(shrill electronic music)
[Narrator] Conventional wisdom these days
says that robots will soon put millions
of factory workers out of jobs.
(playful electronic music)
This may sound like the fever dream of Dr. Evil,
but in fact, there are very pleasant people
making this happen.
May I introduce Suzanne Gildert?
A budding AI overlord and founder
of Toronto startup Kindred AI.
(playful electronic music)
Tell me about these guys.
So these are research prototypes.
So they're some of the first robots we built at Kindred.
(mechanical sounds)
We tend to work with small robots.
It's a bit like if you imagine a child growing up,
and it breaks a lot of things.
Now imagine if the child was six feet tall
when it had the brain of a six month old.
It would be terribly dangerous.
How many of these robots have ever slapped you?
I have been hit in the face by robots a couple of times.
(laughs)
Suzanne seems nice enough.
(upbeat electronic music)
She makes exotic digital art
and she loves cats to the point where she's built
a robotic fleet of them for the office.
This one, I believe, is called Pinkfoot.
It's a quadruped robot loosely based on a cat anatomy,
although it's not a very highly faithful representation yet.
When you were growing up you would build things as well?
Yeah, that's correct. Yeah.
So I was really enthralled by electronics at an early age.
I guess most little girls would be
looking at trays of beads and things,
and I was looking at trays of resistors
and capacitors and little components,
but having the same kind of reaction to them.
But don't be fooled
by the hobby electronics and the cute cat bots.
Suzanne is a keen businesswoman.
And Kindred has recently embarked
on its first commercial venture.
(mechanical whirring)
What's going on here is that we have a bank of robots
that are learning, so they are continuously running,
picking up objects.
These would run all day?
All day, all night.
("Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy")
Powered by state of the art AI,
these arms can do something that's very easy for a human,
but very hard for a bot.
Pick up objects of different shapes and put them down.
Most factories still use people
to do that sort of thing, lots and lots of people.
Today everyone's shopping on e-commerce,
thousands and thousands of different types of objects,
shapes, textures, weights.
How do you pick that up?
Right now it's human, so you have millions of humans
in warehouses just picking up things
and putting it into another location.
So we're teaching our robots how to do that.
(mechanical whirring sound)
What's the hard part, is it figuring out what's a belt?
What's a shirt?
Or it's just, how to grasp it?
Yeah, exactly.
It's very hard to pick it up, right?
So things will show up in any shape, right?
And you gotta figure out how to pick it up
without dropping it, put it in the location,
so it takes a lot of training.
Part of that training involves,
of all things, humans.
Robot pilots who manually control the arms while the AI
watches and learns the finer points of grabbing.
Alright man, teach me how to use this thing.
Alright, have a seat.
So you see a 3D mouse here, this lets you navigate
the arm through three-dimensional space.
So imagine you're holding the arm in that left hand
and you're just moving it around.
Move it slowly, gently.
There you go.
Trying to get the Oreos, I gotta go up.
Oh shoot, I went too far up.
I want these Oreos.
(Host groans)
(Host and George laugh)
You lose.
(Host and George laugh)
Come back to me, arm.
There. Success.
(playful electronic music)
It's like being at an arcade.
Basically.
But you actually get to win something.
Exactly.
(Host and George laugh)
Just down the hall, Kindred keeps a room
full of pilots doing the same thing as me.
Only these guys are actually competent.
They're remotely overseeing some arms in a Gap factory
1,000 miles away in Tennessee.
How long have you been a robot pilot?
Just over a month, actually.
I've only been here five weeks.
What was the training process like?
Almost like playing a video game.
It's like a shirt gun?
That's a backpack.
That's a backpack, okay.
(Sai laughs)
Somebody's undies?
Oh, there it goes.
Yeah, one shirt at a time.
(Host and Sai laugh)
(mysterious chiming music)
As the arms observe their human guides,
they gradually learn how to do better
at picking up T-shirts and shoe boxes.
Eventually, they'll be fully autonomous
and Sai's services will no longer be required.
One day, this is just gonna light up
and it's going to be picking the objects all the time.
Pretty much, pretty much.
That's the ultimate end goal, at least for these
to have it just constantly whirring and going.
(robot arm whirring)
And the people will be free.
The people will be free to do other more important things.
(Host and Sai laugh)
Sai seemed kind of happy
about the prospect of unemployment.
But I was concerned for his future.
(mechanical whirring sound)
Isn't there something grim about the human
training their end?
Yeah, it's not good to take people's jobs away,
but this kind of technology coming into the workforce
should make us start thinking about how we're
going to pay people in the future.
Because AI is not just going to automate manual labor jobs.
It's going to automate things like doctors
and lawyers and accountants very soon.
So I think there's gonna be issues.
There's gonna be a lot of disruption
when these things come online.
Suzanne is a realist,
but she's also an optimist.
In her vision of the future,
robots won't be mindless competitors to humanity.
They'll be full-fledged citizens like the rest of us.
One of the crazy ideas that I see you talk about
was you've got a robot and it's working in a factory
and then it's gotta go, maybe it gets paid a wage
and it goes to buy lithium ion batteries to keep it going.
Why would that have to happen?
I mean, through having a physical body,
they will have a lot of physical needs just like we have.
You might have to go to their repair shop
to get a motor looked at or something like that
and they'll have to pay someone to do that.
I think they'll just be contributing to our economy
in the same way we do.
(mechanical whirring)
And if they have brains like us, they'll want
to explore new things they've never seen before.
They'll want to learn things, they'll want to perhaps rest
so that their mind has time to consolidate
all this new information.
I keep trying to picture it in my head.
Does the robot worker go home and sit on the couch?
Or watch TV after work?
I don't see why not, probably watch cat videos
like the rest of us.
(Host and Suzanne laugh)
It's hard to tell sometimes
if Suzanne is laughing with us or at us.
Either way, I plan to clear a nice spot on the couch
for my robot friends, oil up some delicious popcorn,
and smile politely.