YouSaid · the spoken record
Robert Playter
- lines on the record
- 161
- first
- 2023-04-28
- most recent
- 2023-04-28
- sittings or episodes
- 1
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- podcast
Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections
“An interesting long running study, maybe it's in Harvard, they just nice report article written about it recently. They've been studying the group of a few thousand people now for 70 or 80 years. And the conclusion is that companionship and friendship are the things that make for a better and happier life. So I agree with you. I think that could happen with Simulating intelligence. I'm not convinced there will ever be true intelligence in these machines, sentience, but they could simulate it and they could collect your history and they could, you know, I guess it remains to be seen whether they can establish that real deep, you know, when you sit with a friend and they remember something about you and bring that up and you feel that connection, it remains to be seen if a machine's going to be able to do that for you.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that could be really cool, right? If you can work in an interaction and really be helpful, robots, you You can ask a robot to do a job you wouldn't ask a person to do. And that would be a real asset. You wouldn't feel guilty about it. You'd say, just do it, it's a machine, and I don't have to have qualms about that, you know.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overweight lying on their beach chairs, kind of sliding around on the deck of the movie because they didn't do anything anymore. Well, we definitely don't want to be there. You know, we need to work in some complimentary fashion where we keep all of our faculties and our physical health and we're doing some labor, right? But in a complementary fashion somehow”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the part that's, you know, that's the rewarding. The creative part of solving a problem is the thing that gives you that serotonin rush that you never forget, you know, or that adrenaline rush that you never forget. And so, you know, people need to be able to do that creative work and just feel productive. And sometimes you can feel productive over fairly simple work. It's just well done, you know, and that you can see the result of. So there is a I don't know. There was a cartoon. Was it Wally where they had this big ship and all the people were just”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I do think that. The robots will be ubiquitous and they will be out amongst us Certainly doing some of the hard labor that we do today. I don't think people don't want to work. People want to work. People need to work. Do I think feel productive? We don't want to offload all of the work to the robots because I'm not sure if people would know what to do with themselves. And I think just self-satisfaction and feeling productive is such an ingrained part of being human that we need to keep doing this work. So we're definitely going to have to work in a complementary fashion. And I hope that the robots and the computers don't end up being able to do all the creative work, right?”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when people are trying to plan a career, I always feel like there's a few happy mistakes that happen along the way and just live with that, you know, but just make choices then. So avail yourselves to these interesting opportunities. Like when I happen to run into Markdown in the lab, the basement of the AI lab. But be willing to make a decision and then pivot if you see something exciting to go at, you know, because if you're out and about enough, you'll find things like that that get you excited.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would say follow your heart and your interest. Again, this was an organizing principle, I think, behind. Like lab at MIT that turned into a value at Boston Dynamics, which was follow your curiosity. Love what you're doing You'll have a lot more fun and you'll be a lot better at it as a result. I think it's hard to plan, you know. Don't get too hung up on planning too far ahead. Find things that you like doing and then see where it takes you. You can always change direction. You will find things that, you know, that wasn't a good move. I'm going to back up and go do something else.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Needs to be some process of labeling, I think, what is true because there is also disinformation available on the web, and these models are going to consider that kind of information as well. And again, you can't average something that's true and something that's untrue and get something that's moderately true. It's either right or it's wrong. And so how is that process? And this is obviously something that the purveyors of these Bard and ChatGPT, I'm sure this is what they're working on.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would be the kind of knowledge that allowed a sentient being to grow or evolve. It feels to me like there's something about Truth or emotions, that's just a very different kind of knowledge that is absolute. The interesting thing about truth is it's absolute and it doesn't matter how frequently it's represented in the World Wide Web. If you know it to be true, it may only be there once, but by God, it's true. And I think emotions are a little bit like that too. You know something, you know, and And I just think that's a different kind of knowledge than the way these large language models derive sort of simulated.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I do think it's fairly remote for the machines that we're dealing with. Robots, you're right. The people anthropomorphies read into the robots' intelligence and emotion that isn't there because they see physical gestures that are similar to things they might even see in people or animals. I don't know much about how these large language models really work. I believe it's a kind of statistical averaging of the most common responses to a series of words, right? It's sort of. A very elaborate word completion. And I'm dubious that that has anything to do with consciousness. And I even wonder if that model of sort of simulating consciousness by stringing words together that are statistically associated with one another, whether or not that kind of knowledge, if you want to call that knowledge,”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think you figure out did they really do the work if they know some of the details And if they have to wash over the details, well, then they just.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does let you compare candidates really well, but it doesn't necessarily let you tap in to who they are, right? Because you're asking them to answer your question instead of you asking them about what they're interested in. But frankly, that process is hard to scale. And even at Boston Dynamics, we're not doing that with everybody anymore. But we are still doing that with the technical people. But because we too now need to sort of increase our rate of hiring, not everybody's giving a presentation anymore.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At Google, they taught us about their interview process, and it was a little bit different. We evolved the process at Boston Dynamics where it didn't matter if you were an engineer or you are an administrative assistant or a financial person or a technician. You gave us a presentation. You came in and you gave us a presentation. You had to stand up and talk in front of us And I just thought that was great to tap into those things. At Google, they taught us, and I think I understand why, right? They're hiring tens of thousands of people. They need a more standardized process. So they would sort of error on the other side where they would ask you a standard question. I'm going to ask you a programming question, and I'm just going to ask you to write code in front of me. That's a terrifying application process.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We developed an interview process that I was quite fond of. It's a little bit of a hard interview process because the best interviews you ask somebody about what they're interested in and what they're good at. And if they can describe to you something that they worked on and you saw, they really did the work, they solved the problems, and you saw their passion for it. And you could ask, but what makes that hard is you have to ask a probing question about it, you have to be smart enough about what they're telling you, their expert at. To ask a good question. And so it takes a pretty talented team to do that. But if you can do that, that's how you tap into, ah, this person cares about their work. They really did the work. They're excited about it. That's the kind of person I want at my company.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Adaptability. Part of it's been a great career for me. I never would have guessed I'd stayed in one place for 30 years. And the job has always changed. I didn't really aspire to be CEO from the very beginning, but it was a natural progression of things. There was always, there always needed to be some level of management that was needed. And so, you know, when I saw something that needed to be done that wasn't being done, I just stepped in to go do it. And oftentimes because we were full of such strong engineers, oftentimes that was in the management direction or it was in the business development direction or Organizational hiring. Geez, I was the main person hiring at Boston Dynamics for probably 20 years. So I was the head of HR, basically.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Courage, I would put front and center for multiple reasons. I talked earlier about the courage to tackle hard problems. So, I think there's courage required not just of me, but of all of the people who work at Boston Dynamics. I also think we have a lot of really smart people. We have people who are way smarter than I am. And it takes a kind of courage to be willing to lead them and to trust that. Have something to offer to somebody who probably is maybe a better engineer than I am.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and then publicize that. And our plan is to begin to engage with lawmakers and regulators. Let's figure out what the rules are going to be around the use of this technology and use our position as leaders in this industry and technology to help force that issue. And so we are, in fact, I have a policy director at my company whose job it is to engage with the public, to engage with interested parties and including regulators to sort of begin these discussions.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reasons that we think ultimately it's better for the whole industry if it If it grows in a way where robots are ultimately going to help us all and make our lives more fulfilled and productive, but by goodness, you're going to have to trust the technology to let it in. And if you think the robot's going to harm you, that's going to impede the growth of that industry. So we thought it was important to draw a bright line.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We authored a letter and then got several leading robotics companies around the world, including Unitry and China and Agility here in the United States and Annie Mall in Europe. And some others to co-sign a letter that said we won't put weapons on our robots. And part of the motivation there is as these robots start to become commercially available, you can see videos online of people who've gotten a robot and strapped a gun on it and shown that they can operate the gun remotely while driving the robot around. And so having a robot that has this level of mobility and that can easily be configured in a way that could harm somebody from a remote operator is Justifiably a scary thing. And so we felt like it was important to draw a bright line there and say, we're not going to allow this.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But on the other hand, you also want it to be right. And they don't know how to make it right yet, but it might make a good starting point for you to iterate”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quickly in Europe, they're worried about hiring enough people just to keep the logistics supply chain going. And part of this is the response to COVID and everybody's sort of thinking back what they really want to do with their life. But these jobs are getting harder and harder to fill. And I just, I'm hearing that over and over again. So I think, frankly, this is the right technology at the right time where we're going to need some of this work to be done and we're going to want tools to enhance that productivity.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At every significant technological transformation, there's been fear of an automation anxiety. It's going to have a broader impact than we expected. And there will be jobs will change. Sometime in the future, we're going to look back at people who manually unloaded these boxes from trailers and we're going to say, why did we ever do that manually? But there's a lot of people who are doing that job today that could be impacted. But I think the reality is, as I said before, we're going to build the technologies those very same people can operate it. And so I think there's a pathway to upskilling and operating just like look, we used to farm with hand tools and now we farm with machines and nobody has really regretted that transformation. And I think the same can be said for a lot of manual labor that we're doing today. And on top of that, you know, look, we're entering a new world where demographics are going to have strong impact on economic growth. And the advanced, the first world is losing population.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Humanity has figured out how to make machines safe. There's regulatory environments and certification protocols that we've developed in order to figure out how to make machines safe. We don't know and don't have that experience with software that can be propagated worldwide in an instant. And so I think we needed to develop those protocols and those tools. And so. That's work to be done, but I don't think the fear of that and that work should necessarily impede our ability to now get robots out. Because again, I think we can judge when a robot's being safe.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm nervous about that connection. It's unfortunate that they chose to use a robot as that embodiment. As you and I just said, there's big differences in this. But people are afraid because we've been taught to be afraid for over 100 years. So, you know, the word robot was developed by a playwright named Carol Chapek in 1921, the Czech playwright, Rossam's universal robots. And in that first depiction of a robot, the robots took over at the end of the story. And people love to be afraid. And so we've been entertained by these stories for a hundred years. But I... And I think that's as much why people are afraid as anything else as we've been sort of taught that this is the logical progression through fiction. Think it's”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted to show you this. So this is in the Wall Street Journal. And this is all about ChatGPT, right? Look at the picture It's a humanoid robot. That's saying that looks scary, and it says, I'm going to replace you And so the humanoid robot is sort of the embodiment of this chat GPT tool. There's reason to be a little bit nervous about how it gets deployed.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pushing this forefront. And we expect to be working together where Boston Dynamics is going to both commercialize and do research. But the sort of time horizon of the research we're going to do is, you know, in the next, let's say, five years. What can we do in the next five years? Let's work on those problems. And I think the goal of the AI Institute is to work even further out. Certainly, the analogy of legged locomotion again, when we started that, that was a multi-decade problem. And so I think Mark wants to have the freedom to pursue really hard over the horizon problems. And that'll be the goal of the Institute.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a separate organization, the Boston Demix Artificial Intelligence Institute. It's led by Mark Raybert, the founder of Boston Dynamics and the former CEO and my old advisor at MIT. Mark has always loved the research, the pure research, without the confinement or demands of commercialization. And he wanted to continue to pursue that unadulterated research. And so suggested to Hyundai that he set up this institute and they agree that.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have this partner, Levatas, that's adding the vision algorithms for daydreaming for us. They just this week I saw a demo where they hooked up a language tool to spot and they're talking a spot to give a kid.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good verifier. That's exactly it. Whereas if you're asking for, yeah, I don't know. Trying to ask a theoretical question in ChatGPT. It could be true, or it may not be true, and it's hard to have that verifier. What is that truth that you're comparing against? Whereas in physical reality, you know the truth. And this is an important difference. And so I'm not, I think there is reason to be a little bit concerned about how these tools, large language models could be used, but I'm not very worried about how they're going to be used. Well, how learning algorithms in general are going to be used on robotics. It's really a different application that has different ways of verifying what's going on.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like everybody else, we're all, you know, I'm surprised at how much they've come. I'm a little bit nervous about There's anxiety around them, obviously, for, I think, good reasons, right Disinformation is a curse that's an unintended consequence of social media that could be exacerbated with these tools. So if you use them to deploy disinformation, it could be a real risk. But I also think that the risks associated with these kinds of models don't have a whole lot to do with the way we're going to use them in our robots. If I'm using a robot, I'm building a robot to do, you know, a manual task of some sort, I can judge very easily. Is it doing the task I asked it to? Is it doing it correctly? There's sort of a built-in mechanism for judging. Is that Is it doing the right thing? Did it successfully do the task?”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing stuff like that. And I think ultimately. You might even be able to do the same thing with behaviors. So this technology will also be brought to bear on. Controlling the robot, the motions of the robot. And we're using learning, reinforcement learning to develop algorithms for both locomotion and manipulation. And ultimately, this is going to mean you can add new behaviors to a robot quickly. And that could potentially be done outside of Boston Dynamics. Right now, that's all internal to us. I think you need to understand at a deep level, you know. the robot control to do that, but eventually that could be outside. But it's certainly a place where these approaches are going to be brought to bear in robotics.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some kinds of things we really believe ought probably going to be more broadly available, maybe even commoditized. Using a machine learning like a vision algorithm. So a robot can recognize something in the environment. That ought to be something you can just download. I'm going to a new environment. I have a new kind of door handle or piece of equipment I want to inspect. You ought to be able to just download that. And I think people besides Boston Dynamics will provide that. And we've actually built an API that lets people add these vision algorithms to Spot. And we're currently working with some partners who are providing that. Levitas is an example of a small provider who's giving us software for reading gauges. And actually another partner in Europe reply is doing the same thing. So we see that ultimately an ecosystem of providers.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the thing that he's certainly been learning by building car factories is what that looks like. And scaling by scaling, you can get efficiencies that drive costs down very well. And the smart thing that they have in their favor is they know how to manufacture, they know how to build electric motors, they know how to build computers and vision systems. So there's a lot of overlap between modern automotive companies and robots. But We have a modern robotic coming, the automotive company behind us as well.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Robot arm for stuffing chips into electronics boards. But we don't really want to do really fine work like that. I think more coursework where you're using two hands to pick up and balance an unwieldy thing, maybe in a manufacturing environment, maybe in a construction environment. Those are the things that we think robots are going to be able to do with the level of dexterity that they're going to have in the next few years. And that's where we're headed. And I think Andon has seen the same thing, right? He's talking about using the robots in a manufacturing environment. We think there's something very interesting there about having this, a two-armed robot. Because when you have two arms, you can transfer a thing from one hand to the other. You can turn it around. You know, you can reorient it in a way that you can't do it if you just have one hand on it. And so there's a lot that extra arm brings to the table.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because if you're going to work in a manufacturing environment, that's what you got to be able to do. And for the reasons I explained to you earlier, it's not trivial to do so changing the center of mass by picking up a 50-pound block for a robot that weighs 150 pounds. That's a lot to accommodate. So we're trying to show that we can do that. So it's totally been energizing. We see the next phase of Atlas being more dextrous hands that can manipulate and grab more things that we're going to start by moving big things around that are heavy and that affect balance. And why is that? Well, really tiny dexterous things probably are going to be hard for a while yet. You know, maybe you could go build a special purpose.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, definitely. When we released our most recent video of Atlas, you know, I think you'd seen it, the scaffolding and throwing the box of tools around and then doing the flip at the end. We were trying to show the world that not only can we do this parkour mobility thing, but we can pick up and move heavy things.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, you know, it's bring it has sprung a tremendous validation to what we're doing. And excitement, competitive juices are flowing, you know, the whole thing. So it's all good.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And interestingly, many of them, as they're raising money, for example, will claim whether or not they have a former Boston Dynamics employee on their staff as a criteria. Yeah,”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very exciting, right? When Elon speaks, people listen. And so it suddenly brought a bright light onto the work that we'd been doing for over a decade. And I think that's only going to help. And in fact, what we've seen is that in addition to Tesla, we're seeing a proliferation of robotic companies arise now.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think we're in a unique position in that because of our investors primarily Hyundai, but also SoftBank still owns 20% of us. They're not totally fixated on Driving us to profitability as soon as possible. That's not the goal. The goal really is a longer-term vision of creating, you know, what does mobility mean in the future? How is this mobile robot technology going to influence us and can we shape that? And they want both. And so we are, as a company, are trying to strike that balance between let's build a business that makes money. I've been describing that to my own team as self-destination. If I want to if I want to drive my own ship, we need to have a business that's profitable in the end. Otherwise, somebody else is going to drive the ship for us. So that's really important. But we're going to retain the aspiration that we're going to build the next generation of technology at the same time. And the real trick will be if we can do both.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be interesting to see when a generative AI can give you that warm feeling that you connected and that, oh yeah, you remember me, you're my friend. You know, we have a history. That history matters, right?”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think that. Being able to verbally converse or even converse through gestures, part of these learning models is that you can now look at video and imagery and associate intent with that. Those will all help in the communication between robots and people, for sure. And that's going to happen, obviously, more quickly than any of us were expecting.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's probably not a path we're going to go down because, again, we're so focused on performance and utility. We can add those other things also, but we really want to start from that foundation of utility, I think.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it should not be disregarded. Robots that can somehow communicate through their physical gestures are you going to be more attached to in the long run. Do you remember IBO? The Sony They sold over 100,000 of those, maybe 150,000. You know, what probably wasn't considered a successful product for them. They suspended that eventually. And then they brought it back. Sony brought it back. And people definitely, you know, treated this as a pet, as a companion. And I think that will come around again Will you get away without having any other utility? Maybe in a world where we can really talk to our simple little pet because, you know, ChatGPT or some other generative AI has made it possible for you to really talk in what seems like a meaningful way. Maybe that'll open the social robot. Up again”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“May be true, but I also think the variety of things a consumer level robot would be expected to do will also be quite broad. Going to want to get the beer and know the difference between the beer and a Coca-Cola or my snack, they're all going to want you to clean up the dishes from the table without breaking them. Those are pretty complex tasks. And so there's still work to be done there.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to go through the design and software development in industrial, and then that's eventually going to let you reach a scale that could then be addressed to a commercial consumer level market. And so, yeah, maybe we'll be able to build a smaller spot with an arm that could really go get your beer for you. But there's things we need to figure out still. How to safely, really safely. If you're going to be interacting with children, you better be safe. And right now, we count on a little bit of standoff distance between the robot and people so that you don't pinch a finger in the robot. So you've got a lot of things you need to go solve before you jump to that consumer-level product.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely think about it, and we would like to get there. We think the pathway to getting there is likely through these industrial applications and then mass manufacturing. Let's figure out how to build the robots, how to make the software so that they can really do a broad set of skills that's going to take real investment to get there. Performance first, right? A principle of the company has always been really make the robots do useful stuff. And so, you know, The social robot companies that tried to start someplace else by just making acute interaction, mostly they haven't survived. And so we think the utility really needs to come first. And that means you have to solve some of these hard problems. And so to get there”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we know the target. We know what we're going after. And with Spot, it took us a while to figure out what we were going after.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not yet, but I will say that when we engage with our customers, they'll be able to see a return on investment in typically two years.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Palletized, depalletized. We're starting with unloading trucks because there's so many trucks and containers that where goods are shipped. And it's a brutal job. In the summer, it can be 120 degrees inside that container. People don't want to do that job. And it's backbreaking labor, right? Again, these can be up to 50-pound boxes. And so we feel like this is a productivity enhancer. And for the people who used to do that job unloading trucks, they're actually operating the robot now. And so by building robots that are easy to control, and it doesn't take an advanced degree to manage, you can become a robot operator. And so as we've introduced these robots to both DHL and Marisk and Gap, the warehouse workers who were doing that manual labor are now the robot operators. And so we see this as ultimately a benefit to them as well.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source