Socially assistive robots with Maja Matarić [AI miniseries]

What if we each had a personal “buddy” to support us? Maja Mataric is a computer scientist, roboticist and AI researcher at the University of Southern California. She pioneered the field of socially assistive robotics: the design of robots to help humans—especially vulnerable people such as kids with autism, the elderly, and people struggling with illness—navigate complicated social needs. In the second episode of our AI miniseries, Maja, Reid, and Aria discuss AI, robots and our future with both. Throughout her career, Maja has sought to understand human needs and desires in order to create the right kind of robot. How big should it be? Should it be a humanoid? Animal? Or… WALL-E? These questions lead to the nature of empathy itself—and what it means for robots to be empathetic. Maja also responds to an AI-generated story that speculates on the role that a socially assistive robot could play for a multigenerational family. Read the transcript of this episode here. Read the AI story here. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all of the episodes, visit www.possible.fm/podcast. Topics: 03:30 - What inspired Maja to pursue robotics? 06:09 - The pop culture perception of “doomsday robots” 07:32 - What are socially assistive robots? 10:20 - How socially assistive robots can enhance our humanity 12:55 - The relationship between an assistive robot and a human 16:19 - The hardware side of AI 20:05 - How our lives would look different with robots in them 24:06 - Why physically embodied robots are important 27:42 - AI story about intergenerational family and a robot assistant 31:16 - How VR/AR can be integrated with AI 38:34 - Rapidfire questions 44:10 - Debrief with Reid and Aria Possible is a podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? In its first season, hosts Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger spoke with visionaries across many fields, from climate science to criminal justice, and from entertainment to education. For this special miniseries, they’re speaking with expert builders and skilled users of artificial intelligence. These conversations also feature another kind of guest, AI. Whether it’s Inflection’s Pi or OpenAI’s GPT-4, each episode will include an AI-generated element to spark discussion. Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network and hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard and Sara Schleede. Jenny Kaplan is our Executive Producer and Editor. Special thanks to Samantha Barber, Surya Yalamanchili, Ian Alas, Greg Beato and Ben Relles.

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  How do you even develop machines that are going to be really helpful to a certain population? For example, having these robots for kids with autism and therapists were worried. They said, "You're trying to replace therapists." Not at all. But then, they actually saw it from the other side. They said, "Oh, my goodness, this is great." "I spent like one hour or two hours a day with a particular child, and then I want them to practice things at home. And so, isn't it grand if you can have this robot that ends up playfully doing this stuff?" So, that's the vision. The vision is that it's complementing the ecosystem of human support, which is never perfect.

• 0:42Reid Hoffman?

  Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:44Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finger.

• 0:46Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way.

• 0:52Aria Finger?

  In our first season, we spoke with visionaries across many fields, from climate science to criminal justice and from entertainment to education. For this special mini-series, we're speaking with expert builders and skilled users of artificial intelligence. They use hardware, software, and their own creativity to help individuals use AI to better their personal, everyday lives.

• 1:14Reid Hoffman?

  These conversations also feature another kind of guest: AI. Whether it's Inflection's Pi or OpenAI's GPT-4, each episode will include an AI-generated element to spark discussion. You can find these additions down in the show notes.

• 1:31Aria Finger?

  In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it takes to get there.

• 1:37Reid Hoffman?

  This is possible.

• 1:45Aria Finger?

  So excited for the second episode of our summer arc on AI, and especially because we've been talking so much about large language models and how people used to talk about robotics, but now everyone's only talking about software. Not true. The guest today is an incredible researcher, practitioner, who was talking about AI and hardware, which means robotics.

• 2:10Reid Hoffman?

  While, of course, we see in the kind of the so-called digital world and so forth, a rapid evolution in the large language models, ultimately, a lot of our lives are embedded, and a lot of the things we need to learn, need to do, are embedded. And, you know, part of what, in particular, about our... You know, kind of selection of today's guest is the understanding that embedded doesn't mean like, I am robot, right? But actually, something that that is there with us and actually, in fact, focuses on things like, you know, social interaction and, you know, human assistance. And first, everyone talks about LMS, little about robots, and then no one's talking about

• 2:51Reid Hoffman?

  this really important part of robots that I think, you know, is an important theme. It's not all of robotics, but it's a super important theme to add strongly in the discourse. And that's part of the reason why we couldn't be more delighted to talk to Maya. Maya Matarik is a renowned computer scientist, roboticist, and professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. She is founding director of the USC Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center and co-director of the USC Robotics Research Lab.

• 3:27Aria Finger?

  Maya, we are so thrilled to have you here today. You are known as a pioneer in the field of robotics. Can you talk about your earliest memory of seeing or engaging with a robot? And like, what about that moment made you want to pursue robotics?

• 3:41Speaker 00

  Well, my path to robotics is actually, I would say, unusual in the sense that I'm not one of those people that tinkered in the basement. We didn't have basements. I come from the former Yugoslavia. We lived in a high-rise, so there was no option for a basement. Instead, I came upon the path because when I was in college, AI just started to emerge. It was at that time in what was called an AI winter. But I thought it was really interesting. But for some reason, even from then, from my college days, which now seems like it was in the dark ages, what I really was interested in is behavior in the real world. And so I was interested in psychology and people, but I was also interested in AI. And if you think about bringing together a lot of aspects of AI and the real world

• 4:24Speaker 00

  and people, well, that's really robotics, because robotics is AI in the physical world around us. And so that's how I came upon it, and I read up on it. And I really read books and stuff, and I thought they were super boring. I'll be very honest about that. And I did not probably see my First robot, really, until I was in graduate school and looking around at possible labs. And he was the robotics labs of my former advisor that caught my eye because they had the funnest robots. So that's why. So a very unusual path. No early dreams of this at all.

• 4:54Aria Finger?

  No, but I love it. I think you said like you were interested in the real world. You were interested in how to help people. You were interested in having fun. I think we should like, we shouldn't forget that those are things that can lead to, you know, amazing careers in STEM and computer science and AI and all the things.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  In fact, what I would love to tell people is that there is no standard path. And even though I think often in the media in particular, we get this kind of typical path showcased. Like, oh, you know, I've been dreaming about this since I was a child. But in fact, I think it's perfectly lovely to dream of many things and arrive wherever you arrive and keep moving. And so I think it's not at all necessary to have thought about this before. My dad was an engineer, so I have to say probably I had some early influences. And it turns out I'm really an engineer at heart. But how that was going to manifest itself, I didn't know, and it's still unfolding. And that's a great thing about just learning continually. So no, no strict paths, people. Come on, let's keep it open.

• 5:49Reid Hoffman?

  Perfect. Yeah, indeed. And, and you know, part of that is to think about like the actual interesting space of robotics. Because, you know, probably most of our listeners are open to robots and home and workspaces. But, you know, kind of not prime to the full range and some of the stuff that you really do, which we'll go into. You know, pop culture shows us, you know, doomsday scenarios, killer robots goes all the way back to the eponymous Terminator. So why do you think people are more fearful of physical robots than non-physical AI? How does that affect how you do your research, do your work, you know, what kinds of things you're doing?

• 6:28Speaker 00

  You know, it's really interesting that you would say that people are more fearful of physical robots. Because all studies show that when you take people who have not interacted with robots and you put them next to little robots, people are curious. We project our internal expectations onto machines. If the machine behaves in any even remotely Life like way, no matter what it looks like. It may even be just a boring box, but if it moves in a particular way, we're going to be interested, we're going to be engaged, we're going to expect it to be intelligent, emotional, intentional. And so, in fact, in reality, people aren't scared. Now, of course, in the media, there have been a lot of portrayals. I used to just call it so boring. And I've worked with really fun folks in the entertainment industry. And I would always start out by saying, please don't lead with killer robots.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  So boring, come on, be interesting. So I think the media will tell us that people are afraid of robots. But in reality, when people are confronted with a physical machine, we're actually quite interested. We are a very social species and we're social with machines as well. So that is the truth.

• 7:29Aria Finger?

  So that actually tees me up for my next question so well. You pioneered a subfield of robotics called socially assistive robotics. Can you tell us about that space? And how does it fit into sort of the broader landscape of robotics?

• 7:43Speaker 00

  I am always happy to talk about my field. So, of course. So when I started out in robotics, you know, of course, you know, when you start out, you work on stuff that's out there. And so my first work was on getting a robot to navigate. And people are still working on robots navigating, although we're pretty darn good at it. You know, we have autonomous cars, so the field has moved along. And then I worked on teams of robots because, you know, I always liked social interaction. And I got a team of little, we called it the nerd herd. And I had 20 because I was very fortunate that my advisor could make that happen. And so I was herding these robots. It was, it was crazy. And it was really only after I had kids, or at least my first kid, that I started to think about not only what I'm doing, which is fun and intellectually curious, but really why?

• 8:28Speaker 00

  You know, kids will do that or, you know, kind of real, the real world and life will do that. And when I started thinking about why am I doing this? And I wanted to have a really good answer when my kid asked me, not just what do you do, mommy, but why do you do it? And I'd realized that why had to be more than, I get a lot of, you know, papers published and, you know, people think it's nice, but who are these people? I want to be able to tell my kids that I make robots to help people. And so I then really started to look at how can we actually make robots to help people? And that's hard. And I looked At rehabilitation robotics, I looked at people who needed physical help right after an injury or disability. And that was really hard. It was a field that existed.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  But I really wanted to do something that people would have in their lives continually. Because even back then, I had the sense that people are in different paths all the time. And we need help occasionally, if not all the time, different kinds of help. And I don't mean physical help. I mean, really, sort of emotional support. As I was working through that, I realized that, oh, and this is 20 years ago. You know, AI and robotics was about ready to go into a field where you can create machines that will be with you in your home even every day, not rolling around around your home, not manipulating objects in your home. We're still not there, even now, 20 years later. But we can have machines that will be there and support you on your journey of the specific thing you need.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Whether you're trying to teach a child with autism social skills like eye gaze, whether you're trying to help an Alzheimer's patient just kind of exercise their brain and talk to someone, or a stroke patient to just do the boring daily rehab exercising. That's the niche that I wanted to get into. And you know, it's great because it's very easy for me now to say, hey, mommy makes robots to help people. So I got there.

• 10:19Reid Hoffman?

  Well, yes, for sure. But this is a great setup to it. And one of the things I think is really a key part of your work that that made us really excited to have this podcast and talk to you, which is how is that helping people, that the interaction, the tracking, the eye gaze and so on? How does that help us become more human? Like, what's what's in that helping? It obviously there's help in tasks and help in navigation of the home environment or other kinds of things. But what's also the way that that extends our humanity through it?

• 10:50Speaker 00

  I am so glad you asked. So first of all, my first premise that I arrived at by talking to a lot of stroke patients and their families, families of kids with autism, you know, we spent a month and more in homes with kids with autism, collecting data. So learning from what people said they needed. So there was a very loud and clear message from everyone that people wanted to have a sense of purpose. They wanted to have a sense of ability and autonomy, like, you know, I am who I am because of all of these things that I can do. It's difficult to know who you are if you don't have a sense of anything that you can do and feel good about doing. The thing is that when people are empowered, they also start to think outward. And so we have had robots, for example, that just behave empathetically

• 11:34Speaker 00

  to the user and in that way make the user more empathetic. And the interesting kind of positive cycle that gets created there is, you know, studies show that if you're behaving empathetically, you're actually healthier. You get a health benefit from being a nice person. So, you know, even if you're totally selfish and don't even care about anyone else, you should still be nice because it benefits you. But as it happens, it also benefits other people. So, you know, we're wired to be these social, helpful, empathetic entities. And so when we create these machines, we're very conscious that we're not just trying to help one person with the exclusion of others. But we're saying, you know, look, the robot is modeling good behavior for you, positive behavior, helpful behavior that empowers you, which makes you the kind of person who does that in return.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  I know it sounds kind of like earthy crunchy, but we are really completely based on the literature, literature from, basically, we read a lot of behavioral economics, behavioral science, social science, and neuroscience, so that we can understand what works here in the human head. So, and what makes us humans feel better and behave better. And then we implement that on our robots.

• 12:42Aria Finger?

  That's fantastic. I love the conversation about empathy and it's interesting how it sort of spans hardware and software. Everyone always says, to your point, the best engineers and the best product managers are empathetic. They understand their users, the consumers. And so when we're thinking about empathy with the robots, like if these are empathetic acting robots, what relationship should we, like should the robots have with empathy? Should they feel it? Should they understand it? Should they recognize it? Like, how does that work on the robotic side, in addition to, of course, it, you know, helping humans to be more empathetic themselves?

• 13:17Speaker 00

  So empathy is a really interesting challenge because first of all, if you look at the science of empathy, there's disagreement there already. So in the neuroscience of empathy and cognitive science of empathy, some people will say empathy is what you feel, right? So I feel empathetic towards you. Other people, like Simon Baron Cohen, who is a well-known neuroscientist from Europe, has written a lot about empathy being actually what you do. So it's about the behavior, not about what you feel. That's really important because that means if we believe that empathy is how we behave, then robots can be empathetic because robots cannot feel. There's no feeling. Why can't they feel? They don't feel because they don't have the mush that we have. You know, they don't have neurotransmitters and they don't have hormones and they don't have all these other things that make us feeling

• 14:02Speaker 00

  creatures. We've done a bunch of studies where we've, one, created robots that are empathetic and that's very easy. Others have done this as well, right? You can basically have a robot that says things like, "Oh, I'm so sorry you feel that way and I know how you feel and I've been through that as well." So you can make a robot appear and behave empathetically and therefore, according to Baron Cohen, also be empathetic. What's more interesting to me is not how a robot should be empathetic, but how a robot can get a person to be empathetic. Because as we know from science, again, if the person is empathetic towards themselves, right, self-accepting, and towards others, their health outcomes will be better, you know, they will be a better person to be around.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  So it's altogether a good thing. So we've been really working with what should the robot do to make you empathetic? And it's really interesting. Done some studies with relatively pathetic robots, like really needy and kind of like, oh, I'm failing. Oh, I'm failing again. It's it's very funny and it's amazing. People are just really helpful. Frankly, I was surprised to find out that kind of a snarky funny robot was very unpopular. And that kind of just a blah, I have failed again. My cameras are not receiving information was more well received. And then the really needy, oh, no, I can't. The force is not with me. I'm banging my head against the wall. That robot got the most help for the longest time. So I don't want to over generalize.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  I think if that were in your home, you might grow tired of it. Sure. But if you're just encountering a robot in the real world and it's needy, it turns out that is actually better received than a very transactional cold robot. Or I really like, oh, well, I guess I'd lost my leg, but whatever. Right. So it's very interesting how empathy is very, I'm just going to use Star Wars techno. It's strong within us. So it can be, and it is something that, sorry. It's something that we can evoke and we can reinforce.

• 16:02Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I love it. And I think that part of the the notion of like the human condition, the human elevation is we also like to feel wanted, like to feel needed, like to feel that we're important. And that's part of the the work you've done. And, you know, on path to one of the things that I think is also super interesting here, because obviously the the huge amount of public discourse is around the software of AI right now, you know, A100s, A200s. But what are the things that are particularly important for the hardware side to contribute?

• 16:35Speaker 00

  Well, thank you for asking about the hardware side because we are right now, you know, in the world so embroiled on the AI, which is purely software side that we we're kind of pushing this aside. Robotics is almost still fringe. But the reality is it's the physical embodiment. It's the physical manifestation of intelligence in the world. And as we know, how people appear and how we physically behave has a huge impact on how we relate to one another. Every little bit. About how we design and build a robot is important. And that's why it's so hard. So first of all, you know, there's the basic stuff about safety. And I don't even want to talk about that because we already know robots must be safe. Okay, I mean, that's a given, right? And that's still hard. And so that's why we don't, we still don't have robots all over the place, but we're getting there.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  And that's why the robots that my lab works with are small and safe and often soft. And, you know, they're just because we don't, we want to make sure safety is not even an issue. But after safety, that this is this begins, now that begins the hard part. So what should it look like? How tall should it be? Turns out just how big the robot is, it has a huge impact in how you psychologically perceive it and how you respond to it physiologically without even realizing it. So if it's sort of more than about three quarters of your size, it's going to impact you physically differently. And so you'll be reluctant at a certain level. You can accustom yourself to it, but you'll be more reluctant than if it's smaller. How does it look? Does it look like an animal? Does it look like a biologically existing creature?

• 18:06Speaker 00

  Does it look like a human? Or does it look like nothing at all that's really familiar to you? This is incredibly important. I'm engaged in conversations both with companies and obviously in research about, you know, what would you want a robot to look like? And it really depends, right? If you're talking about, so if you start talking about humanoid robots, then you have this huge load of human expectations. If you build something that people really have to get used to and they have to get over certain things. Well, you know, that's not good design. Good design is that it has the metaphors that evoke just the right expectations that you lean into and you really enjoy. So that's why the design is really important and it's very wide open.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  So, so now it has a, an open field for it to disappoint you or, you know, engage you and endear you. And that's a lot of expectations of that robot, like wow, but if you do it right. And so my favorite, favorite example is Wally. Wally is just a, you know, is one of my favorite robotics movies. Actually, it is my favorite robotics movie. Because here's the thing that looks like, what is that? Like some kind of old rusty mechanical, you know, garbage collector. But it's so completely endearing and you just gotta love it. Now that is good design. Whereas in comparison, you have, in the same movie, you have Eve, which is egg-like. So eggs we get, that's like sort of biological cool. It's also like kind of apple white, plasticky.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  Nothing warm about Eve. Nothing. Yeah, she's very, she's very like out there, ooh, high tech. But you don't want to hug her, but you want to hug Wally and you know he smells. But you still want to hug him. So that's what I mean by good design. And you know, that's, those are, you know, creative people who drew animation. But in the, in the end, when we start designing robots that will really be wonderful for people, that's the kind of creativity that we need.

• 19:55Aria Finger?

  No, I mean, it's so interesting. Like you said, it's, it's, it's obvious, but still so critical. Like, what is the design of this robot going to be? And so let's like go down a level. If you're an average listener of the Possible Podcast, how could their lives look different if they were looking, you know, if they were using socially assisted robots on a daily basis?

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Socially assistive.

• 20:17Aria Finger?

  Oh, socially assistive.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:19Aria Finger?

  Robots on a daily basis.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  Just to explain that. So the idea is that we were looking at assistive robots, assistive or robots to help people, usually people who really need help, right? So I don't mean like.

• 20:28Aria Finger?

  Yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  It's going to go fetch you a beer. You should do that yourself. But socially assistive is that they're assistive, they're helping you, they're assisting you. And then they're doing that socially, through social interaction rather than physically. For example, if you've had a stroke and you can't reach something and it reaches it for you. What we would like to say is like, can we, if at all, we could get you to reach it yourself? That's what we like to, like, I'm gonna give you grit and support and like make you feel better. So here's the idea. Imagine that, you know, you're getting up in the morning and it's a, it's a, you'll have some challenge. Maybe you've had a stroke and so a part of your body is disabled, something, maybe it's just your dominant arm, right? So you're supposed to exercise, you're supposed to do things like reach for your coffee maker with your stroke affected limb. Well, that's going to be really inefficient and it's going to look like crap.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  And it's going to demoralize you every time because, you know, you'd just like to be the self that you were before the stroke happened. Now, maybe you're fortunate and you have amazing people in your life 24/7 who are going to be like, you can do it. And by the way, they're not going to enable you by reaching for that for, instead of you. Because if everybody gives it for you, you will forever be disabled. And if you use the other arm, you'll forever be disabled. So you have to fight your brain to get better. Who is gonna be there to constantly support you and say, "Sometimes, that is fantastic, great job." Or, "Ah, you're dropped, but you know what? You tried, that's better than not trying." And sometimes, sometimes, when necessary, will say, "Okay, really? Really? Are we gonna sit now again? Come on, get off, get off the chair.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  Come on, let's go reach for that thing." So you need a coach. And people in your life are not necessarily always available or able. They have their own stuff that they have to deal with. So the idea is, we want to have this companion robot that's going to help you through, which is these days called the journey. So there's technology that can help you, you know, get you out the door. Now, we've also worked with kids with autism, and they would want to understand things like, "Is this person interested even in talking to me? How can I tell?" And so they can have this companion robot to talk them through it, to practice social gaze, to practice like, "Okay, look at me, but now don't keep looking at me, cuz that's creepy. Occasionally, look away. Where do you look away? Doesn't matter, just look somewhere and then look back."

• 22:40Speaker 00

  And they can practice, because unfortunately, other kids are not going to practice with them. So you can imagine, you know, elderly with Alzheimer's, they're lonely, they're isolated. They could be staring at some screen, whatever. But, you know, and they can look at pictures of their family, but, you know, for how many hours a day? So this is a thing that can talk to them and talk to them about their family and always be there, always be pleasant, always be happy, never gets tired. It could tell jokes, just the right vintage of jokes. We've done that. The point is, in everyone's lives, right? There are many challenges. And there's a lot of expectation that other people will help us with these challenges. Well, every person has their own challenges. And so here, the idea was, we want to create these socio-emotional,

• 23:24Speaker 00

  but physically embodied companions. They're not lovers, they're not friends in the sense of, "This is not your friend." Although people sometimes perceive them as friends. So they feel a certain niche in people's lives, but they're not replacing therapists, they're not replacing friends, they're not replacing teachers, because they can't. That's not their purpose.

• 23:44Aria Finger?

  Right, absolutely. It's so interesting. We, last week, we spoke to Mustafa Suleyman, who is doing a personal intelligence through not hardware but software, and talking about AI and how, to your point, that this is not a replacement for humans. This is for, you know, the millions of people who, to your point, don't have someone for them 24 hours a day. And so you hit on this a little bit, but can you talk about why it's important for the physical embodiment of a robot to be there as opposed to just a screen or just a speaker? What is the importance of that actual robot versus just the software?

• 24:21Speaker 00

  So, there's been a very long debate about, you know, by people who are not in robotics, and also by people who are not in neuroscience, why we need physically embodied companions and social partners. And if anything is going to demonstrate to us why, the after-effects of the quarantine and the pandemic will. So we will see effects in early child development, in teen development, in adult isolation. We're seeing all of that. We can be fully connected through various social media. We can fully connected, be fully connected through screens and video conferencing. And yet, what you're seeing is extremely increased rates of anxiety, depression, isolation, child development delays, kids who missed

• 25:06Speaker 00

  one or two years by not being around their peers are now, you know, in their social development is two years delayed. This is happening because we, humans, are evolved to be social creatures. So we need, from day one, we need to look, you know, if we're sighted, we need to look at human faces. We need to see the smiles. We need to see the crinkled eyes, the Duchenne smile. We need to, we need that for feedback. And you know, back in the 60s, there were these wonderful experiments, or maybe slightly cruel and sad experiments, but they took baby monkeys and they put them on artificial monkey mothers, some that had wonderful fur on them, and others that were just metal, but they had

• 25:49Speaker 00

  a bottle of milk. And what did the baby monkeys prefer? If we were just transnational creatures, we'd just go for the milk. But no, all the monkeys went to the furry mother, even if they were starving. We humans are fundamentally social creatures. We need social support around us. And by that, I mean really around us in the physical world. And there have been, I would say, thousands of studies in science to show this. So we actually did a meta review. This is something we do in science, right? We look at all the studies and we do like a summary of it all statistically. And they show basically side by side comparisons. If I take a human of any age and have them compare a screen based interaction with a real robot interaction in the real world,

• 26:34Speaker 00

  the real robot interaction is going to make them retain, learn more, retain the information longer and report enjoying it more.

• 26:42Aria Finger?

  I mean, I have a, I have a friend who's an occupational therapist at a, at a local elementary school. And I, I could imagine her being, you know, so, so much augmentation, amplification, positive things happening if she had, you know, a robot in her classroom to help with some of her students.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  We've actually found that after the initial stuff of talking about, for example, having these robots for kids with autism and therapists were worried. They said, you're trying to replace therapists, not at all. But then they actually saw it from the other side. They said, oh, my goodness, this is great because I spent like one hour or two hours a day with a particular child and then I want them to practice things at home. And either the parents have to do it and parents have enough and, you know, parents don't actually want to practice therapy with their kids. They'd like to just be parents, but they don't have the luxury of being parents, right? So now they also have to be therapists. So isn't it grand if you can have this robot that ends up playfully doing this stuff? And then parents can be parents. So that's the vision. The vision is that it's complementing the ecosystem of human support, which is never perfect.

• 27:39Aria Finger?

  As, as a parent, I will, I will second that notion. So this brings us to our story generated by ChatGPT. It's about a family with three generations under one roof. And it spotlights three of the family members. There's Mr. Johnson. He's an 80 year old grandfather who needs help with his medication. Lisa is a 40 year old mom who needs support with preparing to repair a roof. An eight year old Ethan who needs assistance with his homework and getting to soccer practice. And so this robot steps in to Support each of their needs. And so, first of all, if you hate the story, that's fine. I didn't write it. You can, you can critique it. But I want to ask, like, what did you see in this story that you were like, oh, that's interesting? That could happen. That could be in our future. Or what was wrong? What seemed promising? What seemed way off? Like, what are your reflections?

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Actually, I love the story. And in fact, you know, it's interesting, and in some ways, not surprising, that this vision comes out because, among other things, I was part of a recent grant proposal in which we had a very similar vision. Except it wasn't necessarily a one robot, because it's more of like a, because the state of the art now is that you will not, at any time, really soon, have a robot that can do many physical things. But it can certainly, in terms of intelligence, talk to various different people. As long as it can uniquely recognize you, then it will be able to help you and talk to you. And so I think that's very likely and very realistic and very needed. And so we really, we wrote a grant proposal in which we literally came up with a vision of a family,

• 29:06Speaker 00

  which is very much like in the story. So, you know, you have the busy mom who's trying to take care of her elderly parents, but also her kids. And the kids are maybe having like one of these very, very common issues now, right? They might be suffering from anxiety, they might, you know, all this kind of stuff, or bullying, or something like that. So I would say that it's, the story is spot on. And then, so what is the solution? The idea of having one robot, you see that in the movies, you see that in a lot of, you know, literature. It makes sense. It's kind of the butler notion that people had, or a maid notion. I'm not a huge fan of those, because it puts a tremendous burden on this one entity. It may be a robot.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  But think about it. What if three of us are in the house at the same time and we all need something? Now, what, you know, who, who gets, you know, who gets to go first? Right? So. There's actually a whole debate about are we going to ultimately be creating this other race of servants, right? And I prefer to think of it as your buddy. And so it seems much more likely to me that the kid will have a buddy that they can play with and what the mom will have is something else, maybe kind of an assistant identity. So I think there are different versions of who fills what roles. But what does the future look like? Maybe people will be filling these roles and then robots will be doing something else. And I think it's just really important to keep thinking about this and not just drill

• 30:30Speaker 00

  down one path because, oh gee, we can, and not consider possible outcomes really, you know, a bit long term.

• 30:36Reid Hoffman?

  I love all that. I mean, this is part of the reason why, you know, a kind of a road impromptu is kind of human amplification and such. I'm actually quite bullish on the fact that we'll always figure out things to do because even if the robot was doing all the manufacturing, you know, we'll go out and play pickleball or, you know, or do other kinds of things because of that human to human, it's the exact like, kind of go touch the fur. Also, why Mustafa and I, I'm very curious if you ever play with Pi, kind of what your kind of thing is, because it's the same thing. It's kind of like, how does it kind of help you in your life versus draw you away from it? And I think this also gets to, I completely agree with the whole embedded, you know, kind of keep you engaged in your life. Have you also thought about this in kind of VR and AR?

• 31:20Reid Hoffman?

  Because, you know, there obviously we have this, there's been an ongoing discussion of metaverse and other kinds of things. I'm curious if you've thought about that environment as well as the real world one and what your reflections are between those.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Indeed. You know, I said early on, I made this point that there's a big difference in how our brains perceive interacting with a screen versus interacting in the real world. Now, if you go into virtual reality and the virtual reality environment and immersion is really well done, then you can almost trick your brain. So your brain feels like you really are interacting almost in a physical world. You don't have touch, which is important because touch is incredibly important. I mean, the lack of physical touch is a part of the loneliness epidemic that we have actually. So we are, our brains are really wired for this physical experience. We want touch, we want smell. But I do think the metaverse Versus coming no matter what, but how soon it'll come and what economic bumps will happen along the road, whatever.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  The issue is that our physical bodies are not just vessels, they are how we experience the world. The science of embodiment shows us that. That's why things like mindfulness work so well. Because you know, when you're in the moment and you're experiencing things, you're happier. Oh, lo and behold, how come? Well, that's what we're built to do. We're built to do in this experiences in this physical world. And so that's why I think there are a lot of wonderful things you can do in a metaverse kind of virtual reality. The things that excite me about it are, for example, you could teach tolerance, right? You, if you want to understand what it's like to be an elderly person, you can be put in an environment that's immersive and maybe put on a suit and you could really feel like you're, you know, an 85 year old. And that is going to, in 30 minutes, make you understand

• 32:58Speaker 00

  and possibly, let's say, be a better engineer for people who are 85 than any amount of books you can read and so on. I'm excited about that. People have done virtual reality training for understanding the climate crisis. And just like putting yourself in various places and experiencing it, fantastic, right? So we could, we could really expand our space of experiences and yes, we can democratize experience where now everyone can go to Everest, right? But the downside is if everyone can go to Everest in VR and no one goes, well, maybe that's better for Everest, right? Like, let's protect Everest. But some other things, right? If you never get out of your house. So it's actually really exciting. There's a whole new field that just arose in the last two years.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  And I just know because one of my PhD students was literally doing the work, Tom Gresham. So that's why I know. This is how we luck out, we professors. We seem to know everything. But really, we just have a lot of smart students. So there's a new field called VAMHRI and it really stands for virtual, virtual and mixed reality for human robot interaction or human machine interaction.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  So it's really interesting, right? You can put, what I love is augmented reality. So augmented reality is the idea that you can put lightweight goggles, like glasses. Our perception of the world is augmented, and it can be augmented in a shared way. So you know, you and I can now have a shared world, and we can be in this world, but also this world is much more interesting because we have the shared world between us. Now, that's exactly what's happening with humans and robots. A human user can wear these lightweight glasses and can see things that the robot can also see. And the beauty of that is, we humans experience the world in much richer ways than robots do. But when we create the shared world, this mixed-reality world, now the robot can experience so many more things.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  And so, for example, we had kids playing with physical robots in a shared world in which there were these floating code blocks, and they were coding, they were moving the blocks around them, they were pushing them and shoving them and throwing them. And can you imagine? That's pretty fun. Like, how fun is coding? Usually not this fun. These kids were having a great time. They were fifth graders, they were having a great fun, but the most important thing is later we test them on their coding skills, and they're way better coders. By playing, by integrating play and freedom in what they were doing, they were not afraid, they were more creative, they were more curious, they learned way more.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  And so, this is just an interesting way to think about, imagine learning in this augmented world with companions. And so, for example, you know, you go to school, you interact with your friends, you do all this stuff, and then you come home and you interact with your, you know, learning buddy in this interesting augmented world, and you're not missing out on the physical experience, but you get this extra layer. So I think augmented reality is going to do a lot to improve our experiences without leaving our full brains behind. I worry about that in complete immersion.

• 35:58Reid Hoffman?

  One of the things that your answer reminded me in kind of a follow-up is that you're one of the very few people I know who, when asked the metaverse, goes immediately to, "Here's how we can increase empathy," right, like empathy for old people, et cetera. And it reminded me of one of the questions that I had for you, which is, what kind of learnings around how do builders and designers, like, what are the things to really increase empathy? Like, what would be kind of like a couple of bullet points to just, you know, to just kind of go, like, here is what's really important for getting this empathetic interaction?

• 36:37Speaker 00

  That's a really good and hard question, and so I'll try to get it right, but there are bigger experts on this. But at least I would say, two things that have been shown to work well. So one is, and we all know this, is listening, right? So asking a lot of questions, like, "How do you feel? How did it go?" And then not solving problems. So empathy is all about, "Tell me about you." It's about you. And then the other part is using feeling-oriented language. This was actually very surprising to us. We ran a study to see if it was okay for robots to talk about feelings, because, remember, they don't have any. And we can pretend that they do, but they really don't. They don't. And so, is it okay for a robot to say, "I know how you feel?" Because it really doesn't. And I was actually surprised, and this is good, because we should, as researchers, be

• 37:22Speaker 00

  surprised. If I were never surprised, then it feels like I'm biasing my studies. So I was surprised. I actually thought that, because I would feel like if a robot said to me, "Oh, I know how you feel," I'd be like, "Hmm, do you really? Because I don't think you do." But actually, people like it when a robot says, "Well, how did that feel?" And, "Oh, I know how you feel." And we were dealing with a group of users also, who were actually suffering from anxiety, and then we were dealing with users who also were grappling with recovery from cancer. They actually liked the robot companion referring to understanding their feelings. So feelings oriented language really comes across as empathetic and is well received. And people often think intuitively that if you have a supportive agent that is supportive

• 38:06Speaker 00

  consistently, that you will get bored of that and you won't like it. But I don't know, think about humans in your life. Oh my gosh, I have this parent slash friend who is always supportive. Oh, I'm so bored with that. I don't want that anymore. Right? Who doesn't want that anymore? So the point is, if you have an empathetic agent that is consistently empathetic, it just cannot be rote repetition. But if it is meaningfully empathetic, people do not get bored with that. Everybody needs support.

• 38:33Aria Finger?

  Totally.

• 38:41Aria Finger?

  Oh Maya, we could talk for so much longer, but we want to get to our rapid fire questions. So you actually already mentioned some movies that I also love, but is there a movie, song or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 38:57Speaker 00

  So Wally, actually, I'm going to go back to that, but Wally does fill me with optimism because Wally actually does a lot to show some bad things that people can get themselves into by not planning ahead. And then the way that we are infinitely malleable as a species. So we can do better and be better, and so can the machines that we create. So I am going to still go back to Wally. But if you want another robot movie, which is more fun than maybe optimistic, but I do like Robot and Frank. That's an often overlooked robotics movie, and I think it's quite well done, really. Great acting, great understanding of what robots are like. It has a scene in which two robots come together and instead of some kind of taking over the world, one says, I'm operating at expectation level, and the other one says, me as well.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  And then they just go their separate ways. I thought that was good.

• 39:44Reid Hoffman?

  Where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you?

• 39:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, that's actually, I'm actually really, really excited. And I feel like if I had taken a different path, I would have loved to have been in bioengineering, this intersection now of biology and engineering, where we're looking at things like everything from, on the one hand, like prosthetics, okay, that's obvious, that's kind of even closer to what I do, but, you know, restoring vision, restoring physical ability, like this, and this whole mush where we're going from genes to cells to physical ability. So even, you know, gene therapies and things like that, I'm extremely excited about this. And I think there are areas there with AI that will actually, you know, just really make huge impacts. And so that is, you know, getting into the whole area of personalized medicine, where

• 40:34Speaker 00

  we're going away from one size fits all, oh my God, we ran this trial and now we have to use this. Instead, it's like, this is, we're going to understand you as a human so thoroughly that we can really not only help you with a specific issue that you're having, you know, cancer or something horrible like that, but also we can predict and anticipate and hopefully prevent. That's huge. So the field of medicine is just so exciting. I could see an alternate reality in which I do that, but I'm good with what I'm doing.

• 41:02Aria Finger?

  I love that. Personalized medicine is so fascinating and could make such a huge impact. And so our final question, can you leave us with a final thought on what it's possible to achieve in the next 15 years if everything goes humanity's way? And then what's the first step to get there?

• 41:21Speaker 00

  I thought about this and it worries me. This worries me because I think, I think it's very rare that everything goes the humanity's way for all of humanity. I want to be optimistic, but I'm a bit concerned about the particular place we're in with AI because it's going to disrupt the economy in a massive way and it could be really positive, but it may not be. So I would really like us to like do some serious thinking. That's not the same as, I'm not necessarily saying we pause, but I will say one thing, which isn't what you asked, but I'll say, here's a thing we should do. The big tech folks, OpenAI, Google, all the other folks, they need to not Just say that they they've welcomed regulation. They need to tell us what needs to be regulated because they know the best.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  It is not the job of academics and it is most definitely not the job of politicians because they have no clue. So the people who are creating technology need to be responsible for also suggesting specific regulation. I understand this will be super biased and, you know, they're obviously, but that's everybody's bias. They it is their responsibility if we do that. Because I know on the inside, there are a lot of really responsible folks who care, but they aren't proposing what should be done. I want them to work with us, let's say in academia, because we can't do this alone. So I think if we do that now, if we think very hard about how to put proper guardrails around by very people who are creating the systems, that's when we can end up somewhere really much, much better.

• 42:49Aria Finger?

  That's the step in the right direction is is government, academics and industry all working together to be inclusive and think about everyone for AI. I'll take it.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  But in terms of vision, and I don't think it's 15 years, but in terms of like this grand vision, you know, there's always this discussion about like, oh, well, you know, people need to take care be taken care of and people will take care of people while technology will do all the other things. And the part I don't know is there's a there's like a big trench in between where we are now and that. And I don't know how we get through that trench, right? Because you cannot just take 60 year old people who have worked in like, let's say, food delivery with trucks and suddenly make them caregivers for people with Alzheimer's. So what do you do? How do you transition to get into eventually this other world in which it would be fantastic to think that we have a lot of leisure time and we're taking care of one another and machines are doing all the crappy stuff plus and then some. And so I want us to think about that trench, like, how are we going to get through that

• 43:44Speaker 00

  trench? If we can figure out bridging that thing, then we can get to the other side, which is going to be really awesome, I hope.

• 43:50Aria Finger?

  I love it. Figure out how to transition to more care. Maya, thank you so much for being here. It was eye opening and I loved hearing about robots, really wonderful.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you. You and thank you for asking me such wonderful questions. I I don't get to talk about this often, so this is great.

• 44:13Reid Hoffman?

  That was super exciting. It isn't often that you talk to people who are very deeply engineering sophisticated, who are solving problems like engineering. And the engineering problem they're focused on is empathy, and is the amplification of humanity through that. So, you know, as you noted, Ari, on the pod, we got to talk to her for another hour or two and completely lost track of the time.

• 44:37Aria Finger?

  And to your point, like, she literally was using the same words as Mustafa. And so it was so interesting to hear someone working on software and AI and large language models, talking about empathy, how we can have people as therapists, how we're definitely not replacing humans, this is an addition for, this is a compliment. And Maya was saying the same exact thing. She was just talking about hardware, and she was talking about robots, and she was talking about how we can have them sort of present in our everyday 3D lives. And I thought it was especially interesting when she wove in the AR and VR, and how that actually, when you look at people's brain scans, does give the same stimulation

• 45:18Aria Finger?

  at times as in person. And so that could be such an iteration on the field of empathy, and helping folks out, having therapists and coaches and all that stuff.

• 45:28Reid Hoffman?

  Well, that's definitely one of the things we're going to get, both by her robotics and by, you know, various of the AI, you know, chatbots, Pi, others, which is, we're going to actually be running, what is the real typology of how you have empathetic interactions, compassionate interactions, understanding interactions? And we're going to begin to understand this in a much broader way. And, you know, I think her neurologist's point was kind of as simple as, you know, empathy is as empathy does. You know, I thought that that was, you know, like, well, that's a very important lesson to remember.

• 46:03Aria Finger?

  I mean, if you had asked me before this episode, can a robot be empathetic? I would have said, absolutely not. Like, that has to do with intent. That has to do, you know, X, Y, Z. And it's like, right, well, actually, all that matters is the person who's feeling it. And if you are a stroke victim and this robot can, you know, perform tasks that are empathetic to you, then that's incredible. And also, you know, she talked about so many times, it's like the classic, you know, teach a man to fish tail, but like, we're not doing anyone a service for certain things when we're just doing everything for them. And we certainly know that when you have five, six, and seven-year-olds, but it's also true as people age or whatever it might be. And how do we use these robots to help people help themselves?

• 46:46Aria Finger?

  How do we use these robots to amplify what everyone wants to be doing? And again, like, take away the drudgery, but for the stuff that we want to be doing, so for our own independence, how wonderful to have someone right there with us, helping us along on that journey.

• 47:00Reid Hoffman?

  And it makes sense that she's starting with the most needful, right? Whether it's, you know, children on the spectrum, or injured, or people who experience some kind of disability, maybe recovery, because that's obviously the most important thing to do, shows the lens of it. I'll be super interested as that work also broadens out to Susie and Joe Average.

• 47:19Aria Finger?

  One of the, you know, one of the questions that we had on our long question list was about commercialization and was about scale. And, you know, how does she take that from, you know, in the lab or helping a few folks to sort of broad adoption and who are the future customers? And so, you know, we'll have to have her on the pod again because we, you know, in a year or two, we got to hear about how that scale is working. So I'll be interested to watch the space.

• 47:43Reid Hoffman?

  Me too.

• 47:52Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wondery Media Network, hosted by me, Reid Hoffman, and Aria Finger. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard and Sarah Schleid. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor. Special thanks to Zuri Yalamanchili, Sadeh Sapiyeva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, and Ben Wallace.