Episode 329·Deep read

Kate Darling: Social Robots, Ethics, Privacy and the Future of MIT

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Lex Fridman Podcast #329 – Kate Darling: Social Robots, Ethics, Privacy and the Future of MIT Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors. 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. And now a quick second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got True Classic T's for high quality T-shirts, Shopify for e commerce, Linux for Linux, Insight Tracker for biometrics and ExpressVPN for privacy. She's wisely my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I hate those. And since I do this podcast, I am able to control whether we do them or not. I tried to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by I believe in you sponsor. I've been wearing their T-shirts for a while now, so I don't remember, but I do remember that I've been loving it for a while now. Anyway, the sponsor is True Classic T's, their high quality soft slim fitted T-shirts for men. They also make all the other men's wear staples like polos and workout shirts. And they're all built with the same flattering fit as their T-shirts. It's kind of fascinating how something like a T-shirt can feel good and look good, and the way to achieve those two goals are very subtle design decisions. So it's fascinating because I am a T-shirt person. I usually just wear a black T-shirt, a bunch of black T-shirts. True Classic T's is an example of a company that delivers. Now that I've tried it, that's all I've been wearing. I feel amazing, get comfortable and upgrade your wardrobe with True Classic. Get twenty five percent off at trueclassic dot com with code Lex, free shipping included on purchases over one hundred dollars. One hundred percent risk free guarantee with thirty day return policy. This show is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store that brings your ideas to life and gives you tools to manage day to day operations. I've been using Shopify for a while to sell stuff, but I. You know my use cases are pretty simple, and I think that's probably true for many people, for many merchants. Like you just want to sell a couple of things that you care about and to a small set of people that are interested in that kind of thing. But I think there is a lot of entrepreneurs that really use Shopify to like run a business, small business, medium size business, all that kind of stuff. I think it's one point seven million entrepreneurs that use it. Yeah, it's my favorite. As far as I am concerned, if you look on Reddit and all those other kinds of places, Shopify is the recommended place to sell stuff online. Super easy to use, super easy to set up. All that. Get a free trial and full access to Shopify's entire suite of features when you sign up at Shopify dot com slash Lex. That's all lowercase Shopify dot com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Linux, virtual machines. It's an awesome computer infrastructure that I just love. Everything about it, it lets you develop, deploy, and scale. What applications you build faster and easier. I use it for small personal projects. I hope to one day have huge projects that I can run on it. I think the big competitor is AWS. There is probably a bunch of others, but AWS. It's lower cost than AWS, better customer service, the simplicity of everything. I just love it. Obviously, computer infrastructure—the compute has to be really good, right? The actual systems have to be really good. The distributed compute has to be good, but the interface from a user perspective of how you set everything up, how you scale, all that kind of stuff also should be good. I think that's actually more important. The ability to set stuff up to monitor all that kind of stuff, and that's really why I love Linux. And of course, the number one reason—or should I say the number zero reason—is that it's Linux. I love Linux, all things Linux. Visit Linux dot com slash Lex to get one hundred dollars in free credit. This show is also brought to you by Insight Tracker, service I use to track biological data. They have a bunch of plans that collect a bunch of information from your body and you use machine learning algorithms to analyze your blood data, DNA data, fitness tracker data—all of that to give you a picture of what's going on inside you and give you recommendations. For diet, lifestyle changes. I wish they gave like dating advice or career advice or just like food advice. What I should eat today based on my body. That's probably the future. My body is giving me very noisy signals about when it's hungry and what it wants to eat. I wish I had higher resolution signals or like the signals that it's sending needs to be interpreted. There is probably a lot of signal there. It's just my brain is too dumb to interpret it, so I would love to understand what my body is telling me. That's why I love Insight Tracker is that it's listening to your body to give you advice about what you should do with said body. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to insighttracker dot com slash Lex. This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. I also use them to feel good about my life, but that's because I have a strange relationship with software that's really well designed. Anyway, it's like a good VPN should be. It's fast, works on any device, including Linux, Android, all of that good stuff, and it's a base level of protection that everybody should be using. I am probably having a bunch of conversation with cybersecurity folks on both sides. I think I have a person coming on that that used to be an FBI agent doing cybersecurity. And also really want to get a bunch of hackers on former current hackers would be epic of course. It's very difficult because if they're current hackers, there is this gray area about what they can and can't talk about, and I don't like gray areas. I like people to be raw and transparent and real. All that kind of stuff, but no matter what, it's a super fascinating topic. Go to ExpressVPN dot com slash Lex Pod for an extra three months free. This is the Lex Freedom podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here is Kate Darling. Last time we talked a few years back, you wore Justin Bieber shirt for the podcast. So now looking back, you are respected researcher, all the amazing accomplishments in robotics. You are 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 because I walked in I didn't know you were going to be filming. I walked in and you are in a fucking suit. Yeah, and I am like, why are you all dressed up? Yeah, and then you were so nice about it. You like made some excuses. You are like, oh, well, I am 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, I was we were got 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 a one time? No, like how could I touch it again? It was on your podcast now 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 open 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, 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 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 because 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 is this magic aspect that. That which is how people understand robots. If you ask a robotist, 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. Um, 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 is really no 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 am 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, doesn't make sense from a technical perspective because you know the early AI researchers, some of them were trying to recreate human intelligence. Some people still are and there is 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 where we're comparing these two. Um and we're 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 like practical what could we use these technologies for perspective. It's much more interesting to create something new to create a skill set that we don't have that we can partner with and 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 of 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 are 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 you all you need is something that's enough like. A person to to give off cues that someone relates to, and that but that doesn't have to look human or even act human. You can take a robot like R two D two and it just like beeps and beeps, and people love R two D two right even though it's just like a trash can on wheels and they like R two D two more than C three P O who's a humanoid. So there is lots of there is 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. Yeah, just just a voice. Just 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 the robot, the right people to design those is animators like Disney type of people. Yeah, versus like robotists, robotists. Quote unquote are mostly clueless. It seems like they just have their own discipline that they're very good at and they didn't don't have. Yeah, but that don't don't you know I feel like robotics. Of the early twenty first century is not going to be the robotics of the later twenty first century. Like if you call yourself a robotist, it'll be something very different. Because I I think more and more you'll be like a. Maybe like a control engineer or something controls engineer like a 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 not the 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 are so right, and and 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 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. It's 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 am sorry, I fucked up." Yeah, or ask for help. Oh, for 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 have unsolved it. We are really damn good at it, but the magic is in the the self deprecating humor and the self awareness about where our flaws are all that kind of stuff. Yeah, and there is 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. You are welcome. But like they, these poor people work 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? Because I like I like Marty. I feel like Clippy. Yeah, and actually, like there is a parallel between the two. I believe there is. So we were actually going to do a study on this right before the pandemic hit, and then we canceled it because we didn't want to go to the grocery store and neither did anyone else. Um, but our theory so this was with a a student at MIT, Daniela Depeola. She noticed that everyone on Facebook in her circles was complaining about Marty. They're like, "What is this creepy robot? It's watching me. It's always in the way." And she did this like 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 so. And so we were like, that's interesting. And then we did this like 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 is not it looks for spills on the floor. It doesn't actually like look at any people. Um, it's 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 is 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 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 is I mean, some people a lot of people show love by sort of. Busting each other's chops, you know, like making fun of each other, and then if I think I think people would really love it if Marty talked back. And and like 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 saying like yes I I'm watching you because you're so important with your shopping patterns I'm collecting all this data or or just you know 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 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 he 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 like not a not a you know 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 relationship I think we absolutely can find deep meaningful relationship 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 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 I wonder if that contributed maybe to people feeling watched because 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 doesn't 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 like the more personality you give it the more it feels like it's not sharing data with anybody else 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 going to hear that right that's true that's true no no I'm kidding well 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 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 what are your what are your actually thoughts about that the the way the avatars the way like Mark Zuckerberg looks in that world you know the in the the the Metaverse the virtual reality world where you can have like virtual meetings and stuff like that like how do we get that right do you have thoughts about that because it's a kind of it's a it's 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 like posting whatever yeah but I mean have you seen it because it there's something you can't quite put into words that doesn't feel genuine yeah 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 having 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 like avatars and a lot of the games are about connecting with others I just the thing that I don't know is and again I haven't looked into this at all I've been like shockingly not very interested in the Metaverse but they must have poured so much investment into this meta and like why why is it so why are people why is it so bad like there's got to be a reason there's got to 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 because they they run through this whole process through the PR department through all that kind of stuff and it somehow becomes generic to that process they strip out anything interesting because it could be controversial is that or yeah right exactly like like what I mean we we're living through this now like with with a lot of people with cancellations all those kinds of stuff people are nervous and nervousness results in like like usual the assholes are ruining everything but you know the magic of human connection is taking risks of making a risky joke of of of like with people you like who are not assholes good people like some of the fun 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 like in Metaverse the possibility of sexual assault and sexual harassment and all that kind of stuff it's 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 I but in general forget all that just the ability to come up 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 the independent game designers have solved this problem of how to create something beautiful and interesting and compelling they they do a really good job so you have to let those kinds of minds of small groups of people design things and let them run with it let let them run wild and do edgy stuff yeah but otherwise you become 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 paper clip 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 because it would be like well there would be these meetings about why is it a people 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 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 like okay so what I know from social robotics is like obviously if you create agents that okay so take for an example you 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 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 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 I because 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 it obviously great humor great personality doesn't have to like Clippy but yeah I mean it but it's tricky to get right and I I'm not exactly sure I 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 going to 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 um from a designer perspective or maybe like a Johnny Ive that is almost like a dictator yeah you want a benevolent dictator yeah who rolls in and says like the cuts through the lawyers the PR but has a benevolent aspect like yeah has 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 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 in the 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 because rushed through the caption reads two hospital delivery robots whose sexy nurse names Roxie 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 this stupid robot doesn't work but why Lola and Roxie 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 in assistance and are like nurses are usually female gendered robots that are you know powerful all wise computers like Watson usually have like a booming male coded voice and name so like what 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 just give it a different name like why Roxie it's because people aren't even thinking so to some extent I don't 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 the when 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 Roxie and Lola as as as names they it would enjoy most like that could come up as as the highest as then 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 what do you think about that like what I mean if I 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 like if everyone wants Alexa to 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 like in some sense there's this weird tension like you want to listen to a lot of people but at the same time you want to 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 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 or or you know that that 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 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 going to 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 like ambiguous voice people will just choose something and maybe that's better than just like you know entrenching something that you've decided is best but I do think it it can be helpful on the like anthropomorphism engagement level to give it attributes that people identify with yeah I think a lot of robotists I know they they don't gender the robot they don't they even try to avoid naming the robot or naming it something that is 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 they're going to anthropomorphize it that's a good point and so like you want to be able to like 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 like 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 yeah like that arm I worked a lot a lot with quadrupeds now with with with robot dogs you know that arm people think is a head immediately yeah 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 major eye people. " Well, Boston Dynamics is an interesting company, or any of the others that are doing similar thing because. Their their main source of money is in industrial applications, so like surveillance of factories and doing dangerous jobs. So to them, it's almost good PR to for people to be scared of these things because it's 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 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 how to make the whole thing happen, 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 like 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 he was very. Um, held of integrity about the authenticity of them, uh, but then when they started to go viral, I think that's when they started to realize, oh, there is something interesting here that. You know I don't I don't know how much they took it seriously in the beginning other than realizing that they could play within 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 is a bit more PR leaking in, but those videos are made by engineers because that's what they find fun. It's like testing the robustness of the system. I mean they. They're having a lot of fun there with the robots. Totally. Have you been have you been to visit? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's cool. It's one of the most incredible. Like I I I. I mean because I have eight robot dogs now. Wait, you have eight robot dogs. What? They just walking around your place like. Yeah, I am working on them. That is actually one of my goals is. To have at any one time, always a robot moving. Oh, I am far. That's an ambitious goal. Well, I have like more roombos that I know what to do with the room that I program, so the the programmable roombos. Nice. And I have a bunch of little like I built the well I am not finished with it yet but bought a robot from Rick and Morty. I saw a bunch of robots everywhere but the thing is. What happens is you are working on one robot at a time, and that becomes

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