[MUSIC PLAYING]
LAURENCE MORONEY: James, it's a real pleasure
to have you on the show.
Thanks for coming.
JAMES MCLURKIN: It's wonderful to be here.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now a lot of us
know you as the maker guy, right, with the AIY Project.
But can you just tell us about yourself?
What is it that you do here at Google?
JAMES MCLURKIN: So my primary job
is hardware engineer on AIY.
But that's not my top secret mission.
So my top secret mission really is
to build things that build engineers.
I'm trying to get the coolest of Google technology, which
is artificial intelligence-- get that out
so that makers and students and everybody can
use that in their own projects.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And one of your first things
you've done with it is this thing, right?
JAMES MCLURKIN: Yes.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And this is the before,
and this is the after.
JAMES MCLURKIN: Right.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So can you show us how it works?
JAMES MCLURKIN: Sure.
How tall is the Space Needle?
Oh, that's so trite.
AI: The Space Needle is 605 feet tall.
JAMES MCLURKIN: Let's try some other ones.
What is Union Pacific 844?
AI: According to Wikipedia, Union Pacific 844
is a 484 Northern type steam locomotive
built by the American Locomotive Company in December, 1944,
for the Union Pacific Railroad.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice.
So I know you like trains, right?
JAMES MCLURKIN: I do.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Wasn't there a little thing
as you were designing this that you designed it for trains?
JAMES MCLURKIN: So we got our prototypes back,
and as we were getting to our production,
we never had quite enough time to get enough prototypes to
built. So we were having a demo, and I cleared the week,
and I was like, I've got to build
some stuff with this thing.
We can't have people dogfooding it
without me testing it myself.
So I went throughout my house trying
to figure out what to control, and I saw my trains there.
Well, let's go drive the trains.
And I went to go connect the trains to it,
and I had to cut the circuit board up in order
to drive the trains.
And I thought, this will never do.
This will never do.
So I stopped literally at that instant,
went back and changed the design,
changed the circuit board design so it would
be easier to control trains.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right, so a ship
stopper on the original design was it
didn't work with your train set, so you got
it to work with your train set.
I think we have a video of that.
Should we take a look?
JAMES MCLURKIN: Train, fast.
Motors, or lights, or servos, or anything
else that you can control with no electrical signal.
It literally is just that simple.
If you can plug wires into a circuit board,
then you can connect a motor to the voice kit.
Train, stop.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now that looks cool.
Do you have a lot of trains?
JAMES MCLURKIN: I do.
So the one you saw in the video, the gray diesel engine,
that's an old SP model, ST9.
And then my pride and joy, which is that UP844 model which
showed up at the end.
And there's a bunch of others.
I live in Seattle, and there's a famous train
that goes from Seattle to Chicago, the Empire Builder.
And the scale that I model in is N scale.
So that's one to 160.
And that train, I have it on my wall.
It is 6 and 1/2 feet long.
So I had to go build a special wall display unit
just to put this train on the wall.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice.
And then you get to control the trains [INAUDIBLE]
this project, which is pretty cool.
Now I know we released a bunch of these,
and they kind of sold out really quickly, right?
JAMES MCLURKIN: They did.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And you had a magazine in the UK,
I think that was.
JAMES MCLURKIN: So our launch partner
was Raspberry Pi Foundation.
And they have a magazine called MagPi,
which is all about their Raspberry Pi single board
computer.
So the Raspberry Pi, it's a computer about this big.
And the real breakthrough isn't the size.
We're used to small computers now.
It's the cost.
It's a $35 computer.
You plug in your keyboard and your monitor
and you're ready to go.
So it has really revolutionized the low end
and the educational market for computing.
So it was an obvious partner for us.
It had enough compute to do what we wanted to do.
It is the most popular single board computer.
Easy, easy thing.
LAURENCE MORONEY: They're super cool.
JAMES MCLURKIN: Yeah, they are.
And we got along famously.
The cultures of Raspberry Pi, what they're
trying to do with education outreach,
what we're trying to do with machine intelligence,
basically to democratize it, to commodify it,
to make it as simple as putting a Lego brick, or a servo,
or a motor, you just take your machine intelligence block
and you put it onto your project,
and you're ready to go.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now when you first told me about this,
I said, I want to put this to the test as an education thing.
So I knew some high school kids, and some of these
were part of a robotics club.
So we gave them a bunch of these,
and we gave them some Raspberry Pis.
And we gave them five days to see what they would do with it.
Should we take a look?
JAMES MCLURKIN: Let's take a look.
Cool.
SPEAKER 2: We can [INAUDIBLE] to turn left.
Turn left.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice.
SPEAKER 2: Stop.
SPEAKER 3: Pawn to D5.
AI: [INAUDIBLE] takes D5.
Your move.
SPEAKER 3: Yeah, and it just takes.
And then you go on.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Shop for a New York Mets jersey.
SPEAKER 4: Candies.
SPEAKER 1: Giving you two candies.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So we get plural as well.
Nice.
And red is my favorite, so I'm glad I got a couple of reds.
Pretty cool stuff, right?
JAMES MCLURKIN: That was awesome.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Did any of them jump out at you?
JAMES MCLURKIN: Well, so the three favorites, [INAUDIBLE],,
are the walking robot.
LAURENCE MORONEY: [INAUDIBLE] cool.
JAMES MCLURKIN: I used to be a robotics professor,
so anything that gets up and moves
around is near and dear to my heart.
I also really liked the shopping example,
because that was a pure software make.
And I don't want people to think that makes
have to be blocks and screws and soldering and stuff.
Making with software is just as important.
And connecting things together with software
is critical, because that's how the whole world works.
But obviously, if you put Lego and candy together,
what could be better than that?
LAURENCE MORONEY: Exactly, life is good.
JAMES MCLURKIN: And the other thing there
is that there is sophistication and subtlety there.
But it has the look that, well, anyone can do this.
The robot's got all these wires and crazy stuff.
The software, all the magic is hidden,
and you can't see all the delicacy there.
But the Lego stuff, yeah.
Maybe I could do that.
Now of course it's never that simple,
and that's what you'll learn when you go to build.
But then when you get working, the feeling
of accomplishment and joy-- look,
I built a little Lego thing.
And you take it.
Put it on yourself.
Any time you want some candy, give me candy.
LAURENCE MORONEY: When she first told me
she was going to build a candy dispenser,
I thought she was buying an off-the-shelf candy dispenser
and just pinning it and then controlling that.
And I thought, OK.
It's kind of cool.
It's kind of good.
High school kids do that.
And then she shows up with the one that she made herself.
It was like jaw on the floor kind of thing.
JAMES MCLURKIN: So much better.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And it's just amazing
what a bunch of kids, when we gave them five days,
were able to do.
And it was like when we first gave them this, it was like--
you were there.
We probably have some footage of it.
They were so quiet.
They were a little intimidated.
And then they just went away and they just
started building these amazing things.
JAMES MCLURKIN: That's the magic right there,
to have this machine intelligence.
In these projects, it was kind of
like a connector between some input
that they've got in the physical world and some output
that they've got in the physical world.
And to put that machine intelligence
right in the middle is exactly what we want to do,
because right now, machine intelligence,
it really is everywhere, but it's a very enterprise-y,
big server, back end thing.
And that's just not how it needs to be.
And I don't even think that's how it should be.
I think that the world would be better
when more people are building more things that are smarter.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Absolutely.
And it was something that you said right
at the beginning of when we were talking.
It was like, you build engineers.
JAMES MCLURKIN: Well, so I used to actually
be directly in the engineer creation business.
I used to be a professor.
And I didn't get to play with any of the cool toys
as a professor.
So my job was to live in a lab with cool toys,
and have my students build stuff, do science, write
papers.
But the engineering supported the science.
But what I always kept coming back to
was that what I really am enjoying doing
is building engineers.
And I got distracted by outreach programs, and things
in museums, and other stuff that wasn't along
the straight and narrow path of academia.
And eventually I decided that if I'm going to want to do this,
I need better toys, basically.
I need a bigger toy box.
LAURENCE MORONEY: We all need better toys.
JAMES MCLURKIN: So the path to Google
and then the serendipitous path of this project
was just fantastic.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I think with the experience
that we're just talking about, just getting this box
and open it up, and we see it's a bunch of cardboard
components, and circuit boards, and a button.
Everybody loves the button, right?
JAMES MCLURKIN: Yeah, the button's great.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I like to just take it out and play with it.
JAMES MCLURKIN: We had to fight so hard for that button.
So we couldn't find it.
The vendor wasn't there.
It was late.
We couldn't figure out how to pay them.
It was just so much problem to get that button.
But it's such a wonderful--
I'm shamelessly biased about the button.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah, I think everybody likes the button.
As soon as you put it on the desk, the first thing is people
reach over and press the button.
JAMES MCLURKIN: So we have a partnership with ITP at NYU.
And that's a design studio.
Their slogan is, I do believe, the art of the newly possible.
So what's at the cutting edge of technology
that they can get their hands on,
and then what does that mean from a design point of view,
and a user experience point of view,
and a human interaction point of view.
So we showed up to talk to them about, here's our kits.
Do you want to use them in your summer class?
Yes, we love it.
And the first thing they said was, look at this button.
And they started pushing on the button.
Well this button has meaning.
And they used a bunch of--
I'm an engineer.
So they're using a bunch of very serious, UI, artsy words
that describe that immediacy of it,
the human interaction, and things I didn't understand.
But there is theory about you see this
and you want to push it.
So that desire to do it, now you can
use that to get the thing to do something.
And it pulls the thing into the world.
Basically, they like the buttons, too.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah.
I just love it.
I push it and say candy, and I got candy.
JAMES MCLURKIN: You see?
LAURENCE MORONEY: It was really, really cool.
So back on the theme of building engineers.
So our experience was that it worked really, really
well with that experiment.
But what if people want to do this for themselves?
Where would they get started?
How can they get going in building one of these
by themselves?
JAMES MCLURKIN: So we're working on making
it just as easy as possible.
We are working to move these things into retail chains.
So the first batch, we freely admit we totally
underestimated the popularity.
LAURENCE MORONEY: They even ended up on EBay right?
JAMES MCLURKIN: They ended up on EBay.
The kit in the States, I want to say it was $14.95.
It's an imported magazine.
In the UK, I think it was seven pounds.
On eBay, $120 for this thing.
So Adam Smith has spoken, and the solution there is just
to crank up the factories.
And we're during a second run.
So soon, hopefully by the time you see this,
there will be enough to have everyone.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So we have a website where people
can go to find it, and open source code,
and all that kind of goodness.
JAMES MCLURKIN: The website, the documentation, the maker guide,
that sign-up sheet for the waiting list,
it's all available on the website.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So it's AIY Projects with Google.com?
JAMES MCLURKIN: There you go.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Thank you so much, James.
That was awesome.
JAMES MCLURKIN: It's been great being here.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And if you want
to learn more about the AIY Project, please
take a look at the website.
We've linked it in the description below.
If you've any questions for me or if you've
any questions for James, just please also leave them
in the comments below.
Thank you so much, James.
JAMES MCLURKIN: Oh, it's been a great time being here.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And go build something great, right?
JAMES MCLURKIN: Build something awesome.