Ep156 What Do We Learn About AI by Dancing with Robots? with Catie Cuan

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Speaker 1: Why does the way that a robot moves change how we feel about it? And what does that tell us about human brains? For example, should we program a robot to look at an object that it's about to pick up, even if it doesn't need to look because it has cameras all around? Why did our evolutionary history make us so sensitive to movement? Why do we read so much into it? Why do we trust graceful motion? Is movement the original form of animal intelligence? Today we're joined by doctor Katie Kwan, a roboticist and a professional dancer and choreographer. Katie is an expert on this strange social interface between robots and humans, and she's gotten there by dancing with robots. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Egelman. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Here's something that happens all the time in modern life, and most of us barely notice it anymore. You walk into a grocery store and the automatic door slides open before you touch it. If you live in a big city, little delivery robots roll past you on the sidewalk. If you have a modern car, the steering wheel vibrates and pushes back against you if you drift across the lane. These technologies are all moving, by which I mean something is shifting in space or changing velocity, or turning towards you, or pausing or accelerating, or signaling intention. Now, I know that I'm guilty of thinking about the digital revolution mostly as zeros and ones, But it's more than that, And as we're now entering the dawn of robotics, it's about to be much more than that. We are going to be surrounded with moving computers, and movement is actually something much closer to what your brain understands. Long before language and writing and agriculture, animal brains evolve to answer a very old question, what the heck is moving out there? And why? Nervous systems became exquisitely tuned to reading emotion because survival depended on it. So your brain, like all animal brains, is constantly inferring intention from movement. You look at tiny changes in speed or hesitation, or smoothness, or rhythm or posture.
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Speaker 2: These are all.
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Speaker 1: Things that matter to your brain For example, you can tell when somebody is angry from the way that they close the cabinet. You can tell when somebody is afraid from their body postures they're walking across a parking lot at night. You can tell when somebody loves you from the way they move toward you after a long absence. So we are movement reading machines, and now, for the first time in history, we're entering a world where huge numbers of non living things move autonomously around us. And that's of course totally new, because for millions of years, everything that moved on its own belonged to nature. But now the movement around us includes machines that we program. We have cars driving themselves. We have drones buzzing over our heads. We have warehouse robots navigating aisles. We have humanoid robots sloping across factory floors. Whenever I'm in the restaurant near my house, there's a robotic bus buoy. It's essentially like a big cylinder that carries the food back and forth from the kitchen. And many people have pancaked sized robots that vacuum the house. And when you watch a moving robot, your brain has to decide very quickly, what is this thing? What does it intend? Is it safe? Is it aware of me? Now here's a strange psychological thing that we're going to talk about today. A machine can perform the exact same task in two different ways, and one version feels reassuring and the other version feels unsettling because our nervous systems assign meaning to movement. So we're about to spend this next century surrounded by moving machines, which raises this new set of questions. What makes a robot feel graceful? Why do we instinctively search for what the eyes are doing and what that tells us about intention? Why do some movements make us feel uneasy? Could robots eventually feel socially legible to us the way that animals and humans do? And what can dance teach us about robotics? Now that might seem like a weird question, but dancers and choreographers spend their lives studying something in fine detail that engineers rarely, if ever, think about, which is the emotional meaning of motion, The arc of an arm, the timing of a pause, the smoothness of a transition, the emotional payload that gets carried by velocity and rhythm, and today's guest lives precisely at that intersection. Katie Kwan is a roboticist and a dancer and a choreographer. She's an adjunct professor at Stanford and an entrepreneur working at the frontier of human robot interaction. She earned her PhD in robotics, specializing in what's known as imitation learning, which is teaching robots to learn tasks from human movement. She's performed professionally in hundreds of dance performances involving humans and robotics moving together on stage. Here's Katie Kwan. So, Katie, you say that how a robot moves changes how we feel about it. Why is movements so psychologically powerful?
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Speaker 3: Humans have moved together in large groups as long as we've been humans. Every early human society shows evidence of dancing and collective movement.
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Speaker 2: Because if you.
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Speaker 3: Can dance, you can hunt very large animals, you can win wars against other warring tribes, you can celebrate successes and create strong intersocial bonding. So movement is this very core evolutionary quality of what it means to be a person.
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Speaker 1: Let me understand that. Why if you can dance can you do these other things because.
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Speaker 3: You can coordinate large numbers of humans together, I see with their movement, and this involves things like being able to mirror other people's movement, being spatially aware of where they are, calling verbals that are associated with timing, and movement that has intention and is not only abstract. And so if you can coordinate dancing together in very large groups, you can be tremendously effective at these other things that require a movement coordination. There is a great headline and Scientific American in twenty seventeen which said does dancing just feel good? Or did it help early humans survive? The takeaway is that it's both. The other flip side of why movement and a robots movement is super important to us is because how we perceive the world has so much to do with what in the world is moving and why because we used to get chased down and eaten by large predators, so we have this sharp acuity as to what movement means. For example, almost everything that we've ever been exposed to that moves autonomously is a part of nature. That's things like trees moving in the wind, squirrels running up and down the field of a park watching other people walking versus running. Almost all the movement that's autonomous that we've been exposed to is a part of nature that's completely changing now because robots move autonomously, but we don't have hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to help anticipate whether the movement that they're doing is safe or scary. And that's where how we choreograph a robot and how it moves is going to be table stakes when it comes to people accepting and feeling safe around these tools.
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Speaker 1: And so if the same robot accomplishes a task with two different ways of moving, what does that cause in our brains.
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Speaker 3: Let's say that you and I are sitting here having a completely normal conversation and then I somewhat eerily grab my water bottle while I'm still making eye contact with you.
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Speaker 2: How did that make you feel? Just now?
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Speaker 1: Right? So for the listeners who sort of reached out kind of like a robot and grabbed it while breaking her gaze, so, yeah, it's weird. It was weird to me. Really, it was like a zombie movie. I guess. Normally we attribute attention and intention to where your eyes are and so somehow you were just reaching out as though you already knew the bottle was there, and picked it up like a robot.
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Speaker 3: Right, And let's say, I'm now, for everyone who's not watching the video but listening, I'm going to put the bottle back on the table.
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Speaker 2: How did that feel?
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Speaker 1: Okay? Now she picked it back up. Looking at it, it looked much more normal, to the extent that I didn't even notice you were doing in a sense.
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Speaker 3: Sure, So robots have sensors that are different than ours. Right, they have time of flight sensors, they have light r they have cameras that are in all different kinds of positions, and it gives them a type of spatial awareness which is very different than our spatial awareness.
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Speaker 2: So robot might be able.
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Speaker 3: To grab a water bottle without quote unquote looking at it with its gaze because it probably doesn't have eyes the same way that we do. That feels very creepy for us as people, because over the course of your entire life, you've seen millions, billions, I don't know, trillions of interactions with other people where you've learned to anticipate what their movement means, and that if I move my gaze towards something that means that my attention is on it and I'm likely to take an action, whereas a robot doesn't need to do that because the way its body is constructed is fundamentally different than a human body. And for someone especially who's not that exposed to robots or doesn't spend a ton of time with them, maybe you're an eight year old in school, maybe you're an eighty eight year old and a caretaking facility. If your first exposure with a robot, the designers and programmers and creators of that robot are not socially attuned to these types of very minor cues, then you are going to scare and alienate a whole lot of people because you're not thinking about these intangibles which actually affect the human perception of the machine.
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Speaker 1: You know, this makes me rethink something. So I saw a terminator. I think it was too where he comes back and these sort of help the kid Schwarzenegger, this terminated robot, and one thing that struck me is he you know, he's always turning around and looking at what's going on. And I thought, gosh, if you're a robot from the future, you don't need to have two little cameras on the front to look around. You can have eyes everywhere, and you don't need to turn your stupid head all the time. But what you're saying really changes my view on this suddenly, because there is something useful for us about a robot that moves the way that we do, if only because we're used to that? Is that right?
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Speaker 2: Absolutely right?
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Speaker 3: If you look around I live in San Francisco, there's Weamo's driving everywhere. It's amazing because they have view and gaze all they have a three sixty vision of understanding. They have sensors all around the exteria there, and still when people go to cross the street, they look into the driver's seat to see if there's someone there to validate yes, indeed, I'm safe across the road, because that's what we're so accustomed to. Weimo has a nice user signaling mechanism that they've worked around with this, where they have a small screen that flips on top of the autonomous car that indicates to the pedestrian.
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Speaker 2: Yes, I see you.
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Speaker 3: But it's so essential that when you're interacting with a machine, it's not only that you see the machine, but you want to know that it also sees and is legible to you, and that relationship is I think fundamentally under explored. Researchers have looked at it fairly closely, and a lot of different university settings and social roboticists, you know, people who are making machines that are specifically designed for human intention think about this very deeply. But I think we have a massive new class of robots that are cropping up right now, tremendous amount of investment going into the space where I don't hear leaders from many of those companies highlighting the importance of making their new class of robots clear and legible to the humans that they're going to be around.
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Speaker 1: Okay, this is great, So let's go into your origin story and then we'll come back to these issues. So you are very special because you are both a dancer and a roboticist. So tell us your path to get here.
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Speaker 3: That's very generous thing to say, thanks, David. I think, well, so I've as long as I can remember, I've always been in love with numbers, and I always love to move. My family's cuban. My dad says, if you don't know how to dance, you're probably not a Cuban, and so my whole family grew up doing social dance, and I trained in dance most of my early life and also was very athletic. I played volleyball, I did track and field, and I always had this balance where I loved my math and science classes and I always love to express and move in choreograph. Specifically, I love to choreograph, and I.
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Speaker 2: Had some exposure to the tech world.
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Speaker 3: I got to intern at a couple of big tech companies when I was in college, and then my first job out of college, I did private equity consulting at one of the big firms. Realized very quickly that wasn't for me. I used to sit in my first job. I was twenty one in my suit on the fourteenth floor of a building in Times Square and looked down into the Broadway dance studios. Literally I could see straight down into them from my desk and thought, that's my childhood dream, that's my other life. If I don't pursue this now, I'll never do it. Wound up leaving that job. I became a professional dancer, so I got to dance at them at Topolitan Opera Ballet at Lincoln Center in New York. I had my own dance company. I had this very rich artistic life, and because of my background and technology and business, I also was always leading early stage tech companies of some variety, and so I had this very bifurcated existence between being a professional artist and being in the technology world. I knew on some level I wanted to combine those things. And around that same time, my dad got really sick and spent quite a bit of time in the hospital. English is his third language, he's an immigrant, and he was surrounded by all these giant machines and they were beeping and making noise. And if you've spent an extended period in hospitals, depending on what facility you're in, there's whole parts of that experience that are really emotionally taxing. And I think to see my dad's experience, especially in relationship to these big machines, was an obvious lightning bolt moment for me of I should take my skills as an artist, that artists know how to oscillate and change emotions and apply that to the design of these new technologies and tools. And so my life took another right turn because then I decided to go get a PhD in robotics, and so I did my master's and my PhD at Stanford, and imitation learning was my specialization in my thesis. So it's a sub field of machine learning that's specifically about robots and learning tasks from people. Did that at Stanford and then Google. Spent quite a bit of time at Google while I was doing my PhD, and still spend quite a bit of time at Stanford where I'm an adjunct professor there now.
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Speaker 2: So I've gotten to.
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Speaker 3: Have this semi circuitous But for me, it always seemed very aligned with this exploration of numbers and expression and really about making nascent technologies more human centered, whimsical, and widely accessible.
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Speaker 1: And so one of the big projects that you did was dancing with robots, So tell us about that.
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Speaker 3: I've choreographed and danced I think with more different types of robots than anyone on earth.
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Speaker 2: If someone else had let me know.
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Speaker 3: Because we should exchange notes since it's a cuckoo experience. But yeah, I've used robots in quite a few artistic and research projects, everything from the giant abb industrial robots that solder welds on cars all the way down to small rumbas that drive around, and I've made a bunch of my own robots for different projects and for me, the first time I ever danced with a robot, which was during a residency I had at the University of Illinois Urbana champagn with Amy Levis, who was the professor there at the time, was one of the most incredible experiences of my life because I felt myself imbue my physical agency into this machine and then interact with it so I could choreograph it to do something and then also experience it in real time. Instead of I'm going to make you do something, now you do it. It wound up becoming a bi directional interactive experience.
00:17:26
Speaker 1: As in you reacted to it m hmm exactly And did it have sensors so it could sense what you were doing or it was pre programmed.
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Speaker 3: All the robots I've worked with have some form of sensing, which means that their behavior can be nondeterministic. I mean, even if you have sensors, you can still be doing a pre choreographed motion. But in the first robot I ever got to use in that setting was actually called a Baxter robot was made by a company called Rethink Robotics is Rodney Brooks' longtime roboticist, made that sort of bilateral, two armed, symmetric, vaguely humanoid robot that was supposed to be used in collaborative settings, and it also seemed very safe, but also risky because you can't anticipate what it's going.
00:18:11
Speaker 1: To do in what way, as in it it'll make movements that you didn't see coming.
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Speaker 3: Well, I think all robots, even if they're very reliable, they're complex systems, so they do things all the time that surprise you. Maybe they wind up in a configuration that they weren't supposed to be in and it stops moving, or maybe it's been running for longer than it should have been and it gets too hot in times out or in that case with that robot, the backs to robot because of where it was in the lab, there was sort of static charge everywhere, and I'd been shuffling my plastic sneakers against the flooring and then at some point the computer actually zapped because of all the slot collect we had to you know, no one could have anticipated that that would have happened. Of here we are wearing sneakers and now it's creating problems for the robot.
00:18:57
Speaker 2: But I enjoy that. Actually, I like.
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Speaker 3: Working with complex systems that are not one hundred percent predictable all the time because you need to be on your toes.
00:19:06
Speaker 1: So for somebody who hasn't seen dancing with robots, give a sense of what that looks like.
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Speaker 3: Robots move in ways that are very different than people. The most obvious example is the drone. This is something that flies, so it moves off the floor and has a completely different dimension than humans do. We can jump, but we don't stay in the air for very long. I went to the San Francisco Valley this week and I was amazed at.
00:19:28
Speaker 2: How high they can jump.
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Speaker 3: But they're not hanging in the air right, So so robots move in ways that are very different than how humans move, and for me, as a choreographer, a maker, and now an entrepreneur, it opens an enormous canvas of things to play with. It's almost like if you or a person who exclusively played acoustic guitar and then you discovered that you could also play the electric guitar, and you could use a loop pedal and you could.
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Speaker 2: Broaden the range of or.
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Speaker 3: For you, David, you know you think about, I'm working as an author, but I'm also now I can speak to the things that I'm writing, and I can put them in new mediums and modalities, which are films and not only in fiction books. And so it all of a sudden it opened does up this new canvas of ways that you can work. And so for someone who's never seen a performance between a human and a robot, you're depending on the kind of machine that gets used. You'll see types of motions that are a little bit foreign or alien to you, and that can convey different types of stories or different ways of being. I often use robots in my pieces as a character, but it doesn't look like a human looks as a character, And so what does it mean for those things to still convey emotion and story when they don't look like people.
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Speaker 1: One thing I've been wondering about with robot movement generally is the uncanny valley where for anyone who does know this term, it's that you know, if a robot looks more and more human, gets closer and closer looking human, at some point just before it gets there, there's this sort of uncanny thing where it looks kind of almost human, but it's not quite right. But tell us. Usually we think about that in terms of looks, but tell us about that in terms of movement. And when it comes to dancing with robots, does that matter or is being in the uncanny valley kind of an interesting place?
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Speaker 3: Have you ever seen a robot that you, for you, has put you squarely in this uncanny space?
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Speaker 1: Yeah, which one Sophia, And these various robots that are almost human but they're kind of jerking around a little bit and their faces move around in kind of strange ways.
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Speaker 3: Right, So I've seen a few of these robots that for me put me in the uncanny valley. And the first question that always comes up for me is why you know this is a creepy space to be in. I'm not sure I want to be in this space. And I also it doesn't draw me towards the machine. It makes me feel more alienated. I think where that shows up in terms of movement. So movement's amazing because it happens over a time horizon. It's the difference between a picture and a film. So it's taking a snapshot, which is a pose, versus seeing a movement actually unfold over time, which is your actual movement sequence. And I think when we design these kinds of trajectories, the beginning, the middle, and the end are all important. How it started or why it started, what the movement looks like throughout, where it resolves and ends, and then where it goes next. You could even argue that you're in a choreography for your entire life. From the moment that you are born until the moment the lights go out, you are moving continuously. You are in one long choreographic sequence. I think where this can sometimes get creepy from an uncanny Valley standpoint is if those transitions, so why I started a movement is unusual, unpredictable, strange, where I am in the middle of that movement, and then how it gets resolved. And I guess the best exact sample as I could give you is like if I was sitting here right now and then all of a sudden it did some sort of big jerker shape, that would be a discontinuity. You wouldn't understand where it came from. If you saw that kind of thing on a stage, you would ascribe meaning to that continuity because you would say, oh, here were all these dancers moving in soft graceful light patterns, and then all of a sudden one of them jerked around.
00:23:24
Speaker 2: What does that mean? You know?
00:23:27
Speaker 3: So, I think with robots we need to be thinking about sequence, which is the beginning of the middle of the end. We need to be thinking about discontinuities. And then, of course it's always relational. So if a robot has been moving near you doing things that you can follow and understand, and then stops doing that for some reason, you're going to ascribe meaning to it.
00:23:52
Speaker 1: So is that useful when you choreographed to have robots do things that are a little bit inhuman I think that.
00:23:58
Speaker 3: Robots should move like for me, the expressive potential of them not being the same as people, you know, having motors or linear actuators that are different than ours are I enjoy that, you know, I like the It's almost if you were a painter and you said you like the fact that painting with a brush is different than painting with your fingers. You know, it's it's experientially different. You want to highlight with those changes. It doesn't mean that painting with your fingers is worse or painting with your brushes are worse or better. You couldn't qualify. It's they just provide different artistic expressive potential.
00:24:36
Speaker 2: You know.
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Speaker 3: I think as a choreographer, I'm always interested in how can I use these devices to say something about the world that I wouldn't be able to do without them. So it's not marketing on behalf of a robot. It is saying something about what it is to be human in this moment in twenty twenty six that I couldn't say otherwise.
00:25:12
Speaker 1: As a choreographer. What do you see in motion that an engineer would ignore or just not notice?
00:25:20
Speaker 3: Engineers mostly think about how can I have a robot efficiently perform a task. What that typically means is I want to minimize the amount of energy that this robot takes, which often is very closely linked to I want to minimize the time it takes to do that. For example, if you have a robot in a factory that needs to pick objects out of a bin, you need to meet a certain threshold of how many picks you perform per hour, and you want to reach a certain threshold of accuracy so you pick the right object when that command is required. So I think most of my colleague engineers are thinking very much about efficiency and the time, energy, accuracy domain, et cetera. When I'm thinking about choreography with robots that need to be around people, Yes, it's important if you had a robot that was near you in a restaurant and was taking a glass off your table, for example, for it to grab the glass and not to grab your purse, or for it to grab a plate and not to grab your phone. Accuracy is important. Of course, we want it to be fast and efficient enough that provides value to the restaurant or whoever the buyer would be in that case, and you are at a restaurant, you're having a good experience. You want to enjoy the food. You chances are there's good lighting in there. You probably picked a nice shirt to be able to.
00:26:43
Speaker 2: Wear at a dinner.
00:26:45
Speaker 3: You don't want something that screeches and scars you or interrupts you in the middle of conversation. And that's where I think choreography has a tremendous role to play in terms of taking that movement from not only being accurate or efficient or subcases sacrificing some of that accuracy efficiency timing in order to be safer, legible, and more empowering.
00:27:06
Speaker 2: For people to be around.
00:27:08
Speaker 1: So what's an example of the kind of way that you might sacrifice sufficiency to make let's say a waiter robot you feel more comfortable.
00:27:17
Speaker 3: I think you know the path that you take in order to get to a table, right, So it might be that the shortest path requires you to bypass a bunch of people who are in the middle of conversation, cut through the middle of them. Or it might be that the fastest path for you to be able to grab that dish is to move over someone's arm for example. Those things are rude, I mean, they're not polite. You want a robot in a restaurant that takes the path. Maybe that's a little bit longer, but doesn't stop to people who are flirting at the table from being continuing to be able.
00:27:49
Speaker 2: To talk to each other.
00:27:49
Speaker 3: So I think it's paying attention to social cues and being able to abide by them that would warrant reducing your efficiency.
00:27:59
Speaker 1: Evit, move around to the other side and gently take the thing out and so on. Got it. So efficiency is not always the acme that we're shooting for. It's other kinds of social cues that we get from movement.
00:28:12
Speaker 2: Sure, which we can call those things cost functions.
00:28:14
Speaker 3: So we have ways of describing this to robots algorithmically and mathematically and saying, hey, there's a cost associated with when you're reaching in between two people who are sitting next to each other to grab something off of a table, you should be going around. So I think there are very seamless ways for us to be able to do this if they are things that we value.
00:28:33
Speaker 1: Yeah. Cool, And this comes back to that second question that I asked you about. If the same robot performs a movement in two very different ways, how does that strike us very differently in terms of our brains. So in the case of grabbing over the people versus reaching around in a nice way, we have all kinds of social interpretation on that. Yeah.
00:28:54
Speaker 3: Plus, I mean, the saturation of robots in society right now is really low. So these types of first exposures, if they go well or poorly, they affect people's impressions of these new tools. And you'll notice there's a whole new genre of robots that do spill detection and grocery stores and pharmacies or big box retailers like Target or Walmart. I'm not sure if all of them have adapted these, but I've seen them in a variety of different locations and so funny because they are these very tall columnal robots that can move in any direction. But what the company has done is they've stuck googly eyes on them because people need a place to look. They need to know where do I direct my gaze? And so even if you, as a robot designer, don't put this on the robot yourself, chances are humans will come up with workarounds to make them more palatable.
00:29:42
Speaker 1: Now you've done movement analysis on your robots, and the question is how do you translate movement into code?
00:29:50
Speaker 3: Wow, so many different ways we can generate trajectories. So we can have big long lists of numbers that are positions in space. So it's for every single motor that's on a robot, we're going to give it value in radiance of where we want it to go, and then it'll go there and it winds up creating a shape at the end. We can we call do kinesthetic teaching, which you mean you could put a robot. We call it in compliant mode, so all it's doing is resistant gravity and somebody comes up grabs it presses record moves the robot around with their arms or sometimes with a teleoperation device that's simply a device that somehow mirrors the movement of the robot in some capacity, and you can record movements that way. You can also record movements from motion captures. So I could be standing in a dance studio wearing one of those motion capture suits like they wear in the movies, and move around a bunch and then decide if there were specific primitives from what I was doing that I wanted to. So there are so many different ways that you can choreograph and move a machine. And I keep using this word choreograph. I think you could call it animate. You could, I'd say design motion for or plan you know motion planning depends on how you cut it, but yes, that would be a part of it too. So there's so many different ways to make robots move.
00:31:11
Speaker 1: When a robot moves gracefully, what is it that we are perceiving.
00:31:18
Speaker 3: You're seeing velocities that fall within a specific band that roughly mirror the kinds of velocities that we see from other things in the natural world.
00:31:30
Speaker 2: You're also seeing fairly low jerk.
00:31:33
Speaker 3: This is kind of the when a robots starts moving, it's whether or not it creates these strong discontinuities between its sets of motions. I think the other thing that people don't think about enough, which in my company and all my performance works we're very attuned to, is actually sound. We're very sensitive to the combination of movement and sound, and we're sensitive also to the discontinuities between those things. If you have a movement that looks very leisurely, where it's smooth, it's continuous, but you have hardcore screeching, intense high volume that can be very jarring and uncanny for people. And similarly, if you're seeing a robot that's super jerky or creating joint configurations and moving around in patterns which seem strange, and it's being done to this soft ambling. So people are very sensitive to that as well, and have in a product setting to be super clear, not just on a stage. They actually are very sensitive to those things in products that ship in the real world. And robots make a lot of movement because they have motors, a lot of them have fans typically to keep them cool, and so we need to be sensitive to the sound as well.
00:32:53
Speaker 1: Would two people from two different cultures interpret the movement of a robot differently, or as is it some fundamental evolutionary issue that we would all interpret the movements same.
00:33:04
Speaker 3: Way, the same way that we have gestures, which mean different things in different cultures, so gesticulating in general has different sets of meanings.
00:33:13
Speaker 2: I think movement overall is.
00:33:15
Speaker 3: Perceived differently by people who come from different cultures, and I think there are universal similarities because of this evolutionary prior that we have to being very sensitive to.
00:33:26
Speaker 2: Things that are moving fast towards us and don't appear to be slowing down.
00:33:30
Speaker 3: Regardless of what culture you're in, I think you would infer that as being threatening or scary, or movement happening out of the corner of your eye that seems jerky and discontinuitous, like you would have some sensitivity to that regardless. So I think gesture one thousand percent varies by culture. I think there are some attributes of motion which we can all agree on in terms of how we react.
00:33:55
Speaker 1: So what's more unsettling? Do you think a beautiful, realistic looking robot that moves in a jerky manner or a very mechanical, weird robot that moves smoothly like a human.
00:34:07
Speaker 2: I think it's the first one.
00:34:08
Speaker 3: I think when something looks similar to humans, are expectations for what it can do go through the roof. Rodney Brooks talks about this a lot longtime MIT professor, founder of i Robot now robust Ai.
00:34:22
Speaker 2: He says, the closer you.
00:34:24
Speaker 3: Make something to a human, the higher people's expectations are for it, for what it can do and accomplish. And so I think the former case, where you have something that looks very close to a human, but it moves in ways they're super unsettling, that's hard for people. I think it also as a builder and a maker, we have this huge design canvas of what's possible. We don't necessarily want to constrain ourselves all the time. I mean humans, we watch Toy Story, we see you Slinky's being animated on the screen, or mister potato Head. You know these things that are abstract up but still give a convey emotion and feeling. And so I think as roboticists we can also be playing in different corners of the design space.
00:35:11
Speaker 1: And when you think about intelligence, do you think that that is just a cognitive problem that we could solve with lllms or do you think that embodiment actually having a body is part of what we mean by intelligence.
00:35:25
Speaker 3: I just finished reading Michael Polland's new book, A World Appears.
00:35:28
Speaker 2: Have you read this?
00:35:29
Speaker 3: I have? Okay, what a beautiful book. Yeah, he's such a fabulous writer. He writes about embodiment in the book with this question of can something truly be intelligent if it doesn't have a body? One critique I have for Michael Pollin if you're listening about this book, is he gestures and speaks towards people of the literary tradition like Henry James or Virginia Woolf and how they write about this experience of being conscient, and that they fold language into these interesting configurations to convey this continuous, abstract stream of conscious thought. I'm thinking the whole time you need to have interviewed some dancers for this book, because Hopemore, who is a choreographer in San Francisco, has this statement She've put on a lot of T shirts for a long time, which.
00:36:23
Speaker 2: Said, the body is the brain.
00:36:26
Speaker 3: There is so much to the experience of consciousness and of being intelligent that has to do with living and having a body in the real world. And dancers understand this intuitively because when you look at the training that goes into shaping and sculpting the muscles, the body, the awareness, the balance, that's all fantastic. And it's the intangibles of creating emotional connection while you're performing on stage that you derived so over the course of performing hundreds thousands of times, that you get from exchanging and dancing with people in a studio, and that so much of that intelligence about being relational and connecting is based in your body and these body based somatic kinesthetic memories. And I'm thinking, wow, I love that book, you know, top to bottom, and how can we describe what's the kind of intelligence that you get from being that somatically centered for so long?
00:37:35
Speaker 2: So I think you know, AI.
00:37:37
Speaker 3: Has been hugely impactful for all of us on screens contained into these two D light boxes, in our phones and on our laptops. Now we're moving into this new era where AI is coming off of the screen. It's manifesting in the physical world. Has a physical body, whether that's a big industrial robot arm that's powered by all the latest we call them in robotics via so vision language action models as opposed to LLMS LLMS well how that whole train sits together LMS Large language models VLMs Vision language models. So these are models that can look at pictures and images and describe them in natural language. And then on top of that, in robotics, we have what we call vla's vision language action models, So it's teaching robots how to then take action on the basis of that knowledge. And in our case, what we're building at my company we call them VLI is so vision language interaction models. These are models that are specifically geared towards teaching autonomous physical agents to interact with people. Your original question was about how intelligence is going to sit in the body. I think, for sure, a huge part of being a human and our experience of our consciousness is based in our body. Everything from what you ate affects how you feel to whether you've stretched enough I think can also affect you know, how open you are to different sets of ideas, and so we can't separate them. I mean, we also don't know how consciousness is even dispersed in the body. I mean, you know this more than anyone. Whether it's can't only be in the brain, It kind of sits in all these other places. So do you think that we can have a true intelligence that doesn't have some form of embodiment.
00:39:21
Speaker 1: I wonder this all the time. What's clear is that the three pounds of brain tissue that's where most of the action is. And the reason we know that is because you can get your heart replaced and an artificial heart put in, and you can get a kidney removed, and you can get your limbs amputated, and you're still the same person. But if you damage just a tiny part of brain tissue, it changes who you are. So we know that that's the densest representation of who you are. But the way that I think about it is that the brain is like the city, let's say Manhattan, and then all the rest of this is sort of the outlying areas, and there's still a lot of communication between the main city and the rural areas. There's lots of stuff happening back and forth. So you know, if something were to happen to Manhattan, like an earthquake or something, you got real troubles there. But there's so much signaling going back and forth between the countryside, and it may well be that consciences requires all that. I'll just mention there's a company that's doing cryogenics. They will freeze you after you die. So you pay a certain amount of money and you can get your brain frozen. And the idea is that sometime in the future civilizations will figure out how to thaw this out. But if you pay more money, you can get your whole body frozen. And people have asked me, what's my opinion on whether I think it's worth it to pay the more money, and I suspect it's probably worth it to pay to get the whole body there so that it's still the same you.
00:40:42
Speaker 2: I'm curious as well.
00:40:43
Speaker 3: I read an article from Bruce Hood, who's at the University of Bristol, who said that the majority of the neurons in the brain are actually in the cerebellum. It's the back of the brain that controls your movement, so that part of the reason we might have a brain at all is to support our motion. We have something like eighty percent in this year, and then only twenty percent control these higher order thought processes of language and math and things like that. Is that right, well sort of.
00:41:11
Speaker 1: So it is the case that the cerebralm has an enormous number of neurons in it. And what that indicates is the absolute importance of movement in the world. The fact that you only have x number of neurons that are devoted towards the higher function stuff doesn't say anything to its relative importance, just its recency. And so what that tells us is that once we got the movement down, and especially once we became bipedal and started using our hands for tool use and so on, then we really took off as a species because we had the capacity to ause tools and b as our cortex the wrinkly outer bit as that exploded in size. Then we became able to think about possible futures and evaluate hypotheses before acting on them, stuff like that. So you're absolutely right that fundamentally we're all about moving this body. And then secondarily we came up with all this other great stuff that allowed us take off.
00:42:09
Speaker 2: That makes me think of two things.
00:42:10
Speaker 3: One is this sea snail example that I often given some of my talks, that swims all around the ocean and then at some point in its life it plants itself on a rock and eats its own brain because it doesn't have to move anymore. OK, yeah, exactly, I don't have to move. I can reprieve myself of this big honking brain. That is a fascinating But the second thing that made me think of as I was recently exposed to some ideas that Aristotle had, which is, we shouldn't be called homo sapiens. There are a lot of things in the world that are wise Homo sapiens, wise man, you know, intelligent man. There are lots of things that have what we should be called is homotechne because the thing that defines our species is our relationship to our tools and the fact that we have been able to manipulate our environment to work together in society because we are such strong wielder of tools. And I think robots are the next instantiation of that. We're going to have billions of robots in our lifetimes. I one thousand percent believe in that it's going to happen super fast, and they will be extensions of all of the tools that we currently have in place, powered by many of these amazing advances, whether it's in light ar or edge compute or large language models. The difference is that they have bodies, they are fully embodied and they move around in ways without our assistance. Think of how many other tools are entirely reliant upon human intervention, either using them in real time, whether it's a chainsaw or setting and forgetting like a camera. But these robots, they're autonomous, embodied moving tools, and that represents a complete paradigm shift in how we live in our environment and how we relate to other entities that are in it.
00:44:00
Speaker 1: It's right, Well, you know, we're all thinking about AI agents nowadays and how they run off and do things, but we will have this physically where you'll bump into robots on the sidewalk who are on a task for their master and going and doing things and coming back and reporting in later. Yeah, and so and so. The part that you think about the most is about how do these things move in such a way that we feel comfortable with them, that we appreciate them and see intelligence in them and so on. So when you imagine a world forty years from now when robots are just running all around the place, what is it that you want to see? What does that world look like?
00:44:45
Speaker 3: Demographics are shifting worldwide really quickly right now. I think China is one point four billion people by the end of this century, they'll be seven hundred million. At the US our birth rates.
00:44:57
Speaker 1: You're saying it's going to happen.
00:44:59
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, the US our birth rate is one point six the last time I checked. I mean, we have historically been fine in terms of population growth because we had a lot of immigration. That's changing a little bit. If you look at what are the drivers of economic growth, it's two things. It's population growth or it's innovation. When we observe worldwide that population growth is declining in many places except for Africa. Actually, Africa is the only continent where there's going to be net population growth in this century. So if you look all around you and you see this decline in population growth, the other economic driver that you have is innovation. Okay, well, what does innovation mean in twenty twenty six embodiment ai agents, et cetera. If we want to keep growing economic output the way that we have historically, we need to see those efficiency gains in other places. And the demand for specific kinds of labor are still very high, for example, in the US, and ten years will have more people over the age of sixty five than under the age of eighteen for the first time in the country's history history of the United States. Okay, if you think about that, that means you have fewer young people who are not only working and providing labor into the market, but also paying into some of these systems like Social Security and Medicare, and so, you know, I won't discuss that now, but I think we have these enormous, unavoidable demographic shifts that are coming up, and we will have demand for certain kinds of labor, whether that's caretaking for elderly people who want to stay at home for longer, things like data center management and upkeep, even cleaning solar panels. You know, I heard that as an amazing application for robots recently, because it turns out there's a lot of solar panels and when they get dirty, they're less efficient, and you know, it's not a great job to be standing out in the hot, hot desert moving a cleaning baton up and down, and so there's so many opportunities for robots to be helpful and useful in our lives. My strong argument is that for humans to accept those solutions, these robots need to engage and interact with them in ways that are safe, legible, and empowering period. Otherwise you and I are going to be sitting here in forty years. Hopefully we won't both be criogenetically frozen at that point, but like, you and I are going to be sitting here in forty years and being like, why are we surrounded by all these horrible, ugly robots and machines? And it is too late for us to change that, because when a new technology like robotics, which I'm arguing is new ish in this new wave because of how much they're powered by all these new state of the art models. When a new technology shows up, that adoption curve. The near term choices you make are so impactful because then they get embedded and they get entrenched, and we've seen it in everything from cell phone technology and it just becomes the default, de facto way of being. And I think we have a huge opportunity right now and we want to land it. We want to land this robot plane correctly because it is going to affect how we relate and engage and interact with these machines in the future.
00:48:20
Speaker 1: So I want to come back to two quick points. One, is this a technical point that I'm curious about. So everybody's heard about large language models. These are based on a transformer model. And what it's doing is it's taking in, Okay, there's a bunch of tokens. Let's think of them as words that have come in. What's the next word that I should put here? Given this huge context window? Is it the case that these VLAs you mentioned in the vlis are doing the same thing where they're taking in a bunch of context and saying, hey, what's the next token here? But the context now is hey, let's say I'm moving my arm and I've gone through this motion, this motion, this motion. Where am I like to move next? Is it the same structure?
00:49:02
Speaker 2: It really varies.
00:49:04
Speaker 3: I mean lots of different companies have different approaches to this problem. When I was at Google, it was largely a transformer architecture. So the big seminal paper that blew this up was in December of twenty twenty two at a conference called CORAL, the Conference on Robot Learning. And it was a paper that came out of Google, and it was called do as I can, not.
00:49:24
Speaker 2: As I say.
00:49:25
Speaker 3: So they called it say cant and paper was the name of this paper, And what was amazing about it was they took this LM, so they had a transformer that was also helping with breaking down long horizon planning. So if I tell you, David to go clean a bathroom, you understand that that means you need to get a mop, you need to find a bucket, you need to get a sponge, you need to get some cleaning solution. Then sequentially you need to navigate to where the bathroom is. Then once you're in the bathroom, you've got to put down your tools and prior to a lot of this transformer work, and you know the big blow up in LLLMS, we used to do a lot of that long horizon planning semi manually, right, so you could take a pretty abstract task and then figure out how to break it down into all these subtasks. Now, go ask Claud. Claud is very good at saying, Hey, Claud, I'm a robot. I need to clean up this bookshelf. What are the different micro tasks that I would do? And Cloud can give you a nice long list of what you would need to do to clean up the bathroom, by the bookshelf or anything anything else. Part of the major innovation in this sacan paper was it then took those sets of instructions and actually mapped them on to actions that the robot could do. So the robot can have a set of we call them parameterized actions. It's things like go to might be an example. A robot can go to a specific position in space. Right, you can give it, you know, an XYZ point and an orientation, and you say you're going to go to this point in space. Well, you stick together this long list of actions that you know you need in order to clean a bathroom. You stick together your perception of the environment, so where different objects are located at what point in space, and a frame that's relative to where you are as the robot. And then you tack on the calling of all these different parameterized commands and boom, you have a robot that will do things end to end in the real world. And so part of where that core innovation came from was actually stringing together these sets of prior knowledge that then turned into a very valuable output at the end, which is that you could give a robot a language command, and one of the ones that they give in the paper, or it might have been in the demo, because I was at when they did the live demo in New Zealand and December twenty twenty two, was grab the spicy chips for me, you know, and there's six things on the counter and it figures out which one of those is sure enough, a bag of spicy Helipinia chips, and it grabs that one instead of grabbing the pencil or the fork.
00:51:57
Speaker 1: I want to come back to you a quick question. After you years of training as a dancer, when you watch somebody dancing on stage, do you sort of feel yourself moving with them? That's my experience when I watch a dancer on stage. I'm not even a dancer, and so if so, my question is, what is it when you're watching a robot doing moves that a human couldn't do.
00:52:18
Speaker 3: I completely agree about the experience that you just described when you're watching a dancer, because I went to go see Alvin Alei American Dance Theater in Berkeley a few weeks ago with my with my mom, and I have a whoop, so I wear this thing on my wrist that you know you probably a lot of the people listening know what.
00:52:33
Speaker 2: A woop is. But during that show, I was not in low stress mode.
00:52:39
Speaker 3: I was wiggling and shaking up and down between medium and high meet because I was having the experience that I was doing these dances, especially some of that choreography, especially in the last piece, which is a masterful work. It's called Revelations by Alvin Alee. I've actually learned some of that choreography, so I felt like I was doing the performance. When I watch robots do that, it's certainly not as let's say, I'm not in the high whoop zone. But I think when I watch a robot move, especially in the pieces that I've made historically, there's something that's mesmerizing and hypnotic about it. It feels like I'm on this long continuum of humans and our tools from fire and wheels, printing press all the way up until now, and I we've made this kooky world for ourselves. I mean, we used to live in caves with fireplaces, and we would stick our hands on the wall and do paintings. And now we live in these boxes that we make and with overhead lighting and electrical outlets and all these attri It's kind of wild how much human existence has changed in a relatively short period and what that has to do with me watching a robot moves. It seems like this continuous reshaping of what it is to be a person and to have experiences in the world.
00:54:02
Speaker 1: Love it. One of the classes I teach is Stanford is Literature in the Brain. And one of the things that's fascinating about literature is that it can be a testing ground for things, in the case of a lot of science fiction, a testing ground for human robot interactions. My question to you is, to what degree you're in what sense is dance a testing ground for the future of human robot interactions?
00:54:25
Speaker 2: What a fabulous question.
00:54:26
Speaker 3: I wrote a paper when I was an artist in residence at the University of Illinois or Banish Champaign alongside Amy and Sean. We actually came up with this tactic we called something called Curtain. We said it was an experimental test bed for human robot interaction. What we did was we had designed these sets of diotic interactions so we would have a person stand up and move around and follow the agent that was in front of it. This was a part of a larger performance work and research work called time to Compile. So, for example, you have a small humanoid robot, it's moving around and you have a person that's standing across from it moving. So we designed these different diotic interactions diet meaning to people, yes exactly, and that the human who was participating was always told follow the thing in front of you. So we did this with a humanoid robot. We did this with a representation of a humanoid on a screen. We did this with a body in virtual reality. We did this with a big, big robot, and then we also did this with a person. So you stand across and you follow the person in front of you in time to compile. The reveal to the audience was that you are it's a little hard to explain, but you're actually always following the person who came before you because their movement data is being captured and that drives the agent in the following room. So it was this commentary on the hidden human network and how we're actually always all interacting and talking to other people. Because when I speak into a microphone, I'm having an interaction with a person who designed this somewhere in someplace, and the gentlemen who came and moved it in the room, and you know, all of these things are just these abstract representations of human human hands, so in time to compile, we created. But what we did was we ran that performance and that installation as a research study, and so we asked people what were your impressions of robots before they did this, and then what were their impressions afterwards. We also ran a similar research study where we showed a whole bunch of different objects on a stage, including people, including robots. We had people rank them in terms of their complexity, also their intelligence, their capability. Then we did a performance with all of these things and we had the audience rate those things again. So they said, oh wow, you know, the humans are much more expressive than I thought they were before, and the robots were much less. So we actually found ourselves using performances and art installations as interventions for scientific experiments. And I think what's fabulous too about that is you can play. I mean, you can try so many different performances and installations, and you know, it's hard to be able to replicate that across board. But I think we called it an experimental test bed for human robot interaction because we were giving people interactions with robots and then measuring if you're in this heightened artistically aware theatrical experience with a machine. How does it change your expectations for what it is?
00:57:42
Speaker 1: You know, there's something I've been wondering about recently, which is obviously, as a society we've blown past the Turing test, which is can you tell whether you're talking to human or AI? And you know at this point the Turing test has been passed. But it turns out it's actually really useful sometimes to know whether you're talking to a bot or a human, because, for example, with political debate, it turns out, if I'm talking to another human, I'm really reluctant. There's lots of studies on this. Humans are really reluctant to change their opinion, but if they know they're talking to a bot, they're much more open to the idea of hearing facts and thinking about different ways they might change their opinion. So when you think about the future of dance with human and robotics, is there is some advantage to understanding the difference and seeing, oh, now I'm interacting with a robot.
00:58:32
Speaker 3: So I taught a class to Stanford last quarter. It is called Computer Science three thirty four Robots and Arts. We had students from mostly computer science but designed civil engineering. A few from the Business School theater, Arts and Performance studies, and they made philosophical political social statements about the world using AI and robots in the class and one of them, one group, did a project where they it was.
00:58:58
Speaker 2: Almost like a research study as an installation.
00:59:01
Speaker 3: What they presented in their final report was they had a group of people come in and they show them to artwork side by side, and they said which one do you like better? And you would vote with a survey, and then they would show you another two sets of artworks. In this case it's actually two poems, and you vote. And then the third was they would show you some dance, some movement. And what they found is that humans far and away prefer things that have been made by people. And after they reveal to everyone, you know, this is which painting was a human versus an ai, This is which poem was a human versus an AI. This is Zeny and Keshav who were in my class. They find that people will actually switch so they say, I don't.
00:59:45
Speaker 2: Like that painting as much anymore. I think I like this one. They like the human one more.
00:59:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, And they their project was reflecting a series of a couple of other papers that we had read in the class as well, which is, let's say that we're going to hang out on Saturday, and I'm like, look, David, we have your choice of two museums that we can go to. We can go to this one, which has all the artwork in this museum is made by people, or we can go to this one, which has all the artwork in the museum is made by ais. People again, far and away prefer to go to the museum that's been made by people, or with art that's been made by people. I think it's not just because of whatever the art is that's in there, but think about why you go to a museum. We want to be able to tell your friends about it. Oh, I had this great time hanging out with Katie. We went to this cool museum. You want to be able to relate to the history, largely the human history of whatever it's been painted about. Maybe it was a specific, you know, religious happening that was documented in a beautiful art work, and that's important to you, And so people want to engage in this human made work for reasons aside from I looked at it and I had a sharp, immediate emotional yes or no towards it?
01:00:54
Speaker 2: And I think how that.
01:00:56
Speaker 3: Relates to dance and if we have robots in the future that are all moving gracefully and perfectly, is it's the exact same phenomenon? Do you want to be able to learn about this dancer? What was their training like? What were some of the influences that affected how they move? Have I seen them tour at this place before? Do I get to meet them and have a relationship with this person? Can I How is their dance emblematic of these other trends that other people are curious about, maybe on TikTok or And I think it's all of the mush around it that gives the richness.
01:01:37
Speaker 2: But does it matter to you that a human or an AI makes something?
01:01:41
Speaker 1: Absolutely? In fact, I've been describing this as the effort phenomenon, which is that given you know, something produced by AI and something produced by human. Because I'm a writer, I think about writing all the time, we just don't care. Even if it were the exact same set of words, we would really value the thing written by William And if Claude put out exactly the same words, we just we wouldn't value it. And I think This has to do with our sense of the effort that goes into it, because there are these old psychological studies about Let's say I'm showing you two pieces of artwork. One of them looks like it was really easy to do, and the other one looks like it took a really long time. People always like the one that took a long time. And I actually think there's an interesting analogy here with diamonds. People will pay a lot more for a diamond, which is just a matrix of carbon atoms shoved together if it came from the Earth versus if it was a synthetic diamond made in the lab. It's the exact same matrix of carbon atoms, but Mother Nature took billions of years of effort for this one, whereas this one just took five days in the laboratory. So we really do care about that. Yeah, I agree with you.
01:02:48
Speaker 3: I think Terrence Tao, is a very famous mathematician, has a statement about this, which is, if you were given two choices, you can climb Mount Everest, so you can train for X period of time, you can get your equipment, you can find the right you can climb Mount Everest and get to the peak, or choice number two. I've got my helicopter right here. You can hop in. We can helicopter that. I promise you it's safe. We're going to helicopter to the top of Mount Everest. Hop out, take the selfie.
01:03:20
Speaker 2: Come back down.
01:03:22
Speaker 3: Which of those choices are you making? I asked that question in my class because I said, for a lot of the students, part of making projects that have richness to them again is this effort piece. It's a demonstration of agency of choice making. And I asked them, you know who's taking the helicopter. I go, look, if you take the helicopter, probably your parents are going to be a little bit happier since your safety is more guaranteed. You still get the selfie, so you get to be up there and experience what it was like. You can still tell your friends how cool you are because you were at You know, there's some benefits to taking the helicopter, and I think almost nobody raised their hands right. They all would rather climb because you put in your best effort. Or part of why we glorify specific amazing artworks or why we go to the ballet is because if everything was easy, we would all do it. Part of what gives the meaning to certain things is that it acquired effort and specialization, curiosity, physical exertion in many cases to get there, and that's important to us. I think for me, if I were to snap my fingers and say am I taking the helicopter? Am I climbing Mount Everest? Well, it's a hard choice. But do your best work or don't do it at all.
01:04:42
Speaker 1: I totally agree. You know, I've got a bunch of I've seen this happening a lot lately where someone says, hey, I've written a book. It's half written by me, half written by chatchpt and they put that on the cover of the book and they think it's sort of cool and futuristic that they're doing that. And I immediately think, I don't want to read that book just only it is probably unfair because it might be a perfectly good book, but it's just it feels like the requisite effort was not put in.
01:05:06
Speaker 3: I think it's also when we talked about intelligence and consciousness sort of. I think the intelligence that I have now at this age is different than the one that I had at twenty four, and it's different than the one I had at sixteen and it's because the experiences that you have and the effort. And I remember Alison Gopnik, who's an amazing professor at UC Berkeley, said this thing when she came to visit at Google, where she told us how grad school is annealing. It's a process of annealing your brain. And anneeling, which I had to look up, is when you heat up a metal a little bit so that you can bend it, and then you wait and you let it cool off, and then you heat it up a little bit more and you bend it even farther. And it's so that every single one of those marches up the staircase demonstrates to you that you can keep going higher and higher because you landed those initial steps.
01:05:56
Speaker 2: And my PhD.
01:05:59
Speaker 3: I actually didn't have an undergraduate degree in engineering, and so it was my first foray into a lot of that material that I had been exposed to more in coating boot camps or I even took some remedial classes online before I started grad school. And for me, it really felt that way, this process of a kneeling, of heating up a little bit, bending, heating up a little bit more, bending more, and that by the time I was finished with that degree, I was like, wow, I am not the same person with the same set of intelligence, and I earned that capacity. And I love that you have an appreciation for that, because it's not that we should be doing that because we like pain or we like suffering, but it's because it means something about the new intelligence that's been acquired. You can say something different having earned those small bends along the way.
01:06:50
Speaker 1: Okay, So in wrapping up, imagine the future, like, really picture ourselves twenty years now. First of all, what are robots looking like at that point? Are they humanoid? Are they others shapes like R two D two.
01:07:02
Speaker 3: We're going to have many different shapes and instantiations of robots in the future. We will have humanoids for sure. Some of them will be walking, some of them will be on wheels. We will have quadruped robots. These are robots that look a little bit abstractly like dogs, so they have a centered torso and then four legs. We'll have robots that have more or fewer legs than that. We might have tripod robots. I've seen an amazing robot that moves around a bit on a globe, so it's almost like it's floating on top of a globe that's wheeling around. We'll have disc and puck like ones, We'll have ones that fly. We're going to see so many different form factors of these machines in the future. We'll even see robots that are soft, that are made out of softer materials like fabric or plastic bags, and they're inflated with air and they move around because the pressure in different parts of the robot changes. And so I think it's really the sky's the limit of what some of these new form factors are going to look like. And the key I think in many cases is that they not only are useful, but they got to bring some beauty and onto the world. We have unlimited imagination. We've built all kinds of crazy stuff as people. Let's make robots that look interesting but also do things that are a little unexpected. I love the idea of what if I had a robot that could go out in my garden and pick me five or six fresh flowers every morning and put them in a little cup on my shelf. Sounds like a great robot to be I would love that robot. What if I had a robot that could go around my house, not only rearranging and reorganizing, but also surprise me a little bit. Maybe it puts a book in a new place and says, oh, Katie, you talked about this author a few times. I want to put this next to your bag by the door in case you decide to take it with you. What if I had a robot that could tell me compliments and jokes and they could be use for fun facts. I mean, there's it's an unlimited number.
01:09:14
Speaker 2: Of things that we could use these tools for in the future.
01:09:18
Speaker 3: And I think the embodiment, the whole robot becomes an interface because it's three dimensional. And the big difference between a robot and a computer is that a robot moves. Robot moves and has a body. And so what are all the new ways that we can create relationships and derive utility and also have fun in the world. Because we don't have an I mean, unless we're all cryogenically frozen to come back to that, we don't have unlimited time. And I want the tools that we use to inspire us to be useful and also to make us feel more optimistic.
01:10:07
Speaker 1: That's Katie Kwan. One of the things that I keep thinking about after this conversation is how much of human life depends on movement that we almost never consciously notice. Somebody leans forward slightly during a conversation, or your friend matches his walking pace to yours, or a stranger steps aside on a crowded sidewalk, or a parent reaches out towards a child. There are a million tiny choreographies that collectively form this invisible social fabric of our civilization, and your brain tracks all of it automatically. Movement is almost never just a mechanical thing to us. We experience it as intention. And this makes sense, of course, through an evolutionary lens, because movement was one of the earliest forms of communication. You needed to infer whether something approaching you is dangerous or a cooperative or aggressive or playful or whatever. And this all becomes massively relevant now that AI is leaving the screen. The challenge is that machines are plugging into an ancient perceptual system that evolved long before machines existed. And this is why choreographers are going to be involved in this next step of invention, because choreography is the study of how movement creates meaning. So what I love about Katie's perspective is that she understands robotics not just as an engineering problem, but as a humanistic problem. The future of robotics is going to depend partly on batteries and actuators of machine learning, but also partly on empathy and aesthetics and social fluency. It's going to depend on whether machines can come to understand the unwritten choreography that humans have spent millions of years developing, which with each other. Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading. Join the weekly discussions on my substack, and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.