#1696 - Lex Fridman

Joe Rogan (0:06)

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

Is that a robot?

Lex Fridman (0:17)

Yeah, it's a robot.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

That's what it said, consciousness is not included.

Lex Fridman (0:21)

What's in the box?

Joe Rogan (0:22)

What's in the box, man? What's in the box?

Lex Fridman (0:25)

That's a great movie, by the way.

Joe Rogan (0:25)

It's a great movie. It's a dark movie.

Lex Fridman (0:28)

Yeah, no, it's a legged robot, and I've been involved with those a lot recently, and I'm going to explore... I was going to bring it here, but I thought this is the wrong...

the other robot I have is the wrong atmosphere.

Joe Rogan (0:41)

Is it a Boston Dynamics one?

Lex Fridman (0:43)

So I had a lot of...

I've been closely working with Boston Dynamics, and how do I put it? I put a lot of my love into what they're doing for a few years. I love the engineers there. We're close. We like each other.

Joe Rogan (0:58)

But...

Lex Fridman (0:59)

Let me politely say that they're also a company that are trying to make money. And so there's a marketing team, there's PR, and they're starting getting in the way of engineers. And whenever marketing people get in the way of engineering, I'm out.

And so there's a lot of robotics companies. It was kind of heartbreaking for me because how much I love that company.

Joe Rogan (1:19)

In what way did they get in the way?

Lex Fridman (1:23)

So, very specifically, I'm interested in the problem of human-robot interaction, where there's this beautiful dance between a human and a robot. The same way you have a dog that you love playing with, there's a magic there. Like, I don't know, there's an excitement when Marshall looks at you and looks away, and then looks at you again. And just that excitement, I want to understand how we can engineer that into our AI systems. So that's called human-robot interaction. From a perspective of Boston Dynamics, they want a machine that doesn't have anything to do with humans. They want a machine that, like, patrols a factory looking for anything dangerous, or like does surveillance on a factory floor, or helps in dangerous environments where humans, it's too dangerous for humans, so you want a robot to do the work, so that you want always there to be a distance between a human and a robot. For me, I'm interested in exploring when human and robot are close together. And I think that's actually really important to understand for safety as well.

Robots should be able to detect and predict the movement of humans really well in order to avoid hurting them accidentally. Like, that's the robotics AI problem.

You know, it's predicting the movement of pedestrians, predicting the movement of humans, whether it's the human body or the human hand on the factory floor. You have to understand the mind of humans. They don't move like billiard balls.

They move in unpredictable, complicated ways, or rather predictable but complicated ways. And that's the problem of human-robot interaction. I think it's beautiful. Not very many people are really studying it carefully, and I wanted to study it carefully. One of the things I did, and you always learn this mistake the hard way, is I asked for permission on everything. The right way to do it is just to do it and apologize later.

Joe Rogan (3:19)

Permission for what kind of actions?

Lex Fridman (3:21)

Permission for the kind of things I wanted to do. I asked for permission to, on video, touch a spot.

Joe Rogan (3:28)

Touch it?

Lex Fridman (3:29)

Yeah, like as a human. I wanted a spot to understand when a human touches a knot, and using only vision.

Joe Rogan (3:37)

Right, because there's no sensors that can detect touch.

Lex Fridman (3:40)

Right. So to have a sense where you, I mean, where gestures and touch can be part of the communication between the robot and the human.

Telling them, the Boston Dynamics folks, that made them very nervous. They know I know what I'm doing, but they also know I'm starting to give less and less fucks.

And they get nervous about that. Because they see the positivity. I love people, I love robots. I want to show the positive stuff. I want to inspire and educate the world. But they're like, is there some evil thing he's going to do? What do they think you're going to do? They only have stuff to lose. From my perspective, I love Boston Dynamics. I want to show off some awesome stuff. Probably one of the greatest engineering feats in the space of robotics ever, which is both Atlas, the bipedal robot, and the spot, the legged robots.