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

Kate Darling is a researcher at MIT Media Lab interested in human robot interaction and robot ethics. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – True Classic Tees: https://trueclassictees.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off – Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get 14-day free trial – Linode: https://linode.com/lex to get $100 free credit – InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off – ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod to get 3 months free EPISODE LINKS: Kate’s Twitter: http://twitter.com/grok_ Kate’s Website: http://katedarling.org Kate’s Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/grok_ The New Breed (book): https://amzn.to/3ExhBuf Creativity without Law (book): https://amzn.to/3MqV5F3 LuLaRobot (paper): http://drive.google.com/file/d/1PtYpkDQaQVPbhQIc6wcCC50JKWVsDo3k/view PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (07:57) – What is a robot? (23:57) – Metaverse (33:19) – Bias in robots (47:02) – Modern robotics (49:34) – Automation (53:57) – Autonomous driving (1:02:22) – Privacy (1:05:48) – Google’s LaMDA (1:10:35) – Robot animal analogy (1:23:38) – Data concerns (1:41:40) – Humanoid robots (2:00:42) – LuLaRobot (2:09:36) – Ethics in robotics (2:24:57) – Jeffrey Epstein (2:58:31) – Love and relationships

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 0:45Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick, use second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got True Classic Tees for high-quality t-shirts, Shopify for e-commerce, Linode for Linux, InsideTracker for bio-monitoring, and ExpressVPN for privacy. Choose 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'm able to control whether we do them or not. I try 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 a beloved new sponsor.

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  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 Tees. They're high-quality, soft, slim-fitted t-shirts for men. They also make all the other menswear 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'm a T-shirt person. I usually just wear a black T-shirt, a bunch of black T-shirts.

• 2:12Lex Fridman?

  True Classic Tees 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 25% off at trueclassic.com with code Lex. Free shipping included on purchases over $100. 100% risk-free guarantee with 30-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.

• 2:56Lex Fridman?

  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's a lot of entrepreneurs that really use Shopify to like run a business, small business, medium-sized business, all that kind of stuff. I think it's 1.7 million entrepreneurs that use it. Yeah, it's my favorite. As far as I'm 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

• 3:41Lex Fridman?

  at Shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Shopify.com/lex.

• 3:50Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Linode, 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's 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 had to be really good. The distributed compute has to be good.

• 4:32Lex Fridman?

  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 Linode. 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 linode.com/lex to get $100 in free credit. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data. They have a bunch of plans that collect a bunch of information from your body

• 5:15Lex Fridman?

  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's probably a lot of signal there.

• 5:58Lex Fridman?

  It's just my brain is too dumb to interpret it. So I would love to understand what my body's telling me. That's why I love InsideTracker 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 inside tracker.com/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,

• 6:39Lex Fridman?

  Android, and all of that good stuff. And it's a base level of protection that everybody should be using. I'm probably having a bunch of conversation with cyber security folks on both sides. I'm 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's 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.

• 7:20Lex Fridman?

  But no matter what, it's a super fascinating topic. Go to expressvpn.com/lexpod 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's Kate Darling.

• 7:57Lex Fridman?

  Last time we talked, a few years back, you wore Justin Bieber shirt for the podcast. So now, looking back, you're a respected researcher, all the amazing accomplishments in robotics. You're an author. Was this one of the proudest moments of your life? Proudest decisions you've ever made?

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Definitely. You handled it really well, though. It was cool, because I walked in, I didn't know you were gonna be filming. I walked in and you're in a fucking suit.

• 8:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  And I'm like, why are you all dressed up?

• 8:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  And then you were so nice about it. You like made some excuse. You were like, oh, well, I'm interviewing some art. Didn't you say you were interviewing some military general afterwards to like?

• 8:35Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah, that was the-

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Make me feel better?

• 8:36Lex Fridman?

  CTO of Lockheed Martin, I think.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Oh, that's what it was.

• 8:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  You didn't tell me, oh, I was dressed like this.

• 8:42Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 8:50Speaker 01

  I think I bought it for my husband as a joke. And, yeah, it was, we were gut renovating a house at the time, and I had worn it to the site.

• 8:59Lex Fridman?

  Got his joke and now you wear it. Okay. Have you worn it since? Is this the one time?

• 9:05Speaker 01

  No, like, how could I touch it again? It was on your podcast. Now it's framed.

• 9:09Lex Fridman?

  It's like a wedding dress or something like that. You don't, you only wear it once. You are the author of The New Breed: What Our History With Animals Reveals About Our Future With Robots. You opened the book with the surprisingly tricky question, what is a robot? So let me ask you, let's try to sneak up to this question. What's a robot?

• 9:31Speaker 01

  That's not really sneaking up.

• 9:33Lex Fridman?

  It's just asking it.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:35Lex Fridman?

  All right, well.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  What do you think a robot is?

• 9:39Lex Fridman?

  What I think a robot is, is something that has some level of intelligence.

• 9:48Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  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's this magic aspect that that which is how people understand robots. If you ask a roboticist, they have the definition of something that is, well, it has to be physical usually. It's not an AI agent. It has to be embodied.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  They'll say it has to be able to sense its environment in some way. It has to be able to make a decision autonomously and then act on its environment again. I think that's a pretty good technical definition, even though it really breaks down when you come to things like the smartphone, because the smartphone can do all of those things. And most robotists would not call it a robot. So there's really no, 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.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  And that's the definition of robot that I'm trying to get us away from because I think that it trips us up a lot.

• 11:48Lex Fridman?

  Why does the humanoid form trip us up a lot?

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Well, because this constant comparison of robots to people, artificial intelligence to human intelligence. First of all, it doesn't make sense from a technical perspective because. You know, the early AI researchers, some of them were trying to recreate human intelligence. Some people still are, and there's a lot to be learned from that academically, et cetera. But that's not where we've ended up. AI doesn't think like people. We wind up in this fallacy where we're comparing these two.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  And when we talk about what intelligence even is, we're often comparing to our own intelligence. And then the second reason this bothers me is because it doesn't make sense. I just think it's boring to recreate intelligence that we already have. I see the scientific value of understanding our own intelligence, but from a 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 in what we're trying to achieve.

• 12:54Lex Fridman?

  And it should be in some deep ways similar to us, but in most ways different. Because you still want to have a connection, which is why the similarity might be necessary.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  That's what people argue, yes. And I think that's true. So the two arguments for humanoid robots are people need to be able to communicate and relate to robots, and we relate most to things that are like ourselves. And we have a world that's built for humans. So we have stairs and narrow passageways and door handles. And so we need humanoid robots to be able to navigate that. And so you're speaking to the first one, which is absolutely true. But what we know from social robotics and a lot of human robot interaction research is that all you need is something that's enough like a person for it to give off cues that someone relates to, but that doesn't have to look human or even act human.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  You can take a robot like R2-D2, and it just like beeps and boops. And people love R2-D2, right? Even though it's just like a trash can on wheels. And they like R2-D2 more than C3PO, who's a humanoid. So there's lots of ways to make robots even better than humans in some ways, and make us relate more to them.

• 14:10Lex Fridman?

  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, just a voice.

• 14:21Lex Fridman?

  Just subtle, basic interaction. I think people sometimes overengineer these things. Like simplicity can go a really long way.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Totally. I mean, ask any animator and they'll know that.

• 14:32Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:46Lex Fridman?

  Versus like roboticists. Roboticists, quote unquote, are mostly clueless.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Well, no, they just have their own discipline that they're very good at and they didn't, don't have.

• 14:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but that, that don't, don't, you know, I feel like robotics of the early 21st century is not going to be the robotics of the later 21st century.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 15:11Lex Fridman?

  Like if you call yourself a roboticist, it'd be something very different. Uh, cause I, I think more and more you'd be like a, maybe like a control engineer or something. Controls engineer, like, uh, 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.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  You call it basic, it's actually really complex.

• 15:50Lex Fridman?

  It's very, very complicated.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  And that's why, but like, I think you're so right and, and, and what a time to be alive.

• 15:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:08Lex Fridman?

  They're coming out of the closet.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and we're seeing all these mistakes that companies are making because they focused 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.

• 16:22Lex Fridman?

  See, what I feel like people don't understand is to solve the perception and the control problem. You shouldn't try to just solve the perception control problem. You should. Teach the robot how to say, oh shit, I'm sorry, I fucked up.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, or ask for help.

• 16:39Lex Fridman?

  Or ask for help, or be able to communicate the uncertainty. Yeah, exactly. All of those things because you can't solve the perception and control. We humans haven't solved it. We were really damn good at it. But the magic is in the self-deprecating humor and the self-awareness about where our flaws are, all that kind of stuff.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's a whole body of research in human-robot interaction showing like ways to do this. But a lot of these companies haven't, they don't do HRI. They like the, have you seen the grocery store robot in the Stop and Shop?

• 17:16Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Marty, it looks like a giant penis. It's like six feet tall, roams the aisles.

• 17:22Lex Fridman?

  I will never see Marty the same way again. Thank you for that.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  You're welcome. But like, they, these poor people were 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.

• 17:40Lex Fridman?

  Does everybody, I mean, you talk about this, do people mostly hate Marty? Because I like, I like Marty.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you like Flippy.

• 17:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  And actually, like.

• 17:51Lex Fridman?

  There's a, there's a parallel between the two?

• 17:53Speaker 01

  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. But our theory, so this was with a student at MIT, Daniela DiPaola. She noticed that everyone on Facebook in her circles was complaining about Marty. They were like, what is this creepy robot? It's watching me. It's always in the way. And she did this 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

• 18:29Speaker 01

  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 it's not. It looks for spills on the floor. It doesn't actually like look at any people. It's watching, it's creepy, it's getting in the way. Those were the things that people complained about. And so our hypothesis became, is Marty a real life Clippy?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Because I know Lex, you love Clippy, but many people hated Clippy.

• 19:18Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's a complex thing there. It could be like marriage. A lot of people seem to like to complain about marriage, but they secretly love it. So it could be the relationship you might have with Marty is like, oh, there he goes again, doing his stupid surveillance thing. But you grow to love the, I mean, bitching about the thing. That kind of releases a kind of tension. And there's, I mean, some people, a lot of people show love by sort of busting each other's chops, you know, like making fun of each other. And then if I think, I think people would really love it if Marty talked back.

• 20:03Lex Fridman?

  And like, well, 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.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  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

• 21:09Speaker 01

  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 diff, like not a, not a, you know, virtual character.

• 21:24Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 21:43Speaker 01

  I think we absolutely can find deep meaningful relationship with robots.

• 21:47Lex Fridman?

  With Marty.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  And well, maybe with Marty. I mean, I just would, I would have designed Marty a little differently.

• 21:52Lex Fridman?

  Like how? Isn't there a charm to the clumsiness, the slowness?

• 21:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:14Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I wonder if there's a way to. If it would help to make Marty seem like an entity of its own versus

• 22:52Lex Fridman?

  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

• 23:15Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, what I say to you, no one's gonna hear that, right?

• 23:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's true. That's true.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  No, I'm kidding.

• 23:32Lex Fridman?

  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's happening. But there for some reason, I think probably with Marty,

• 23:43Lex Fridman?

  I think when it's done really crudely and crapily, you start to realize, oh, this is like PR people trying to make a friendly version of a surveillance machine. But I mean, that reminds me of the slight clumsiness or significant clumsiness on the initial releases of the avatars for the metaverse. I don't know. What are your, what are your actually thoughts about that?

• 24:10Lex Fridman?

  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? Cause it's a kind of a, 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.

• 24:42Lex Fridman?

  Compelling when you connect to others there in the same way that physical connection is.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Right. I haven't looked into, I mean, I've seen people joking about it on Twitter and like posting whatever.

• 24:54Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:03Lex Fridman?

  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

• 25:26Lex Fridman?

  better capturing of expressions in interesting, complex ways versus like cartoonish, oversimplified ways?

• 25:34Speaker 01

  But haven't video games figured this out? I'm not a gamer, so I don't have any examples. But I feel like there's this whole world in video games where they've thought about all of this. And depending on the game, they have different 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?

• 26:13Lex Fridman?

  Well.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  There's got to be a reason. There's got to be some thinking behind it, right?

• 26:17Lex Fridman?

  Well, I talked to Carmack about this, John Carmack, who's a part time Oculus CTO.

• 26:28Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  They strip out anything interesting because it could be controversial? Is that, or?

• 27:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, right. Exactly. Like, like what, I mean, we're living through this now, like with

• 27:11Lex Fridman?

  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. Um, in the sexual tension or in, uh, they're definitely paranoid about that.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:49Lex Fridman?

  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, um, 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, uh, like you have to have ability, um, to be a little bit political, to be a little bit edgy, all that kind of stuff. And, uh, large companies tend to suffocate that. So I, but in general, if you get all that, just the ability to come up with really cool, beautiful ideas. Um, if you look at, um, I think Grimes tweeted about this, she's very critical about the

• 28:34Lex Fridman?

  metaverse, is that, um, you know, the, uh, independent, uh, 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, the small groups of people, design things and let them run with it and 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. Um, but even Clippy has some, like, that's kind of wild that you would take a, a paperclip and put eyes on it.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  And suddenly people are like, oh, you're annoying, but you're definitely a social agent.

• 29:23Lex Fridman?

  And I just feel like that wouldn't even, that Clippy thing wouldn't even survive Microsoft or Facebook of today, Meta of today. Cause it would be like, well, there'd be these meetings about why is it a paperclip? Like, why don't we, it's not sufficiently friendly. Let's make it, you know, and then all of a sudden, the artist that with whom it originated is killed and it's all PR, marketing people and all of that kind of stuff. Now, they do important work to some degree, but they kill the creativity.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  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'd create a robot that looks like a humanoid and it's, you know, Sophia or whatever. Now suddenly, you do have all of these issues where are you reinforcing an unrealistic beauty standard? Are you objectifying women? Why is the robot 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

• 30:40Speaker 01

  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, cause I, you know, maybe we disagree on that. I don't think that edginess or humor or interesting things need to be things that harm or hurt people or that people are against. There are ways to find things that everyone is fine with. Why aren't we doing that?

• 31:12Lex Fridman?

  The problem is, there's departments that look for harm in things.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:16Lex Fridman?

  And so they will find harm in things that have no harm.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:20Lex Fridman?

  That's the big problem because their whole job is to find harm in things. So what you said is completely correct, which is edginess should not hurt, doesn't necessarily, doesn't need to be a thing that hurts people. Obviously, great humor, great personality, doesn't have to, like, Clippy.

• 31:43Lex Fridman?

  But, yeah, I mean, but it's tricky to get right and I'm not exactly sure. I don't, I don't know. I don't know why a large corporation with a lot of funding can't get this right.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:11Lex Fridman?

  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,

• 32:21Lex Fridman?

  from a designer perspective, or maybe like a Johnny Ive, that is almost like a dictator.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you want a benevolent dictator.

• 32:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, who rolls in and says, like, cuts through the lawyers, the PR, but has a benevolent aspect, like, yeah, there's a good heart and make sure. Like, I think all great artists and designers create stuff that doesn't hurt people. Like, if you have a good heart, you're going to create something that's going to actually make a lot of people feel good. That's what, like, people like Johnny Ive, what they love doing is creating a thing that brings a lot of love to the world. They imagine, like, millions of people using the thing and it instills them with joy. That's that you could say that about social robotics, you could say that about the metaverse. It shouldn't be done by the PR people, it should be done by the designers.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  I agree, PR people ruin everything.

• 33:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, all the fun.

• 33:19Lex Fridman?

  In the, in the book, you have a picture, this, 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.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  No, no one edited the book, we got rushed through.

• 33:40Lex Fridman?

  The caption reads, "Two hospital delivery robots, whose sexy nurse names Roxy and Lola made me roll my eyes so hard they almost fell out." What aspect of it made you roll your eyes? Is it the naming?

• 33:54Speaker 01

  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 Roxy? Like,

• 34:20Lex Fridman?

  Those are too sexy?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  I mean, there's research showing that.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  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 names. So like, that's one of those things, right? You're opening a can of worms for no reason, for no reason.

• 34:58Lex Fridman?

  You can avoid this whole can of worms.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, just give it a different name. Like, why Roxy? It's because people aren't even thinking. So, to some extent, I don't, 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.

• 35:38Lex Fridman?

  So, don't unnecessarily propagate the biases of society.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, why?

• 35:44Lex Fridman?

  In the design. But if you're not careful, though, when you do the research of, like, you might, if you ran a poll with a lot of people, of all the possible names these robots have, they might come up with Roxy and Lola as, as, as names they would enjoy most. Like, that could come up as, as the highest.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  As in, you do marketing research and then, well, that's what they did with Alexa. They did marketing research and nobody wanted the male voice. Everyone wanted it to be female.

• 36:19Lex Fridman?

  Well, what do you, what do you think about that? Like, what, if I, if I were to say... I think the role of a great designer, again, to go back to Johnny I, is to throw out the marketing research.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:33Lex Fridman?

  Like, take it in, do it, learn from it. But like, if everyone wants Alexa to be a female voice, the role of the designer is to think deeply about the future of social agents in the home and think, like, what does that future look like? And try to reverse engineer that future. So 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.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's true, and I think some companies like Apple have historically done very well at understanding a market and saying, you know what our role is? It's not to listen to what the current market says, it's to actually shape the market and shape consumer preferences. And companies have the power to do that. They can be forward-thinking and they can actually shift what the future of technology looks like. And I agree with you that I would like to see more of that, especially when it comes to existing biases that we know, 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.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:07Lex Fridman?

  But do you think it's still useful to gender and to name the robots?

• 38:12Speaker 01

  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 can be helpful on the like anthropomorphism engagement level to give it attributes that people identify with.

• 38:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think a lot of roboticists I know, 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're going to anthropomorphize it.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  That's a good point.

• 39:21Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:39Lex Fridman?

  Like that arm, I worked a lot, a lot with quadrupeds now with, with, with robot dogs, you know, that arm, people think is the head immediately.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:49Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  They do now.

• 39:57Lex Fridman?

  They do now?

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Well, they've deployed the robots and people are like, oh my God, the cops are using a robot dog. And so they have this PR nightmare and so they're like, oh, yeah, okay, maybe we should hire some HR people.

• 40:12Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 40:57Lex Fridman?

  And so they, they, they have fun with it. If you watch Boston Dynamics videos, they're aware of it.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:03Lex Fridman?

  They're, I mean, I was.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  The videos for sure that they put out.

• 41:07Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  And then when they started doing the videos, I think that was kind of a labor of love. I know that the former CEO, Mark, like he oversaw a lot of the videos and made a lot of them himself. And like, he's even really, 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 hell of integrity about the authenticity of them. But then when they started to go viral, I think that's when they started to realize, oh, there's something interesting here that, 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.

• 42:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  I know that they take it very seriously now.

• 42:23Lex Fridman?

  What I like about Boston Dynamics and similar companies, it's still mostly run by engineers.

• 42:31Lex Fridman?

  But, you know, I've had my criticisms. There's a bit more PR leaking in, but those, 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,

• 42:49Lex Fridman?

  they're having a lot of fun there with the robots.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Totally. Have you been, have you been to visit?

• 42:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's one of the most, like I, I, I, I mean, because I have eight robot dogs now.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Wait, you have eight robot dogs? What? They're just walking around your place?

• 43:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I'm working on them. That's actually one of my goals is. To have at any one time, always a robot moving.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 43:20Lex Fridman?

  I'm far away.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  That's an ambitious goal.

• 43:23Lex Fridman?

  Well, I have like more Roombas than I know what to do with. That are programmed. So the programmable Roombas.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 43:30Lex Fridman?

  And I have a bunch of little, like I built the, well, I'm not finished with it yet, but bought a robot from Rick and Morty. I still have a bunch of robots everywhere, but the thing is, what happens is you're working on one robot at a time. And that becomes like a little project. It's actually very difficult to have just a passively functioning robot always moving.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:57Lex Fridman?

  And that's a, that's a, that's a dream for me because I'd love to create that kind of little world. So the impressive thing about Boston Dynamics to me was to see like hundreds of spots. And like, there was a, the most impressive thing that still sticks with me is there was a spot robot walking down the hall, seemingly with no supervision whatsoever. And he was wearing, he or she, I don't know, was wearing a cowboy hat. It just, it was just walking down the hall and nobody paying attention. And it's just like walking down this long hall. And I'm like, looking around, does, is anyone, like, what's happening here? So presumably some kind of automation where it's doing the map.

• 44:41Lex Fridman?

  I mean, the whole environment is probably really well mapped, but I, it was just, it gave me a picture of a world where a robot is doing, doing his thing, wearing a cowboy hat. Just going down the hall, like getting some coffee or whatever. Like, I don't know what it's doing, what's the mission, but I don't know. For some reason, that really stuck with me. You don't often see robots that aren't part of a demo or that aren't, you know, like with a semi autonomous or autonomous vehicle, like directly doing a task. This was just chilling.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:13Lex Fridman?

  Walking around, I don't know.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, you know, I mean, we're at MIT, like when I first got to MIT, I was like, okay, where's all the, where's all the robots? And they were all like broken or like not demoing, so. Yeah. And, and, and what really excites me is that we're about to have that. We're about to have so many moving robot about to, well, it's coming. It's coming in our lifetime that we will just have robots moving around. We're already seeing the beginnings of it. There's delivery robots in some cities on the sidewalks. And I just love seeing like the TikToks of people reacting to that. Because yeah, you see a robot walking down the hall with a cowboy hat. You're like, what the fuck? What is this? This is awesome and scary and kind of awesome. And people either love or hate it.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  That's one of the things that I think companies are underestimating, that people will either love a robot or hate a robot and nothing in between. So it's just, again, an exciting time to be alive.

• 46:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I, I think kids almost universally, at least in my experience, love them. Love, love legged robots.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  If they're not loud, my, my son hates the Roomba because ours is loud.

• 46:23Lex Fridman?

  Oh, that, yeah, no, the legs, the legs.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:27Lex Fridman?

  Cause I, your son, um, do, do they understand Roomba to be a robot?

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, my kids, that's one of the first words they learned. They know how to say beep boop. And yes, they think the Roomba is a robot.

• 46:40Lex Fridman?

  Does, do they project intelligence out of the thing?

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Well, we don't really use it around them anymore for the reason that my son is scared of it.

• 46:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's really interesting.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  I think they would, like even a Roomba, because it's moving around on its own. I think kids and animals view it as a, an agent.

• 47:02Lex Fridman?

  So what do you think, if we just look at the state of the art of robotics, what do you think robots are actually good at today? So if we look at today.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  You mean physical robots?

• 47:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, physical robots.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 47:15Lex Fridman?

  Like, what are you impressed by? So I think a lot of people, I mean, that's what your book is about, is have maybe a, not a perfectly calibrated understanding of.

• 47:28Lex Fridman?

  Where we are in terms of robotics, what's difficult to robotics, what's easy in robotics?

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're way behind where people think we are. So what's impressive to me, so let's see. Oh, one, one thing that came out recently was Amazon has this new warehouse robot. And it's the first autonomous warehouse robot that can, is safe for people to be around. And so like, it's kind of, most people, most people, I think, envision that our warehouses are already fully automated and that there's just like robots doing things. It's actually still really difficult to have robots and people in the same space because it's dangerous for the most part. Robots, you know, because especially robots that have to be strong enough to move something

• 48:16Speaker 01

  heavy, for example, they can really hurt somebody. And so until now, a lot of the warehouse robots had to just move along like pre-existing lines, which really restricts what you can do. And so having, I think that that's, that's one of the big challenges. And one of the big like exciting things that's happening is that we're starting to see more cobotics in industrial spaces like that, where people and robots can work side by side and not get harmed.

• 48:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's what people don't realize, sort of the physical manipulation task with, with humans. It's not that the robots want to hurt you. I think that's what people are worried about, like this malevolent robot gets out of its own and wants to destroy all humans. Now, it's, you know, it's actually very difficult to know where the human is.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:07Lex Fridman?

  And to, to respond to the human and dynamically and collaborate with them on a task, especially if you're something like an industrial robotic arm, which is extremely powerful. See, this, some of the, some of those arms are pretty impressive now that you can just, you can, you can grab it, you can move it. So the, the collaboration between human and robot in the factory setting is really fascinating.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:35Lex Fridman?

  Do you think they'll take our jobs?

• 49:38Speaker 01

  I don't think it's that simple. I think that there's a ton of disruption that's happening and will continue to happen. You know, I think, speaking specifically of the Amazon warehouses, that might be an area where it would be good for robots to take some of the jobs that are, you know, where people are put in a position where it's unsafe and they're treated horribly. And, you know, probably it would be better if a robot did that and Amazon is clearly trying to automate that job away. So I think there's going to be a lot of disruption. I do think that robots and humans have very different skill sets. So while a robot might take over

• 50:17Speaker 01

  a task, it's not going to take over most jobs. I think just things will change a lot. Like, I don't know, one of the examples I have in the book is mining. So there you have this job that is very unsafe and that requires a bunch of workers and puts them in unsafe conditions. And now you have all these different robotic machines that can help make the job safer. And as a result, now people can sit in these like air-conditioned remote control stations and like control these autonomous mining trucks. And so that's a much better job,

• 50:57Speaker 01

  but also they're employing less people now. So it's, it's just a lot of, I think from a bird's eye perspective, you're not going to see job loss, you're going to see more jobs created because that's, I think the future is not robots just becoming like people and taking their jobs. The future is really a combination of our skills and then the supplemental skill set that robots have to increase productivity, to help people have better, safer jobs, to... Give people work that they actually enjoy doing and are good at. But it's really easy to say that from a bird's eye perspective and

• 51:41Speaker 01

  ignore kind of the rubble on the ground as we go through these transitions because of course specific jobs are going to get lost.

• 51:49Lex Fridman?

  If you look at the history of the 20th century, it seems like automation constantly increases productivity and improves the average quality of life. So it's been always good. So like thinking about

• 52:06Lex Fridman?

  this time being different is at least would need to go against the lessons of history.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 52:13Lex Fridman?

  And the other thing is I think people think that the automation of the physical tasks is easy. I was just in Ukraine and the interesting thing is, I mean, there's a lot of difficult and dark lessons just about a war zone. But one of the things that happens in war is there's a lot of mines that are placed.

• 52:37Lex Fridman?

  This one of the big problems for years after a war is even over is the entire landscape is covered in mines. And so there's a de-mining effort. And you would think robots would be good at this kind of thing. Or like your intuition would be like, well, say you have unlimited money and you want to do a good job of it, unlimited money. You would get a lot of really nice robots, but no, humans are still far superior.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Or animals.

• 53:08Lex Fridman?

  Or animals, but right, but humans with animals together.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:13Lex Fridman?

  You can't just have

• 53:13Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 53:14Lex Fridman?

  Dog with a hat.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  That's fair.

• 53:19Lex Fridman?

  But yes, and but figuring out also how to disable the mine. Obviously, the easy thing, the thing a robot can help with is to find the mine and blow it up. But that kind of destroy the landscape that that really does a lot of damage to the land. You want to disable the mine and to do that because of all the different, all the different edge cases of the problem. It requires a huge amount of human-like experience, it seems like. So it's mostly done by humans. They have no use for robots. They don't want robots.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we overestimate what we can automate.

• 54:00Lex Fridman?

  In especially in the physical realm.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:02Lex Fridman?

  It's weird. I mean, it's continues that the story of humans. We think we're shitty at everything in the physical world, including driving. We think everybody makes fun of themselves and others for being shitty drivers, but we're actually kind of incredible.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  No, incredible. And that's why like, that's why Tesla still says that if you're in the driver's seat, like you, you are ultimately responsible. Because the ideal for, I mean, I mean, you know more about this than I do, but like, robot cars are great at predictable things and can react faster and more precisely than a person and can do a lot of the driving. And then the reason that we still don't have autonomous vehicles on all the roads yet is because of this long tail of just unexpected occurrences where a human immediately understands that's a sunset and not a traffic light. That's a horse and carriage ahead of me on the highway, but the car has never encountered that before.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  So like, in theory, combining those skill sets is what's gonna really be powerful. The only problem is figuring off the, figuring out the human robot interaction and the handoffs. So like in cars, that's a huge problem right now, figuring out the handoffs. But in other areas, it might be easier. And that's really the future is human robot interaction.

• 55:23Lex Fridman?

  What's really hard to improve, it's, it's, it's terrible that people die in car accidents. But I mean, it's like 70, 80, 100 million miles, one death per 80 million miles. That's like really hard to beat for a robot. It's, that's like incredible that, like, think about it. Like the, how many people, like just the number of people throughout the world that are driving every single day. All this, you know, Steve deprived, drunk.

• 55:56Lex Fridman?

  Uh, distracted, all of that, and still very few die relative to what I would imagine. If I were to guess, back in the horse, see when I was like in the, in the beginning of the 20th century, riding my horse, I would talk so much shit about these cars. I'd be like, this is going, this is extremely dangerous. These machines traveling at 30 miles an hour, or whatever the hell they're going at. This is irresponsible. It's unnatural and, and it's going to be destructive to all of human society. But then it's extremely surprising how humans adapt to the thing. And they know how to not kill each other. I mean, that, that ability to adapt is incredible. And to mimic that in the machine is really tricky.

• 56:41Lex Fridman?

  Now that said, what Tesla is doing, I mean, I wouldn't have guessed how far machine learning can go. On vision alone, it's really, really incredible. And people that are, at least from my perspective, people that are kind of, you know, critical of Elon and those efforts, I think, don't give enough credit of how much progress we've made, how much incredible progress has been made in that direction. I think most of the robotics community wouldn't have guessed how much you can do on vision alone. It's kind of incredible. Because we would be, I think it's that approach, which is relatively unique, has challenged the other competitors to step up their game.

• 57:26Lex Fridman?

  So if you're using LiDAR, if you're using mapping, that challenges them to do better, to scale faster, and to use machine learning and computer vision as well to integrate both LiDAR and vision. So it's kind of incredible. And I'm not.

• 57:48Lex Fridman?

  I don't know if I even have a good intuition of how hard driving is anymore. Maybe it is possible to solve. So all the sunset, all the cases you mentioned. Yeah, the question is when?

• 58:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's not happening as quickly as people thought it would because it is more complicated.

• 58:05Lex Fridman?

  But I wouldn't have. I I agree with you. My current intuition is that we're gonna get there.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  I think we're gonna get there too.

• 58:14Lex Fridman?

  But I didn't before. I wasn't sure we're gonna get there without like with current technology. So, you know, I I was kind of, this is like with vision alone. I my intuition was you're gonna have to solve like common sense reasoning. You're gonna have to, you're gonna have to solve some of the big problems in artificial intelligence, not just, not just perception.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:46Lex Fridman?

  Like you have to have a deep understanding of the world is what was my sense. But now I'm starting to like, well, this, I mean, I'm continuously surprised how well the thing works.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:54Lex Fridman?

  Obviously Elon and others, others have stopped, but Elon continues, you know, saying we're gonna solve it in a year.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the thing, bold, bold prediction.

• 59:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but everyone else used to be doing that, but they kind of like, all right.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe.

• 59:11Lex Fridman?

  Maybe let's not promise we're gonna solve level four driving by 2020. Let's uh, let's chill on that.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  But people are still trying silently. I mean, the UK just committed hundred million pounds to research and development to speed up the process of getting autonomous vehicles on the road. Like everyone is, everyone can see that it is solvable and it's going to happen and it's going to change everything. And they're still investing in it.

• 59:38Lex Fridman?

  And like Waymo low key has driverless cars in in Arizona. Like you can get, you know, there's like robots. It's weird. Have you ever been in one?

• 59:52Speaker 01

  No.

• 59:53Lex Fridman?

  It's so weird. It's so awesome because the the most awesome experience is a, is the wheel turning. And you're sitting in the back. It's like, I don't know, it's um.

• 1:00:07Lex Fridman?

  It feels like you're a passenger with that friend who's a little crazy of a driver. It feels like, shit, I don't know, are you all right to drive, bro? You know, that kind of feeling, but, but then you kind of, that experience, that nervousness, and the excitement of trusting another being, and in this case, it's a machine, is really interesting.

• 1:00:32Lex Fridman?

  Just even introspecting your own feelings about the thing.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Lex Fridman?

  They're not doing anything in terms of making you feel better.

• 1:00:46Lex Fridman?

  Like, at least Waymo, I think they went with the approach of like, let's not try to put eyes on the thing. Let's, it's, it's a wheel, we know what that looks like, it's just a car, it's a car, get in the back, let's not like discuss this at all, let's not discuss the fact that this is a robot driving you, and you're in the back, and if the robot wants to start driving 80 miles an hour and run off of a bridge, you have no recourse, let's not discuss this, you're just getting in the back, there's no discussion about like how shit can go wrong, there's no eyes, there's nothing, there's like a map showing what the car can see, like, you know, what happens if it's like a Hal 9000 situation?

• 1:01:28Lex Fridman?

  Like, I'm sorry, I can't, you have a button, you can like call customer service.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Oh, God, then you get put on hold for two hours?

• 1:01:37Lex Fridman?

  Probably.

• 1:01:40Lex Fridman?

  But, you know, currently what they're doing, which I think is understandable, but, you know, the car just can pull over and stop and wait for help to arrive, and then a driver will come, and then they'll actually drive the car for you, but that's like, you know, what if you're late

• 1:01:57Lex Fridman?

  for a meeting or all that kind of stuff?

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Or like the more dystopian, isn't it the fifth element where, is Will Smith in that movie? Who's in that movie? No, Bruce Willis?

• 1:02:05Lex Fridman?

  Bruce Willis.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, and he gets into like a robotic cab or car or something, and then because he's violated a traffic rule, it locks him in?

• 1:02:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  And he has to wait for the cops to come and he can't get out, so like,

• 1:02:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  we're gonna see stuff like that, maybe.

• 1:02:19Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's, I, I, I believe that the companies that have robots.

• 1:02:27Lex Fridman?

  The the only ones that will succeed are the ones that don't do that, meaning they respect privacy.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  You think so?

• 1:02:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, because people, because because they're gonna have to earn people's trust.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like, Amazon works with law enforcement and gives them the data from the Ring cameras, so.

• 1:02:48Lex Fridman?

  Really?

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Why should it? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Do you have a Ring camera?

• 1:02:52Lex Fridman?

  Uh, no.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:02:54Lex Fridman?

  No, no. But the basic, any security camera, right? I have a Googles, whatever they have.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  We have one that's not the data. We store the data on a local server because we don't want it to go to law enforcement. Because all the companies are doing it. They're doing it. I I bet Apple wouldn't.

• 1:03:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  The only company I trust, and I don't know how much longer.

• 1:03:18Lex Fridman?

  I don't know. I, maybe that's true for cameras. But with robots, I didn't, people are just not gonna let a robot inside of their home. Where, like, one time where somebody gets arrested because of something a robot sees, that's gonna be, that's gonna destroy a company.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  You don't think people are gonna be like, well, that wouldn't happen to me. That happened to a bad person.

• 1:03:43Lex Fridman?

  And I think they would.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46Lex Fridman?

  Because in the modern world, people are get, have you seen Twitter? They get extremely paranoid about any kind of surveillance.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  But the thing that I've had to learn is that Twitter is not the modern world. Like, when I go, you know, inland to visit my relatives, like, they don't, that that's a different discourse that's happening. I think like, the whole tech criticism world.

• 1:04:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  It's loud in our ears because we're in those circles.

• 1:04:12Lex Fridman?

  Do you think you can be a company that does social robotics and not win over Twitter?

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  That's a good question.

• 1:04:19Lex Fridman?

  I feel like the early adopters are all on Twitter. And it feels like you have to win them over.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  It feels like nowadays you'd have to win over TikTok, honestly. I don't.

• 1:04:29Lex Fridman?

  TikTok, is that, is that a website?

• 1:04:34Lex Fridman?

  I need to check it out.

• 1:04:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and that's an interesting one, because China is behind that one.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:04:44Lex Fridman?

  So if it's compelling enough, maybe people would be able to give up privacy and that kind of stuff. That's really scary.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  I just, I mean, I'm worried about it. I'm worried about it and I'm, there've been some developments recently that are like super exciting, like the large language learning models. Like, wow, I did not anticipate those improving so quickly. And those are going to change everything. And one of the things that I'm trying to be cynical about is that I think they're going to have a big impact on privacy and data security and like manipulating consumers and manipulating people because suddenly you'll have these agents that people will talk to and they won't care or won't know, at least on a conscious level, that it's recording the conversations. So kind of like we were talking about before.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  And at the same time, the technology is so freaking exciting that it's going to get adopted.

• 1:05:41Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's not even just the collection of data, but the ability to manipulate at scale. So what do you think about the AI, the engineer from, from Google that thought Lambda is sentient? You had actually a really good post from somebody else, I forgot her name, is brilliant. I can't believe I didn't know about her.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Chanel Shane?

• 1:06:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, from Weird AI.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I love her book.

• 1:06:08Lex Fridman?

  Oh, she's, she's great. I left a note for myself to reach out to her. She's amazing. She's hilarious and brilliant and just a great summarizer of the state of AI. But she has, I think that was from her, where I was looking at AI explaining that it's a squirrel.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, because the transcript that the engineer released, Lambda kind of talks about the experience of.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  Human like feelings and I think even consciousness. And so she was like, oh, cool. That's impressive. I wonder if an AI can also describe the experience of being a squirrel. And so she interviewed, I think she did GPT three about the experience of being a squirrel. And then she did a bunch of other ones too. Like, what's it like being a flock of crows? What's it like being an algorithm that powers a Roomba? And like,

• 1:07:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  You can have a conversation about any of those things and they're very convincing.

• 1:07:04Lex Fridman?

  Pretty convincing, yeah.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05Lex Fridman?

  Even GPT three, which is not like state of the art.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:09Lex Fridman?

  It's convincing of being a squirrel. It's like, what it's like. I mean, you should, you should check it out because it really is. It's like, yeah, that probably is what a squirrel would, would.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Would say.

• 1:07:22Lex Fridman?

  Are you excited? Like, what's it like being a squirrel? Well, it's fun.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Okay, I get to eat nuts and run around all day.

• 1:07:28Lex Fridman?

  Like, how do you think people feel like when you tell them that you're a squirrel? You know, or like, I forget what it was. Like, a lot of people might be scared to find out that you're a squirrel or something like this. And then the system answers pretty, like, pretty well. Like, yeah, I, um, I hope they'll, like, what do you think that when they find out you're a squirrel? I, I hope they'll see how fun it is to be a squirrel, something like that.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  What do you say to people who don't believe you're a squirrel? I say, come see for yourself. I am a squirrel.

• 1:08:01Lex Fridman?

  That's great.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's really great because it, like, the two things to note about it are, first of all, just because the machine is describing an experience doesn't mean it can, it actually has that experience. But then secondly, these things are getting so advanced and so convincing at describing these things and talking to people. That's, I mean, just the implications for health, education, communication, entertainment, gaming. Like, I just, like, all of the applications, it is mind boggling what we're going to be able to do with this. And, and that my kids are not going to remember a time before they could have conversations with artificial agents.

• 1:08:43Lex Fridman?

  Do you think they would? Because to me, this is, um, The focus in the act community has been, well, this engineer surely is hallucinating. The thing is not sentient. But to me, I, first of all, it doesn't matter if he is or not. This is coming.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Lex Fridman?

  Where a large number of people would believe a system is sentient, including engineers within companies.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:10Lex Fridman?

  So in that sense, you start to think about a world where like your kids aren't just used to having a conversation with a bot, but used to believing, kind of having an implied belief that the thing is sentient.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's true. And I think that one of the things that bothered me about all of the coverage in the tech press about this incident, like, obviously, I don't believe the system is sentient. Like, I think that it can convincingly describe that it is. I don't think it's doing what he thought it was doing and actually experiencing feelings. But a lot of the tech press was about how he was wrong and depicting him as kind of naive. And it's not naive. Like, there's so much research in my field showing that people do this. Even experts, they, they might be very clinical when they're doing human robot interaction experiments with a robot that they've built. And then you bring in a different robot and they're like, oh, look at it. It's having fun.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  It's doing this, like, that happens in our lab all the time. We are all this guy. And it's gonna, it's gonna be huge. So I think that, that the goal is not to discourage this kind of belief or like design systems that people won't think are sentient. I don't think that's possible. I think you're right. This is coming. It's something that we have to acknowledge and even embrace and be very aware of.

• 1:10:35Lex Fridman?

  So one of the really interesting perspectives that your book takes on a system like this is to see them, not to compare a system like this to humans, but to compare it to animals, of how we see animals. Can you kind of try to, again, sneak up, try to explain why this analogy is better than the human analogy, the analogy of robots as animals?

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it gets trickier with the language stuff, but we'll get into that, too.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  I think that animals are a really great thought experiment when we're thinking about AI and robotics, because, again, this comparing them to humans that leads us down the wrong path, both because it's not accurate, but also, I think, for the future, we don't want that. We want something that's a supplement. But I think animals, because we've used them throughout history for so many different things, we domesticated them not because they do what we do, but because what they do is different and that's useful. And it's just like, whether we're talking about companionship, whether we're talking about work integration, whether we're talking about responsibility for harm, there are just so many things we can draw on in that history from these entities that can sense, think,

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  make autonomous decisions and learn that are applicable to how we should be thinking about robots and AI. And the point of the book is not that they're the same thing, that animals and robots are the same. Obviously, there are tons of differences there. Like, you can't, you can't have a conversation with a squirrel, right? But the, the point

• 1:12:07Lex Fridman?

  I do it all the time.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:12:09Lex Fridman?

  By the way, squirrels are the cutest. I project so much on squirrels. I wonder what their inner life is. I suspect they're much bigger assholes than we imagine.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:12:20Lex Fridman?

  Like, if it was a giant squirrel, it would fuck you over so fast if you had the chance. It would take everything you own. It would eat all your stuff because it's small and the furry tail. The furry tail is a, is a, is a weapon against human consciousness and cognition. It wins us over. That's what cats do, too. Cats outcompete squirrels.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  And dogs, like, dogs-

• 1:12:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. No, dogs have love. Cats are, have no soul. They, no, I'm just kidding. People get so angry when I talk shit about cats. I love cats. Anyway, so, yeah, you're, you're describing all the different kinds of animals that get domesticated. And it's a really interesting idea that it's not just sort of pets. There's all kinds of domestication going on. They all have all kinds of uses.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:11Lex Fridman?

  Like the ox that you propose might be at least historically, one of the most useful domesticated animals.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  It was a game changer because it revolutionized like what people could do economically, et cetera. So I mean, just like robots, they're going to change, they're going to change things economically. They're going to change landscapes, like cities might even get rebuilt around autonomous vehicles or drones or delivery robots. Like I think just the same ways that animals have really shifted society. And society has adapted also to like socially accepting animals as pets. I think we're going to see very similar things with robots. So I think it's a useful analogy. It's not a perfect one, but I think it's, it helps us get away from this idea that robots can, should, or will replace people.

• 1:13:59Lex Fridman?

  If you remember, what are some interesting uses of animals? Ferrets, for example.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, the ferrets. They, they still do this. They use ferrets to go into narrow spaces that people can't go into, like a pipe. Or like they'll use them to run electrical wire. I think they did that for Princess Di's wedding. There's so many weird ways that

• 1:14:18Lex Fridman?

  Work is work.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  We've used animals and still use animals for things that robots can't do, like the dolphins that they used in the, in the military. I think the, I think Russia still has dolphins and the US still has dolphins in their navies.

• 1:14:35Lex Fridman?

  What?

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  Mind detection, looking for lost underwater equipment, some rumors about like using them for weaponry, which, which I think Russia's like, sure, believe that. And America's like, no, no, we don't do that. Who knows? But they started doing that in like the 60s, 70s. They started training these dolphins because they were like, oh, dolphins have this amazing echolocation system that we can't replicate with machines and they're trainable. So we're going to use them for all the stuff that we can't do with machines or by ourselves. And they've tried to phase out the dolphins. I know the US has like invested a lot of money in trying to make robots do the mind detection. But like you were saying, there are some things that the robots are good at.

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  And there's some things that biological creatures are better at. So they still have the dolphins.

• 1:15:24Lex Fridman?

  So there's also pigeons, of course.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, pigeons. Oh, my gosh, there's so many examples. The pigeon, I mean, The pigeons were the original hobby photography drone. They also carried mail for thousands of years, letting people communicate with each other in new ways. So the thing that I like about the animal analogy is they have all these physical abilities, but also sensing abilities that we just, we don't have. And like, that's, that's just so useful. And that's, that's robots, right? Robots have physical abilities. They can help us lift things or do things that we're not physically capable of. They can also sense things. It's just, I just feel like, I still feel like it's a really good analogy.

• 1:16:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's really strong.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  And it works because it's, people are familiar with it.

• 1:16:09Lex Fridman?

  What about companionship? And when we start to think about like cats and dogs as pets that seem to serve no purpose whatsoever, except the social connection.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a newer thing. At least in the United States, like dogs used to have, like they used to have a purpose. They used to be guard dogs or they had some sort of function. And then at some point they became just part of the family. And I, it's, it's so interesting how there's some animals that we've treated as workers, some that we've treated as objects, some that we eat and some that are parts of our families. And that that's different across cultures. And I'm convinced that we're going to see the same thing with robots. Where people are going to develop strong emotional connections to certain robots that they relate to, either culturally or, or personally, emotionally.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  And then there's going to be other robots that we don't treat the same way.

• 1:17:08Lex Fridman?

  I wonder, does that have to do more with the culture and the people or the robot design? Is there interplay between the two? Like, why did dogs and cats out compete ox and, I don't know, what else? Like farm animals to, to really get inside the home and get inside our hearts?

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, people point to the fact that dogs are very genetically flexible and they can evolve much more quickly than other animals. And so they.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  Evolutionary biologists think that dogs evolved to be more appealing to us. And then, once we learned how to breed them, we started breeding them to be more appealing to us, too, which is not something that we necessarily would be able to do with cows, although we've bred them to make more milk for us. So, but part of it is also culture. I mean, there are cultures where people eat dogs still today. And then there's other cultures where we're like, oh, no, that's terrible. We would never do that. And so I think there's a lot of different elements that play in.

• 1:18:12Lex Fridman?

  I wonder if there's good, because I understand dogs, they use their eyes, they're able to communicate affection, all those kinds of things. It's really interesting what dogs do. There's whole conferences on dog consciousness and cognition and all that kind of stuff. Now, cats is a mystery to me, because they seem to not give a shit about the human.

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  But they're warm and fluffy.

• 1:18:34Lex Fridman?

  But they, but they're also passive aggressive. So they're, at the same time, they're like, they're dismissive of, of you in some sense.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  I think some people like that, some people like that about people.

• 1:18:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, they want, they want the push and pull of a relationship.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  They don't want loyalty or unconditional love. That does, that means they haven't earned it.

• 1:18:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:19:00Lex Fridman?

  And maybe that says a lot more about the people than it does about the animals.

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, we all need therapy.

• 1:19:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:07Lex Fridman?

  So I'm judging harshly the people that have cats, or the people that have dogs. Maybe the people that have dogs need, are desperate for attention and unconditional love, and they're unable to, to, um, to sort of struggle, to earn meaningful connections. I don't know.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  Maybe people are talking about you and your robot pets in the same way.

• 1:19:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's, uh, it is kind of sad. There's just robots everywhere. But it's, I mean, I'm joking about it being sad, because I think it's kind of beautiful. I think robots are beautiful in the same way that pets are, even children, in that, like, they capture some kind of magic of, uh, social robots. They have the capacity to have the same kind of magic of connection.

• 1:20:03Lex Fridman?

  I don't know what that is. Like, um, when they're brought to life and they move around.

• 1:20:09Lex Fridman?

  The way they make me feel, I'm pretty convinced is, as you know, they will make billions of people feel. Like, I don't think I'm like some weird robotic guy. I'm not.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  I mean, you are, but not in this way.

• 1:20:25Lex Fridman?

  Not in this way. I mean, I just, I can put on my like hu- normal human hat and just see this, oh, this is like, there's a lot of possibility there of something cool, just like with dogs. Like, what is it? Why are we so into dogs or cats? Like, it's like, that, it's way different than us.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:20:46Lex Fridman?

  It's like drooling all over the place with its tongue out. It's like, what? It's like a weird creature. There used to be a wolf. Why are we into this thing?

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Well, dogs can either express or mimic a lot of emotions that we recognize. Um, and I think that's a big thing. Like, a lot of the magic of animals and robots is our own self-projection. And the easier it is for us to see ourselves in something and project human emotions or qualities or traits onto it, the more we'll relate to it. And then you also have the movement, of course. I think that's also really, that's why I'm so interested in physical robots, because that's, I think, the visceral magic of them. I think we're, I mean, there's, there's research showing that we're probably biologically hardwired to respond to autonomous movement in our physical space,

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  because we've had to watch out for predators, or whatever the reason is. And so animals and robots are very appealing to us as these autonomously moving things that we view as agents instead of objects.

• 1:21:50Lex Fridman?

  I mean, I, I love the moment, which is, I've been particularly working on, which is when a robot, like the cowboy hat, uh, is doing its own thing, and then, uh, it recognizes you. I mean, the way a dog does. And it, it looks like this, and the, the moment of recognition, like, you're walking, say, you're working at an airport on the street, and there's just, you know, hundreds of strangers. But then you see somebody you know, and that like, where you wake up to like, uh, that excitement of seeing somebody you know and saying hello and all that kind of stuff. That's a magical moment. Like, uh, I think, especially with the dog.

• 1:22:33Lex Fridman?

  It makes you feel noticed and heard and and loved like that somebody looks at you and recognizes you that that it matters that you exist.

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, you feel seen.

• 1:22:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and that's a cool feeling. And I honestly think robots can give that feeling.

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, totally.

• 1:22:51Lex Fridman?

  Currently Alexa, I mean, one of the downsides of these systems is they don't. They're servants. They like a

• 1:23:01Lex Fridman?

  part of the, you know, they're trying to maintain privacy, I suppose. But I don't feel seen Alexa. Right?

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  I think that's gonna change. I think you're right. And I think that that's that's the game changing changing nature of things like these large language learning models. And the fact that these companies are investing in embodied versions that move around of Alexa, like Astro.

• 1:23:28Lex Fridman?

  Can I just say, yeah, I haven't, is that out?

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  I mean, it's out. You can't just like buy one commercially yet, but you can apply for one.

• 1:23:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. My gut says that these companies don't have the guts

• 1:23:46Lex Fridman?

  to do the personalization. This goes to the because it's edgy, is dangerous. It's gonna make a lot of people very angry. Like in the way that, you know, just imagine, okay, all right. If you do the full landscape of human civilization, just visualize the number of people that are going through breakups right now, just the amount of really passionate, just even if we just look at teenagers. The amount of deep heartbreak that's happening. And like, if you're going to have Alexa have more of a personal connection with the human, you're gonna have humans that like have existential crises.

• 1:24:27Lex Fridman?

  There's a lot of people that suffer from loneliness and depression. And like, you're now taking on the full responsibility of being a companion to the the roller coaster of the human condition. As a company, imagine PR and marketing people, they're gonna freak out. They don't have the guts. It's gonna have to come from somebody from a new Apple, from those kinds of folk, like it's a small startup.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  And it might.

• 1:24:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Like they're coming. There's already virtual therapists. There's that replica app. I haven't tried it, but replicas like a

• 1:24:58Lex Fridman?

  It's great.

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  virtual companion, like. It's coming and if big companies don't do it, someone else will.

• 1:25:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think the the future, the next trillion dollar company will be those personalization. Because if you think, um, if you think about all the the AI we have around us, all the the smartphone and so on, there's very minimal personalization.

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  You don't think that's just because they weren't able?

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:25:26Lex Fridman?

  I don't think they have the guts.

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  I mean, it might be true, but I have to wonder, I mean, Google is clearly gonna do something with the language. I mean.

• 1:25:34Lex Fridman?

  They don't have the guts.

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  Are you challenging them?

• 1:25:38Lex Fridman?

  Uh, partially, but not really, because I know they're not gonna do it.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 1:25:43Lex Fridman?

  They they don't have to, it's bad for business in the short term.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  I'm gonna be honest, like, maybe it's not such a bad thing if they don't just like roll this out quickly, because I do think there are huge issues.

• 1:25:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  And and there's, and not just issues with like the responsibility of like unforeseen effects on people, but what's the business model? And if you are using the business model that you've used in other domains, then you're gonna have to collect data from people, which you will anyway, to personalize the thing. And you're gonna be somehow monetizing the data, or you're gonna be doing some like ad model. It just, it seems like now we're suddenly getting into the realm of like severe consumer protection issues. And I'm, I'm really worried about that. I I see massive potential for this technology to be used in a way that's not for the public good and not,

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  I mean, that's in in an individual user's interest, maybe, but not in society's interest.

• 1:26:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, see, I think, I think that kind of personalization should be.

• 1:26:52Lex Fridman?

  Like redefine how we treat data. I think you should own all the data your phone knows about you. Like, and be able to delete it with a single click and walk away. And that data cannot be monetized or used or shared anywhere without your permission. I think that's the only way people will trust you to give, for you to use that data.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  But then how are companies gonna? I mean, a lot of these applications rely on massive troves of data to train the AI system.

• 1:27:28Lex Fridman?

  Right, so you have to opt in constantly and opt in not in some legal, I agree. But obvi- like show, like in the way I opt in to tell you a secret. Like, we understand, like, that, like, I have to choose, like, how well do I know you? And then I say, like, don't tell this to anyone. And then I have to judge how leaky that, like, how good you are at keeping secrets. In that same way, like, it's very transparent in which data you're allowed to use for which purposes.

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  That's what people are saying is the solution. And I think that works to some extent, having transparency, having people consent. I think it breaks down at the point at which, we've seen this happen on social media too. Like, people are willingly giving up their data because they're getting a functionality from that. And then the harm that that causes is on a, like, maybe to someone else and not to them personally. So.

• 1:28:31Lex Fridman?

  I don't think people are giving their data. They're not being asked, like.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  But if, if you were asked.

• 1:28:37Lex Fridman?

  It's not consensual.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  If you were like, tell me a secret about yourself and I'll give you a hundred dollars. I'd tell you a secret.

• 1:28:44Lex Fridman?

  No, not a hundred dollars. First of all, you wouldn't. You wouldn't trust, like, why are you giving me a hundred dollars?

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  It's a bad example.

• 1:28:52Lex Fridman?

  But, but like, I need, I would ask for.

• 1:28:58Lex Fridman?

  Your specific like fashion interest in order to give recommendations to you for shopping. And I'd be very clear for that. And you could disable that. You can delete that. But but then you can be have a deep, meaningful, rich connection with a system about what you think you look fat in, where you look great in, what like the full history of all the things you've worn, whether you regret the Justin Bieber or enjoy the Justin Bieber shirt, all of that information that's mostly private to even you, not even your loved ones. That a system should have that because then a system,

• 1:29:38Lex Fridman?

  if you trust it to keep control of that data that you own, you can walk away with that system could tell you a damn good thing to wear.

• 1:29:47Speaker 01

  It could. And the harm that I'm concerned about is not that the system is going to then suggest a dress for me that is based on my preferences. So I I went to this conference once where I was talking to the people who do the analytics in like the big ad companies. And like literally a woman there was like, I can ask you three totally unrelated questions and tell you what menstrual product you use. And so what they do is they aggregate the data and they map out different personalities and different people and demographics. And then they have a lot of power and control to market to people. So like, I might not be sharing my data with any of the systems because I'm like, I'm on Twitter. I know that this is bad.

• 1:30:31Speaker 01

  Other people might be sharing data that can be used against me like it's, I think it's, it's way more complex than just, I share a piece of personal information and it gets used against me. I think that at a more systemic level. And then it's always, you know, vulnerable populations that are targeted by this. You know, low income people being targeted for scamming loans or, I don't know, like, I could get targeted like someone, not me, because I have someone who doesn't have kids yet and is my age could get targeted for like freezing their eggs. And there's all these ways that you can manipulate people where it's not really clear that that came from.

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  That person's data, it came from all of us, all of us opting into this.

• 1:31:21Lex Fridman?

  But there, there's a bunch of sneaky decisions along the way that could be avoided. If there's transparency, so that, so one of the ways that goes wrong, if you share that data with too many ad networks. Don't run your own ad network. Don't share with anybody.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:31:40Lex Fridman?

  This data.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  You could regulate.

• 1:31:42Lex Fridman?

  You, that belongs to just you and all the ways you allow the company to use it. The default isn't no way at all. And you're consciously, constantly saying exactly how to use it. And, uh, and also it has to do with the recommender system itself from the company, which is,

• 1:32:06Lex Fridman?

  freezing your eggs. If that doesn't make you happy, if that idea doesn't make you happy, then the system shouldn't recommend it and should very be very good at learning. So not the kind of things that the category of people it thinks you belong to would do, but more you specifically, what makes you happy, what is helping you grow.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  But you're assuming that people's preferences and like what makes them happy is static. Whereas when we're talking before about how a company like Apple can tell people what they want and they will start to want it. That's the thing that I'm more concerned about.

• 1:32:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that is a huge problem. It's not just listening to people, but manipulating them into wanting something.

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  And that's like, we have a long history of using technology for that purpose. Like the persuasive design in casinos to get people to gamble more or like, it's just, I'm.

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  The other thing that I'm worried about is as we have more social technology, suddenly you have this on a new level. Like if you look at the influencer marketing that happens online now.

• 1:33:19Lex Fridman?

  What's influencer marketing?

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  So like on Instagram, there will be some like person who has a bunch of followers.

• 1:33:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  And then a brand will like hire them to promote some product. And it's above board. They disclose like I'm, this is an ad that I'm promoting, but they have so many young followers who like deeply admire and trust them. This, I mean, this must work for you too. Don't you have like ads on the podcast? Like people trust you.

• 1:33:43Lex Fridman?

  Magic Spoon cereal, low carb. Yes.

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  If you say that, like I guarantee you, some people will buy that just because even though they know that you're being paid, they trust you.

• 1:33:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. It's different with podcasts because uh, well, my particular situation, but it's true for a lot of podcasts, especially big ones, is you know, I have 10 times more sponsors that want to be sponsors than, than I have.

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

  So you get to select the ones that you actually want to support.

• 1:34:12Lex Fridman?

  And so like you end up using it and then you're able to actually, like there's no incentive to like um, show for anybody.

• 1:34:22Speaker 01

  Sure. And that's why it's fine when it's still human influencers.

• 1:34:26Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  Now, if you're a bot, you're not gonna discriminate. You're not gonna be like, oh, well, this product's good for people.

• 1:34:37Lex Fridman?

  You think there'll be like bots essentially with millions of followers?

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  There already are. There are virtual influencers in South Korea.

• 1:34:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  Who show products and, and like, that's just the tip of the iceberg because that's still very primitive. Now with the new image generation and the language learning models. And like, so we're starting to do some research around kids and like young adults because.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  A lot of the research on like, what's okay to advertise to kids and what is too manipulative has to do with television ads back in the day where like, a kid who's 12 understands, oh, that's an advertisement. I can distinguish that from entertainment. I know it's trying to sell me something. Now, it's getting really, really murky with influencers. And then, if you have like, a bot that, that a kid has developed a relationship with, is it okay to market products through that or not? Like, you're getting into all these consumer protection issues because you're developing a trusted relationship with a social entity. But it's, and, and so, and so now, it's like personalized, it's scalable, it's automated,

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  and it has, it, it can, so some of the research showing that kids are already very confused about like, the incentives of the company versus what the robot is doing.

• 1:36:00Lex Fridman?

  Meaning they're...

• 1:36:03Speaker 01

  So, okay.

• 1:36:04Lex Fridman?

  They're not deeply understanding the incentives of the, of the, of the system.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. So like, kids who are old enough to understand, this is a television advertisement, it's trying to advertise to me. I might still decide I want this product, but they understand what's going on. So there's some transparency there. That age child, so Daniela DiPaola, Anastasia Ostrowski, and I advised on this project, they did this, they, they asked kids who had interacted with social robots, whether they would like a policy that allows robots to market to people through casual conversation, or whether they would prefer that it has to be transparent, that it's like an ad coming from a company. And the majority said they preferred the casual conversation. And when asked why, there was

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  a lot of confusion about, they were like, well, the robot knows me better than the company does. So the robot's only going to market things that I like. And so they don't really, they're not connecting the fact that the robot is an agent of the company. They're viewing it as something separate. And I think that even happens subconsciously with grownups when it comes to robots and artificial agents. And it will, like, this Blake guy at Google, sorry, I'm going on and on, but like, his main concern was that Google owned this sentient agent and that it was being mistreated. His concern was not that the agent was going to mistreat people. So I think we're going to see a lot of this.

• 1:37:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but shitty companies will do that. I think ultimately that confusion should be alleviated by the robot should actually know you better and should not have any control from the company.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  But what's the business model for that?

• 1:37:44Lex Fridman?

  It's if you use the robot to buy, first of all, the robot should probably cost money.

• 1:37:51Speaker 01

  Should what?

• 1:37:52Lex Fridman?

  Cost money, like the way Windows operating system does. I see it more like an operating system than um like this thing is your window, no pun intended, into the into the world. So it's helping you as like a personal assistant, right? And so that should cost money. You should, you know, whatever it is, 10 bucks, 20 bucks. Like that's the thing that makes your life significantly better. This idea that everything should be free is is like it should actually help educate you. You should talk shit about all the other companies that do stuff for free. But uh, but also, yeah, in terms of if you purchase stuff based on its recommendation, it gets money.

• 1:38:36Lex Fridman?

  That so it's it's it's kind of ad driven, but it's not ads. It's like um

• 1:38:45Lex Fridman?

  it's not controlled, like no, no external entities can control it to try to manipulate to want a thing.

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  That would be amazing.

• 1:38:56Lex Fridman?

  It's actually trying to discover what you want. So it's not allowed to have any influence, no promoted ad, no anything. So that's finding, I don't know, the uh, the thing that would actually make you happy. That's the only thing it cares about. I I think I think companies like this can win out.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  Yes, I think eventually, once people understand the value of the robot, even just like, I think that robots would be valuable to people, even if they're not. Marketing something or helping with like preferences or anything like just a simple, the same thing as a pet, like a dog that has no function other than being a member of your family. I think robots could really be that and people would pay for that. I don't think the market realizes that yet. And so my concern is that companies are not going to go in that direction, at least not yet, of making like this contained thing that you buy. It seems almost old fashioned, right? To have a disconnected

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  object that you buy, that you're not like paying a subscription for. It's not like controlled by one of the big corporations.

• 1:40:06Lex Fridman?

  But that's the old fashioned things that people yearn for because I think it's very popular now and people understand the negative effects of social media, the negative effects of the data being used in all these kinds of ways. I think, I think we're just waking up to the realization, we tried, but we're like baby deer, finding our legs in this new world of social media of ad driven companies and realizing, okay, this has to be done somehow different. I mean, that like, like one of the most popular notions, at least in the United States, that social media is evil and is doing bad, it's doing bad by us. It's not like it's totally tricked us

• 1:40:50Lex Fridman?

  into believing that it's good for us. I think everybody knows it's bad for us. And so like there's a hunger for other ideas.

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  All right. It's time for us to start that company.

• 1:40:59Lex Fridman?

  I think so.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 1:41:00Lex Fridman?

  I think this go.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  Hopefully no one listens to this and steals the idea.

• 1:41:04Lex Fridman?

  There's no, see, that's the other thing. I think I'm a big person on execution is what matters. I mean,

• 1:41:12Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:13Lex Fridman?

  It's like ideas are kind of true. The social robotics is a good example that there's been so many amazing companies that went out of business. I mean, to me, it's obvious, like it's obvious that there will be a robotics company that puts a social robot in the home of billions of homes.

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:41:33Lex Fridman?

  And it'll be a companion. Okay, there you go. You can steal that idea. Do it.

• 1:41:38Speaker 01

  Okay, I have a question for you. What about Elon Musk's humanoid? Is he going to execute on that?

• 1:41:47Lex Fridman?

  There might be a lot to say. So for people who are not aware, there's an Optimus, Tesla's Optimus robot that's, I guess, the stated reason for that robot is a humanoid robot in the factory that's able to automate some of the tasks that humans are currently doing. And the reason you want to do, this is the second reason you mentioned, the reason you want to do humanoid robots, because the factory is built for, there's certain tasks that are designed for humans. So it's hard to automate with any other form factor than a humanoid. And then the other reason is because so much effort has been put into

• 1:42:25Lex Fridman?

  this giant data engine machine of perception that's inside Tesla Autopilot. That's seemingly, at least the machine, if not the data, is transferable to the factory setting, to any setting.

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, he said it would do anything that's boring to us.

• 1:42:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah. The interesting thing about that is there's no interest and no discussion about the social aspect. Like, I talked to him on mic and off mic about it quite a bit. And there's not a discussion about like, to me, it's obvious if a thing like that works at all, at all. In fact, it has to work really well in a factory. If it works kind of shitty, it's much more useful in the home.

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:43:22Lex Fridman?

  Because we're much, this, we're, I think being shitty at stuff is kind of what makes relationships great. Like, you want to be flawed and be able to communicate your flaws and be unpredictable in certain ways. Like, if you fell over every once in a while for no reason whatsoever, I think that's essential for, for like-

• 1:43:45Speaker 01

  Very charming.

• 1:43:46Lex Fridman?

  It's charming, but also concerning and also like, like-

• 1:43:51Lex Fridman?

  Like, are you okay? Is you, I mean, it's both hilarious. It's whenever somebody you love like falls down the stairs. It was both hilarious and concerning. It's some, some dance between the two. And I think that's essential for like, you almost want to engineer that in. Except you don't have to because of robotics in the physical space is really difficult. So.

• 1:44:18Lex Fridman?

  I think I've learned to not discount the, the efforts that Elon does. There's a few things that are really interesting there. One, because he's taking it extremely seriously. What I like is the humanoid form, the cost of building a robot. I talked to Jim Keller offline about this a lot. And currently humanoid robots cost a lot of money. And the way they're thinking about it, now they're not talking about all the social robotic stuff that you and I care about. They are thinking, how can we manufacture this thing cheaply and do it like well? And the kind of discussions they're having is really great engineering.

• 1:44:59Lex Fridman?

  It's like, it's the ba, it's like first principles question of like, why is this cost so much? Like, what's the cheap way? How, why can't we build? And there's not a good answer. Why can't we build this humanoid form for under a thousand dollars? And like, I've, I've sat and had these conversations. There's no reason. It's, I think the reason they've been so expensive is because they were focused on trying to. They weren't focused on doing the mass manufacture. There were, people are focused on getting a thing that's, I don't, I don't know exactly what the reasoning is, but it's the same like Waymo. It's like, let's, let's build a million dollar car in the beginning. Or like multimillion dollar car.

• 1:45:43Lex Fridman?

  Let's try to solve that problem. The, the way Elon, the way Jim Keller, the way some of those folks are thinking is. Let's like, at the same time, try to actually build a system that's cheap. Not crappy, but cheap. And let's first principles. What is the minimum amount of degrees of freedom we need? What are the joints? Where's the control set? Like, how many, how do we, like, where are the activators? What's the way to power this in the lowest cost way possible? But also in a way that's like, actually works. How do we make the whole thing not part of the components where there's a supply chain? You have to have all these different parts that have to feed us.

• 1:46:25Lex Fridman?

  Do it all from scratch and do the, the learning. I mean, it's like immediately certain things like become obvious. Do the exact same pipeline as you do for autonomous driving. Just exactly, I mean, the infrastructure that is incredible. For the computer vision, for the manipulation task. The control problem changes, the perception problem changes, but the pipeline doesn't change. Do it. And so I don't, I don't, um, obviously the optimism about how long it's gonna take. I don't share. Um, but it's a really interesting problem. And I don't want to say anything because my first gut is to say that. Why the humanoid form? That doesn't make sense.

• 1:47:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's my second gut too, but.

• 1:47:12Lex Fridman?

  But, but then there's a lot of people that are really excited about the humanoid form there.

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:47:17Lex Fridman?

  I don't want to get in the way, like, they might solve this thing and they might. It's like similar with Boston Dynamics. Like, why, like, if I were to, you can be a hater and be, and you go, go up to Mark Riber and just like, how are you gonna make money with these super expensive legged robots? What's, what's your business plan? This doesn't make any sense. Why are you doing these legged robots? But at the same time, they're pushing forward. The science, the art of robotics and the way that nobody else does.

• 1:47:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:48Lex Fridman?

  And with Elon, they're not just going to do that. They're going to drive down the cost to where we can have humanoid bots in the home potentially.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  So the part I agree with is. A lot of people find it fascinating and it probably also attracts talent who want to work on humanoid robots. I think it's a fascinating scientific problem and engineering problem and it can teach us more about human body and locomotion and all of that. I think there's a lot to learn from it. Where I get tripped up is why we need them for anything other than art and entertainment in the real world. Like, I get that there are some areas where you can't just rebuild, like a spaceship. You can't just, like, they've worked for so many years on these spaceships, you can't just re-engineer it. You have some

• 1:48:41Speaker 01

  things that are just built for human bodies, a submarine, a spaceship. But a factory, maybe I'm naive, but it seems like we've already rebuilt factories to accommodate other types of robots. Why would we want to just, like, make a humanoid robot to go in there? I, I just get really tripped up on, I think that people want humanoids. I think people are fascinated by them. I think it's a little overhyped.

• 1:49:08Lex Fridman?

  Well, most of our world is still built for humanoids.

• 1:49:13Speaker 01

  I know, but it shouldn't be. It should be built so that it's wheelchair accessible.

• 1:49:17Lex Fridman?

  Right. So the question is, do you build a world that's the general form of wheelchair accessible, all robot form factor accessible? Or do you build humanoid robots?

• 1:49:32Speaker 01

  I mean, it doesn't have to be all, and it also doesn't have to be either or. I just feel like we're thinking so little about the system in general and how to create infrastructure that works for everyone, all kinds of people, all kinds of robots. Like, that's, that, I mean, it's more of an investment, but that would pay off way more in the future than just trying to cram expensive or maybe slightly less expensive humanoid technology into a human.

• 1:49:59Lex Fridman?

  Unfortunately, one company can't do that. We have to work together. It's like autonomous driving can be easily solved if you do V2I, if you change the infrastructure of cities and so on. But that requires a lot of people, a lot of them are politicians and a lot of them are somewhat, if not a lot, corrupt and all those kinds of things. I, and the talent thing you mentioned is really, really, really important.

• 1:50:27Lex Fridman?

  I've gotten a chance to meet a lot of folks at SpaceX and Tesla, other companies too, but there specifically the openness makes it easier to like meet everybody.

• 1:50:38Lex Fridman?

  I think a lot of amazing things in this world happen when you get amazing people together.

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:50:44Lex Fridman?

  And if you can sell an idea like us becoming a multi-planetary species, you can say, why the hell I would go to Mars? Like, why colonize Mars? If you think from, from basic first principles, it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense to, to go to the moon. It doesn't go, it, the only thing that makes sense to go to space is for satellites.

• 1:51:12Lex Fridman?

  But there's something about the vision of the future, the optimism laden that permeates this vision of us becoming multi-planetary. It's thinking not just for the next 10 years, it's thinking like human civilization, reaching out into the stars. It, it makes people dream. It's really exciting. And that, they're gonna come up with some cool shit that might not have anything to do with, uh, like, here's what I, cause Elon doesn't seem to care about social robotics, which is constantly surprising to me. I've talked to him, he doesn't, humans are, humans are the things you avoid and don't hurt, right?

• 1:51:53Lex Fridman?

  Like, that's, like, the number one job of a robot is not to hurt a human, to avoid them. You know, that, the collaborative aspect, the human-robot interaction, I think is not, at least not in his, uh, not something he thinks about deeply. But my sense is if somebody like that takes on the problem of humanoid robotics, we're gonna get a social robot out of it. Like, people like, not necessarily Elon, but people like, like Elon, if they take on seriously these,

• 1:52:28Lex Fridman?

  Like I could just imagine with a humanoid robot, you can't help but create a social robot. So if you do different form factors, if you do industrial robotics, you don't, you're likely to actually not end up in like walking head into a social, a social robot, human robot interaction problem. If you create for whatever the hell reason you want to, a humanoid robot, you're gonna have to reinvent, well, not reinvent, but do introduce a lot of fascinating new ideas into the problem of human robot interaction, which I'm excited about. So like if I, if I was a business person, I would say this is not, this is, this is way too risky. This doesn't make any sense.

• 1:53:12Lex Fridman?

  But when people are really convinced and there's a lot of amazing people working on it, it's like, all right, let's see what happens here. This is really interesting, just like with Atlas and Boston Dynamics. I mean, they, I apologize if I'm ignorant on this, but I think they really, more than anyone else, maybe with iBoat, like Sony pushed forward humanoid robotics, like a leap with the.

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, with Atlas, absolutely.

• 1:53:43Lex Fridman?

  And like without them, like why the hell did they do it?

• 1:53:46Speaker 01

  Why? Well, I think for them, it is a research platform. It's not, I don't think they ever, this speculation, I don't think they ever intended Atlas to be like a commercially successful robot. I think they were just like, can we do this? Let's try.

• 1:54:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I wonder if they, maybe the answer they landed on is, because they eventually went to Spot, the earlier versions of Spot. So Quadruped is like four, four-legged robot. But maybe they reached for, let's try to make, like, I think they tried it and they still are trying it for Atlas to be picking up boxes, to moving boxes, to being, it, it makes sense. Okay, if they were exactly the same cost. It makes sense to have a humanoid robot in the warehouse.

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  Currently.

• 1:54:43Lex Fridman?

  Currently.

• 1:54:43Speaker 01

  I think it's short sighted, but yes, currently, yes, it would sell.

• 1:54:47Lex Fridman?

  But it's not, it's, it's short sighted. It's short sighted, but it's, it's not pragmatic to think any other way, to think that you're going to be able to change warehouses. You're going to have to, you're going.

• 1:55:00Speaker 01

  If you're Amazon, you can totally change your warehouses.

• 1:55:03Lex Fridman?

  Yes, yes. But even if you're Amazon, that's very costly to

• 1:55:10Lex Fridman?

  change warehouses.

• 1:55:11Speaker 01

  It is. It's a big investment.

• 1:55:14Lex Fridman?

  But isn't, shouldn't you do that investment? In a way, so here's the thing, if you build the humanoid robot that works in the warehouse, that humanoid robot, see, I don't know why Tesla's not talking about it this way. As far as I know, but like that humanoid robot is going to have all kinds of other applications outside their setting. Like, to me, it's obvious. I think it's a really hard problem to solve, but whoever solves the humanoid robot problem are gonna have to solve the social robotics problem.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. I mean, they're already with Spot needing to solve social robotics problems.

• 1:55:49Lex Fridman?

  For, uh, like for Spot to be effective at scale. I'm not sure.

• 1:55:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:53Lex Fridman?

  Spot is currently effective at scale. It's getting better and better. But they're actually, the, the thing they, they did is an interesting decision. Perhaps Tesla will end up doing the same thing, which is Spot is supposed to be a, a platform for intelligence. So Spot doesn't have any high level intelligence, like, um, high level perception skills. It's supposed to be controlled remotely.

• 1:56:20Speaker 01

  And it's a platform that you can attach.

• 1:56:22Lex Fridman?

  Attach stuff to.

• 1:56:23Speaker 01

  Something to, yeah.

• 1:56:23Lex Fridman?

  And somebody else is supposed to do the attaching. It's a platform that you can take an uneven ground and it's able to maintain balance, go into dangerous situations. It's a platform. On top of that, you can add a camera that does surveillance, that you can remotely monitor, you can record, uh, you can record the camera. You can remote control it, but it's not gonna.

• 1:56:45Speaker 01

  Manipulation.

• 1:56:46Lex Fridman?

  Basic object manipulation, but not autonomous object manipulation. It's remotely controlled. But the intelligence on top of it, which was what would be required for automation, is somebody else is supposed to do.

• 1:56:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:58Lex Fridman?

  Perhaps Tesla would do the same, the same thing ultimately. But it doesn't make sense because the goal of Optimus is automation.

• 1:57:08Lex Fridman?

  Without that.

• 1:57:13Lex Fridman?

  But then you never know. He's like, why go to Mars? Why, why?

• 1:57:18Speaker 01

  I mean, that's true. And I reluctantly like, I'm very excited about space travel.

• 1:57:23Lex Fridman?

  Why? Why? Can you introspect? Like, why?

• 1:57:26Speaker 01

  Why am I excited about it? I think what got me excited was I saw a panel with some people who

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  study other planets and it became really clear how little we know about ourselves and about how nature works and just how much there is to learn from exploring other parts of the universe.

• 1:57:51Speaker 01

  So like on a rational level, that's how I convince myself that that's why I'm excited. In reality, it's just fucking exciting. I mean, just like the idea that we can do this difficult thing and that humans come together to build things that can explore space. I mean, there's just something inherently thrilling about that. And I'm reluctant about it because I feel like there are so many other challenges and problems that I think are more important to solve, but I also think we should be doing all of it at once. And so to that extent, I'm like all for research on humanoid robots, development of humanoid robots.

• 1:58:35Speaker 01

  I think that there's a lot to explore and learn and it doesn't necessarily take away from other areas of science, at least it shouldn't. I think unfortunately, a lot of the attention goes towards that and it does take resources and attention away from other areas of robotics that we should be focused on. But I don't think we shouldn't do it.

• 1:58:56Lex Fridman?

  So you think it might be a little bit of a distraction. Oh, forget the Elon particular application, but if you care about social robotics, the humanoid form is a distraction.

• 1:59:09Speaker 01

  It's a distraction and it's one that I find particularly boring. It's just, it's interesting from a research perspective, but from like, what types of robots can we create to put in our world? Like, why would we just create a humanoid robot?

• 1:59:24Lex Fridman?

  So even, even just robotic manipulation, so arms is not useful either?

• 1:59:29Speaker 01

  Oh, arms can be useful, but like, why not have three arms? Like, why does it have to look like a person?

• 1:59:35Lex Fridman?

  Well, I actually personally just think that washing the dishes is harder than a robot that can be a companion.

• 1:59:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:45Lex Fridman?

  Being useful in the home is actually really tough.

• 1:59:48Speaker 01

  But does your companion have to have like, two arms and look like you?

• 1:59:52Lex Fridman?

  No, I'm, I'm making the case for zero arms.

• 1:59:54Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. Zero arms.

• 1:59:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:57Speaker 01

  Okay. Freaky.

• 1:59:59Lex Fridman?

  That didn't come out the way I meant it. Cause it almost sounds like I don't want a robot to defend itself. Like that's immediately you project, you know what I mean? Like, no, I think, I just think that the social component doesn't require arms or legs or so on, right? As we've talked about. And I think that's probably where a lot of the meaningful impact that's gonna be happening.

• 2:00:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think just, we could get so creative with the design. Like, why not have a robot on roller skates? Or like, whatever. Like, why does it have to look like us?

• 2:00:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Still, it is, it is a compelling and interesting form from a research perspective, like you said.

• 2:00:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:43Lex Fridman?

  You co-authored a paper, as you were talking about, that for WeRobot 2022, Lula Robot Consumer Protection in the Face of Automated Social Marketing. I think you were talking about some of the ideas in that?

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  Yes. Oh, you got it from Twitter. I was like, that's not published yet.

• 2:01:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What do you, this is how I do my research.

• 2:01:02Speaker 01

  You just go through people's Twitter feeds?

• 2:01:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Go. Thank you. It's not stalking if it's public. So there's a, you looked at me like you're offended. Like, how did you know?

• 2:01:15Speaker 01

  No, I was just like worried that like, some early, I mean.

• 2:01:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a PDF. There's a.

• 2:01:23Speaker 01

  There is.

• 2:01:23Lex Fridman?

  There's a PDF.

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  Like now?

• 2:01:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:26Speaker 01

  Maybe like, as of a few days ago?

• 2:01:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:01:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:01:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:01:32Lex Fridman?

  You look violated. Like, how did you get that PDF?

• 2:01:36Speaker 01

  It's just a draft. It's online. Nobody read it yet until we've written the final paper.

• 2:01:41Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's really good, so I enjoyed it.

• 2:01:42Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you.

• 2:01:44Lex Fridman?

  By the time this comes out, I'm sure it'll be out. Or no, when's We Robot?

• 2:01:47Speaker 01

  So basically, We Robot, that's the workshop where you have an hour where people give you constructive feedback on the paper, and then you write the good version.

• 2:01:55Lex Fridman?

  Right. I take it back. There's no PDF. I don't know.

• 2:01:57Speaker 01

  It doesn't exist.

• 2:01:58Lex Fridman?

  I imagine. But there is a table in there in a virtual imagined PDF that I like, that I wanted to mention, which is like this kind of strategy used across various marketing platforms. And it's basically looking at traditional media, person-to-person interaction, targeted ads, influencers and social robots. This is the kind of idea that you've been speaking to. And it's just a nice breakdown of that, that social robots have personalized recommendations, social persuasion, automated, scalable, data collection and embodiment. So person-to-person interaction is really nice, but it doesn't have the automated and

• 2:02:42Lex Fridman?

  the data collection aspect. But the social robots have those two elements.

• 2:02:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're talking about the potential for social robots to just combine all of these different marketing methods to be this really potent cocktail. And that table, which was Daniela's idea and a really fantastic one, we put it in at the last second, so.

• 2:03:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I really liked it.

• 2:03:01Speaker 01

  I'm glad you like it.

• 2:03:02Lex Fridman?

  In a PDF that doesn't exist.

• 2:03:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:03:04Lex Fridman?

  That nobody can find if they look.

• 2:03:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:07Lex Fridman?

  So when you say social robots, what does that mean? Does that include virtual ones or no?

• 2:03:11Speaker 01

  I think a lot of this applies to virtual ones, too, although the embodiment thing, which I personally find very fascinating, is definitely a factor that research shows can enhance people's engagement with a device.

• 2:03:24Lex Fridman?

  But can embodiment be a virtual thing also? Meaning like, it has a body in the virtual world? Like.

• 2:03:31Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 2:03:31Lex Fridman?

  Makes you feel like, because what makes a body? A body is a thing that.

• 2:03:39Lex Fridman?

  Could disappear like has a permanence. I mean, there's certain characteristics that you kind of associate to a physical object.

• 2:03:48Speaker 01

  So I think what I'm referring to, and I think this gets messy because now we have all these new like virtual worlds and AR and stuff, and I think it gets messy. But there's research showing that something on a screen, on a traditional screen and something that is moving in your physical space, that that has a very different effect on how your brain perceives it even.

• 2:04:14Lex Fridman?

  So, I mean, I have a sense that we can do that in a virtual world.

• 2:04:20Speaker 01

  Probably like when I've used VR, I jump around like an idiot because I think something's going to hit me.

• 2:04:26Lex Fridman?

  And even if a video game on a 2D screen is compelling enough, like the thing that's immersive about it is I kind of put myself into that world. You kind of those, the, the, the, the objects you're interacting with, Call of Duty, things you're shooting, they're, they're kind of, I mean, your imagination fills the gaps and it becomes real, like it pulls your mind in when it's well done. So it really depends what's shown on the, on the 2D screen.

• 2:04:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I think there's a ton of different factors and there's different types of embodiment. Like you can have embodiment in a virtual world. You can have an agent that's simply text based, which is, has no embodiment. So I think there's a whole spectrum of factors that can influence how much you engage with something.

• 2:05:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I wonder, I always wondered if you can have like a, an entity living in a computer. It's okay, this is going to be dark. I haven't always wondered about this. So it's gonna make it sound like I keep thinking about this kind of stuff. No, but like, um, this is almost like Black Mirror, but the entity.

• 2:05:30Lex Fridman?

  That's convinced or is able to convince you that it's being tortured inside the computer and needs your help to get out. Something like this. That to me, to me, suffering is one of the things that make you empathize with. Like, we're not good at, as you've, you've discussed in other in the physical form, like, holding a robot upside down. You have a really good examples about that and discussing that. I think suffering is a really good catalyst for empathy.

• 2:06:03Lex Fridman?

  And I just feel like we can project embodiment on a virtual thing if it's capable of certain things like suffering.

• 2:06:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:12Lex Fridman?

  So I was wonder.

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

  I think that's true, and I think that's what happened with the Lambda thing. Not that I don't, none of the transcript was about suffering, but it was about having the capacity for suffering and human emotion that convinced the engineer that this thing was sentient. And it's basically the plot of Ex Machina.

• 2:06:33Lex Fridman?

  True. Have you ever made a robot like scream in pain?

• 2:06:36Speaker 01

  Have I? No, but have you seen that? Did someone?

• 2:06:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, no, they actually, they actually made a Roomba scream whenever it hit a wall.

• 2:06:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I programmed that myself as well.

• 2:06:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:48Lex Fridman?

  Because I was inspired by that, yeah.

• 2:06:50Speaker 01

  Do you still have it?

• 2:06:51Lex Fridman?

  Oh, sorry, hit, hit a wall, I didn't.

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  Whenever it bumped into something, it would scream in pain.

• 2:06:56Lex Fridman?

  No, I, so I had, the way I programmed the Roombas is when I kick it, whenever, so contact between me and the robot is when it screams.

• 2:07:05Speaker 01

  Really? Okay. And you were inspired by that?

• 2:07:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I guess I misremembered the video. I saw the video a long, long time ago. And, or maybe heard somebody mention it, and that just, it's an easy thing to program. So I did that. I haven't run those Roombas for over a year now, but yeah, it was, my experience with it was that.

• 2:07:27Lex Fridman?

  It's like they quickly become like you remember them. You you you miss them like they're real living beings. So the the capacity to suffer or is is a really powerful thing.

• 2:07:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:45Lex Fridman?

  Even then that, I mean, it was kind of hilarious. It was just a random recording of screaming from the internet. But it's still it's still is weird. There's a thing you have to get right based on the interaction, like the latency. Like it has, there is.

• 2:08:03Lex Fridman?

  There is a realistic aspect of how you should scream relative to when you get hurt. Like it should correspond correctly.

• 2:08:11Speaker 01

  Like if you kick it really hard, it should scream louder.

• 2:08:15Lex Fridman?

  No, it should scream at the appropriate time, not like.

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  Oh, I see.

• 2:08:18Lex Fridman?

  Not like. One second later, right? Like there's a exact like there's a timing when you get like, I don't know. When you run into when you run your foot into like the side of a table or something. There's a timing there. The dynamics you have to get right for the for the actual screaming. Because the the Roomba in particular doesn't. So I was.

• 2:08:44Lex Fridman?

  The sensors don't. It doesn't know about pain.

• 2:08:48Speaker 01

  What?

• 2:08:51Lex Fridman?

  I'm sorry to say Roomba doesn't understand pain. So you have to correctly map the the sensors, the timing to the production of the sound. But when you get that somewhat right, it starts is is weird. It's really weird feeling and you actually feel like a bad person.

• 2:09:09Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:09:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So but it's it's makes you think because that with all the ways that we talked about, that could be used to manipulate you.

• 2:09:19Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure.

• 2:09:20Lex Fridman?

  In a good and bad way. So the good way is like you could form a connection with a thing. In a bad way, they can form a connection in order to sell you products that you don't want.

• 2:09:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or manipulate you politically or many nefarious things.

• 2:09:36Lex Fridman?

  You tweeted, "We're about to be living in the movie Her," except instead of... I've researched your tweets like they're like Shakespeare.

• 2:09:44Speaker 01

  "We're about to be living in the movie Her, except instead of about love, it's going to be about, what did I say, the chatbot being subtly racist and the question whether it's ethical for companies to charge for software upgrades."

• 2:09:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So can we break that down? What do you mean by that?

• 2:10:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:05Lex Fridman?

  Obviously, some of it is humor.

• 2:10:07Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, kind of. I am like, oh, it's so weird to be in this space where I'm so worried about this technology and also so excited about it at the same time. But the really like, I haven't, I'd gotten a little bit jaded. And then with GPT-3 and then the Lambda transcript, I was like,

• 2:10:33Speaker 01

  re-energized, but have also been thinking a lot about,

• 2:10:38Speaker 01

  how, you know, what are the, what are the ethical issues that are going to come up? And I think some of the things that companies are really going to have to figure out is, obviously, algorithmic bias is a huge and known problem at this point. Like even, you know, the, the new image generation tools like DALL-E, where they've clearly put in a lot of effort to make sure that if you search for people, it gives you a diverse set of people, et cetera. Like even that one, people have already found numerous like ways that it just kind of regurgitates biases of things that it finds on the internet. Like how if you search for success, it gives you a bunch of images of men. If you search for sadness, it gives you a bunch of images of women.

• 2:11:20Speaker 01

  So I think that this is, this is like the really tricky one with these voice, voice agents that companies are going to have to figure out. And that's why it's subtly racist and not overtly, because I think they're going to be able to solve the overt thing. And then with the subtle stuff, it's going to be really difficult. And then I think the other thing is going to be... Yeah, like, people are gonna become so emotionally attached to artificial agents with this complexity of language, with a potential embodiment factor that, I mean, there's already, there's a paper at We Robot this year, written by roboticists about how to deal with the fact that robots die, and looking at it as an ethical issue because it impacts people.

• 2:12:04Speaker 01

  And I think there's gonna be way more issues than just that, like, like, I think that the tweet was software upgrades, right? Like, how much is it okay to charge for something like that if someone is deeply emotionally invested in this relationship?

• 2:12:20Lex Fridman?

  Oh, the ethics of that, that's interesting. But there's also the practical funding mechanisms. Like you mentioned with Ibo, the dog, in theory, there's a subscription.

• 2:12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, the new Ibo, so the old Ibo from the 90s, people got really attached to, and in Japan, they're still having like funerals in Buddhist temples for the Ibos that can't be repaired, because people really viewed them as part of their families.

• 2:12:46Lex Fridman?

  So we're talking about robot dogs?

• 2:12:47Speaker 01

  Robot dogs, the Ibo, yeah, the, the original, like, famous robot dog that Sony made, came out in the 90s, got discontinued, having funerals for them in Japan. Now they have a new one. The new one is great, I have one at home, it's like,

• 2:13:02Lex Fridman?

  It's $3,000?

• 2:13:03Speaker 01

  I think it's 3,000 bucks. And then, after a few years, you have to start paying, I think it's like 300 a year for, for a subscription service for cloud services. And the cloud services,

• 2:13:17Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a lot, the dog is more complex than the original, and it has a lot of cool features, and it can remember stuff and experiences, and it can learn, and a lot of that is outsourced to the cloud, and so you have to pay to keep that running, which makes sense, people, you know, should pay, and people who aren't using it shouldn't have to pay. But it does raise the interesting question,

• 2:13:40Speaker 01

  could you set that price to reflect a consumer's willingness to pay for the emotional connection? So if, if like, you know that people are really, really attached to these things, just like they would be to a real dog, could you just start charging more, because there's like more demand?

• 2:14:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and you have to be... But that's true for anything that people love, right?

• 2:14:09Speaker 01

  It is, and it's also true for real dogs. Like, there's all these new medical services nowadays where people will shell out thousands and thousands of dollars to keep their pets alive. And is that taking advantage of people, or is that just giving them what they want? That's the question.

• 2:14:26Lex Fridman?

  Back to marriage. What about all the money that it costs to get married? And then all the money that it costs to get a divorce?

• 2:14:36Lex Fridman?

  That feels like a very, like, that's like a scam. I think the society is full of scams that are like...

• 2:14:43Speaker 01

  Oh, it's such a scam. And then we've created, like, the whole wedding industrial complex has created all these quote unquote traditions that people buy into that aren't even traditions. Like, they're just fabricated by marketing. Like, it's awful.

• 2:14:58Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask you about racist robots.

• 2:15:01Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:15:02Lex Fridman?

  Is it up to a company that creates that? So, we talk about removing bias and so on.

• 2:15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:07Lex Fridman?

  And that's a really popular field in AI currently.

• 2:15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:11Lex Fridman?

  And a lot of people agree that it's an important field. But the question is, for like, social robotics, is it should be up to the company to remove the bias of society?

• 2:15:20Speaker 01

  Well, who else can? Oh, to remove the bias of society?

• 2:15:23Lex Fridman?

  Like, I guess, because there's a lot of people that are subtly racist in modern society, like, why shouldn't our robots also be subtly racist? I mean, that's, like, why do we put so much responsibility on the robots?

• 2:15:38Speaker 01

  Because...

• 2:15:41Speaker 01

  Because the robot...

• 2:15:42Lex Fridman?

  I'm imagining like a Hitler Roomba.

• 2:15:46Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that would be funny, but I guess I'm asking a serious question.

• 2:15:51Speaker 01

  You're Jewish, right? You're allowed to make that joke.

• 2:15:52Lex Fridman?

  Yes, exactly. I'm allowed to make that joke, yes.

• 2:15:57Lex Fridman?

  And I've been nonstop reading about World War II and Hitler. I think I'm glad we exist in the world where we can just make those jokes that helps deal with it. Anyway, it is a serious question of sort of like,

• 2:16:14Lex Fridman?

  like, it's such a difficult problem to solve. Now, of course, like bias and so on, like, there's low hanging fruit, which I think was a lot of people are focused on. But then it becomes like subtle stuff over time. And it's very difficult to know. Now, if you can, you can also completely remove the personality. You can completely remove the personalization.

• 2:16:36Speaker 01

  You can remove the language aspect, which is what I had been arguing, because I was like, the language is disappointing aspect of social robots anyway. But now are we introducing that? Because it's, it's now no longer disappointing. So I do think, well, let's just start with the premise, which I think is very true, which is that racism is not a neutral thing, but it is the thing that we don't want in our society. Like, I, it does not conform to my values. So if we agree that racism is bad, I do think that it has to be the company, because the, I mean, it might not be possible. And companies might have to put out products that where they're

• 2:17:21Speaker 01

  taking risks, and they might get slammed by consumers, and they might have to adjust. I don't know, like, how this is going to work in the market. I have opinions about how it should work, but it is on the company. And the danger with robots is that they can entrench this stuff. It's not like your racist uncle, who you can have a conversation with, and

• 2:17:46Lex Fridman?

  And put things into context, maybe?

• 2:17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, or who who might change over time with more experience. A robot really just, like, regurgitates things, entrenches them, could influence other people. And I mean, I think that's terrible.

• 2:18:04Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think there's a difficult challenge here is because even the premise you started with that essentially racism is bad.

• 2:18:12Lex Fridman?

  I think we live in a society today where the definition of racism is different between different people. Some people say that it's not enough not to be racist. Some people say you have to be anti-racist. So you have to, you have to have a robot that constantly calls out, like, calls you out on your implicit racism.

• 2:18:34Speaker 01

  I would love that. I would love that robot.

• 2:18:37Lex Fridman?

  But like, maybe it, maybe it sees, well, I don't know if you'd love it, because maybe you'll, you'll see racism in, in things that aren't racist, and then you're arguing with the robot. Your robot starts going racist. I'm not, I'm not exactly sure that, I mean, it's, it's a tricky thing. I guess I'm saying that the line is, is not obvious, especially in this heated discussion where we have a lot of identity politics of what, what is harmful to different groups and so on.

• 2:19:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:07Lex Fridman?

  It feels, it feels like a, the broader question here is, should a social robotics company be solving or being part of solving the issues of society?

• 2:19:20Speaker 01

  Well, okay, I think it's the same question as, should I, as an individual, be responsible for knowing everything in advance and saying all the right things? And the answer to that is, yes, I am responsible, but I'm not going to get it perfect.

• 2:19:40Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:19:41Speaker 01

  And then the question is, how do we deal with that? And so as a person, how I aspire to deal with that is, when I do inevitably make a mistake because I have blind spots and people get angry, I don't take that personally, and I listen to what's behind the anger. And it can even happen that, like, maybe I'll tweet something that's well-intentioned, and

• 2:20:07Speaker 01

  One, you know, one group of people starts yelling at me and then I change it the way that they said, and then another group of people starts yelling at me, which has happened. This, this happened to me actually around, in my talks, I talk about robots that are used in autism therapy. And so whether to say a child with autism or an autistic child is super controversial. And a lot of autistic people prefer to be referred to as autistic people. And a lot of parents of autistic children prefer child with autism. And then there's, they disagree. So, so I've gotten yelled at from both sides. And I think I'm still, I'm responsible, even if I can't get it right. I don't know if that makes sense. Like, it's a responsibility thing.

• 2:20:52Speaker 01

  And I'm, I can be as well intentioned as I want, and I'm still going to make mistakes. And that is part of the existing power structures that exist. And that's something that I accept.

• 2:21:01Lex Fridman?

  And you accept being attacked from both sides and grow from it and learn from it?

• 2:21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:05Lex Fridman?

  But the, the danger is that after being attacked, assuming you don't get canceled, AKA completely removed from your ability to tweet,

• 2:21:17Lex Fridman?

  you might become jaded and not want to talk about autism anymore.

• 2:21:21Speaker 01

  I don't, and I didn't. I mean, it's happened to me.

• 2:21:25Lex Fridman?

  But that's.

• 2:21:25Speaker 01

  What I did was I listened to both sides and I chose, I tried to get information. And then I, I decided that I was going to use autistic children.

• 2:21:39Speaker 01

  And now I'm moving forward with that. Like, I don't know.

• 2:21:41Lex Fridman?

  For now, right?

• 2:21:42Speaker 01

  For now, yeah, until, until I get updated information. And I'm never going to get anything perfect, but I'm making choices and I'm moving forward. Because being a coward and like just retreating from that, I think.

• 2:21:55Lex Fridman?

  But see, here's the problem. You're a very smart person and an individual, a researcher, thinker, and intellectual. So that's the right thing for you to do. The, the hard thing is when, as a company, imagine you had a PR team.

• 2:22:09Lex Fridman?

  I said, Kate, like this, you should-

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  These are the teams we hate.

• 2:22:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, just, well, if you were, if you hired PR people, like, obviously, they would see that and they'd be like, well, maybe don't bring up autism. Maybe don't bring up these topics. You're, you're getting attacked. It's bad for your brand. They'll say the brand word. There'll be, you know, if we look at different demographics that are inspired by your work, I think it's insensitive to them. Let's not mention this anymore. Like, there's this kind of pressure that all of a sudden, you, or, or you do suboptimal decisions. You take a kind of poll. Again, it's looking at the past versus the future. All those kinds of things. And it, it, it becomes difficult.

• 2:22:54Lex Fridman?

  In the same way that's, is difficult for social media companies to, to figure out, like, who to censor, who to recommend.

• 2:23:03Speaker 01

  I think this is ultimately a question about leadership, honestly. Like, the way that I see leadership, because right now, the thing that bothers me about institutions and a lot of people who run current institutions is that their main focus is protecting the institution or protecting themselves personally. That is bad leadership because it means you cannot have integrity. You cannot lead with integrity. And it makes sense because, like, obviously, if you're the type of leader who immediately blows up the institution you're leading, then that doesn't exist anymore. And maybe that's why we don't have any good leaders anymore, because they had integrity and they didn't put, you know, the survival of the institution first.

• 2:23:47Speaker 01

  But I feel like you have to, it just, to be a good leader, you have to be responsible and understand that with great power comes great responsibility. You have to be humble and you have to listen and you have to learn. You can't get defensive and you cannot put your own protection before other things.

• 2:24:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, take risks where you might lose your job. You might lose your well-being because of-

• 2:24:17Lex Fridman?

  Because in the process of standing for the principles, for the things you think are right to do, yeah.

• 2:24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:25Lex Fridman?

  Based on the things you like, based on learning from, like, listening to people and learning from what they feel. And the same goes for the institution, yeah. Yeah, but I ultimately actually believe that those kinds of companies and countries succeed that have leaders like that. You should run for president.

• 2:24:46Speaker 01

  No, thank you.

• 2:24:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:49Speaker 01

  That's maybe the problem, like, the people who have good ideas about leadership, they're like, yeah.

• 2:24:53Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 2:24:54Speaker 01

  This is why I don't, that's why I'm not running a company.

• 2:24:57Lex Fridman?

  It's been, I think, three years since the Jeffrey Epstein controversy at MIT, MIT Media Lab. Joy Ito, the head of the Media Lab, resigned. And I think at that time, you wrote an opinion article about it. So just looking back, a few years have passed. What, what have you learned about human nature?

• 2:25:23Lex Fridman?

  From the fact that somebody like Jeffrey Epstein found his way inside MIT?

• 2:25:32Speaker 01

  That's a really good question. What have I learned about human nature? I think, well, there's, there's, how did this problem come about? And then there's, what was the reaction to this problem? And to it becoming public? And in the reaction, the things I learned about human nature

• 2:26:04Speaker 01

  were that sometimes cowards are worse than assholes.

• 2:26:11Speaker 01

  Wow, I'm really, ugh.

• 2:26:14Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's a really powerful statement.

• 2:26:16Speaker 01

  I think because the assholes, at least, you know what you're dealing with. They have integrity in a way. They're just living out their asshole values.

• 2:26:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:26Speaker 01

  And the cowards are the ones that you have to watch out for. And this comes back to people protecting themselves over doing the right thing.

• 2:26:37Speaker 01

  They'll throw others under the bus.

• 2:26:40Lex Fridman?

  Is there some sense that not enough people took responsibility?

• 2:26:44Speaker 01

  For sure. And I mean, I don't want to sugarcoat at all what Joey Ito did. I mean, I think it's gross that he took money from Jeffrey Epstein. I believe him that he didn't know about the bad, bad stuff. But I've been in those circles with those like, public intellectual dudes that he was hanging out with. And any woman in those circles like, saw 10 zillion red flags. Just, the whole environment was so misogynist. Like, and so personally, because Joey like, was a great boss and a great friend,

• 2:27:21Speaker 01

  I was really disappointed that he ignored that in favor of raising money.

• 2:27:28Speaker 01

  And I think that it was right for him to resign in the face of that. But one of the things that he did that no many others didn't, was he came forward about it and he took responsibility.

• 2:27:47Speaker 01

  And all of the people who didn't, I think,

• 2:27:54Speaker 01

  it's just interesting. The other thing I learned about human nature, okay, I'm gonna go on a tangent, but I'll come back, I promise. So I once saw this tweet from someone, or it was a Twitter thread, from someone who worked at a homeless shelter. And he said that when he started working there, he noticed that people would often come in and use the bathroom, and they would just trash the entire bathroom. Like rip things out of the walls, like toilet paper on the ground. And he asked someone who had been there longer, like, why do they do this? Why do the homeless people come in and trash the bathroom? And he was told, it's because it's the only thing in their lives that they have control over. And I feel like sometimes, when it comes to

• 2:28:37Speaker 01

  the response, the...

• 2:28:42Speaker 01

  Just the mobbing response that happens in the wake of some harm that was caused. If you can't target the person who actually caused the harm, who was Epstein, you will go as many circles out as you can until you find the person that you have power over and you have control over, and then you will trash that. And it makes sense that people do this. It's again, it's a human nature thing. Of course, you're going to focus all your energy because you feel helpless and enraged and you, and it's unfair and you have no other power. You're going to focus all of your energy on someone who's so far removed from the problem that that's not even an efficient solution.

• 2:29:26Lex Fridman?

  And the problem is often the first person you find is the one that has integrity, sufficient integrity to take responsibility.

• 2:29:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's why my husband always says, he's, he is a liberal, but he's always like, when liberals form a firing squad, they stand in a circle. Because you know that your friends are going to listen to you, so you criticize them. You're not going to be able to convince someone across the aisle.

• 2:29:52Lex Fridman?

  But see, in that situation, what I had hoped is the people in the farther, in that situation, any situation of that sort, the people that are farther out in the circles stand up.

• 2:30:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:30:08Lex Fridman?

  And like, also take some responsibility for the broader picture of human nature versus like, specific situation. But also, take some responsibility and, but also defend the people involved. As flawed, not in a like, no, no, no, nothing like, like this, people fucked up. Like you said, there's a lot of red flags that people just ignored for the sake of money, in this particular case. But also like be transparent and public about it and spread the responsibility across a large number of people such that you learn a lesson from it institutionally.

• 2:30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a systems problem. It wasn't a one individual problem.

• 2:30:57Lex Fridman?

  And I feel like currently because Joey took like resigned because of it or essentially fired pressured out because of it, MIT can pretend like, oh, we didn't, we didn't know anything. It wasn't part.

• 2:31:16Speaker 01

  Bad leadership again, because when you are at the top of an institution with that much power and you were complicit in what happened, which they were like, come on, there's no way that they didn't know that this was happening. So I like to not stand up and take responsibility. I think it's bad leadership.

• 2:31:39Lex Fridman?

  Do you understand why Epstein was able to, outside of MIT, he was able to make a lot of friends with a lot of powerful people? Does that make sense to you? Why was he able to get in these rooms, befriend these people, befriend people that I don't know personally, but I think a lot of them indirectly I know as being good people, smart people. Why would they let Jeffrey Epstein into into their office, have a discussion with them? What do you understand about human nature from that?

• 2:32:18Speaker 01

  Well, so I never met Epstein or, I mean, I've met some of the people who interacted with him, but I was never like, I never saw him in action. I don't know how charismatic he was or what that was. But I do think that sometimes the simple answer is the more likely one. And from my understanding, what he would do is he was kind of a grift, a social grifter. Like, you know, those people who will, you must get this because you're famous. You must get people coming to you and being like, oh, I know your friend so and so in order to get cred with you.

• 2:33:00Speaker 01

  I think he just convinced some people who were trusted in a network that he was a great guy and that, you know, whatever, I think at that point, because at that point, he had had like a, what, a conviction prior, but it was a one-off thing. It wasn't clear that there was this other thing that was that.

• 2:33:22Lex Fridman?

  And most people probably don't check.

• 2:33:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and most people don't check. Like, you're at an event, you meet this guy. I don't know, maybe people do check when they're that powerful and wealthy, or maybe they don't. I have no idea. No, they're just stupid.

• 2:33:33Lex Fridman?

  I mean, and they're not like, all right, does anyone check anything about me? Because I've walked into some, some of the richest and most powerful people in the world, and nobody, like, asks questions like, who the fuck is this guy? Like,

• 2:33:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:51Lex Fridman?

  Like, nobody asks those questions. It's, it's interesting. I, I would think like there would be more security or something. Like, there, there really isn't. I think a lot of it has to do, well, my hope is, in my case, has to do with, like, people can sense that this is a good person. But if that's the case, then they can surely, then a human being can use charisma to infiltrate.

• 2:34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:16Lex Fridman?

  Just being, just saying the right things.

• 2:34:17Speaker 01

  And once you have people vouching for you within that type of network, like, once you, yeah, once you have someone powerful vouching for you, who someone else trusts, then, you know, you're in.

• 2:34:32Lex Fridman?

  So how do you avoid something like that? If you're MIT, if you're Harvard, if you're in any of these institutions?

• 2:34:39Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, first of all, you have to do your homework before you take money from someone. Like, I think, I think that's required. But I think, you know, I think Joey did do his homework. I think he did. And I think at the time that he took money, there was the one conviction and not like the later thing. And I think that the story at that time was that.

• 2:35:03Speaker 01

  He didn't know she was underage and blah, blah, or whatever. It was mistaken. Joey always believed in redemption for people and that people can change and that they can genuinely regret and like learn and move on. And he was a big believer in that. So I could totally see him being like, well, I'm not going to exclude him because of this thing and because other people are vouching for him. So, and just to be clear, we're now talking about the set of people who I think Joey belonged to, who did not like go to the island and have sex with underage girls, because that's a whole other set of people who like were powerful and like were part of that network and who knew and participated. And so like I distinguish

• 2:35:46Speaker 01

  between people who got taken in, who didn't know that that was happening and people who knew.

• 2:35:51Lex Fridman?

  I wonder what the different circles look like. So like people that went to the island and didn't do anything, didn't see anything, didn't know about anything versus the people that did something.

• 2:36:03Speaker 01

  And then there's people who heard rumors, maybe.

• 2:36:07Lex Fridman?

  And what do you do with rumors? Like, isn't there, isn't there people that heard rumors about Bill Cosby for the longest time? For like, for the longest, like whenever that happened, like all these people came out of the woodwork, like everybody kind of knew. I mean, it's like, all right, so what are you supposed to do with rumors? Like, what? I think the other way to put is red flags, as you were saying.

• 2:36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like, I can tell you that those circles, like, there were red flags without me even hearing any rumors about anything ever. Like, I was already like, hmm, there are not a lot of women here, which is a bad sign.

• 2:36:48Lex Fridman?

  Isn't there a lot of places where there's not a lot of women and that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad sign?

• 2:36:52Speaker 01

  There are if it's like a pipeline problem where it's like, I don't know, technology law clinic that only gets like male lawyers because there's not a lot of women, you know, applicants in the pool.

• 2:37:07Lex Fridman?

  But there's some aspect of this situation that like, there should be more women here.

• 2:37:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 2:37:16Lex Fridman?

  You've, uh,

• 2:37:19Lex Fridman?

  actually, I'd love to ask you about this because you have strong opinions about Richard Stallman.

• 2:37:28Lex Fridman?

  Is that, do you still have those strong opinions?

• 2:37:30Speaker 01

  Look, all I need to say is that he met my friend who's a law professor.

• 2:37:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:36Speaker 01

  She shook his hand and he licked her arm from wrist to elbow and it certainly wasn't appropriate at that time.

• 2:37:43Lex Fridman?

  What about if you're like, an incredibly weird person?

• 2:37:48Speaker 01

  Okay, that's a good question because obviously there's a lot of neurodivergence at MIT and everywhere. And obviously, like, we, we need to accept that people are different, that people don't understand social conventions the same way. But one of the things that I've learned about neurodivergence is that women are often

• 2:38:12Speaker 01

  expected or taught to mask their neurodivergence and kind of fit in. And men are accommodated and excused. And I don't think that

• 2:38:24Speaker 01

  being neurodivergent gives you a license to be an asshole. Like, you can be a weird person and you can still learn that it's not okay to lick someone's arm.

• 2:38:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's, it's a balance. Like, women should be allowed to be a little weirder and men should be less weird. Because I think, I think there's a, because I, you're one of the people, I think, tweeting that. What made me, because I wanted to talk to Richard Stallman on the podcast about, because I didn't have a context. Because I wanted to talk to him because he's, you know, free software.

• 2:38:56Speaker 01

  Thanks, Richard Stallman.

• 2:38:58Lex Fridman?

  He's very weird in interesting, good ways in the world of computer science.

• 2:39:04Lex Fridman?

  He's also weird in that, you know, when he gives a talk, he'll be like, uh, like picking at his feet and eating the skin off his feet, right? That he's known for these extremely kind of

• 2:39:17Lex Fridman?

  How else do you put it? I don't know how to put it. But then there was something that happened to him in conversations on this thread related to Epstein.

• 2:39:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:27Lex Fridman?

  Which I was torn about because I felt it's similar to Joy Ito's like, I felt he was maligned. Like, people were looking for somebody to get angry at. So he was inappropriate, but the, I didn't like the cowardice more. Like, I set aside his situation, and we could discuss it. But the cowardice on MIT's part, and this is me saying it, about the way they treated that whole situation.

• 2:40:01Speaker 01

  Oh, they're always cowardly about how they treat anything. They just try to make the problem go away.

• 2:40:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so that it was about, yeah, exactly making the conversation.

• 2:40:08Speaker 01

  I think he should have left the mailing list.

• 2:40:11Lex Fridman?

  He shouldn't have, he shouldn't have been part of the mailing list.

• 2:40:13Speaker 01

  Well, that's probably true also. But I think, I think what, what bothered me, what always bothers me in these mailing list situations or Twitter situations, like, if you say something that's hurtful to people or makes people angry, and then people start yelling at you.

• 2:40:34Speaker 01

  Maybe they shouldn't be yelling. Maybe they are yelling because, again, you're the only point of power they have. Maybe, maybe it's okay that you're yelling, whatever it is, like, it's your response to that that matters. And I think that I just have a lot of respect for people

• 2:40:55Speaker 01

  who can say, oh, people are angry. There's a reason they're angry. Let me find out what that reason is and learn more about it. It doesn't mean that I am wrong. It doesn't mean that I am bad. It doesn't mean that I am ill intentioned. But why are they angry? I want to understand. And then, once you understand, you can respond, again, with integrity and say, actually, I stand by what I said. Here's why. Or you can say, actually, I listened and here are some things I learned. That's the kind of response I want to see from people. And people like Stallman do not respond that way. They just like go into battle.

• 2:41:36Lex Fridman?

  Right, like where it's obvious you didn't listen.

• 2:41:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, no interest in listening.

• 2:41:40Lex Fridman?

  Honestly, that's to me as bad as the people who just apologize just because they are trying to make the problem go away.

• 2:41:47Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 2:41:48Lex Fridman?

  Right, so like if

• 2:41:49Speaker 01

  That's not

• 2:41:50Lex Fridman?

  Both are bad.

• 2:41:51Speaker 01

  A good apology has to include understanding what you did wrong.

• 2:41:56Lex Fridman?

  And in part standing up for the things you think you did right.

• 2:42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, if there are those things, yeah.

• 2:42:02Lex Fridman?

  Finding and then, but you have to give, you have to acknowledge, you have to like give that hard hit to the ego that says, I did something wrong. Yeah, definitely Richard Stallman is not somebody who is capable of that kind of thing or hasn't given evidence of that kind of thing. But that was also even just your tweet, I had to do a lot of thinking like

• 2:42:25Lex Fridman?

  different people from different walks of life see red flags in different things.

• 2:42:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:42:31Lex Fridman?

  And so, things I find

• 2:42:36Lex Fridman?

  as a, as a man, non-threatening and hilarious

• 2:42:42Lex Fridman?

  are not necessarily, doesn't mean that there

• 2:42:48Lex Fridman?

  aren't like deeply hurtful to others. And I don't mean that in a social justice warrior way, but in a, in a, in a real way, like people really have different experiences. So I have to like really put things into context. I have to kind of listen to what people are saying, put aside the emotion of what their emotion with what you're saying and try to keep the, the facts of their experience and learn from it.

• 2:43:16Speaker 01

  And because it's not just about the individual experience either. It's not like, oh, you know, my friend didn't have a sense of humor about being licked. It's that she's been, she's been metaphorically licked, you know, 57 times that week because she's an attractive law professor and she doesn't get taken seriously. And so like, men walk through the world and it's impossible for them to even understand what it's like. To have a different experience of the world. And that's why it's so important to listen to people and believe people and believe that they're angry for a reason. Maybe you don't like their tone. Maybe you don't like that they're angry at you. Maybe you get defensive about that. Maybe you think that they should, you know, explain it to you.

• 2:43:58Speaker 01

  But believe that they're angry for a reason and try to understand it.

• 2:44:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a deep truth there and an opportunity for you to become a better person.

• 2:44:10Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you a question?

• 2:44:12Speaker 01

  Haven't you been doing that for two hours?

• 2:44:16Lex Fridman?

  Three hours now. Let me ask you about Ghislaine Maxwell. She's been saying that she's an innocent victim. Is she an innocent victim? Or is she evil and equally responsible, like Jeffrey Epstein? Now I'm asking far away from any MIT things and more, just your sense of the whole situation.

• 2:44:39Speaker 01

  I haven't been following it, so I don't know the facts of the situation and like what is now like known to be her role in that. If I were her, clearly I'm not, but if I were her, I wouldn't be going around saying I'm an innocent victim. I would say, maybe she's, I don't know what she's saying. Again, like, I don't know.

• 2:44:58Lex Fridman?

  She was controlled by Jeffrey.

• 2:45:01Speaker 01

  Is she saying this as part of a legal case or is she saying this as like a PR thing?

• 2:45:06Lex Fridman?

  Well, PR, but it's not just her. It's her whole family believes this. There's a, there's a whole effort that says like, that, how should I put it? I believe they believe it. So in that sense, it's not PR.

• 2:45:23Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 2:45:24Lex Fridman?

  I, I believe the family, basically the family is saying that she's a good, she's a really good human being.

• 2:45:32Speaker 01

  Well, I think everyone is a good human being. I know it's a controversial opinion, but I think everyone.

• 2:45:40Speaker 01

  Is a good human being. There's no evil people. There's people who do bad things and who behave in ways that harm others. And I think we should always hold people accountable for that. But holding someone accountable doesn't mean saying that they're evil.

• 2:45:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, actually, those people usually think they're doing good.

• 2:46:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, aside from, I don't know, maybe sociopaths like are specifically trying to like harm people. But I think most people are trying to do their best. And if they're not doing their best, it's because there's some impediment or something in their past. So I just, I genuinely don't believe in good and evil people, but I do believe in like harmful and not harmful actions. And so I don't know, like, I don't, I don't care. Yeah, she's a good person, but if she contributed to harm, then she needs to be accountable for that. Like, that's my position. I don't know what the facts of the matter are. It seems like she was pretty close to the situation, so it doesn't seem very believable that she was a victim, but I don't know.

• 2:46:46Lex Fridman?

  I wish I had met Epstein, because something tells me he would just be a regular person, a charismatic person like anybody else. And that's a very dark reality that we don't know which among us, what each of us are hiding in the closet. That's a really tough thing to like, deal with, because then you can put your trust into some people and they can completely betray that trust and in the process destroy you.

• 2:47:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:16Lex Fridman?

  Which there's a lot of people that interacted with Epstein that now have to, I mean, if they're not destroyed by it, then their, their whole, like, the ground on which they stand ethically is, has crumbled, at least in part.

• 2:47:37Lex Fridman?

  And you, I'm sure, I'm sure you and I have interacted with people without knowing it who are bad people.

• 2:47:45Speaker 01

  As I always tell my four year old, people who have done bad things.

• 2:47:48Lex Fridman?

  People who have done bad things.

• 2:47:50Speaker 01

  He's always talking about bad guys and I'm trying to move him towards, they're just people who make bad choices.

• 2:47:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's really powerful, actually. That's really important to remember because that that means you have compassion towards all human beings. Do you have hope for the future of MIT, the future of Media Lab in this context? So David Newman is now at the helm. I'm gonna talk, I talked to her previously, I'll talk to her again. She's great.

• 2:48:15Speaker 01

  Love her. Yeah, she's great. I don't know if she knew the whole situation when she started because the situation went beyond just the Epstein scandal. A bunch of other stuff happened at the same time. Some of it's not public, but my, what I was personally going through at that time. So the Epstein thing happened, I think, was it August or September 2019? It was somewhere around late summer. In June 2019, so I'm, I'm a research scientist at MIT, you are too, right? So, and I always have had various supervisors,

• 2:48:58Speaker 01

  you know, over the years, and they've just basically let me do what I want, which has been great. But I had a supervisor at the time and he called me into his office for a regular check in. In June of 2019, I reported to MIT that my supervisor had grabbed me, pulled me into a hug, wrapped his arms around my waist and started massaging my hip and trying to kiss me, kiss my face, kiss me near the mouth, and said literally the words, "Don't worry, I'll take care of your career."

• 2:49:37Speaker 01

  And that, that experience was really interesting because I just, I was very indignant. I was like, he can't do that to me. Doesn't he know who I am? And I was like, this is the Me Too era. And I naively thought that when I reported that, it would get taken care of. And then I had to go through the whole reporting process at MIT. And I learned a lot about how institutions really handle those things internally, particularly situations where I couldn't provide evidence that it happened. I had no reason to lie about it, but I had no evidence. And so I was going through that.

• 2:50:16Speaker 01

  And that was another experience for me where there's so many people in the institution who really believe in protecting the institution at all costs. And there's only a few people who care about doing the right thing. And one of them resigned. Now there's even less of them left. So.

• 2:50:39Lex Fridman?

  So what did you learn from that? I mean, where's the source? If you have hope for this institution that I think you love, at least in part. I love the idea of MIT.

• 2:50:51Speaker 01

  I love the idea. I love the research body. I love a lot of the faculty. I love the students.

• 2:50:55Lex Fridman?

  The students.

• 2:50:56Speaker 01

  I love the energy. Like, I love it all. I think the administration suffers from the same problems as any institutional, any leadership of an institution that is large, which is that they've become risk averse, like you mentioned. They care about PR. The only ways to get their attention or change their minds about anything are to threaten the reputation of the institute or to have a lot of money. That's the only way to have power at the institute. Yeah, I don't think they, I don't think they have a lot of integrity or believe in ideas or even have a lot of connection to the research body.

• 2:51:40Speaker 01

  And like, the people who are really, because it's so weird. You have this amazing research body of people pushing the boundaries of things, who aren't afraid to like, there's the hacker culture. And then you have the administration and they're really like.

• 2:51:58Speaker 01

  Protect the institution at all costs.

• 2:52:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a disconnect, right?

• 2:52:02Speaker 01

  Complete disconnect.

• 2:52:03Lex Fridman?

  I wonder if that was always there, if it just kind of slowly grows over time. A disconnect between the administration and the faculty.

• 2:52:10Speaker 01

  I think it grew over time is what I've heard. I mean, I've been there for 11 years now.

• 2:52:19Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's gotten worse during my time, but I've heard from people who've been there longer that it didn't, like MIT didn't used to have a general counsel's office. They didn't used to have all this corporate stuff. And then they had to create it as they got bigger and in the era where such things are, I guess, deemed necessary.

• 2:52:39Lex Fridman?

  See, I believe in the power of individuals to like overthrow the thing. So just a really good president of MIT or certain people in the administration can reform the whole thing because the, the culture is still there of like, I, I think everybody remembers that MIT is about the students and the faculty.

• 2:53:01Speaker 01

  Do they though? Because I don't know, I've had a lot of conversations that have been shocking with like senior administration. They think the students are children. They call them kids. It's like, these are the smartest people. They're way smarter than you.

• 2:53:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:16Speaker 01

  And you're so dismissive of them.

• 2:53:17Lex Fridman?

  But those individuals, I'm saying like the, the capacity, like the aura of the place still values the, the students and the faculty. Like I, I'm not, I'm being awfully poetic about it, but what I mean is the administration is the, um, the froth at the top of the, like the waves, the surface. Like they can be removed and new life can be brought in that would keep to the spirit of the place.

• 2:53:49Speaker 01

  Who decides on who to bring in? Who's hiring?

• 2:53:51Lex Fridman?

  Bottom up. Oh, I see. Uh, I see, but I, I do think ultimately, especially in the era of social media and so on.

• 2:54:02Lex Fridman?

  Faculty and students have more and more power, just more and more of a voice, I suppose.

• 2:54:08Speaker 01

  I hope so, I really do. I don't see MIT going away anytime soon. And like, I also don't think it's a terrible place at all.

• 2:54:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's an amazing place. And it's a, but there's different trajectories it can take.

• 2:54:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54:21Lex Fridman?

  And like, and that has to do with a lot of things, including,

• 2:54:28Lex Fridman?

  does it, is it stays, even if we talk about robotics, it could be the capital of the world in robotics. But currently, if you want to be doing the best AI work in the world, you're going to go to Google or Facebook, or Tesla, or Apple, or so on. You're not going to be, you're not going to be at MIT. And so that, that has to do, I think that's basically, has to do with

• 2:54:58Lex Fridman?

  not allowing the, the brilliance of the researchers to flourish.

• 2:55:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, people say it's about money, but I don't think it's about that at all. Like,

• 2:55:09Speaker 01

  sometimes you have more freedom and can work on more interesting things in companies. That's really where they lose people.

• 2:55:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And some of the, the freedom in all, in all ways.

• 2:55:21Lex Fridman?

  Which is why it's heartbreaking to get like, people like Richard Stallman, there's such an interesting line, because like, Richard Stallman was a gigantic weirdo that crossed lines he shouldn't have crossed, right? But we don't want to draw too many lines.

• 2:55:37Lex Fridman?

  This is the tricky thing.

• 2:55:38Speaker 01

  There are different types of lines, in my opinion.

• 2:55:41Lex Fridman?

  But yes, your opinion, you have strong lines you hold to. But then if administration listens to every line, there's, there's also power in drawing a line. Like, and there's, it, it becomes like a little drug. You have to find the right balance. Licking somebody's arm is never appropriate. I think the biggest aspect there is not owning it, learning from it, growing from it, from the perspective of Stallman or people like that.

• 2:56:13Lex Fridman?

  Back when it hap, like, understanding, seeing the right, being empathetic, seeing the, the fact that this was like totally inappropriate. Like, not when that particular act, but everything that led up to it, too.

• 2:56:27Speaker 01

  No, I think there are different kinds of lines. I think there are a lot.

• 2:56:32Speaker 01

  So Stallman crossed lines that essentially excluded a bunch of people and created an environment where we, they're brilliant minds that we never got the benefit of because he made things feel gross or even unsafe for people. There are lines that you can cross where you're challenging an institution to... Like, I don't think he was intentionally trying to cross a line, or maybe he didn't care. There are lines that you can cross intentionally to move something forward or to do the right thing. Like, when MIT was like, "You can't put an all-gender restroom in the Media Lab because, like, something permits, whatever."

• 2:57:17Speaker 01

  And Joey did it anyway. That's a line you can cross to make things actually better for people. And the line you're crossing is some arbitrary stupid rule that people who don't want to take the risk are like...

• 2:57:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:57:31Speaker 01

  You know what I mean?

• 2:57:31Lex Fridman?

  No, ultimately, I think the thing you said is like, cross lines in a way that doesn't alienate others. So like, for example, me wearing, I started for a while wearing a suit often at MIT, which sounds counterintuitive, but that's actually, people always looked at me weird for that. MIT created this culture, specifically the people I was working with. Like, nobody wore suits.

• 2:57:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, we don't trust the suits.

• 2:58:00Lex Fridman?

  They don't trust the suits. I was like, "Fuck you, I'm wearing a suit."

• 2:58:05Lex Fridman?

  But that's not really hurting anybody, right?

• 2:58:07Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's challenging people's perceptions. It's doing something that you want to do.

• 2:58:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:14Speaker 01

  But it's not hurting people.

• 2:58:16Lex Fridman?

  And that particular thing was, yeah, it was hurting people. It's a good line. It's a good line to, like, hurting ultimately the people that you want to flourish. Yeah.

• 2:58:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:58:32Lex Fridman?

  You tweeted a picture of pumpkin spice Greek yogurt and asked, "Grounds for divorce, yes, no?" So let me ask you, what's the key to a successful relationship?

• 2:58:45Speaker 01

  Oh, my god. A good couples therapist?

• 2:58:50Lex Fridman?

  What, uh, what went wrong with the pumpkin spice Greek yogurt? What's exactly wrong? Is it the pumpkin? Is it the Greek yogurt? I didn't understand. I stared at that tweet for a while.

• 2:58:58Speaker 01

  I grew up in Europe, so I don't understand the pumpkin spice in everything craze that they do every autumn here. Like, I understand that it might be good in some foods, but they just put it in everything.

• 2:59:11Lex Fridman?

  And it doesn't belong in Greek yogurt?

• 2:59:15Speaker 01

  I mean, I was just being humorous. I ate one of those yogurts and it actually tasted pretty good. So I think part of the success of a good marriage is like giving each other a hard time humorously for things like that.

• 2:59:31Lex Fridman?

  Is there a broader lesson? Cause you guys seem to have a really great marriage from the external.

• 2:59:37Speaker 01

  I mean, every marriage looks good from the external. Every, I think, yeah.

• 2:59:42Lex Fridman?

  That's, that's not true, but yeah, I get it.

• 2:59:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:59:48Speaker 01

  No, but like, relationships are hard. Relationships with anyone are hard and especially because people evolve and change and you have to make sure there's space for both people to evolve and change together. And I think one of the things that I really liked about our marriage vows was, I remember before we got married, Greg at some point like got kind of nervous and he was like, it's just, it's such a big commitment to commit like to something for life. And I was like, we're not committing to this for life. And he was like, we're not? And I'm like, no, like we're committing to being part of a team and doing what's best for the team. If what's best for the team is to break up, we'll break up.

• 3:00:30Speaker 01

  Like, I don't believe in this, like, we have to do this for our whole lives. And that really resonated with him too, so.

• 3:00:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:00:41Lex Fridman?

  You're putting the vows.

• 3:00:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was our vows, like that we're just, we're gonna be a team.

• 3:00:46Lex Fridman?

  You're a team and do what's right for the team?

• 3:00:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:00:50Lex Fridman?

  That's very like Michael Jordan of you.

• 3:00:55Lex Fridman?

  Did you guys get like married in the desert, like November rain style with Slash playing? Or, you don't have to answer that. I'm not good at these questions. Okay.

• 3:01:06Speaker 01

  You've brought up marriage like eight times. Are you trying to hint something on the podcast?

• 3:01:11Lex Fridman?

  I don't, yeah, I have an announcement to make. No, I don't know. It just seems like a good metaphor for, why, why, it felt like a good metaphor for, in a bunch of cases, for the marriage industrial complex. I remember that. And, oh, people complaining. It just seemed like marriage is one of the things that always surprises me, because I want to get married.

• 3:01:40Speaker 01

  You do?

• 3:01:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I do. And then I listened to like friends of mine that complain, not all. I like, I like guys. I really like guys that don't complain about their marriage. It's such a cheap, like if, it's such a cheap release valve. Like it doesn't, that's bitching about anything, honestly. That's just like, it's too easy. But especially, like bitch about the sports team or the weather, if you want, but like about somebody that you're dedicating your life to, like if you bitch about them, you're going to see them as a lesser being also. Like, you don't think so, but you're going to like decrease the value you have. I, I personally believe over time,

• 3:02:20Lex Fridman?

  you're not going to appreciate the magic of that person, I think. Anyway, but it's like that I just noticed this a lot, that people are married. And they will whine about, you know, like the wife, whatever. This, this, this is part of the sort of the culture to kind of comment in that way. I think women do the same thing about the husband. He doesn't, he never does this, or he's a goof. He's incompetent at this or that, whatever they, there's a kind of.

• 3:02:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's those tropes like, oh, you know, husbands never do acts and like wives. Or I think those do a disservice to everyone. It's just disrespectful to everyone in both.

• 3:03:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but it happens.

• 3:03:01Speaker 01

  So I, I was, I brought that up as an example of something that people actually love,

• 3:03:06Lex Fridman?

  but they complain about, because for some reason that's more fun to do is complain about stuff.

• 3:03:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:03:12Lex Fridman?

  And so that's what with Clippy or whatever, right? So like, you complain about, but you actually love it. There you go. It's just a good metaphor that, you know.

• 3:03:22Lex Fridman?

  What was I gonna ask you? Oh, you, uh,

• 3:03:28Lex Fridman?

  your hamster died.

• 3:03:30Speaker 01

  When I was like eight.

• 3:03:33Lex Fridman?

  You miss her?

• 3:03:34Speaker 01

  Beige, um.

• 3:03:37Lex Fridman?

  What's the closest relationship you've had with a pet? At the one?

• 3:03:44Lex Fridman?

  What?

• 3:03:45Speaker 01

  We didn't have a lot of pets.

• 3:03:46Lex Fridman?

  Have you loved the most in your life?

• 3:03:52Speaker 01

  I think my, my first pet was a goldfish named Bob. And he died immediately and that was really sad.

• 3:04:00Speaker 01

  I think, I think it was really attached to Bob and Nancy, my goldfish. We got new Bobs and then Bob kept dying and we got new Bobs. Nancy just kept living.

• 3:04:12Lex Fridman?

  So it was very replaceable?

• 3:04:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was young.

• 3:04:19Speaker 01

  It was easy to.

• 3:04:21Lex Fridman?

  Do you think there will be a time when the robot, like in the movie Her, be something we fall in love with romantically?

• 3:04:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah.

• 3:04:30Lex Fridman?

  At scale, like where a lot of people.

• 3:04:34Speaker 01

  Romantically, I don't know if it's gonna happen at scale. I think, I think we talked about this a little bit last time on the podcast too, where I think we're just capable of so many different kinds of relationships. And actually, part of why I think marriage is so tough as a relationship is because we put so many expectations on it. Like, your partner has to be your best friend, and you have to be sexually attracted to them, and they have to be a good co-parent and a good roommate. And like, it's all the relationships at once that have to work. But we're like, normally with other people, we have like, one type of relationship. Or we even have, we have a different relationship to our dog than we do to our neighbor than we do to the, you know, person, someone,

• 3:05:17Speaker 01

  a coworker. I think that some people are gonna find romantic relationships with robots interesting. It might even be a widespread thing, but I don't think it's gonna replace like, human romantic relationships. I think it's just gonna be a separate type of thing.

• 3:05:36Lex Fridman?

  It's gonna be more narrow.

• 3:05:39Speaker 01

  More narrow, or even like, just something new that we haven't really experienced before. Maybe like, having a crush on an artificial agent is a different type of fascination. I don't know.

• 3:05:49Lex Fridman?

  Do you think people would see that as cheating?

• 3:05:52Speaker 01

  I think people would, well, I mean, the things that people feel threatened by in relationships are very manifold, so.

• 3:06:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's just an interesting one. Cause uh, maybe jealousy, maybe it'll be good, a little jealousy for the relationship. Maybe that's part of the couples therapy, you know, kind of thing, or whatever.

• 3:06:15Speaker 01

  I don't think jealousy, I mean, I think it's hard to avoid jealousy, but I think the objective is probably to avoid. I mean, some people don't even get jealous when their partner sleeps with someone else. Like, there's polyamory and.

• 3:06:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:30Speaker 01

  I think there's just such a diversity of different ways that we can structure relationships or view them that this is just gonna be another one that we add.

• 3:06:40Lex Fridman?

  You dedicate your book to your dad. What did you learn about life from your dad?

• 3:06:45Speaker 01

  Oh, man, my dad is, he's a great listener and he is the best person I know at the type of cognitive empathy that's like perspective taking. So not like emotional, like crying empathy, but trying to see someone else's point of view and trying to put yourself in their shoes. And he really instilled that in me from an early age. And then he made me read a ton of science fiction, which probably led me down this path.

• 3:07:23Lex Fridman?

  Tell you how to be curious about the world and how to be open minded.

• 3:07:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:07:28Lex Fridman?

  Last question, what role does love play in the human condition? Since we've been talking about love and robots.

• 3:07:38Lex Fridman?

  And you're fascinated by social robotics. It feels like all of that operates in a landscape of something that we can call love.

• 3:07:48Speaker 01

  Love? Yeah, I think there are a lot of different kinds of love. I feel like it's, we need, like, don't the Eskimos have all these different words for snow? We need, we need more words to describe different types and kinds of love that we experience. But I think love is so important and I also think it's not zero sum. That's the, that's the really interesting thing about love is that, you know, I had one kid and I love, loved my first kid more than anything else in the world. And I was like, how can I have a second kid and then love that kid also? I'm never gonna love it as much as the first, but I love them both equally. It's just like my heart expanded. And so I think that people who are threatened by

• 3:08:35Speaker 01

  love towards artificial agents, they don't need to be threatened for that reason.

• 3:08:40Lex Fridman?

  Artificial agents will just, if done right, will just expand your capacity for love.

• 3:08:47Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 3:08:49Lex Fridman?

  I agree. Beautifully put. Kate, this is awesome. I still didn't talk about half the things I wanted to talk about, but we're already like way over three hours. So thank you so much. I really appreciate you talking today. You're awesome. You're an amazing human being, a great roboticist, great writer now. It's an honor that you would talk with me. Thanks for doing it.

• 3:09:08Speaker 01

  Right back at you. Thank you.

• 3:09:10Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Kate Darling. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Maya Angelou. Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.