Is it too grandiose to say the future is relying on you?
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Catie Cuan's dad was in the hospital, surrounded by machines that were supposed to help him. Instead they made him feel alienated and afraid. And Catie, a dancer-turned-roboticist realized that it’s not enough for a machine to just do its functional job, it also matters how they make us feel.
Today Catie is the founder and CEO of ART Lab, where she's focused on what she calls the "interaction gap" — the difference between what a robot is capable of doing and how relatable it is. She says most roboticists don't spend enough time in that space. And it's going to matter a lot, fast. Due to an aging populous and AI that makes robots way more capable, she thinks we're heading toward a world with billions of robots. They’ll be in our homes, at work, getting us from place to place, in outer space, etc…
To make robots that people actually want to be around, ART Lab is building a new kind of AI model — a Vision Language Interaction Model — that conditions success on how the human in the room responds, not just whether the task got done.
Catie’s background is fascinating. Before becoming a roboticist, she danced at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and ran her own dance company. Then while getting her PhD at Stanford, she became an artist-in-residence at Google X and a pioneer in the field of robot choreography, where she considered everything from how self-driving cars should brake (not too fast, not too slow) to how to teach office robots that it's rude to cut between two people having a conversation in a hallway.
Catie is doing fascinating work at the edge of what's possible, so dig in for a peek at what our life with robots might be like and what we can do make it happen in a way that feels good.
Chapters:
02:11 “There will be billions of robots” – from dishwashers to elder care
04:45 Why robots can be capable and still feel unsettling
08:00 How robots could read your reactions and respond in real time
11:45 What shape should robots take?
15:30 The case against humanoids
19:00 A nine foot robot hand and the wild future robot design could take
23:15 What it's like to dance with robots
28:30 “The robot just died” – when a live failure changed the whole performance
32:45 Friendship loneliness and home robots (and why builders need to be clear about the future they are creating)
37:11 Why the home may become robotics’ biggest use case (and what ART Lab is building)
40:06 Robot tutors, homework help, and why teachers still matter most
43:51 “We have a tremendous amount of agency” – choosing the future we build now
46:16 Why inequality and access worry Catie most (and who gets left behind)
48:56 Why builders need to get outside their own bubble
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Future on…
~ Dan