Gadgetory

I think if you think about the progression of computing from desktop to laptop to mobile now what you're starting to see is robotics enter into the fray and really if you think about it that's spurred by one of the key consumer trends which is the ability to talk to your devices and what's ironic about that is it's actually it's a throwback to an original consumer trend which was just talking to each other right so I think I think it's kind of come full circle in that sense but what I think robotics really does is it it takes that wall that's between you and your environment that cell phone and gets rid of right and so the interactions that you can start to have become very meaningful in a way that isn't about you having to go pull out a device start to search it's just having a conversation so that's I think if you are hearing one of the themes across the board here you're going to hear that theme of speaking to your technology and getting value back from it is that is that solving a problem it revised ultimately the evolution of systems like Alexa like Google assistant is that making ultimately the the adoption of robotics move more quickly and almost like a parallel path at islands us real quickly and let them and do I think what's great about echo and Google home is it's it's making that trend be a lot more pervasive and it's moving along quite a bit more quickly I think that the value of some of the form factors that you see from some of the likes of these companies is it takes what is in an inanimate object which is very passive and it turns it into a two-way proactive interaction so pepper can see you pepper can reach out to you call you over and deliver some sort of content which has a lot of really interesting use cases and dr. kloor you've mentioned before that you feel we're about to enter a rapid growth phase of robotics and I'd love to hear a little bit about your reasoning for that well from the examples that you've seen but I think where the reason is is because we it's not just about mobility but it is about the artificial intelligence of course this is not general AI but specific AI and I think you're seeing also a driving factor through media and so in s we as scientists grew up seeing movies like Star Wars and seen various representations of robots and now a host of exponential technologies have been coming together to advanced robotics so it's not just the robot themselves it's the AO it's deep machine learning it's the array of sensors that are out there the ability for those sensors to see and hear for instance the these studies with pepper I'm really impressed with pepper and one of the my favorite innovations by the way because the the whole point of it is it does give presents the whole thing about having arms and a face and seeing you is what we as a society want to see we want to have presence and then and for us from the avatar sense we think that's extremely important and i look at avatars as a basically a sister to robots so that we're looking at avatars as robots powered by human intelligence and I distinguish a rope a robot by itself and need not have any intelligence I mean you could go back a couple thousand years in heaven etana tom that's mechanically driven so I always say a robot with AI or a robot with human intelligence think about a conversation that you've had with Alexa you probably haven't right you you tell Alexa dare do something and it's either music yes lights if you have those enabled some kind of home automation or you ask a question of which most of the time today it says you know I don't know the answer I didn't understand the question that I heard it's getting better you can ask questions I asked them is cut ken follett alive after I finish one of his books and she said yes and I was like wow that's really amazing so it's coming along but also great for ken follett yes yeah that's good for him yeah and I also ice where does he live and it says London and I've got to one word answers which was totally unexpected so so things are coming along and I'm impressed by that but at the same time you know there's no conversation happening and I don't even think there's a conversation happening in the next five years so you ask about short-term you know we focused on not having relay speak and it's no problem to play speech and pretend like we can off the problem is that people walk up to it all the time i drive it through the convention center and they say you know hey bring me of gin and tonic look like it's not going to bring you know I understood it I can't bring you a gin and tonic and you know this is not going to do that and so you end up setting an expectation way up here and then disappointing people and we decided that you know in the Star Wars metaphor we'd go r2d2 instead of c-3po just beeps and whistles and it's cute and and maybe you don't understand it and that's okay the other one I think is interesting just so for using science fiction metaphors is Star Trek which doesn't really have any robots it's surprising in that particular show but the ship as a whole talks to you so that's much more like Alexa than embodying robot wasn't data although eventually eventually you have the same if you actually have to aig of data and then you have the holographic doctor though is an a on a diseased evil twin as well yes let's not forget about the next 45 min we're going to a Star Trek West world i agree but that's my whole point is is an AI training wasn't at all about conversation it was about action so in fact if i want to train it to do a physical thing the data from that not from the conversation and which is why in fact i push strongly for four avatars because i want to see robotics move forward and the limitations that you just mentioned i don't have it all right so I if I put a human in in your robot or in n pepper they can have conversations with you all day long and the great thing about what you're doing is that machine learning needs a lot a lot of data and so if you can actually get a lot of people in the in the vive and other systems like that are making it so that you could inhabit it and avatar pretty well from home and pretty affordably if you can do that and then you collect data for five years then I think you can really start to talk about conversations and interesting stuff I've talked about stories before where there's a lot of Robotics happening on the ISS in order to free up those menial tasks and and free up astronauts time to do more experimenting and more things that require a human less things that don't necessarily need a person to be doing yeah I think it's really interesting if you you think about the space station you know people have at first this in this notion that oh my god what a fantastic wonderful place to be on it probably is but then you get past then you say what's it really like to live and work on the space station and the reality it's not all glamour it's not all fun it's not you know get up in the morning do science all day long in reality it's much more like camping you spend all of your time taking care of where you live and the astronauts spent a tremendous amount of time doing chores they're monitoring their environment they're looking for where things are you may not realize that the space station today is the size of like a six bedroom house and it's a place where you switch out the entire family every six months but you leave all the stuff behind which means that you know when you get a new crew on board and you're told hey you need to go do this activity go use this piece of equipment that's in this drawer on the open door like it's not here so where is it well somebody misplaced it they didn't log where it went and now get to spend time searching for that so if you think about the space station in reality is a lot like our environments here on earth it's a place where we're trying to you know remove all those unnecessary things that just waste too much of our time by trying to do things either autonomously with robots or with systems to help us offload these menial repetitive really frankly boring chores and so one of the things that I'm very excited about is I look to the future is you know how can we build the systems can that can do these things it doesn't mean that you have to have your complete general purpose you know humanoid form robot if we could do that fantastic but the reality is even if we don't build that there's still lots of things that you can do in fact it's kind of interesting the way we're kind of set up here we have sort of like the humanoid robotics end ends of the spectrum and then Steve and I have certainly worked on robots so I shouldn't say not just Steve as Steve used to actually work with robot does was quite humanoid in appearance but the point is that there are lots of different forms of robots and affecting Steve Alou to this to that can do things very productively and I think that more important than sort of just the basic form of the robot is really you know how resilient is it reliable is it I think any consumer out there or frankly any astronaut is not going to want to use a system if it breaks down all the time or if they can't predict how it's going to function it needs to to operate well it needs to interact with you in a way that's efficient and frankly it needs to be something that you can just rely on