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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

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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:46 - What is a robot?
17:47 - Metaverse
27:09 - Bias in robots
40:51 - Modern robotics
43:24 - Automation
47:46 - Autonomous driving
56:11 - Privacy
59:37 - Google's LaMDA
1:04:24 - Robot animal analogy
1:17:28 - Data concerns
1:35:30 - Humanoid robots
1:54:31 - LuLaRobot
2:03:25 - Ethics in robotics
2:18:46 - Jeffrey Epstein
2:52:21 - Love and relationships

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I think that animals are a really great thought experiment when we're thinking about AI and robotics, because again, this comparing them to humans that leads us down the wrong path, both because it's not accurate, but also I think for the future, we don't want that.

But I think animals, because we've used them throughout history for so many different things, we domesticated them not because they do what we do, but because what they do is different and that's useful.

And it's just like, whether we're talking about companionship, whether we're talking about work integration, whether we're talking about responsibility for harm, there's just so many things we can draw on in that history from these entities that can sense, think, make autonomous decisions and learn that are applicable to how we should be thinking about robots and AI.

The following is a conversation with Kate Darling, her second time on the podcast.

She's a research scientist at MIT Media Lab, interested in human-robot interaction and robot ethics, which she writes about in her recent book called The New Breed, what our history with animals reveals about our future with robots.

She was a courageous voice of reason and compassion to the time of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal at MIT 3 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.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Kate Darling.

Last time we talked a few years back, you wore Justin Bieber's shirt for the podcast.

So now looking back, you're a respected researcher, all the amazing accomplishments in robotics, you're an author.

Was this 1 of the proudest moments of your life?

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.

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

And then you were so nice about it, you like made some excuses, you were like, oh, well, I'm interviewing some, didn't you say you were interviewing some military general afterwards to like, make me feel better?

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

Are you an actual Bieber fan, or was that like 1 of those T-shirts that's in the back of the closet that you use for painting?

I think I bought it for my husband as a joke.

And yeah, we were gut renovating a house at the time and I had worn it to the site.

It's like a wedding dress or something like that.

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

That little shine in the eye, you know, that allows you to navigate the uncertainty of life.

So that means like autonomous vehicles to me in that sense are robots because they navigate the uncertainty, the complexity of life.

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, 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.

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 1 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 2 arms and 2 legs.

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

Why does the humanoid form trip us up a lot?

Well, because this constant comparison of robots to people, artificial intelligence to human intelligence, First of all, it doesn't make sense from a technical perspective because, 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.

We wind up in this fallacy where we're comparing these 2.

And when we talk about what intelligence even is, we're often comparing to our own intelligence.

And then the second reason this bothers me is because it doesn't make sense.

I just think it's boring to recreate intelligence that we already have.

I see the scientific value of understanding our own intelligence, but from a practical, what could we use these technologies for perspective, it's much more interesting to create something new, to create a skill set that we don't have that we can partner with in what we're trying to achieve.

And it should be in some deep way similar to us, but in most ways different.

Because you still want to have a connection, which is why the similarity might be necessary.

So the 2 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 1, 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 and that but that doesn't have to look human or even act human you can take a robot like r2d2 and it just like beeps and boops and people love r2d2 right even though it's just like a trash can on wheels.

And they like R2-D2 more than C3PO, who's a humanoid.

So there's lots of ways to make robots even better than humans in some ways and make us relate more to them.

Yeah, it's kind of amazing the variety of cues that can be used to anthropomorphize the thing, like a glowing orb or something like that.

Just a voice, just subtle basic interaction.

I think people sometimes over-engineer these things.

Like simplicity can go a really long way.

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

Yeah, those are actually, so the people behind Cosmo, the robot, the right people to design those is animators, like Disney type of people.

Roboticists, quote unquote, are mostly clueless.

They just have their own discipline that they're very good at and they don't have.

I feel like robotics of the early 21st century is not going to be the robotics of the later 21st century.

Like if you call yourself a roboticist, it'd be something very different.

Because I think more and more, you'd be like a control engineer or something.

Like you separate, because ultimately all the unsolved, all the big problems of robotics will be in the social aspect, in the interacting with humans aspect, in the perception interpreting the world aspect, in the brain part, not the basic control level part.

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

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

Because for me, I just, we've had robots for so long and they've just been behind the scenes.

And now finally robots are getting deployed into the world.

Yeah, and we're seeing all these mistakes that companies are making because they focus so much on the engineering and getting that right and getting the robot to even be able to function in a space that it shares with a human.

See, what I feel like people don't understand is to solve the perception and the control problem.

You shouldn't try to just solve the perception and control problem.

You should teach the robot how to say, oh shit, I'm sorry, I fucked up.

Or ask for help, or be able to communicate the uncertainty.

Yeah, exactly, all of those things, because you can't solve the perception control.

But the magic is in the self-deprecating humor and the self-awareness about where our flaws are, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, and there's a whole body of research in human-robot interaction showing ways to do this.

But a lot of these companies, they don't do HRI.

Have you seen the grocery store robot in the Stop and Shop?

Yeah, the Marty, it looks like a giant penis.

It's like 6 feet tall, it roams the aisles.

I will never see Marty the same way again.

But like, these poor people worked so hard on getting a functional robot together.

And then people hate Marty because they didn't at all consider how people would react to Marty in their space.

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

So we were actually gonna do a study on this right before the pandemic hit, and then we canceled it because we didn't wanna go to the grocery store and neither did anyone else.

But our theory, so this was with a student at MIT, Daniela DiPaola.

She noticed that everyone on Facebook in her circles was complaining about Marty.

They were like, what is this creepy robot?

And she did this quick and dirty sentiment analysis on Twitter where she was looking at positive and negative mentions of the robot.

And she found that the biggest spike of negative mentions happened when Stop and Shop threw a birthday party for the Marty robots like with free cake and balloons.

And then we did this online poll, we used Mechanical Turk, and we tried to get at what people don't like about Marty.

And a lot of it wasn't, oh, Marty's taking jobs.

It was, Marty is the surveillance robot, which it's not.

It's watching, it's creepy, it's getting in the way.

Those were the things that people complained about.

And so our hypothesis became, is Marty a real-life Clippy?

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

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 I think people would really love it if Marty talked back.

And like, there's so many possible options for humor there.

You can be like, yes, I'm an agent of the CIA, monitoring your every move.

Like mocking people that are concerned, you know what I'm saying?

Like, yes, I'm watching you because you're so important with your shopping patterns.

Or just, you know, any kind of making fun of people, I don't know.

But I think you hit on what exactly it is because when it comes to robots or artificial agents, I think people hate them more than they would some other machine or device or object.

And it might be that thing, it might be combined with love, or like whatever it is, it's a more extreme response because they view these things as social agents and not objects.

And that was, so Clifford Nass was a big human-computer interaction person, and his theory about Clippy was that because people viewed Clippy as a social agent, when Clippy was annoying and would bother them and interrupt them and not remember what they told him, that's when people got upset because it wasn't fulfilling their social expectations.

And so they complained about Clippy more than they would have if it had been a different, like not a virtual character.

So is complaining to you a sign that we're on the wrong path with a particular robot?

Or is it possible, again, like marriage, like family, that there still is a path towards that direction where we can find deep, meaningful relationship?

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

I mean, I just would, I would have designed Marty a little differently.

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

There is if you're not trying to get through with a shopping cart and a screaming child.

You know, there's, I think you could make it charming.

I think there are lots of design tricks that they could have used.

And 1 of the things they did, I think, without thinking about it at all, is they slap 2 big googly eyes on Marty.

DG And I wonder if that contributed maybe to people feeling watched because it's looking at them.

And so, is there a way to design the robot to do the function that it's doing in a way that people are actually attracted to rather than annoyed by?

And there are many ways to do that, but companies aren't thinking about it.

Now they're realizing that they should've thought about it.

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

So there's some sense where this is just the camera that's monitoring people versus this is an entity that's a standalone entity.

It has its own task and it has its own personality.

The more personality you give it, the more it feels like it's not sharing data with anybody else.

Like when we see other human beings, our basic assumption is whatever I say to this human being, it's not like being immediately sent to the CIA.

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

I mean, I don't know if that even with the microphones here, you forget that that's happening.

But for some reason, I think probably with Marty, I think when it's done really crudely and crappily, you start to realize, oh, this is like PR people trying to make a friendly version of a surveillance machine.

But I mean, that reminds me of the slight clumsiness or significant clumsiness on the initial releases of the avatars for the metaverse.

I don't know, what are your actually thoughts about that?

The way the avatars, the way Mark Zuckerberg looks in that world, in the metaverse, the virtual reality world where you can have virtual meetings and stuff like that.

Because it's a kind of, it feels like a similar problem to social robotics, which is how you design a digital virtual world that is compelling when you connect to others they're in the same way that physical connection is.

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

Because there's something you can't quite put into words that doesn't feel genuine about the way it looks.

And so the question is, if you and I were to meet virtually, what should the avatars look like for us to have similar kind of connection?

Should it be a little bit more realistic?

Should it be more, better capturing of expressions in interesting, complex ways versus like cartoonish, oversimplified ways.

But haven't video games figured this out?

I'm not a gamer, so I don't have any examples, but I feel like there's this whole world in video games where they've thought about all of this.

And depending on the game, they have different avatars, and a lot of the games are about connecting with others.

The thing that I don't know is, and again, I haven't looked into this at all.

I've been shockingly not very interested in the metaverse, but they must have poured so much investment into this meta.

And like why is it so, why are people, why is it so bad?

There's gotta be some thinking behind it, right?

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

1 is, as you probably know, that 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 run through this whole process through the PR department, through all that kind of stuff and it somehow becomes generic to that process.

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

Like, what, I mean, we're living through this now, like with a lot of people with cancellations and all those kinds of stuff, people are nervous and nervousness results in, like usual, the assholes are ruining everything.

But the magic of human connection is taking risks, of making a risky joke, like with people you like who are not assholes, good people.

Like, some of the fun in the metaverse or in video games is being edgier, being interesting, revealing your personality in interesting ways.

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

Because like in metaverse, the possibility of sexual assault and sexual harassment and all that kind of stuff is obviously very high, but they're, so you should be paranoid to some degree, but not too much, because then you remove completely the personality of the whole thing.

Then everybody's just like a vanilla bot that, you have to have ability to be a little bit political, to be a little bit edgy, all that kind of stuff.

And large companies tend to suffocate that.

So, but in general, forget all that, just the ability to come up with really cool, beautiful ideas.

If you look at, I think Grimes tweeted about this, she's very critical about the metaverse, is that Independent game designers have solved this problem of how to create something beautiful and interesting and compelling.

So you have to let those kinds of minds, the small groups of people design things and let them run with it, let them run wild and do edgy stuff.

Yeah, but otherwise you get this kind of, you get a clippy type of situation, right?

Which is like a very generic looking thing.

But even clippy has some, like, that's kind of wild that you would take a paperclip and put eyes on it.

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

And I just feel like that wouldn't even, that clippy thing wouldn't even survive Microsoft or Facebook of today, Matter of Today, because it would be like, 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 with whom it originated is killed and it's all PR, marketing people, and all of that kind of stuff.

No, they do important work to some degree, but they kill the creativity.

I think the killing of the creativity is in the whole, like, okay, so what I know from social robotics is like, obviously, if you create agents that, okay, so take for an example, you'd create a robot that looks like a humanoid, and it's, you know, Sophia or whatever.

Now suddenly, you do have all of these issues where are you reinforcing an unrealistic beauty standard?

But the thing is I think that with creativity you can find a solution that's even better where you're not even harming anyone and you're creating a robot that looks 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.

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

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

That's the big problem, because their whole job is to find harm in things.

So what you said is completely correct, which is edginess should not hurt, doesn't necessarily, doesn't need to be a thing that hurts people, obviously.

Great humor, great personality, doesn't have to, like Clippy.

But yeah, I mean, but it's tricky to get right.

I don't know why a large corporation with a lot of funding can't get this right.

I do think you're right that there's a lot of aversion to risk.

And So if you get lawyers involved or people whose job it is, like you say, to mitigate risk, they're just gonna say no to most things that could even be in some way, yeah.

Yeah, you get the problem in all organizations.

So I think that you're right, that that is a problem.

I think what's the way to solve that in large organizations is to have Steve Jobs type of characters.

Unfortunately, you do need to have, I think, from a designer perspective, or maybe like a Johnny Ive, that is almost like a dictator.

Yeah, who rolls in and says, cuts through the lawyers, the PR, but has a benevolent aspect.

Like, yeah, there's a good heart and make sure, 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 people like Johnny Ive, what they love doing is creating a thing that brings a lot of love to the world.

Imagine like millions of people using the thing and it instills them with joy.

That's, you could say that about social robotics, you could say that about the metaverse.

It shouldn't be done by the PR people, should be done by the designers.

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Kate Darling: Social Robots, Ethics, Privacy and the Future of MIT | Lex Fridman Podcast #329