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What's up everybody, it's your girl Ti, and today I am here with Dr. Ross Mead.
He's pretty much the opposite of Dr. Robotnic, he makes helpful robots.
- Yeah we design the brains for those helpful robots.
So, make robots that can help people in their everyday lives.
- We're going to find out today with Dr. Mead,
which movies took a little bit too many liberties in their portrayal of robots.
Let's start off with Big Hero Six.
At the beginning of the movie,
Beymax seems pretty persistent about helping Hero.
How realistic is that?
- Robots are goal driven.
They have objectives, and what they're trying to do is
find a variety of different ways that they can get to solving those objectives.
- So, would you say that it was real then?
- Yeah, absolutely, very real.
- Wow.
- (Sound) Ow. - On a scale of one.
- Ow.
- On a scale of- - There's a really funny scene where
Baymax keeps resorting his injury programming because Hero
keeps getting hurt.
- Right now, a robot would do something like that.
So if the robot were to see someone get hurt, that's triggering an event in it's
program, that says respond in a way that's hopefully helpful.
I guess it is better if a robot is mildly annoying,
rather than having a mission prompt to exterminate mankind.
- What are you doing?
- I am downloading a database on- - There's also that moment where Baymax
downloads all of that social information from the Internet when it
becomes relevant.
Is that bogus, or is that real?
- Let's say that it's not real right now.
If a robot were to go out and datamine the Internet,
it's going to come up with a whole slew of things that are wrong.
We don't want our machines to be learning from that kind of thing.
Microsoft deployed a Twitter bot called Tay.
People taught it some, we'll say pretty vile and nasty things.
No, BayMax should not be download things from the Internet now.
- That's assuming the Internet ever becomes a not-terrible place, and
I am not optimistic.
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Let's move on to Interstellar.
And of course, in Interstellar, the main robot we have is Tars.
Who's like this wisecracking robot and
helps the astronauts kind of travel through space.
In the part where Cooper is talking to Tars about those parameters.
- Yes (Noise), that's definitely real.
So what we're trying to do is create robots that have personality.
When Coop says things like, set your humor parameter to 75%.
- What's your human setting gauge?
- That's 100%.
- Bring it on down to 75, please.
- That's basically, setting a personalization value for himself.
- You definitely don't want a 100%, you don't want a robot who's always on.
Giant, sarcastic, robot, what a great idea.
- There is also that moment where Cooper asks Tars for some information, and
Tars reveals that he also has a discretion filter.
Is that a type of thing that an engineer would actually implement in a robot?
- (Noise) Let's call that not real, and
though one thing that's worth noting in that scene too.
The robot is talking in a very human like voice.
And I'd say, for right now, that's really not real.
We want that robot to convey itself in a way that maybe is robotic.
- So you're saying that I'm never going to get a robot that sounds like
Samuel L Jackson?
- Well, maybe we should.
I think the world needs that.
- I need it.
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Star Wars.
Gotta talk about it.
It is the space movie franchise that keeps on giving and
it's got the Mount Rushmore of movie robots.
C-3PO.
Pretty chatty.
Is that a direction we're actually heading in with robotics?
Yeah, C-3PO could had used Tar's discretion filter.
- He could have used the shut the (Bleep) up filter.
- (Laugh) Things like Alexa or
Chabot's on Facebook Messenger, they tend to be quite chatty.
C-3PO uses speech and gestures and body language.
RTD2 is using beeps and boops and little side to side motions.
- Yeah, until they start putting some stank of them bots, not interested.
- There's a really great scene where Hans and Luke are dressed up as storm troopers,
and they're walking Chewy down a hallway.
And there's this small little box troid, and it drives down the hallway and
it stops, it freaks out and it panics and drives away.
They were starting to make personality be part of the engineering
that we do behind the robots, and not just about mathematical efficiency.
It's about the social side of things.
- Where do you come from?
(Noise) - When BB-8 and Ray first meet, they have
a full on conversation even though they're not even speaking the same language.
Meanwhile, if I ask my Google Assistant, for
Steph Curry's phone number, it acts like it doesn't understand English.
- Interestingly, in the real world, we are starting to design languages
that are around the needs of the robots, so I'd actually say this is real.
- All right, BB-8 and Ray, you kept it real.
That's going to do it for us today, but
make sure you check out all the cool stuff that Ross is up to over on semio.ai.
It's not going to be the robot apocalypse, I promise.
And be sure you subscribe to us so
you can find out what other movies we're going to have debunked.
And leave us a comment letting us know what topics you'd like to see.
See you guys next time.
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