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>> It's happened faster than most people realize,
but robots have become incredibly competent
in the past few years.
DARPA, which is the Defense Department R&D shop
that invented the internet, gave us GPS,
invented stealth technology,
is now running a robotics challenge.
And so what we'll see here are robots that are trying
to simulate the response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
They need to drive vehicles, open doors, turn valves,
break through walls.
These are humanoid robots.
This is Atlas.
Atlas is about 6 feet tall, 330 pounds,
the reason he's so light is that he doesn't have batteries.
Atlas was the base platform used by a lot
of those competing teams in the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
For our purposes, it's worth noting that as of January,
Atlas works for Google.
What does that mean?
So, when I ask you what a robot is,
everybody knows what a robot is.
This is a robot.
It's simple.
It's self-explanatory.
This is a robot.
This is self-explanatory, except for one thing.
Why does she have a navel?
[Laughter] So when George Lucas made his robot a few years
later, he did the same robot, basically, look at the, it's,
it's, it's a homage to Maria from Fritz Lang's movie,
Metropolis, notice he, he finessed the abdomen.
So these are robots.
Everybody knows this.
The problem is that they're conditioning our thinking
about what a robot really is.
And so those of you who haven't seen the movie,
The Day the Earth Stood Still,
you know immediately that this is a robot.
His name is Gort.
You haven't seen the movie,
but you know immediately all the messages
that that is sending.
But that's a problem.
Because robots are the first technology in a long time, I'm,
I'm arguing ever, where we have mass market science fiction
predicting and announcing
and describing a technology before the technology happens.
Think about refrigeration, think about the internet,
think about cell phones, think about GPS,
we didn't have a whole body
of knowledge telling us what it was going to be
like before we had it.
Part of this is because mass market science fiction is new
in itself.
It came along with the advent of,
after World War II with paperback books, television,
all the rest of those things.
So when the time comes for us to talk about robots,
everybody has to worry about things like jobs, warfare,
healthcare, and yet we're still thinking
about things like this.
So I'm calling it the robotic paradox.
Everybody knows what a robot is, nobody can define it.
Including computer scientists.
Especially computer scientists.
This is very culturally conditioned.
If you look at the Japanese,
they have a very different robotic science fiction.
This is Astro Boy, also known as Mighty Atom,
it has a much more humanitarian persona,
it's much more of a companion,
the Japanese robot is a companion stereotype,
the American/Western European robot is either a servant
or a slave.
Think about R2D2.
I'm sorry, C3PO.
The butler is an English slave.
Or you basically have the robot gone wrong,
the slave gone wrong, Terminator.
The Japanese, then, build very different robots.
This is the PARO, it's a care robot that you give
to older people, and they,
and the robot responds to their touch, to their voice.
Honda and Sony both have a history
of building a very approachable kind of, of companion robot,
this is the ASIMO from Honda, and here's the AIBO from Sony,
both in the robot hall of fame.
When the Americans build a robot, they build this.
[Laughter] This is the PackBot, it saved a lot of lives
in Afghanistan, it's an amazing invention,
it is not a companion.
Nobody's going to give this to grandma
to help her with her dementia.
[Laughter]
So the time has come to talk seriously about robots,
and we need to get, let go of the science fiction,
we need to start thinking about what the reality really is.
Here's just one example.
You're in the Fukushima nuclear disaster,
this robot breaks through the walls, gets to you,
and it's going to rescue you, you awake from consciousness
and you see this coming at you, are you comforted?
[Laughter] Are you scared to death?
You say, you know, take me back to the radiation please.
And yet, this company is also owned by Google, by the way.
So, the time has come to talk seriously about robots.
I urge you to go further.
Get informed.
Pay attention.
This stuff is happening now.
Let go of the stereotypes, let go of the fantasy, and,
together, we can have some intelligent conversations
about what this stuff will bring us to the future.
Thank you.
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