[applause] >> Hello!
My name is Simone, and I am the beginning of the end.
I'm the bringer of the robot apocalypse, maybe.
I'm going to talk about the importance of building useless things, or at least why it
has been very important to me, and I'm going to start with a story from when I was 8 years
old, and I was this really happy, cheerful kid.
[laughter] And I had an idea that I wanted to build a
robot.
But I had no idea how to actually make it.
So the way I went on about it was that I got a block of wood and I drilled a hole through
it.
I put a stick through the hole, and the way this was a robot, brace yourselves: The way
this was a robot was that if you wiggled one end of the stick, the other end would move,
too.
[applause] AUDIENCE: Woo!
>> And I was like, it's alive.
And I know what you're all thinking.
You're like, goddamn, this girl is a genius.
Somebody should throw a ton of money at her, and I totally agree.
But looking back at this robot as a somewhat grownup, I realize that it's pretty terrible.
I don't think it even qualifies as a robot.
But that, I realized, is one of the biggest differences of building things as a kid and
building things as a grownup.
That when you're building things as a kid, nobody really expects you to build useful
things, and most of all, I didn't expect it of myself, so 8-year-old Simone was like,
fuck that shit, I love this robot.
So a few things have changed since I was 8 years old.
I'm a lot happier nowadays.
[laughter] But one thing that hasn't changed is that
I still build a lot of things.
This is an applause machine that I made, so you can clap your hands without having to
use your hands.
And you're going old school.
You're like, no, we're sticking to normal hands and this invention is great if you have
hands but you don't want to use them.
The next one I'm going to show you is great if you have hands but you don't want to have them
anymore, because I made a chopping machine.
[chopping sounds]
[frightened grunting]
[chopping sounds]
[laughter] >> And as a bonus, this is the perfect response
if anyone ever sends you dick pics you don't want.
[applause] [cheers] And by some weird internet miracle, this has
become what I do for a living.
I have, for the last year, been a full-time inventor of shitty robots.
My YouTube channel is my main platform and people have started calling me the “Queen
of Shitty Robots.”
Yeah, it’s a title I wear with pride!
And that brings me to the first reason as to why it's important to build useless things,
because if you find the things you do interesting, there are probably other people who do too.
And interesting doesn't necessarily mean useful.
For me it really didn't and this was how I got started.
I only built these things because I thought it was fun and I started publishing them online
and the internet is a magical place, because somehow people found these shitty robots that
I was putting out and they started sharing them and more people started sharing them
and I started getting more comments than I could keep up and marriage proposals and people
started calling me the Kardashian of tech, because all these different magazines started
writing about it and all these TV shows started showing my clips.
Here's a Japanese TV show that showed my breakfast robot.
[Japanese narration] [sounds of surprise]
[laughter] And last week, I was on the Late Show with
Stephen Colbert.
[applause] And once again, this is what it all comes
back to.
If you have find the things you do interesting, there are probably other people who do, too.
Because I never planned for this to happen.
I don't think I could have planned for this to happen, because I didn't know that this
could happen.
All I did was do things that I found interesting, and it turned out that other people liked
them, too.
And I understand that my case might be a little bit extreme, but I think it stays true even
on a much smaller scale, because even if there's only one other person who likes what you do,
I can't think of a better way to connect with another person.
>> So a lot of people think that I'm an engineer, but I'm not.
I'm self-taught in both hardware and software, and about two years ago I'd never held a soldering
iron.
And a lot of people ask me what the best way to teach yourself about electronics is—what
books to read and what websites to visit—and first of all, I'm like do you realize who
you're asking for advice?
But it got me thinking of how did I actually teach myself the things that I know today?
And what I realized was that there was not a single point during these two years that
I sat down with a book, being like, I'm going to learn about transistors.
Instead, it was very idea-driven for me.
What I like to talk about is ideas first and tools later.
Because it was always around this idea that I felt really strongly for.
I had some idea of a project that I wanted to build and then there were just all these
things I had to learn along the way.
And to me this really makes sense and it's turned out to be a very effective way for
me to learn, but if you think about how a lot of the education system is, it's the other
way around.
You first learn the tools and then maybe you get to apply them on ideas.
Sometimes you might not even get to the ideas.
But obviously learning by doing is a really effective way to learn, and I mean I would
argue that for building, it's probably the most effective way.
I mean, maybe not if you're a doctor.
[laughter] Because you're like, OK, patient, let's just
try -- [laughter]
-- cutting a little bit here.
It doesn't look like a very important part.
Let's see what happens if we take it out.
If you're a doctor, learning by doing might not be a good idea.
But if you're building things I would argue that it's the best one and, as a bonus, you
learn a lot of stuff around it.
You get a lot of learnings that you never expect.
So, for example, that putting your hair next to motors is a really bad idea.
Oh!
No! [laughter]
Just rest assured, it hurt my scalp a lot less than it hurt my dignity.
[laughter] So my final reason why it's important to build
useless things is because your ideas might be smarter than you.
And what I mean with that, is that good ideas might turn out to be bad and bad ideas might
turn out to be good, but you won't know unless you actually build them.
So it's kind of like that time when I thought it would be a good idea to have a drone cut
hair.
So I put a pair of automated scissors on a drone.
[drone sounds] [laughter]
Obviously a pretty bad idea with a pretty terrifying outcome.
[laughter] Another example is I tried to have a robot
arm make me a sandwich.
[Thumps and sound of glass falling] [laughter]
I actually made this with my friend Fiona who I think in the audience somewhere.
Oh, she’s over there!
Hey, Fiona!
She was puppeteering the robot arm behind the camera.
But a more serious example of when your ideas might be smarter than you, and I love using
the word “serious” whenever I talk about the toothbrush helmet…
This was the first shitty robot I built, and I posted it online, it went viral, and what
really surprised me about it, was that a lot of people wrote me and they were like, hey
Simone, I understand that this is just a gimmick and something you only built for fun, but
do you realize that this would actually be really useful for people with mobility issues?
And that just blew my mind, because here I had been -- I'd built something only because,
why not, and because I thought it was fun, and then other people could find tiny pieces
of useful things that might actually be able to help people.
And a lot of people expect me to kind of accidentally build something useful and maybe one day I
will, but I realize that in some way I already have, because I accidentally created this
job for myself.
And this job, and being the Queen of Shitty Robots and getting to build ridiculous things
and meet cool people, is definitely my best invention so far and to me, that is the real
beauty of creating things, be it useless things or useful things, because you never really
know where it's going to take you.
Anyway, thank you so much for listening, I'm @SimoneGiertz on all social media, and go
home and build some useless things, because something useful things might come out of
it.
Thank you.
[applause]