Russ Tedrake on Robotics, Physical AI, and the Future of Work

**Russ Tedrake** (0:00)
Machine learning success, empirically, has gotten far ahead of our ability to understand it, theoretically. I feel like we've had to change from being engineers, where we design everything on first principles, to we're becoming more scientists, almost like behavioral scientists, where we're building things we don't fully understand, and now we have to go probe them to figure out what the heck just happened.

**Brian Heater** (0:19)
Things are changing in such fundamental ways that it must be both an exciting and very challenging time to be running a physical AI startup.

**Russ Tedrake** (0:27)
Totally, but one has to be focused enough to not chase after every shiny bauble.

**Brian Heater** (0:34)
How do you determine when something is a shiny object and when something is like actually a real game changer?

**Russ Tedrake** (0:41)
That's a good question. So I'm spending a lot of time these days talking to labor economists and with people that I think could be potentially impacted and just trying to build my empathy muscles and build my understanding. I do think if we're successful, if the field is successful, then it's going to change the very nature of work for people. And it's going to have a hopefully hugely positive impact on the world.

**Brian Heater** (1:04)
I'm sure that there have been plenty of points in your career where you've been approached to do something like this. And I'm sure that you've thought about it in the past.

**Russ Tedrake** (1:13)
I will tell you there's one reason that's maybe not even technical, but I really want to do this. First of all, I think.

**Brian Heater** (1:31)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Automated. My name is Brian Heater. I am the managing editor at the Association for Advancing Automation. Here's a great conversation from our marathon of Boston shows from a few weeks back. Russ Tedrake is somebody that we've been looking to get on the show for a while. I figured that we would have to wait until he officially had something official to announce. But it turns out that showing up at his doorstep also worked.
More info on that new project soon. But here is some insight into his work in the space to hold you over. If you're enjoying the show, don't forget to like and subscribe, and please check out the newsletter over at automated.fm. And with that, please enjoy this chat with Russ Tedrake.
You grew up in Detroit?

**Russ Tedrake** (2:17)
I grew up just outside of Detroit.

**Brian Heater** (2:19)
Your father was in automotive?

**Russ Tedrake** (2:21)
That's true, General Motors.

**Brian Heater** (2:23)
So you were like, in a sense, you were kind of in or around automotive manufacturing automation?

**Russ Tedrake** (2:28)
Yeah. My dad actually collected classic cars. We had a drive out basement and we had a 21 pack touring car and a 48 Cadillac, which was the very first of the tail fit. But but I learned a lot about cars back in the day.

**Brian Heater** (2:41)
Yeah. Tell me a little bit about the the internship that you had at the Ford plant.

**Russ Tedrake** (2:46)
So when I was in high school, so a lot of the car makers had a lot of small contract shops there that were around town. There was one that my neighbor ran that did paint shop improvement. So they went into paint shops in the local plants and they would optimize the airflow and other things about the paint process. I took an internship there over the summer. So I got to write some automation that tried to control the airflow through the plants. I was the junior guy on the totem pole. So when somebody had to climb into the sledge pit with the sensor, that was my job the first time.
But I did work up to writing some of the initial codes that would sort of automate the systems.
The most defining part of that experience for me was the day that my, I thought, clever code, which when there was an exception, like somebody tripping over an ethernet cable, I thought the safe thing to do would be to turn off the air fans. Mm-hmm, velocity, you know, air speed go to zero. But that was the wrong thing to do, because the temperature in the booth went from, I don't know what it was, 81 to 82 degrees, which was the unionized threshold when people walked off the line because they didn't have to work at 82 degrees. And I got yelled at. Like I've really learned a hard lesson that day about what it means to stop the line in an automotive plant. But I grew up a lot that summer.