The following is a conversation with Whitney Cummings.

She's a stand-up comedian, actor, producer, writer, director, and recently, finally, the host of her very own podcast called Good For You.

Her most recent Netflix special called Can I Touch It?

Features in part a robot she affectionately named Bearclaw that is designed to be visually a replica of Whitney.

It's exciting for me to see 1 of my favorite comedians explore the social aspects of robotics and AI in our society.

She also has some fascinating ideas about human behavior, psychology and urology, some of which she explores in her book called I'm Fine and Other Lies.

It was truly a pleasure to meet Whitney and have this conversation with her and even to continue it through text afterwards.

Every once in a while, late at night, I'll be programming over a cup of coffee and will get a text from Whitney saying something hilarious or weirder yet, sending a video of Brian Callen saying something hilarious.

That's when I know the universe has a sense of humor and it gifted me with 1 hell of an amazing journey.

Then I put the phone down and go back to programming with a stupid, joyful smile on my face.

listen to Whitney's podcast, Good For You, and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, support on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter, Alex Friedman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N.

This show is presented by Cash App, the number 1 finance app in the App Store.

They regularly support Whitney's Good For You podcast as well.

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And now here's my conversation with Whitney Cummings.

I have trouble making eye contact, as you can tell.

Do you know that I had to work on making eye contact because I used to look here?

But I used to do this and finally people, like I'd be on dates and guys would be like, are you looking at my hair?

Like they get, it would make people really insecure because I didn't really get a lot of eye contact as a kid.

Did you not get a lot of eye contact as a kid.

But there's definitely some psychological issues.

For some reason, when I connect eyes, I start to think, I assume that you're judging me.

The podcast would be me and you both staring at the table the whole time.

Do you think robots of the future, ones with human level intelligence, will be female, male, genderless, or another gender we have not yet created as a society?

I'm gonna ask you questions that maybe nobody knows the answer to.

And then I just want you to hypothesize as a imaginative author, director, comedian.

very clear that you know a ton about this and I know nothing about this, but I have thought a lot about what I think robots can fix in our society.

It's my job to study human nature, to make jokes about human nature, and to sometimes play devil's advocate.

And I just see such a tremendous negativity around robots or at least the idea of robots that it was like, oh, I'm just going to take the opposite side for fun, for jokes.

And then I was like, oh, no, I really agree in this devil's advocate argument.

So please correct me when I'm wrong about this stuff.

So first of all, there's no right and wrong because we're all, I think most of the people working on robotics are really not actually even thinking about some of the big picture things that you've been exploring.

In fact, your robot, what's her name by the way?

What's the genesis of that name by the way?

Bearclaw was, I don't even remember the joke because I black out after I shoot specials, but I was writing something about the pet names that men call women, like Cupcake, Sweetie, Honey, you know, like we're always named after desserts or something, and I was just writing a joke about if you want to call us a dessert, at least pick a cool dessert, like bear claw, like something cool.

So do you think future robots of greater and greater intelligence would like to make them female, male?

Or would we like to move away from gender and say something more ambiguous?

I feel like if it's a sex robot, people prefer certain genders.

And I also, when I went down and explored the robot factory, I was asking about the type of people that bought sex robots and I was very surprised at the answer because of course the stereotype was it's gonna be a bunch of perverts.

It ended up being a lot of people that were handicapped, a lot of people with erectile dysfunction and a lot of people that were exploring their sexuality.

A lot of people that thought they were gay but weren't sure, but didn't want to take the risk of trying on someone that could reject them and being embarrassed, or they were closeted, or in a city where maybe that's, you know, taboo and stigmatized, you know.

So, I think that a gendered sex robot, that would serve an important purpose for someone trying to explore their sexuality.

And to women, let me try on this thing first.

So I think gendered robots would be important for that.

But I think genderless robots in terms of emotional support robots, babysitters, I'm fine for a genderless babysitter with my husband in the house.

There are places that I think that genderless makes a lot of sense, but obviously not in the sex area.

What do you mean with your husband in the house?

What's that have to do with the gender of the robot?

Right, I mean, I don't have a husband, but hypothetically speaking, I think every woman's worst nightmare is like the hot babysitter.

So I think that there is a time and place, I think, for genderless, you know, teachers, doctors, all that kind of, it would be very awkward if the first robotic doctor was a guy or the first robotic nurse is a woman, you know, it's sort of that stuff is so loaded.

I think that genderless could just take the unnecessary drama out of it and possibility to sexualize them or be triggered by any of that stuff.

So there's 2 components to this, to bare claws.

So 1 is the voice and the talking and so on, and then there's the visual appearance.

So on the topic of gender and genderless, in your experience, what has been the value of the physical appearance?

So has it added much to the depth of the interaction?

I mean, mine's kind of an extenuating circumstance because she's supposed to look exactly like me.

I mean, I spent 6 months getting my face molded and having, you know, the idea was I was exploring the concept of can robots replace us?

Because that's the big fear, but also the big dream in a lot of ways.

And I wanted to dig into that area because, you know, for a lot of people, it's like, they're going to take our jobs and they're going to replace us.

But then a lot of women I know are like, I would love for a robot to replace me every now and then so it can go to baby showers for me and it can pick up my kids at school and it can cook dinner and whatever.

So I just think that was an interesting place to explore.

So her looking like me was a big part of it.

Now her looking like me just adds an unnecessary level of insecurity because I got her a year ago and she already looks younger than me, so that's a weird problem.

But I think that her looking human was the idea, and I think that where we are now, please correct me if I'm wrong, a human robot resembling an actual human you know, is going to feel more realistic than some generic face.

Well, you're saying that robots that have some familiarity like look similar to somebody that you actually know, you'll be able to form a deeper connection with?

If then you know me and you're like, well, I know this isn't real because you're right here.

We have a very keen eye for human faces and they're able to detect strangeness, especially that 1 has to do with people whose faces we've seen a lot of.

tend to be a bigger fan of moving away completely from faces.

In general, because I think that's where things get dicey.

And 1 thing I will say is I think my robot is more realistic than other robots.

Not necessarily because you have seen me and then you see her and you go, oh, they're so similar, but also because human faces are flawed and asymmetrical.

And sometimes we forget when we're making things that are supposed to look human, we make them too symmetrical.

And that's what makes them stop looking human.

So because they molded my asymmetrical face, she just, even if someone didn't know who I was, I think she'd look more realistic than most generic ones that didn't have some kind of flaws.

You know, cause they start looking creepy when they're too symmetrical because human beings aren't.

Yeah, the flaws is what it means to be human, so visually as well.

But I'm just a fan of the idea of letting humans use a little bit more imagination.

So just hearing the voice is enough for us humans to then start imagining the visual appearance that goes along with that voice.

And you don't necessarily need to work too hard on creating the actual visual appearance.

When you step into the stereotype of actually building a robot that looks like Bear Claw is such a long road of facial expressions, of sort of making everything smiling, winking, rolling of the eyes, all that kind of stuff, it gets really, really tricky.

It gets tricky and I think I'm, again, I'm a comedian.

Like I'm obsessed with what makes us human and our human nature and the nasty side of human nature tends to be where I've ended up exploring over and over again.

And I was just mostly fascinated by people's reactions.

So it's my job to get the biggest reaction from a group of strangers, the loudest possible reaction.

And I just had this instinct just when I started building her and people going, oh, 0, and people scream.

I mean, I bring around on stage and people would scream.

And I just, to me, that was the next level of entertainment.

Getting a laugh, I've done that, I know how to do that.

I think comedians were always trying to figure out what the next level is and comedy's evolving so much.

And, you know, Jordan Peele had just done, you know, these genius comedy horror movies, which feel like the next level of comedy to me.

And this sort of funny horror of a robot was fascinating to me.

But I think the thing that I got the most obsessed with was people being freaked out and scared of her.

And I started digging around with pathogen avoidance and the idea that we've essentially evolved to be repelled by anything that looks human but is off a little bit.

Anything that could be sick or diseased or dead, essentially, is our reptilian brain's way to get us to not procreate, try to have sex with it, basically.

So I got really fascinated by how freaked out and scared.

They're like, get that thing away from me.

And it was like, you know what this is, you know, but the sort of like, you know, amygdala getting activated by something that to me is just a fun toy said a lot about our history as a species and what got us into trouble thousands of years ago.

So it's that, it's the deep down stuff that's in our genetics, but also is it just, are people freaked out by the fact that there's a robot?

So it's not just the appearance, but that there's an artificial human.

Anything people I think, and I'm just also fascinated by the blind spots humans have.

So the idea that you're afraid of that, I mean, how many robots have killed people?

How many humans have died at the hands of other humans?

And we'll go to the grocery store and be around a bunch of humans who statistically, the chances are much higher that you're gonna get killed by a human.

So I'm just fascinated by, without judgment, how irrational we are as a species.

So it's, you know, you could say the same thing about nuclear weapons before we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So the worry that people have is the exponential growth.

So it's like, oh, it's fun and games right now, but overnight, especially if a robot provides value to society, we'll put 1 in every home, and then all of a sudden lose track of the actual large scale impact it has on society, and then all of a sudden gain greater and greater control to where we'll all be, you know, affect our political system and then affect our decision.

Didn't robots already ruin our political system?

I mean, that was like an algorithm of negative things being clicked on more.

We'd like to tell stories and like to demonize certain people.

I think nobody understands our current political system, our discourse on Twitter, the Twitter mobs, nobody has a sense, not Twitter, not Facebook, the people running it, nobody understands the impact of these algorithms, they're trying their best.

Despite what people think, they're not like a bunch of lefties trying to make sure that Hillary Clinton gets elected.

It's more that it's an incredibly complex system that we don't, and that's the worry.

It's so complex and moves so fast that nobody will be able to stop it once it happens.

Which is, is this just the next stage of evolution?

You know, is this is just taking emotion out of it?

Is this basically the next stage of survival of the fittest?

Yeah, you have to think of organisms, you know, what is it mean to be a living organism?

Like is a smartphone part of your living organism?

What's the difference between with them and through them?

But it also expands your cognitive abilities, expands your memory, knowledge, and so on.

So you're a much smarter person because you have a smartphone in your hand.

But as soon as it's out of my hand, we've got big problems, because we've become sort of so morphed with them.

Well, there's a symbiotic relationship, and that's what Elon Musk and Neuralink is working on, trying to increase the bandwidth of communication between computers and your brain.

And so further and further expand our ability as human beings to sort of leverage machines.

And maybe that's the future, the evolution, next evolutionary step.

It could be also that, yes, we'll give birth, just like we give birth to human children right now, we'll give birth to AI and they'll replace us.

I think it's a really interesting possibility.

I just think that The fear of robots is wildly classist.

Like, it's easy for us to say they're taking their data.

Okay, a lot of people that get employment off of Facebook, they are able to get income off of Facebook.

They don't care if you take their phone numbers and their emails and their data, as long as it's free.

They don't want to have to pay $5 a month for Facebook.

Forget about the election and all that kind of stuff.

A lot of technology making people's lives easier, I find that most elite people are more scared than lower income people.

So the idea of something that's stronger than us and that might eventually kill us, like women are used to that.

Like that's not, I see a lot of like really rich men being like the robots are gonna kill us.

We're like, what's another thing that's gonna kill us?

I tend to see like, oh, something can walk me to my car at night.

Something, you know, for, you know, people in underprivileged countries who can't afford eye surgery.

Like, in a robot, can we send a robot to underprivileged places to do surgery where they can't?

I work with this organization called Operation Smile where they do cleft palate surgeries.

And there's a lot of places that can't do a very simple surgery because they can't afford doctors and medical care and such.

So I just see, and this can be completely naive and should be completely wrong, but I feel like a lot of people are going like, the robots are gonna destroy us.

Robots, to me, are the only hope to clean up all the messes that we've created.

Even when we go try to clean up pollution in the ocean, we make it worse because of the oil that the tankers use.

Like, it's like, to me, robots are the only solution.

You know, firefighters are heroes, but they're limited in how many times they can run into a fire, you know?

So there's just something interesting to me.

I'm not hearing a lot of lower income, more vulnerable populations talking about robots.

Maybe you can speak to it a little bit more.

There's an idea, I think you've expressed it, I've heard actually a few female writers and roboticists I've talked to express this idea that exactly you just said, which is, it just seems that being afraid of existential threats of artificial intelligence is a male issue.

Because men have, in certain positions, like you said, it's also a classist issue.

They haven't been humbled by life, and so you always look for the biggest problems to take on around you.

It's a champagne problem to be afraid of robots.

Most people like don't have health insurance.

They're afraid they're not gonna be able to feed their kids.

They can't afford a tutor for their kids.

Like, I mean, I just think of, you know, the way I grew up and I had a mother who, you know, worked 2 jobs, had kids.

We couldn't afford an SAT tutor, you know, like the idea of a robot coming in, being able to tutor your kids, being able to provide childcare for your kids, you know, being able to come in with cameras for eyes and make sure, you know, surveillance, you know, I'm very pro surveillance because, you know, I've had security problems and I've been, you know, we're generally in a little more danger than you guys are.

So I think that robots are a little less scary to us because we can see them maybe as like, free assistance, help, and protection.

And then there's sort of another element for me, personally, which is maybe more of a female problem.

I don't know, I'm just gonna make a generalization.

Happy to be wrong, but, you know, the emotional sort of component of robots and what they can provide in terms of, you know, there I think there's a lot of people that aren't don't have microphones that I just recently kind of stumbled upon in doing all my research on the sex robots for my standup special, which is there's a lot of very shy people that aren't good at dating.

There's a lot of people who are scared of human beings who have personality disorders or grew up in alcoholic homes or struggle with addiction or whatever it is where a robot can solve an emotional problem.

And so we're largely having this conversation about rich guys that are emotionally healthy and how scared of robots they are.

We're forgetting about a huge part of the population who maybe isn't as charming and effervescent and solvent as people like you and Elon Musk, who these robots could solve very real problems in their life, emotional or financial.

Well, that's in general a really interesting idea that most people in the world don't have a voice.

You've talked about it, sort of even the people on Twitter who are driving the conversation, you said comments, people who leave comments represent a very tiny percent of the population and they're the ones, We tend to think they speak for the population, but it's very possible on many topics they don't at all.

And look, and I'm sure there's gotta be some kind of legal sort of structure in place for when the robots happen.

You know way more about this than I do, but, you know, for me to just go, the robots are bad, that's a wild generalization that I feel like is really inhumane in some way.

You know, just after the research I've done, like, you're gonna tell me that a man whose wife died suddenly and he feels guilty moving on with a human woman or can't get over the grief, he can't have a sex robot in his own house?

Well, there's an interesting aspect of human nature.

So, you know, we tend to as a civilization to create a group that's the other in all kinds of ways.

And so you work with animals too, you're especially sensitive to the suffering of animals.

Let me kind of ask, what's your, do you think we'll abuse robots in the future?

Do you think some of the darker aspects of human nature will come out?

I think some people will, but if we design them properly, the people that do it, we can put it on a record and we can put them in jail.

But why is that a sociopathic thing to harm a robot?

I think, look, I don't know enough about the consciousness and stuff as you do.

I guess it would have to be when they're conscious, but It is the part of the brain that is responsible for compassion, the frontal lobe or whatever.

People that abuse animals also abuse humans and commit other kinds of crimes.

No 1 abuses animals and then is awesome to women and children and awesome to underprivileged minorities.

We've been working really hard to put a database together of all the people that have abused animals.

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Whitney Cummings: Comedy, Robotics, Neurology, and Love | Lex Fridman Podcast #55