There is this long running debate,
do you send people into space or
do you send robots?
And I think that's not the right question.
Split the question into two parts.
Are you only interested in
scientific discovery?
Send robots.
It's cheaper.
You don't have to bring them home.
You don't have to feed them,
at least not food.
(Laugh) They'll need energy from
somewhere, get it from the sun.
If you only care about science then
there's no rational reason to send humans,
really.
For the cost of sending a human,
you can send 100 robots.
And robots are getting better,
smaller, cheaper,
faster, smarter, all of the above.
But here's the catch.
I've never seen a ticker tape parade
for a robot.
I've never seen a high school
named after a robot.
I never saw a kid read a book about
a robot and say, gee,
I wanna be that robot one day.
There's value of human inspiration.
It's less tangible than
the scientific results of an experiment.
It's more emotional.
It's more philosophical.
It's more cultural.
It's more human.
If we send one of ourselves on
the frontier where it's dangerous but
interesting, and they can make
discoveries, and they come back,
I'm gonna go listen to that person.
I wanna read the book
that that person wrote.
I wanna interview that person on the news.
That person will be a hero to
our civilization, and that has value.
Not only that, if you're
gonna send humans anyway, add the humans
to the scientific experiment.
And humans can deduce things way faster
and intuitively than robot can,
at least for now.
We can see something we've never seen
before and then interpret it freshly
in ways I don't know what that is,
well let me find out, I think I know,
this is my first best guess.
Computers currently kind of only think
the way we've programmed them to think.
And if that's the only way a computer is
programmed to think, then take a robot
and take a human and have them confront
something they've never seen before.
Whose analysis are you gonna want first?
It's gonna be the human analysis,
at least for now.
Maybe the day will come when robots
in that mode will be smarter than humans,
serendipity mode.
It's very hard to program into a robot
curiosity for
something it has never seen before.
How to process information it
knows nothing about.
If you program a robot that has
consciousness and curiosity,
is it even ethical to send that robot
on a space mission with no intent of ever
bringing it back?
Are you killing a sentient being?
For having created a robot that has
the same capacity of curiosity as humans,
then you're back in the same boat.
Because you were trying to make a robot
because they're cheaper to send
cuz you don't have to bring them back.
So maybe there's a whole frontier we
have yet to breach.
And that's the ethics and
the morality of sentient machines that we
create, that we put in harm's way.
That we send out into space with no intent
of bringing them back and
maybe not even telling them.
Because if we told them,
they might resist or whisper to their
other robot friends on earth.
(Laugh) Dudes, help me out.
Sabotage the launch.
(Music)