yeah, I guess I misremembered the video.
I saw the video a long, long time ago,
and, or maybe heard somebody mention it,
and that just, it's the easiest thing to program.
So I did that.
I haven't run those Roombas for over a year now,
but yeah, it was, my experience with it was that
it's like they quickly become,
like you remember them, you miss them,
like they're real living beings.
So the capacity to suffer is a really powerful thing.
- Yeah. - Even then, that,
I mean, it was kind of hilarious.
It was just a random recording of screaming
from the internet, but it's still, it's still, it's weird.
There's a thing you have to get right
based on the interaction, like the latency.
Like it has, there is,
there is a realistic aspect of how you should scream
relative to when you get hurt.
Like it should correspond correctly.
- Like if you kick it really hard, it should scream louder?
- No, it should scream at the appropriate time, not like--
- Oh, I see, not like five minutes later.
- One second later, right?
Like there's an exact, like there's a timing
when you get like, I don't know,
when you run into, when you run your foot
into like the side of a table or something,
there's a timing there, the dynamics you have to get right
for the actual screaming,
'cause the Roomba in particular doesn't,
so I was, the sensors don't,
it doesn't know about pain.
See? - What?
(laughing)
- I'm sorry to say, Roomba doesn't understand pain.
So you have to correctly map the sensors,
the timing to the production of the sound.
But when you get that somewhat right,
it starts, it's a weird, it's a really weird feeling.
And you actually feel like a bad person.
- Aw.
- Yeah.
So, but it's, it makes you think
because that, with all the ways that we talked about,
that could be used to manipulate you.
- Oh, for sure.
- In a good and bad way.
So the good way is like you can form a connection
with a thing, and a bad way that you can form a connection
in order to sell you products that you don't want.
- Yeah, or manipulate you politically,
or many nefarious things.
- You tweeted, "We're about to be living in the movie 'Her'
except instead of," see, I researched your tweets,
like they're like Shakespeare.
"We're about to be living in the movie 'Her'
except instead of about love, it's gonna be about,"
what did I say, "the chatbot being subtly racist
§15Transcript · 2:03:43–2:12:25
and the question whether it's ethical
for companies to charge for software upgrades."
- Yeah.
So can we break that down?
What do you mean by that?
- Yeah.
- Obviously, some of it is humor.
- Yes, well, kind of.
(laughs)
I am, like, ah, it's so weird to be in this space
where I'm so worried about this technology
and also so excited about it at the same time.
But the really, like, I haven't,
I'd gotten a little bit jaded,
and then with GPT-3 and then the Lambda transcript,
I was, like, re-energized,
but have also been thinking a lot about,
you know, what are the ethical issues
that are gonna come up?
And I think some of the things
that companies are really gonna have to figure out
is obviously algorithmic bias
is a huge and known problem at this point.
Like, even, you know, the new image generation tools,
like DALI, where they've clearly put in a lot of effort
to make sure that if you search for people,
it gives you a diverse set of people, et cetera.
Like, even that one, people have already found numerous,
like, ways that it just kind of regurgitates biases
and things that it finds on the internet,
like how if you search for success,
it gives you a bunch of images of men.
If you search for sadness,
it gives you a bunch of images of women.
So I think that this is, like, the really tricky one
with these voice agents
that companies are gonna have to figure out.
And that's why it's subtly racist and not overtly,
because I think they're gonna be able
to solve the overt thing,
and then with the subtle stuff,
it's gonna be really difficult.
And then I think the other thing is gonna be,
people are gonna become so emotionally attached
to artificial agents with this complexity of language,
with a potential embodiment factor,
that, I mean, there's already,
there's a paper at WeRobot this year
written by roboticists about how to deal
with the fact that robots die
and looking at it as an ethical issue,
because it impacts people.
And I think there's gonna be way more issues than just that.
I think the tweet was software upgrades, right?
Like, how much is it okay to charge for something like that
if someone is deeply, emotionally invested
in this relationship?
- Oh, the ethics of that, that's interesting.
But there's also the practical funding mechanisms,
like you mentioned with AIBO, the dog.
In theory, there's a subscription.
- Yeah, the new AIBO.
So the old AIBO from the '90s,
people got really attached to,
and in Japan they're still having funerals
in Buddhist temples for the AIBOs that can't be repaired
because people really viewed them as part of their families.
- So we're talking about robot dogs.
- Robot dogs, the AIBO, yeah.
The original, famous robot dog that Sony made
came out in the '90s, got discontinued,
having funerals for them in Japan.
Now they have a new one.
The new one is great.
I have one at home.
It's like--
- It's $3,000, how much is it?
- I think it's 3,000 bucks.
And then after a few years, you have to start paying,
I think it's like 300 a year for a subscription service
for cloud services.
And the cloud services,
I mean, it's a lot,
the dog is more complex than the original,
and it has a lot of cool features,
and it can remember stuff and experiences,
and it can learn.
And a lot of that is outsourced to the cloud.
And so you have to pay to keep that running,
which makes sense.
People should pay, and people who aren't using it
shouldn't have to pay.
But it does raise the interesting question,
could you set that price to reflect a consumer's willingness
to pay for the emotional connection?
So if you know that people are really, really attached
to these things, just like they would be to a real dog,
could you just start charging more?
Because there's more demand.
- Yeah, and you have to be,
but that's true for anything that people love, right?
- It is, and it's also true for real dogs.
Like there's all these new medical services nowadays
where people will shell out thousands and thousands of
dollars to keep their pets alive.
And is that taking advantage of people,
or is that just giving them what they want?
That's the question.
- Back to marriage, what about all the money
that it costs to get married,
and then all the money that it costs to get a divorce?
That feels like a very, that's like a scam.
I think the society is full of scams that are like--
- Oh, it's such a scam.
And then we've created,
the whole wedding industrial complex has created
all these quote unquote traditions that people buy into
that aren't even traditions.
They're just fabricated by marketing.
It's awful.
- Let me ask you about racist robots.
- Sure.
- Is it up to a company that creates that?
So we talk about removing bias and so on.
And that's a really popular field in AI currently.
And a lot of people agree that it's an important field.
But the question is for like social robotics,
is should it be up to the company
to remove the bias of society?
- Well, who else can, oh, to remove the bias of society.
- I guess because there's a lot of people
that are subtly racist in modern society,
like why shouldn't our robots also be subtly racist?
I mean, that's like,
why do we put so much responsibility on the robots?
- Because, because the robot--
- I'm imagining like a Hitler Roomba.
I mean, that would be funny.
But I guess I'm asking a serious question.
- You're allowed to make that joke.
- Yes, exactly, I'm allowed to make that joke, yes.
(laughing)
And I've been nonstop reading about World War II and Hitler.
I think I'm glad we exist in a world
where we can just make those jokes.
That helps deal with it.
Anyway, it is a serious question.
It's sort of like,
like it's such a difficult problem to solve.
Now, of course, like bias and so on,
like there's low hanging fruit,
which I think was what a lot of people are focused on.
But then it becomes like subtle stuff.
Over time, it's very difficult to know.
Now, you can also completely remove the personality.
You can completely remove the personalization.
- You can remove the language aspect,
which is what I had been arguing,
because I was like,
the language is a disappointing aspect
of social robots anyway.
But now we're reintroducing that
because it's now no longer disappointing.
So I do think, well, let's just start with the premise,
which I think is very true,
which is that racism is not a neutral thing,
but it is the thing that we don't want in our society.
Like it does not conform to my values.
So if we agree that racism is bad,
I do think that it has to be the company,
because the problem, I mean,
it might not be possible.
And companies might have to put out products
that where they're taking risks
and they might get slammed by consumers
and they might have to adjust.
I don't know how this is gonna work in the market.
I have opinions about how it should work,
but it is on the company.
And the danger with robots
is that they can entrench this stuff.
It's not like your racist uncle
who you can have a conversation with and-
- And put things into context maybe with that.
- Yeah, or who might change over time with more experience.
A robot really just like regurgitates things,
entrenches them, could influence other people.
And I mean, I think that's terrible.
- Well, I think there's a difficult challenge here
is because even the premise you started with
that essentially racism is bad.
I think we live in a society today
where the definition of racism
is different between different people.
Some people say that it's not enough not to be racist.
Some people say you have to be anti-racist.
So you have to have a robot that constantly calls out,
like calls you out on your implicit racism.
- I would love that.
I would love that robot.
§16Transcript · 2:12:27–2:21:47
- But like maybe it sees racism.
Well, I don't know if you'd love it
'cause maybe you'll see racism in things that aren't racist.
And then you're arguing with a robot.
- Your robot starts calling you racist.
I'm not exactly sure that, I mean, it's a tricky thing.
I guess I'm saying that the line is not obvious,
especially in this heated discussion
where we have a lot of identity politics
of what is harmful to different groups and so on.
- Yeah.
- It feels like the broader question here
is should a social robotics company be solving
or being part of solving the issues of society?
- Well, okay, I think it's the same question as
should I as an individual be responsible
for knowing everything in advance
and saying all the right things?
And the answer to that is yes, I am responsible,
but I'm not gonna get it perfect.
And then the question is how do we deal with that?
And so as a person, how I aspire to deal with that is
when I do inevitably make a mistake
because I have blind spots and people get angry,
I don't take that personally
and I listen to what's behind the anger.
And it can even happen that like,
maybe I'll tweet something that's well-intentioned
and one group of people starts yelling at me
and then I change it the way that they said
and then another group of people starts yelling at me,
which has happened, this happened to me actually around,
in my talks, I talk about robots
that are used in autism therapy.
And so whether to say a child with autism
or an autistic child is super controversial
and a lot of autistic people
prefer to be referred to as autistic people
and a lot of parents of autistic children
prefer child with autism and then they disagree.
So I've gotten yelled at from both sides
and I think I'm still, I'm responsible
even if I can't get it right.
I don't know if that makes sense.
Like it's a responsibility thing
and I can be as well-intentioned as I want
and I'm still gonna make mistakes
and that is part of the existing power structures that exist
and that's something that I accept.
- And you accept being attacked from both sides
and grow from it and learn from it.
But the danger is that after being attacked,
assuming you don't get canceled,
AKA completely removed from your ability to tweet,
you might become jaded
and not want to talk about autism anymore.
- I don't and I didn't.
I mean, it's happened to me.
What I did was I listened to both sides
and I chose, I tried to get information
and then I decided that I was going to use autistic children
and now I'm moving forward with that.
Like, I don't know.
- For now, right.
- For now, yeah, until I get updated information
and I'm never gonna get anything perfect
but I'm making choices and I'm moving forward
because being a coward and like just retreating from that,
I think--
- But see, here's the problem.
You're a very smart person and an individual,
a researcher, a thinker, an intellectual.
So that's the right thing for you to do.
The hard thing is when as a company,
imagine you had a PR team.
- I said, Kate, this you should--
- The PR teams we hate.
- Yeah, I mean, just, well, if you hired PR people,
like obviously they would see that and they'd be like,
well, maybe don't bring up autism.
Maybe don't bring up these topics.
You're getting attacked, it's bad for your brand.
They'll say the brand word.
There'll be, if we look at different demographics
that are inspired by your work,
I think it's insensitive to them.
Let's not mention this anymore.
There's this kind of pressure that all of a sudden you,
or you do suboptimal decisions.
You take a kind of poll.
Again, it's looking at the past versus the future,
all those kinds of things.
And it becomes difficult.
In the same way that it's difficult
for social media companies to figure out like
who to censor, who to recommend.
- I think this is ultimately a question about leadership.
Honestly, like the way that I see leadership,
because right now,
the thing that bothers me about institutions
and a lot of people who run current institutions
is that their main focus is protecting the institution
or protecting themselves personally.
That is bad leadership
because it means you cannot have integrity.
You cannot lead with integrity.
And it makes sense because like, obviously,
if you're the type of leader who immediately blows up
the institution you're leading,
then that doesn't exist anymore.
And maybe that's why we don't have any good leaders anymore
because they had integrity and they didn't put,
you know, the survival of the institution first.
But I feel like you have to,
just to be a good leader,
you have to be responsible
and understand that with great power
comes great responsibility.
You have to be humble and you have to listen
and you have to learn.
You can't get defensive and you cannot
put your own protection before other things.
- Yeah, take risks where you might lose your job,
you might lose your wellbeing because of,
because in the process of standing for the principles,
for the things you think are right to do, yeah.
Based on the things you,
like based on learning from,
like listening to people and learning from what they feel.
And the same goes for the institution, yeah.
Yeah, but I ultimately actually believe
that those kinds of companies and countries succeed
that have leaders like that.
You should run for president.
- No, thank you.
- Yeah.
- That's maybe the problem.
Like the people who have good ideas about leadership,
they're like, yeah.
- No.
- This is why I don't,
this is why I'm not running a company.
- It's been, I think, three years
since the Jeffrey Epstein controversy at MIT,
MIT Media Lab.
Joey Ito, the head of the Media Lab resigned.
And I think at that time you wrote
an opinion article about it.
So just looking back a few years have passed,
what have you learned about human nature
from the fact that somebody like Jeffrey Epstein
found his way inside MIT?
- It's a really good question.
What have I learned about human nature?
I think,
well, there's,
there's how did this problem come about?
And then there's what was the reaction to this problem
and to it becoming public?
And in the reaction,
the things I learned about human nature
were that sometimes cowards are worse than assholes.
(laughs)
Wow, I'm really, ugh.
- I think that's a really powerful statement.
- I think because the assholes,
at least you know what you're dealing with.
They have integrity in a way.
They're just living out their asshole values.
And the cowards are the ones that you have to watch out for.
And this comes back to people protecting themselves
over doing the right thing.
They'll throw others under the bus.
- Is there some sense that not enough people
took responsibility?
- For sure.
And I mean, I don't wanna sugar coat at all
what Joey Ito did.
I mean, I think it's gross
that he took money from Jeffrey Epstein.
I believe him that he didn't know about the bad, bad stuff.
But I've been in those circles
with those public intellectual dudes
that he was hanging out with.
And any woman in those circles
saw 10 zillion red flags.
The whole environment was so misogynist.
And so personally, because Joey was a great boss
and a great friend,
I was really disappointed that he ignored that
in favor of raising money.
And I think that it was right for him to resign
in the face of that.
But one of the things that he did
that many others didn't was he came forward about it
and he took responsibility.
And all of the people who didn't, I think,
it's just interesting.
The other thing I learned about human nature,
okay, I'm gonna go on a tangent,
§17Transcript · 2:21:49–2:31:00
but I'll come back, I promise.
So I once saw this tweet from someone,
or it was a Twitter thread,
from someone who worked at a homeless shelter.
And he said that when he started working there,
he noticed that people would often come in
and use the bathroom
and they would just trash the entire bathroom,
like rip things out of the walls,
like toilet paper on the ground.
And he asked someone who had been there longer,
like, why do they do this?
Why do the homeless people come in and trash the bathroom?
And he was told it's because it's the only thing
in their lives that they have control over.
And I feel like sometimes when it comes to the response,
just the mobbing response that happens
in the wake of some harm that was caused,
if you can't target the person who actually caused the harm,
who was Epstein,
you will go as many circles out as you can
until you find the person that you have power over
and you have control over,
and then you will trash that.
And it makes sense that people do this.
It's, again, it's a human nature thing.
Of course, you're gonna focus all your energy
because you feel helpless and enraged,
and it's unfair and you have no other power.
You're gonna focus all of your energy
on someone who's so far removed from the problem
that that's not even an efficient solution.
- And the problem is often the first person you find
is the one that has integrity,
sufficient integrity to take responsibility.
- Yeah, and it's why my husband always says,
he's a liberal, but he's always like,
when liberals form a firing squad, they stand in a circle.
Because you know that your friends
are gonna listen to you, so you criticize them.
You're not gonna be able to convince someone
across the aisle.
- See, in that situation, what I had hoped
is the people in the farther, in that situation,
any situation of that sort,
the people that are farther out in the circles
stand up and also take some responsibility
for the broader picture of human nature
versus specific situation,
but also take some responsibility,
but also defend the people involved as flawed,
not in a like, no, no, no, nothing,
like this, people fucked up.
Like you said, there's a lot of red flags
that people just ignored for the sake of money
in this particular case.
But also like be transparent and public about it
and spread the responsibility
across a large number of people
such that you learn a lesson from it.
- Institutionally.
- Yeah, it was a systems problem.
It wasn't a one individual problem.
- And I feel like currently,
because Joey took, resigned because of it,
or essentially fired, pressured out because of it,
MIT can pretend like, oh, we didn't know anything.
It wasn't part--
- Bad leadership, again,
because when you are at the top of an institution
with that much power and you were complicit in what happened,
which they were, like, come on,
there's no way that they didn't know
that this was happening.
So like to not stand up and take responsibility,
I think it's bad leadership.
- Do you understand why Epstein was able to,
outside of MIT, he was able to make a lot of friends
with a lot of powerful people.
Does that make sense to you?
Why was he able to get in these rooms,
befriend these people,
befriend people that I don't know personally,
but I think a lot of them indirectly I know
as being good people, smart people.
Why would they let Jeffrey Epstein into their office,
have a discussion with them?
What do you understand about human nature from that?
- Well, so I never met Epstein,
or I mean, I've met some of the people
who interacted with him,
but I was never, like, I never saw him in action.
I don't know how charismatic he was or what that was,
but I do think that sometimes the simple answer
is the more likely one,
and from my understanding,
what he would do is he was kind of a social grifter,
like, you know those people who will,
you must get this because you're famous.
You must get people coming to you and being like,
oh, I know your friend so-and-so
in order to get cred with you.
I think he just convinced some people
who were trusted in a network that he was a great guy
and that, you know, whatever, I think at that point,
'cause at that point he had had like,
what, a conviction prior, but it was a one-off thing.
It wasn't clear that there was this other thing
that was that--
- And most people probably don't check.
- Yeah, and most people don't check.
Like, you're at an event, you meet this guy.
I don't know, maybe people do check
when they're that powerful and wealthy,
or maybe they don't.
I have no idea.
No, they're just stupid. - I haven't seen that.
I mean, and they're not, like,
all right, does anyone check anything about me?
Because I've walked into some of the richest,
some of the most powerful people in the world,
and nobody, like, asks questions like,
who the fuck is this guy?
Like-- - Yeah.
- Like, nobody asks those questions.
It's interesting.
I would think, like, there would be more security
or something.
Like, there really isn't.
I think a lot of it has to do, well, my hope is,
in my case, has to do with, like,
people can sense that this is a good person,
but if that's the case, then they can surely,
then a human being can use charisma to infiltrate.
- Yeah. - Just being,
just saying the right things-- - And once you have people
vouching for you within that type of network,
like, once you, yeah, once you have someone powerful
vouching for you who someone else trusts,
then, you know, you're in.
- So how do you avoid something like that?
If you're MIT, if you're Harvard,
if you're any of these institutions?
- Well, I mean, first of all, you have to do your homework
before you take money from someone.
Like, I think that's required,
but I think, you know, I think Joey did do his homework.
I think he did, and I think at the time that he took money,
there was the one conviction and not, like, the later thing,
and I think that the story at that time was that
he didn't know she was underage and blah, blah, blah,
or whatever, it was a mistake,
and Joey always believed in redemption for people,
and that people can change,
and that they can genuinely regret,
and, like, learn and move on,
and he was a big believer in that,
so I could totally see him being like,
well, I'm not gonna exclude him because of this thing,
and because other people are vouching for him.
Just to be clear, we're now talking about the set of people
who I think Joey belonged to who did not, like,
go to the island and have sex with underage girls,
because that's a whole other set of people who, like,
were powerful and, like, were part of that network
and who knew and participated,
and so, like, I distinguish between people who got taken in
who didn't know that that was happening
and people who knew.
- I wonder what the different circles look like.
So, like, people that went to the island
and didn't do anything, didn't see anything,
didn't know about anything,
versus the people that did something.
- And then there's people who heard rumors, maybe.
- And what do you do with rumors?
Like, isn't there people that heard rumors
about Bill Cosby for the longest time?
For, like, for the longest, like, whenever that happened,
like, all these people came out of the woodwork,
like, everybody kind of knew.
I mean, it's like, all right,
so what are you supposed to do with rumors?
Like, what, I think the other way to put it
is red flags, as you were saying.
- Yeah, and, like, I can tell you that those circles,
like, there were red flags without me even hearing
any rumors about anything ever.
Like, I was already like, hmm,
there are not a lot of women here, which is a bad sign.
- Isn't there a lot of places where there's not a lot
of women and that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad sign?
- There are if it's like a pipeline problem
where it's like, I don't know,
technology law clinic that only gets, like, male lawyers
because there's not a lot of women, you know,
applicants in the pool.
- But there's some aspect of this situation
that, like, there should be more women here.
- Oh, yeah, yeah.
§18Transcript · 2:31:03–2:40:25
- You've, actually, I'd love to ask you about this
'cause you have strong opinions about Richard Stallman.
Is that, do you still have those strong opinions?
- Look, all I need to say is that he met my friend
who's a law professor.
- Yeah.
- She shook his hand and he licked her arm
from wrist to elbow, and it certainly wasn't appropriate
at that time.
- What about if you're, like, an incredibly weird person?
- Okay, that's a good question because, obviously,
there's a lot of neurodivergence at MIT and everywhere,
and, obviously, like, we need to accept
that people are different,
that people don't understand social conventions
the same way, but one of the things that I've learned
about neurodivergence is that women are often
expected or taught to mask their neurodivergence
and kind of fit in, and men are accommodated and excused,
and I don't think that being neurodivergent
gives you a license to be an asshole.
Like, you can be a weird person and you can still learn
that it's not okay to lick someone's arm.
- Yeah, it's a balance.
Like, women should be allowed to be a little weirder
and men should be less weird.
'Cause I think there's a, 'cause you're one of the people,
I think, tweeting that, what made me,
'cause I wanted to talk to Richard Stallman on the podcast
about, 'cause I didn't have a context,
'cause I wanted to talk to him 'cause he's,
you know, free software.
- Richard Stallman.
- He's very weird in interesting, good ways
in the world of computer science.
He's also weird in that, you know, when he gives a talk,
he'll be like picking at his feet
and eating the skin off his feet, right?
He's known for these extremely kind of,
how else do you put it?
I don't know how to put it.
But then there was something that happened to him
in conversations on this thread related to Epstein.
- Yeah.
- Which I was torn about because I felt it's similar to Joy,
you know, it's like, I felt he was maligned.
Like people were looking for somebody to get angry at.
So he was inappropriate, but the,
I didn't like the cowardice more.
Like I set aside his situation and we could discuss it,
but the cowardice on MIT's part,
and this is me saying it,
about the way they treated that whole situation.
- Oh, they're always cowards about how they treat anything.
They just try to make the problem go away.
- Yeah, so it was about, yeah, exactly.
- That said, I think he should have left the mailing list.
- He shouldn't have been part of the mailing list.
- Well, that's probably true also.
But I think what bothered me,
what always bothers me in these mailing list situations
or Twitter situations, like if you say something
that's hurtful to people or makes people angry,
and then people start yelling at you,
maybe they shouldn't be yelling.
Maybe they are yelling because again,
you're the only point of power they have.
Maybe it's okay that you're yelling, whatever it is,
like it's your response to that that matters.
And I think that I just have a lot of respect for people
who can say, "Oh, people are angry.
There's a reason they're angry.
Let me find out what that reason is
and learn more about it.
It doesn't mean that I am wrong.
It doesn't mean that I am bad.
It doesn't mean that I'm ill-intentioned,
but why are they angry?
I wanna understand."
And then once you understand,
you can respond again with integrity and say,
"Actually, I stand by what I said.
Here's why."
Or you can say, "Actually, I listened
and here are some things I learned."
That's the kind of response I wanna see from people.
And people like Stallman do not respond that way.
They just go into battle.
- Right, like where it's obvious you didn't listen.
- Yeah, no interest in listening.
- Honestly, that's to me as bad as the people
who just apologize just 'cause they are trying
to make the problem go away.
- Of course.
- Right, so like if--
- That's not--
- It's like both are bad.
- A good apology has to include understanding
what you did wrong.
- And in part, standing up for the things
you think you did right.
So like--
- Yeah, if there are those things, yeah.
- Finding and then, but you have to give,
you have to acknowledge, you have to like give
that hard hit to the ego that says I did something wrong.
Yeah, definitely Richard Stallman is not somebody
who is capable of that kind of thing
or hasn't given evidence of that kind of thing.
- But that was also, even just your tweet,
I had to do a lot of thinking like,
different people from different walks of life
see red flags in different things.
- Yeah.
- And so things I find as a man,
non-threatening and hilarious are not necessarily,
doesn't mean that they're aren't like deeply hurtful
to others.
And I don't mean that in a social justice warrior way,
but in a real way, like people really have
different experiences.
So I feel like really put things into context.
They have to kind of listen to what people are saying,
put aside the emotion of what they're,
emotion with which you're saying it
and try to keep the facts of their experience
and learn from it.
- And because it's not just about
the individual experience either.
It's not like, oh, my friend didn't have a sense of humor
about being licked.
It's that she's been metaphorically licked
57 times that week because she's an attractive law professor
and she doesn't get taken seriously.
And so like men walk through the world
and it's impossible for them to even understand
what it's like to have a different experience of the world.
And that's why it's so important to listen to people
and believe people and believe that they're angry
for a reason.
Maybe you don't like their tone.
Maybe you don't like that they're angry at you.
Maybe you get defensive about that.
Maybe you think that they should explain it to you,
but believe that they're angry for a reason
and try to understand it.
- Yeah, there's a deep truth there
and an opportunity for you to become a better person.
Can I ask you a question?
Haven't you been doing that for two hours?
- Three hours now.
Let me ask you about Ghislaine Maxwell.
She's been saying that she's an innocent victim.
Is she an innocent victim or is she evil
and equally responsible like Jeffrey Epstein?
Now I'm asking far away from any MIT things and more,
just your sense of the whole situation.
- I haven't been following it,
so I don't know the facts of the situation
and what is now known to be her role in that.
If I were her, clearly I'm not,
but if I were her, I wouldn't be going around
saying I'm an innocent victim.
I would say, maybe she's, I don't know what she's saying.
Again, I don't know.
- She was controlled by Jeffrey.
- Is she saying this as part of a legal case
or is she saying this as a PR thing?
- Well, PR, but it's not just her thing.
It's her whole family believes this.
There's a whole effort that says like,
how should I put it?
I believe they believe it.
So in that sense, it's not PR.
I believe the family, basically the family is saying
that she's a really good human being.
- Well, I think everyone is a good human being.
I know that's a controversial opinion,
but I think everyone is a good human being.
There's no evil people.
There's people who do bad things
and who behave in ways that harm others.
And I think we should always hold people accountable
for that, but holding someone accountable
doesn't mean saying that they're evil.
- Yeah, actually those people usually think
they're doing good.
- Yeah, I mean, aside from, I don't know,
maybe sociopaths like are specifically trying
to harm people, but I think most people
are trying to do their best.
And if they're not doing their best,
it's because there's some impediment
or something in their past.
So I just, I genuinely don't believe
in good and evil people, but I do believe
in harmful and not harmful actions.
And so I don't know, I don't care.
Yeah, she's a good person, but if she contributed
to harm, then she needs to be accountable for that.
§19Transcript · 2:40:27–2:49:30
That's my position.
I don't know what the facts of the matter are.
It seems like she was pretty close to the situation,
so it doesn't seem very believable that she was a victim,
but I don't know.
- I wish I have met Epstein, 'cause something tells me
he would just be a regular person,
charismatic person like anybody else.
And that's a very dark reality that we don't know
which among us, what each of us are hiding in the closet.
That's a really tough thing to deal with,
because then you can put your trust into some people
and they can completely betray that trust
and in the process destroy you.
Which there's a lot of people that interacted with Epstein
that now have to, I mean, if they're not destroyed by it,
then their whole, the ground on which they stand ethically
has crumbled, at least in part.
And I'm sure you and I have interacted with people
without knowing it who are bad people.
- As I always tell my four-year-old,
people who have done bad things.
- People who have done bad things.
- He's always talking about bad guys
and I'm trying to move him towards,
they're just people who make bad choices.
- Yeah, that's really powerful, actually.
That's really important to remember,
'cause that means you have compassion
towards all human beings.
Do you have hope for the future of MIT,
the future of Media Lab in this context?
So David Newman is now at the helm.
I'm gonna talk, I talked to her previously,
I'll talk to her again.
She's great.
- Love her.
Yeah, she's great.
I don't know if she knew the whole situation
when she started, because the situation went beyond
just the Epstein scandal.
A bunch of other stuff happened at the same time.
Some of it's not public,
but what I was personally going through at that time.
So the Epstein thing happened, I think,
was it August or September 2019?
It was somewhere around late summer.
In June 2019, so I'm a research scientist at MIT.
You are too, right?
So, and I always have had various supervisors
over the years, and they've just basically
let me do what I want, which has been great.
But I had a supervisor at the time,
and he called me into his office for a regular check-in.
In June of 2019, I reported to MIT
that my supervisor had grabbed me,
pulled me into a hug, wrapped his arms around my waist,
and started massaging my hip, and trying to kiss me,
kiss my face, kiss me near the mouth,
and said literally the words,
"Don't worry, I'll take care of your career."
And that experience was really interesting
because I just, I was very indignant.
I was like, "He can't do that to me.
Doesn't he know who I am?"
And I was like, "This is the Me Too era."
And I naively thought that when I reported that,
it would get taken care of.
And then I had to go through
the whole reporting process at MIT,
and I learned a lot about how institutions
really handle those things internally,
particularly situations where
I couldn't provide evidence that it happened.
I had no reason to lie about it, but I had no evidence.
And so I was going through that,
and that was another experience for me
where there's so many people in the institution
who really believe in protecting the institution
at all costs.
And there's only a few people
who care about doing the right thing.
And one of them resigned.
Now there's even less of them left.
- So what'd you learn from that?
I mean, where's the source,
if you have hope for this institution
that I think you love, at least in part?
I love the idea of MIT.
- I love the idea.
I love the research body.
I love a lot of the faculty.
I love the students.
I love the energy.
I love it all.
I think the administration suffers from the same problems
as any institutional,
any leadership of an institution that is large,
which is that
they've become risk-averse, like you mentioned.
They care about PR.
The only ways to get their attention
or change their minds about anything
are to threaten the reputation of the institute
or to have a lot of money.
That's the only way to have power at the institute.
Yeah, I don't think they have a lot of integrity
or believe in ideas
or even have a lot of connection to the research body
and the people who are really,
'cause it's so weird.
You have this amazing research body of people
pushing the boundaries of things
who aren't afraid to,
there's the hacker culture.
And then you have the administration
and they're really like
protect the institution at all costs.
- Yeah, there's a disconnect, right?
- Complete disconnect.
- I wonder if that was always there,
if it just kind of slowly grows over time,
a disconnect between the administration and the faculty.
- I think it grew over time is what I've heard.
I mean, I've been there for 11 years now.
I don't know if it's gotten worse during my time,
but I've heard from people who've been there longer
that it didn't,
like MIT didn't used to have a general counsel's office.
They didn't used to have all of this corporate stuff.
And then they had to create it as they got bigger
and in the era where such things are,
I guess, deemed necessary.
- See, I believe in the power of individuals
to overthrow the thing.
So it's just a really good president of MIT
or certain people in the administration
can reform the whole thing.
'Cause the culture is still there
of like, I think everybody remembers
that MIT is about the students and the faculty.
- Do they though?
Because I don't know, I've had a lot of conversations
that have been shocking with like senior administration.
They think the students are children.
They call them kids.
It's like, these are the smartest people.
They're way smarter than you.
And you're so dismissive of that.
- But those individuals, I'm saying like the capacity,
like the aura of the place still values the students
and the faculty.
Like I'm being awfully poetic about it.
But what I mean is the administration is the froth
at the top of the, like the waves, the surface.
Like they can be removed and new life can be brought in
that would keep to the spirit of the place.
- Who decides on who to bring in?
Who's higher? - It's bottom up.
Oh, I see.
I see.
But I do think ultimately,
especially in the era of social media and so on,
faculty and students have more and more power.
Just more and more of a voice, I suppose.
- I hope so.
I really do.
I don't see MIT going away anytime soon.
And like, I also don't think it's a terrible place at all.
- Yeah, it's an amazing place.
But there's different trajectories it can take.
- Yeah.
- And like, and that has to do with a lot of things,
including,
does it, is it stays,
even if we talk about robotics,
it could be the capital of the world in robotics.
But currently, if you wanna be doing the best AI work
in the world, you're gonna go to Google or Facebook
or Tesla or Apple or so on.
You're not gonna be, you're not gonna be at MIT.
And so that has to do,
I think that's basically has to do with
not allowing the brilliance of the researchers to flourish.
- Yeah, people say it's about money,
but I don't think it's about that at all.
Like, sometimes you have more freedom
and can work on more interesting things in companies.
That's really where they lose people.
- Yeah.
- And sometimes the freedom in all ways,
which is why it's heartbreaking to get like
people like Richard Stallman,
there's such an interesting line
because like Richard Stallman's a gigantic weirdo
that crossed lines he shouldn't have crossed, right?
But we don't wanna draw too many lines.
This is the tricky thing.
- There are different types of lines in my opinion.
- But it's your opinion.
§20Transcript · 2:49:32–2:58:20
You have strong lines you hold to,
but then if administration listens to every line,
there's also power in drawing a line.
And it becomes like a little drug.
You have to find the right balance.
Licking somebody's arm is never appropriate.
I think the biggest aspect there is not owning it,
learning from it, growing from it
from the perspective of Stallman or people like that,
back when it happened, like understanding,
seeing the right, being empathetic,
seeing the fact that this was like totally inappropriate.
Not when that particular act,
but everything that led up to it too.
- No, I think there are different kinds of lines.
I think there are...
So Stallman crossed lines that essentially
excluded a bunch of people and created an environment
where we, there are brilliant minds
that we never got the benefit of
because he made things feel gross
or even unsafe for people.
There are lines that you can cross
where you're challenging an institution to...
Like, I don't think he was intentionally
trying to cross a line, or maybe he didn't care.
There are lines that you can cross intentionally
to move something forward or to do the right thing.
Like when MIT was like,
you can't put an all-gender restroom in the media lab
because something permits whatever,
and Joey did it anyway.
That's a line you can cross
to make things actually better for people.
And the line you're crossing is some arbitrary, stupid rule
that people who don't wanna take the risk are like...
- Yeah, for sure. - You know what I mean?
- No, ultimately, I think the thing you said is like,
cross lines in a way that doesn't...
alienate others.
So like, for example, me wearing,
I started for a while wearing a suit often at MIT,
which sounds counterintuitive, but that's actually...
People always looked at me weird for that.
MIT created this culture,
specifically the people I was working with.
Like, nobody wore suits.
Maybe the business school does.
- Yeah, we don't trust the suits.
- People don't trust the suits.
I was like, fuck you, I'm wearing a suit.
- Nice. (laughs)
- But that's not really hurting anybody, right?
- Exactly.
It's challenging people's perceptions.
It's doing something that you wanna do.
- Yeah.
- But it's not hurting people.
- And that particular thing was, yeah, it was hurting people.
It's a good line, it's a good line to...
Hurting, ultimately, the people that you want to flourish.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- You tweeted a picture of pumpkin spice Greek yogurt.
And asked, "Grounds for divorce?
"Yes, no."
So let me ask you,
what's the key to a successful relationship?
- Oh my God, a good couple's therapist?
(both laugh)
- What went wrong with the pumpkin spice Greek yogurt?
What's exactly wrong?
Is it the pumpkin?
Is it the Greek yogurt?
I didn't understand.
I stared at that tweet for a while.
- I grew up in Europe,
so I don't understand the pumpkin spice in everything craze
that they do every autumn here.
Like, I understand that it might be good in some foods,
but they just put it in everything.
- And it doesn't belong in Greek yogurt.
- I mean, I was just being humorous.
I ate one of those yogurts
and it actually tasted pretty good.
- Yeah, exactly.
(Bridget laughs)
- I think part of the success of a good marriage
is like giving each other a hard time humorously
for things like that.
- Is there a broader lesson?
'Cause you guys seem to have a really great marriage
from the external perspective.
- I mean, every marriage looks good from the external.
Every, I think, yeah.
(both laugh)
- That's not true, but yeah, I get it.
- Okay, right.
(both laugh)
That's not true.
No, but like, relationships are hard.
Relationships with anyone are hard,
and especially because people evolve and change,
and you have to make sure there's space
for both people to evolve and change together.
And I think one of the things
that I really liked about our marriage vows
was I remember before we got married,
Greg, at some point, got kind of nervous,
and he was like, "It's such a big commitment
"to commit to something for life."
And I was like, "We're not committing to this for life."
And he was like, "We're not?"
And I'm like, "No, we're committing to being part of a team
"and doing what's best for the team.
"If what's best for the team is to break up,
"we'll break up."
Like, I don't believe in this,
like we have to do this for our whole lives.
And that really resonated with him too, so yeah.
- Did you put in the vows?
- Yeah, yeah, that was our vows,
like that we're gonna be a team.
- You're a team and do what's right for the team?
- Yeah, yeah.
- That's very like Michael Jordan view.
Did you guys get married in the desert,
like November rain style with Slash playing?
- Sure, you don't have to answer that.
I'm not good at these questions.
Okay.
- You brought up marriage like eight times.
Are you trying to hint something on the podcast?
- I don't, yeah, I have an announcement to make.
No, I don't know.
It just seems like a good metaphor for,
it felt like a good metaphor for, in a bunch of cases,
for the marriage industrial complex, I remember that.
And, oh, people complaining.
It just seemed like marriage is one of the things
that always surprises me 'cause I wanna get married.
- You do?
- Yeah, I do.
And then I listened to like friends of mine that complain,
not all, I like guys, I really like guys
that don't complain about their marriage.
It's such a cheap, like if, it's such a cheap release valve,
like that's bitching about anything, honestly,
that's just like, it's too easy.
But especially, like bitch about the sports team
or the weather if you want, but like about somebody
that you're dedicating your life to,
like if you bitch about them,
you're going to see them as a lesser being also.
Like you don't think so,
but you're going to like decrease the value you have.
I personally believe over time,
you're not going to appreciate the magic of that person.
I think, anyway, but it's like that I just noticed this
a lot that people are married and they will whine about,
you know, like the wife, whatever,
it's part of the sort of the culture
to kind of comment in that way.
I think women do the same thing about the husband.
He doesn't, he never does this or he's a goof,
he's incompetent at this or that, whatever.
There's a kind of--
- Yeah, there's this tropes like, oh,
you know, husbands never do X and like wives are,
I think those do a disservice to everyone
it's just disrespectful to everyone involved.
- Yeah, but it happens.
So I was brought that up as an example of something
that people actually love, but they complain about
'cause for some reason that's more fun to do
is complain about stuff.
And so that's what with Clippy or whatever, right?
So like you complain about, but you actually love it.
It's just a good metaphor that, you know,
what was I going to ask you?
Oh, you,
your hamster died.
- When I was like eight.
- You miss her?
- Beige.
- What's the closest relationship you've had with a pet?
That the one?
What pet or robot have you loved the most in your life?
- I think my first pet was a goldfish named Bob
and he died immediately and that was really sad.
I think it was really attached to Bob and Nancy,
my goldfish, we got new Bobs and then Bob kept dying
and we got new Bobs, Nancy just kept living.
- So it was very replaceable.
- Yeah, I was young.
It was easy to.
- Do you think there will be a time when the robot,
like in the movie "Her" be something
we fall in love with romantically?
- Oh yeah, oh for sure, yeah.
- At scale, like we're a lot of people.
§21Transcript · 2:58:22–3:03:25
- Romantically, I don't know if it's going to happen at scale.
I think we talked about this a little bit last time
on the podcast too, where I think we're just capable
of so many different kinds of relationships.
And actually part of why I think marriage is so tough
as a relationship is because we put so many expectations
on it, like your partner has to be your best friend
and you have to be sexually attracted to them
and they have to be a good co-parent and a good roommate
and like it's all the relationships at once
that have to work.
But we're like normally with other people,
we have like one type of relationship
or we even have, we have a different relationship
to our dog than we do to our neighbor,
than we do to the person, someone, a coworker.
I think that some people are gonna find romantic
relationships with robots interesting.
It might even be a widespread thing,
but I don't think it's gonna replace
like human romantic relationships.
I think it's just gonna be a separate type of thing.
- It's gonna be more narrow.
- More narrow or even like just something new
that we haven't really experienced before.
Maybe like having a crush on an artificial agent
is a different type of fascination.
I don't know.
- Do you think people would see that as cheating?
- I think people would, well, I mean,
the things that people feel threatened by
in relationships are very manifold, so.
- Yeah, that's just an interesting one.
'Cause maybe they'll be good, a little jealousy
for the relationship.
Maybe they'll be like part of the couple's therapy
you know, kind of thing or whatever.
- I don't think jealousy, I mean, I think
it's hard to avoid jealousy, but I think
the objective is probably to avoid it.
I mean, some people don't even get jealous
when their partner sleeps with someone else.
Like there's polyamory and.
I think there's just such a diversity of different ways
that we can structure relationships or view them
that this is just gonna be another one that we add.
- You dedicate your book to your dad.
What did you learn about life from your dad?
- Oh man, my dad is, he's a great listener
and he is the best person I know
at the type of cognitive empathy
that's like perspective taking.
So not like emotional, like crying empathy,
but trying to see someone else's point of view
and trying to put yourself in their shoes.
And he really instilled that in me from an early age.
And then he made me read a ton of science fiction,
which probably led me down this path.
- Taught you how to be curious about the world
and how to be open-minded.
- Yeah.
- Last question, what role does love play
in the human condition?
Since we've been talking about love and robots.
And you're fascinated by social robotics.
It feels like all of that operates in the landscape
of something that we can call love.
- Love, yeah, I think there are a lot
of different kinds of love.
I feel like it's, we need,
I'm like, don't the Eskimos have all these different words
for snow?
We need more words to describe different types
and kinds of love that we experience.
But I think love is so important.
And I also think it's not zero sum.
That's the really interesting thing about love
is that I had one kid and I loved my first kid
more than anything else in the world.
And I was like, how can I have a second kid
and then love that kid also?
I'm never gonna love it as much as the first.
But I love them both equally.
It just like, my heart expanded.
And so I think that people who are threatened
by love towards artificial agents,
they don't need to be threatened for that reason.
- Artificial agents will just, if done right,
will just expand your capacity for love.
- I think so.
- I agree.
Beautifully put.
Kate, this was awesome.
I still didn't talk about half the things
I wanted to talk about, but we're already
like way over three hours.
So thank you so much.
I really appreciate you talking today.
You're awesome.
You're an amazing human being,
a great roboticist, great writer now.
It's an honor that you would talk with me.
Thanks for doing it.
- Right back at you.
Thank you.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Kate Darling.
To support this podcast, please check out
our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you with some words
from Maya Angelou.
Courage is the most important of all the virtues,
because without courage, you can't practice
any other virtue consistently.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you.
Next time.
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