full interview_catie cuan_5.mp3
Catie Cuan [00:00:00] I'm Catie Cuan, I'm a robot choreographer. I'm dancer and a choreographer and I'm getting my PhD in robotics at Stanford.
Speaker 2 [00:00:10] Tell us about the kind of two sides of your personality or your professional personality.
Catie Cuan [00:00:20] I've been dancing my whole life. My dad is Cuban, so it's a big part of our culture and family. I started training formally when I was four or five. I took a break from some of my dance training, had some other eclectic physical practices like volleyball and gymnastics for a while. I started choreographing when I probably was 14 or 15. Choreographing shows that five or six hundred people would see. In Berkeley, everyone goes to the dance performances, no one goes to football games. And then in college, I had sort of dual practices where I was working at tech companies over the summer and then was dancing as much as I could. And I never thought I would be a professional dancer. I grew up in an immigrant family and with really, really hardworking parents and it seemed not responsible to be an artist. And when I got out of school, I had a pretty hardcore management consulting job, which was obviously not a fit for me. But I think it's because I had this innate dream that I really wanted to dance and see, see where that could take me. And I wound up in New York City sort of dancing full-time and having my own dance company. But I had the set of skills where I worked at tech companies. The night. Knew my way around web development and I had this whole other practice where I felt like I was excited and inspired by the internet, by all of the devices that were coming into our lives and felt like there was a world where those two things could come together. And then in 2014 or 2015, I want to say, it sort of got looped into the... Art and technology community in New York, which is a variety of people who are working at the intersection of your artistic practice and whatever technology you choose to be inspired by and around that same time the Apple Watch was coming out, a lot of biometric data was becoming really cheap and accessible, the Microsoft Kinect was the same way, motion capture was becoming really inexpensive and also around that time my dad got really So he had a stroke. I was actually in ballet class when I found out that that had happened. And it was in the Bay Area. I went to visit him in the hospital and he had all of these machines around him, big heart monitors and things to check the content of your blood. And my dad, English is his third language. He's pretty elderly at this point. And it. It was so terrifying for him. And I think part of the experience was what was happening to him physically, but a lot of what he was experiencing was what was happened to him emotionally. And I thing what really clicked for me, sort of all these different inputs and themes in my life were that we have this tremendous opportunity as artists to bring sensibility and sensation to the technology that we use in a way that is very human-focused. And I started to wonder, You know what would my dad's experience be like if all of these machines weren't beeping and whirring and having these fine lines that were moving around, but in fact, they were maybe lit differently, or they were moving in different ways. They were a little more approachable. And then in 2017, I wound up meeting a woman named Amy LaVeers sort of through this art and technology community. And she was running a robotics lab at the time at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. And I became really enamored by her, and I think I'd already been exploring sort of virtual reality in my work and film, certainly, and trying to incorporate film into live performance. And I thought, well, I clearly want to work with robots because they're embodied. And when you have something that's embodied, it means that I can move around with it in physical space. I can interact with it. I can have other people interact with that. Can become an entity on stage in a very different way than a two-dimensional screen or a projection. And so I was an artist in residence at this lab, it's called the Rad Lab, for a year. And I really knew that was gonna be my life's work. And I felt super challenged intellectually. I was, I didn't know anything really about robots prior to that experience. I knew that I was really inspired by them, but I didn't know how to program them. I didn't know any of the formal physics, you know, the kinematics or dynamics around robotics. And... That I felt so enlivened by this whole process of getting to program something, interact with it, take it out in the world, share it in performances, but also do core research, sort of fundamental research around these kinds of devices because we're really such on the precipice of robots in our daily lives. And then I decided to apply to grad school. And at the time, I didn't have an undergraduate degree in engineering, but I really, really knew that I could dedicate myself in the most immersive way that I'd ever experienced. I knew I could do it if I was able to explore robotics in this more formal capacity. And that's where I decided to apply to grad school. And Stanford was my first choice. And when I came here initially, I think... I was so scared. I don't have a lot of memories of moving to California back from New York City that weren't tempered by fear. I was fearful that I would fail or I would embarrass myself or I'd come here and everyone would second-guess what I was doing here and I didn't have the exact same formal training as all of my peers. I had a lot skills. I knew how to code in a couple of basic languages. I knew some math. I took a couple of post-bac online courses when I knew I was applying to school. But I didn't have the four years at MIT that everyone does in the core mechanical engineering universe. And I felt like my artistic skills had nothing to do with me being a roboticist. They felt like, OK, here's my artistic life over here. It's really inspired my interest in robotics. But it doesn't. Provide value to my robotic skills. That was my initial impression, and I think since then I've really found that the two are quite integral, not only for me, but I think they're increasingly combining as a field.
Speaker 2 [00:07:11] Okay, so that's really, that was great. Let's talk more about that. You said when you started, you could repeat that, when you first started, you felt that your choreography had no real bearing on the robotics work, and now you think differently. So tell us what happened and why you think you misunderstood in the first place.
Catie Cuan [00:07:33] When I first started in grad school, I certainly thought that choreography had a lot of relevance to robotics, but I don't think that that was a view that many people shared. I certainly knew that Amy felt that way. I knew of a couple of other people who were working in the intersection. People like Wendy Ju or Heather Knight, who are some roboticists at Cornell and Oregon state, respectively, but it wasn't the... It wasn't accepted, right? It's not a sort of widely agreed-upon skill set that you need in order to be a successful roboticist is to have taken classes in dance or choreography. So I think there were, I certainly held that belief, but I don't know that many people in the field felt that way. But interestingly, there have been so many dances that have been done with robots. And for decades, you know, we have. Like in the 80s, there was a PhD student at Stanford, her name's Margo Apostolos, who became a professor at USC. She was making ballets with industrial robots. We also have Osama Khatib, who is a very famous Stanford professor and roboticist, was doing Romeo and Juliet, where they had these sort of compliant industrial puma arms that were being moved and perturbed and glanced around in a dancing type way. Now there's been so many robot dances that people have done, but they haven't had this sort of formal... Standardization is sort of the wrong word, but being able to put a fence around, okay, what is dance to the field of robotics, right? And I think a lot of people are doing that, some of the academics that I mentioned early on, like Amy and Wendy and Heather. But again, it's really hard to be a sort of dance expert in the field of robotics and be a robotics expert. I mean, it is challenging. Both of those fields are incredibly challenging fields for many reasons, not just physically but also intellectually. And so I think when I started, I certainly held that belief. I'm not sure a lot of people I knew held that believe. And since, you know, I've been in school, the way I try to bring my dance training in to much of my robotics work is how do we, is really through this HRI lens. So we, or HRI, excuse me, Human-Robot Interaction Lens. Yeah, that's really how I'm trying to bring much of mine.
Speaker 2 [00:09:53] Okay, so why don't you repeat that?
Catie Cuan [00:09:56] So I think the way, since I've been in school and continued my research, the way that I've really brought my dance and choreography training into robotics is through human-robot interaction. So human- robot interaction is that it encompasses a lot of things, but it's broadly the ways that humans interact with robots. This is very different than some more canonical or classical things in robotics like robot manipulation or robot navigation. You might have human-robot interaction be a subdomain of robot navigation, but robot navigation largely is concerned with different algorithms that allow robots to drive around in environments that maybe have static obstacles or mobile obstacles, but not necessarily to be able to have the robot socially respond to a moving human obstacle. We would sort of call that a combination of robot-navigation with human- robot interaction and maybe call that social navigation. So, I think... The way that dance and choreography makes its way into human-robot interaction. For me, one of my projects is about gesture. So if we want to be able to communicate with a robot using only our bodies without speaking, what kinds of gestures would be legible to a robot? What kinds of gesture would a human want to perform? And those gestures are absolutely influenced by all of my dance training because. Many different dance forms that I've practiced, whether it's salsa or ballet, there's a very clear taxonomy around the certain kinds of gestures that you perform and what they mean. And so I can think about another taxonomy, which is a human-robot interaction gesture taxonomy. What do gestures mean in that context? You know, another great example that people can think of when they're trying to think about human-computer interaction through gesture would be something like the gestures that you performed on a cell phone. So we've got a tap. A double tap, you know, these are all these things which have become really culturally important but didn't really mean anything until a bunch of designers were like, these are movement-based interactions that people are going to have with phones. Now they've become this language in our culture. What is that? What is for robotics? That's a question I'm really interested in. So is there a version of a tap, a swipe, or a double tap for me with robots? And why would we gesture as opposed to something else? Because robots are really hard to program, and they take a very long time. They're getting better. You know, we certainly have lots and lots of interfaces that are letting people interact with robots more seamlessly, but we don't have a super straightforward, simple, easy, universal way of getting robots to do things. And until we have that, we really have this open landscape around how are we going to communicate our intentions to a robot and vice versa.
Speaker 2 [00:12:40] So we filmed you with a swarm of flocked reddocks, right? And did you use gestures? Were you talking to them in gestures? Just tell us. Remember what you showed us and talk about that.
Catie Cuan [00:12:51] In the flock, we definitely use gestures. So in this case, we have robots that are running a navigation algorithm. It's not deterministic, so we have a series of equations that we're performing at any given time step, and that determines where all of the robots go in space. And then they also are detecting a person, so they're using a nice, well-known, well-defined image-based model to be able to know that this is a person versus this is a vase, this is the wall. And when they see a person, they use another fairly well-known algorithm. It's a version of what we call pose detection. So it takes where your body is in space and turns that into a skeleton, which is basically a list of numbers that the robot can read. And then it sees the skeleton, takes those list of number, sees they correspond to another list of numbers that it's used to seeing, and it says, ah, these two lists are quite similar. It means I've got a hand up gesture. So if the robots use a hand up gesture, in the way the flock is currently oriented, they all spin in place. So they perform an abstract version of a pirouette. So they all in place, and then if they see a different gesture, maybe they get their hands together, they sort of peek up at the sky and look around. And so it's really nice because we have this sort of continuity where the robots are flocking, flocking flocking. But every once in a while, you as a human can come and interrupt their behavior with your gestures. And for me, at least when I'm wandering around as they're flocking and I perform these gestures, it feels interactive in a very positive way. It also feels quite similar to, you know, I was a camp counselor for a while, like having everyone follow you in a line to go to lunch or to go get your cups of water. You know, there's certain kinds of communication that are amenable to these types of environments, right? I think if they were all flocking and I was shouting commands, that might feel a little more militaristic, or it might, doesn't have the same sensibility that I want, whereas if they're flocking, and I'm providing a gesture, it feels this sort of seamless, slightly more abstract language. And I like that, not just as a performer, but also for the audience.
Speaker 2 [00:15:06] Can you say that the camp counselor metaphor is great? Can you sort of say that again and relate it to the robot?
Catie Cuan [00:15:12] Yeah, so I was a camp counselor after my junior year of high school, and you have 40 kids and eight teenage to young adult age people, and all of these kids, they have a hard time paying attention to every single thing that you say, but if you provide these sort of canonical interactions that they're used to seeing over and over, it gets their attention and it means they'll follow you around, and I feel that a little bit when I'm flocking with the robot. Be standing in the midst of them, I see that they're all sort of performing their own calculations, they're off in their own little world, and then every once in a while I'll provide a gesture and I know that they are all paying attention to what I'm doing and it brings the focus back and makes it feel more unified, very similar to if I was leading a bunch of kids to 4 o'clock lemonade and put my hand in the air and they all said, yes, we're on our way, you know, something like that. It makes me feel that they communicating and understanding what I'm putting out there.
Speaker 2 [00:16:12] So why is it important to bring choreography to robotics? What are you bringing? What's your value on top of this?
Catie Cuan [00:16:23] We are very much on the precipice of a fundamental shift in the way that we interact with robots. The personal computing revolution was quite similar to this. When computers moved from being only in militaries, universities, and campuses and to being in all of our pockets, you needed a whole other set of expertises to be able to make those computers legible, empowering, and accepted by all of the people who were going to use them. That's how we started to see human-computer interaction. We saw a variety of psychologists and social scientists. We saw animators come to the table. We saw typographers, people who had all of these other forms of expertise, prompt writers, you know, lots of linguistics people, because if you want millions if not billions of people to feel empowered to use something, They can't only be designed by engineers who are experts in how to use those things. And I think that example from the personal computing revolution is very much where we're headed with robotics. We're headed there already. We've had robots be in car manufacturing facilities and surgical robots that were used by expert surgeons, and we've had robots and sorting factory settings for many, many, many decades and they've been very efficacious. And now all of these robots are moving out into our regular lives. We have Roombas, we have fetch robots that are working alongside people. We have hotel robots that are delivering food if you put an order on your phone and it shows up at your front door. We have tug robots in hospitals that are delivery medication so that we can free up some nurses time. And that means that we're now in these very diverse settings where you have many different kinds of people from many ages and backgrounds, and they need to be able to interact with these robots. And so what kinds of expertise are important for that? We need anthropologists. We need philosophers. We need choreographers. We need linguistics people. We need all bioengineers. We need architects if we're gonna design spaces around robots. And if we don't have these people, Not only will we have missed a tremendous, magical, unique opportunity to create robots that people want to be around and make them feel empowered and inspired, but we'll have a lot less fun as a society. I think that is so unexamined in this whole conversation. I think we've sort of accepted that the technology happens to us a lot of the time. The example I use is my keyboard. Like, it's a very efficient way for me to write. It's not a very efficient way for me to live in the world, sort of hunched over at my machine, or maybe efficient is the wrong word. It's nothing most enticing or pleasurable, enjoyable way for you to exist as a person, right? Sort of like hunched-over-my-computer, typing my little fingers, staring at this two-dimensional screen, like I have a beautiful gaze and a range of motion, right? I can see all the way back here, I can all the down here, and I understand that created many of these devices. To enable us to do certain tasks quickly and efficiently but what are we missing from the breadth of human expression when we ask that of people? And so I think robots, for me, because they're three-dimensional, because they are embodied, you can have an interface that is literally a roving embodied sculptural interface and what kinds of interaction modes Can I uncover with this new device? And having spent a long time thinking about how to move around with an empowered, embodied, sculptural other person, we have interaction modes where I can grab their arm and pull them towards me. We can high five, we can kick our feet together, we can glance at each other, we bump elbows, we can go back to back. These are all of these beautiful ways that I'm used to interacting and moving around with another dancer, another human. And how might those, Like this is a much bigger design space, right, than, than this. And so if I have this massive design space, we need people who are real experts like choreographers in movement to be able to help us carve out what parts of that design space might be very compelling between a human and a robot. Which ones are really awkward and strange and weird, but which ones might I like in my narrow kitchen, right? In my narrow kitchen is a voice command the best thing or is it really loud when all my relatives are over and maybe a little elbow bump is better right and what kind of elbow bump and how many times should i elbow bump like all of these things are choreographic decisions so i think why we really need choreography in robotics is because we've moved from a space where robots are cloistered and now they're going to be out in the real world and in the wild and they're to be moving alongside people. And the people who are true experts in how to create those movements and those interactions in ways that can imbue any expression that you want, those really are choreographers.
Speaker 2 [00:21:30] That was great. I'm going to ask you to focus because I like your example of a kitchen. It just, it brings us really, it makes us really reach for the audience. Right, right. So, just limited to that. If I'm gonna have a robot in my kitchen, I wanted to not do this and I wanted it to relate like that and that's why I have to look on the limits. Thank you.
Catie Cuan [00:21:51] Sure, so if I have a robot in my kitchen in the future, let's say I've got an island in the middle of my kitchen, I have big counter that goes around the side, and I have my family and they're really loud and raucous, maybe it's hard for the robot to hear me over all of that noise and shout a command to it. Maybe it also feels like it's broken the tenor of conversation and so a movement-based interaction might be better. So what kind of movement-based interaction would be appropriate for a kitchen? Maybe I nudge the robot in the direction I want it to go. Oftentimes you'll see, when I'm at home with my partner, he'll sort of grab my shoulders or my waist and sort of put me over to the other side and I'll do the same thing to him all the time and he doesn't need to ask what I'm asking him to do. I'm just nudging him out of the way so I can put something in the garbage. So there's a sort of tactile movement- based interaction which could happen. Maybe I want it to go over a little bit to my left and I give it an elbow nudge, or I want to bump it with my foot a little, like people do with their cats and dogs, quite frankly, when they're coming into the kitchen. But all of those choices, those are all specific designed movement interactions between a human and a robot. They aren't superfluous, they're not random, they are important, and they're deliberate. And when you make those kinds of choices, you define the stakes of that relationship. So for example, if the way that I'm gonna get a robot out of my kitchen is to kick it really hard, you know, the stakes in that relationship, there's a real power imbalance, right? Because my association with a kick is get away from here, you don't belong here, it's really negative, right, if... My choice of choreographed interaction to get the robot out of the kitchen is to give it a soft tap on the shoulder and then maybe a slight nice tap on that on the side. That strikes me as quite respectful. It seems like the dynamics of that relationship are a little more positive than the sort of harsh kick. So all of these things have consequences and even with a very simple example like having a robot in your kitchen that you maybe want to push to another side or get out of the way. Based on how you define those interactions, you can have very different relationships. And that's why we need to be very careful and explicit about what we want. And that is where I think choreographers have a lot of expertise to bring to the table.
Speaker 2 [00:24:24] It also sort of brings us into the question of treating them like little kids, like the answer from mortifying them.
Speaker 3 [00:24:33] Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 [00:24:34] I have to say, I find it inevitable. You look at them, even the oddly designed robots as your company, which are quite beautiful, but they don't look like people, but for me, I treat them like they're little beings.
Speaker 3 [00:24:52] Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 [00:24:54] So, talk with them a little bit.
Catie Cuan [00:24:57] We have an unavoidable tendency to anthropomorphize robots. This is for a variety of reasons. Some of the literature that I pull together around this is because we observe most movement as having meaning associated with it. So whether you have a collection of black and white dots that are randomly moving around a screen, or you have... Squares and circles that are actuating on a plane or whether you have a very impoverished version of a human skeleton, maybe it's the torso only and it's wiggling around, any of those representations will be very meaningful for people. And they'll be meaningful on dimensions like context. So I'll say, that reminds me of a tree blowing in the wind. They'll be meaningful in terms of sentiment. So that black and white collection of dots looks angry. And they'll be useful in terms memory. So I say, oh, not just that it reminds me of a true, but that is sort of like when my sister and I fight or something. And so all of these kinds of movement, even if they're very small. Or they're on a 2D plane, or they are totally random, they are very meaningful for us as people. And, you know, I don't know exactly why I think some of the literature has studied this fairly well. It's probably because for a long time we as a species were eaten and so something that was moving around was important for us to look at because we needed to know is this a threat or is this safe, you now, can I approach this thing or not. We certainly also see exactly those kinds of undertones in the movies. So we have villains that tend to move in certain ways in animated films and we have angelic or protagonist characters that move in different ways and I think some of that is because we have these agreed upon implicit, not universal, but implicit and some agreed upon expectations about what different connotations are associated with different movements. So we certainly know that movement is very important for people and then robots move. So you have these robots that are moving around, they're embodied. They maybe have articulated heads. They have some semblance of a human type of articulation, maybe because they have an arm. And we call them, at least the robots I work with, we sure enough, we call the robot arms. We don't call them appendages or something that's really dehumanized. We do call them robot arms, and so you're going to anthropomorphize a little bit. But as roboticists, we have a real responsibility to decide, how far are you going to go with this spectrum? If you lean in super, super hard, you want something to look very human, very anthropomorphic, you maybe give it two arms, you have it walk, you've have it talk in a cadence or a frequency level that sounds like a human voice, wow, people are really going to have some high expectations for what that robot can do. They're going to think that it can do human level performance. Of things because it resembles really a human. It looks like a human, it walks like a human, moves like a human. And that's a very high bar, right? So, as a roboticist, you might almost be setting yourself up for failure. If you run so far in the opposite direction, it's so abstract, people aren't really sure what to make of it. It also makes it harder to be legible and clear. So, let's say, for example, you know, Roombas are extremely popular. There are these coins, they do such a good job that the thing that they do, they've obviously become very successful. And, you know, if you asked a Roomba what it's trying to do, maybe when it's driving in a straight line, you might not know. Maybe it's going to veer off, maybe it's gonna circle right in place because we don't have a lot of priors for what a disk like object moving through my house should do, right? Whereas we probably have thousands of hours of you having observed a cat. Or a person walking, you know what you can sort of anticipate and so we have this big long spectrum, one of which can really increase expectations for what the robot is capable of and one of which can create more ambiguity about what the human can or can't expect. And so as roboticists, we need to be very careful to know exactly which of those anthropomorphization levers we're pulling at any given moment. And as choreographers, we need to do the same, because if you have something that moves quite fluidly... And it is very legible to people. People might also have higher expectations for what the robot can do, or they might feel more empowered around it and want to be around it more and be more forgiving of the robot when it screws up. And so all of those kinds of levers in terms of the character that this robot is providing, we have to be so, so deliberate and careful about them.
Speaker 4 [00:29:57] Did you say something like that? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So, think about it as the robots do screw up.
Speaker 3 [00:30:03] Mm-hmm
Speaker 4 [00:30:04] Right. I mean, we're just sort of watching, you know, and it's a really common, common thing. And I guess that kind of plays into the whole idea that this is a very, very slow kind of deliberate process of getting these robots to kind of do what we think we would like them to do.
Catie Cuan [00:30:24] Yes, robots are very far from perfect right now. It is a blue sky, open space series of problems that we're facing. When they mess up or when they fail, how they fail and what we can learn from that failure is very valuable information for a developer, but it can feel very alienating and confusing and weird for someone who doesn't know that those failures are okay. You know, for example. There was a robot in my dad's house and one in every ten times the robot didn't do what it was supposed to do, I think it would really scare him. He would be really confused and he wouldn't know why the robot is not doing what you're expecting it to do. And so those kinds of failures, I mean, right now the kinds of robots I work with both in my artistic work and in my research, it's very important for developers to ensure that when they do fail, not only do they fail... Safely, right, to make sure that whoever is interacting with them are going to be fine, but also that when they do fail, we let the person know this robot is out of commission forever, or we are learning from this failure, it's okay, or, we're going to fix it better this time, this way. When you have something that's still so novel and new, those kinds of the edge of what you can get wrong, you want to be able to learn from it, but you also want to learn in a way that doesn't scare people in the process. Where they're willing to still be open and curious about what it can do. I think we have some really good examples in history. I think for a while people were really feeling alienated by segues because they would try to get on the fourth or fifth time they tried to figure out how to write it. They're like, oh my gosh, I'm done forever. And then you don't see thousands upon thousands of segues in New York City for a variety of reasons, but I'm sure one of them is that people find them hard to use. And I certainly wouldn't want that to be the case with robots that are meant to help us. If we have a robot that is too difficult to use, too scary, too alienating, fails too much, the tolerance for that kind of behavior is not a lot. And that's why I think we need to be very careful about the kinds of choices we make when we're designing robots.
Speaker 2 [00:32:38] I'm going to ask a question that other folks can chime in. I want to get back to the tension of being a choreographer in a largely engineering environment. How do you feel about that? Do you see people being open to what you're doing? Was there more pushback and now there's less pushback? And also just for you, do you feel you have to sometimes? Turn off you know and we don't do left brain right brain anymore but you have to turn off one side of your brain some of the time just just talk about that are you always pulling on all your skills of it together
Catie Cuan [00:33:18] I think two major differences for me in being a choreographer in a robotics community, not only in my graduate work, but also being a part of everyday robots. One of them is this notion of correctness, that something is always right and needs to be right and we will find the right answer and the right answers waiting for us in the universe. And if we know enough math and we've got enough code and we can measure things well enough, kaboom, we're going to find the answer. Which is fine. You know, there is a world in which we need to do homework and turn it in and have it be graded. And the same for tests. And I think where that becomes hard for me as a choreographer is I've made, I don't know how many dozens of dances, I didn't know if any of them were ever correct. Right? Did I make a correct dance? Did I made a right dance? I don't know. Did I makes the thing that felt urgent? And important and critical for me to share as an artist at that place and time? For sure. Can I quantify that as being 100% correct? No, I mean, what is a right dance, right? Like this subjectivity is so hard to pin down when you're working in an artistic or a liminal space and I think I have found that so challenging coming into an engineering world where we need to find the thing that's right. I appreciate, I know I have to do the homework and put the work in and land all of the same skills that many of my peers land and I think my tolerance for something not being right is extremely high and that's definitely a byproduct of my artistic work. And then where that affects the second big theme of sort of being a choreographer in an engineering space. Is process. Justine talked a little bit about this. I find that I have this creative process where I get curious about something. I have a couple of questions. I examine those questions from a couple different points of view for a while. I decide if it's meaty. I prototype. I look at it a little. Then you have an innate reaction to the thing and you decide if you want to keep. Drilling down that tunnel, or if you've had enough and you want to head somewhere else, or then you wake up on a Saturday and you're like, this is wrong, it's got to be this. Or you wake on a Tuesday and you are like, I have to present this thing and stand behind it, but I know in my gut that I'm going to rip the whole thing apart and remake it. And that is really hard to explain in an engineering community where you have all these very elegant, streamlined processes. For scoping out a project, figuring out what all the deliverables are, determining your timeline, making sure that you're meeting all these interstitial goals, and then using metrics that you've decided upon are gonna be valuable to you at the end that you can gage your success against. And so this sort of engineering process and this artistic process are so different. And it might be, and what has happened actually with this flocking project is we have this. Big body of code. There's a big library that's been checked into the big code repository and all the code has been written to the standard that is required of an engineering project. But the way that we got there was very different, right? So we might have an output at the end that's still a big chunky code library that people are going to use, but we didn't have the exact same intermediate steps to arrive there at the end. So I think the two big things. That have struck me as being so different are this notion of correctness and what is right and how do I examine and investigate what is right and then how do i create a process, an artistic versus an engineering process that can still at the end of the day create something that people can see and experience. And one other point on this kind of notion of correctness at the beginning, it's like You know, me as an artist, I feel... This might be a little too woo-woo, you know, a lot of science is sort of based on this idea that the universe is fundamentally knowable, right, that we have the tools or we can have the tools to learn the things that we don't know. We can build the tools that we can learn the thing that we do not know. I think there are whole facets of the world and our experience relative to the world that we will never know. And that is beautiful. And that is such a glorious space. To think about is all of these parts of the world and ourselves and each other and our community that will never be studied or measured and maybe can only ever be felt or live in these teeny tiny passing moments of experience. And when I put my scientist's brain on, that's like the worst thing ever, right? We need to make our instruments, we need to study, we need design experiments, we to have metrics. We need to have hypotheses and then boom, we validate those or we don't. And I think where I get very inspired by a lot of science is that what we study now seems like it would have been magic a hundred years ago, right? And that's how fast we're moving and that's our faster tools move and that how fast our experience is moving. But I think prior, without that sort of acceptance that the universe is always going to have, things that we can never study or know or understand, then I feel very constrained. I feel like, wow, I'm inside of the small elevator and I only get to choose these 20 buttons, whereas maybe I want to be in the Willy Wonka elevator that takes me any direction I want.
Speaker 2 [00:39:27] Anybody want to chime in?
Speaker 5 [00:39:30] Well, watch this.
Speaker 3 [00:39:37] Mm-hmm.
Speaker 5 [00:39:39] You reminded me of the story of some engineer scientist who built like a little robot buddy years ago and had something of a social experiment where they started it at one end of North America and kind of let it go with a directive to kind of help you travel and take me with you and people all across Canada would bring it to their cars and leave it somewhere and someone else would take it and they took care of it and it crossed the border into America and lasted I think a day before it was torn apart and left on the side of the room. There's a lot of questions you could extrapolate from that but my question to you is how do you make something with the idea that it has to fit into humanity's world when humankind is hard to predict sometimes in terms of what they want whether they want to see something as a real live creature or whether they want it to be a completely dumb piece of plastic. It's hard to make a capital, isn't it?
Catie Cuan [00:40:43] I'm hearing, there's certainly a tension. Oh, sure, sure. Yeah, there is certainly a tension between. The worst angels of our nature and having an autonomous object, the example of having a robot that was launched out to go on its journey and was ripped apart or torn down. There's certainly a lot of stories that you've heard about people being cruel to robots or cruel to animals, cruel to other people. There are the better demons, the worst demons of our of our in the future. That are there. And I think for me as a choreographer and a designer, I try not to think about, well, we certainly have to think of the worst-case scenario that any person is going to come up against when they're interacting with a robot. And those edge cases are super important. But I think the sort of practical ramifications of that are, well then I can make something that's really resilient, right? So like soft robotics is really expanding as a field because you can... Create a robot essentially out of a plastic bag, and those are really cheap, and they're soft, and if you punch them really hard and something bad happens, then maybe you buy a new one, or you have enough material that the robot can keep subsisting, so you could, you know, one solution is that you could make something that's quite resilient, and you're not super concerned about hurting it in the short term. You can also create some frames around the modes of interaction that are acceptable. We certainly see that with voice agents, whether it's Siri or Alexa, you have certain questions that are sort of reserved questions and it will always answer the same way every time and it doesn't really indulge this sort of human propensity to ask offensive or undesirable questions. So you can create some bounds around that interaction. Or I think... For me, the design space that I'm really inspired by is what is the best case scenario? What is the most utopian thing that I could think about? And how might I design for that? Such that if people really wanted to interfere with a robot or something like that that I create, it's less about the robot itself and more about the human having malintent. So I think those would maybe be my three thoughts. To create something that's quite resilient, to have some really strict bounds or some fencing around the kinds of interactions that are allowable, and then also to try to think not only for the worst case scenario, but like what is the best case scenario? And I feel to be sort of not necessarily upper bounded, but to aspire to something like that. And I think one example that I can think of is like, you know, we're sitting in this kitchen, I don't know if I'm allowed to say that, but like we're just sitting in the kitchen, and there's all these beautiful flowers. I could grab the flower and rip off every petal one by one and leave it on a pile on my feet and stomp on it and show a lot of cruelty to this thing, which is an interaction mode that someone might have and unfortunately the flower wouldn't be able to do much about that. Or I could aspire to sort of what's the best-case scenario with this thing. I have it. I'm experiencing it. I feel inspired by it. The colors are there. It smells amazing. It makes me feel welcomed. And if I can already create some fencing or some bounds around that as being the more positive use case scenario, I think you can nudge people in the right direction.
Speaker 4 [00:44:16] But what is your utopian look for a robot? You sketched around that a little bit, but what if you could imagine the best space for all of this?
Catie Cuan [00:44:28] Yeah, we have some extraordinary problems that we're facing. Every generation does, right? We have some extra ordinary problems that feel important, not just for me, but for many generations coming up from the pipe, whether it's climate change, I think massive income inequality, we've got some threats to political will and democracy and the ways that we self-organize. We certainly. We know that we're changing a little bit epigenetically based on our association with our cell phones. We've lost some of our attention spans, and the ways that we communicate are different now. But I think we have some extraordinary problems that we are facing. And I don't think that robots equal solution to all of these problems, but I think that we can really benefit from some of the agential properties that robots have in order to a lot of these edge cases. Like I think of, there's a robot out of MIT a few years ago, there's the trash collecting robot that you could sort of deploy in a river and it would go around, collect a bunch of trash and show back up on the side of the stream and that would be better maybe than sending a ton of different people out there individually in scuba suits, they could do it more efficiently and we could have that running all the time, right? You would have a self-cleaning river. We also have some great examples with robots being able to do dirty, dull, and dangerous jobs, you know, ones where It would be unsafe for people, you know, kind of post nuclear catastrophes, being able to have a robot go in and investigate and do some search and rescue would be a marvelous use case for a robot. We also have robots that can go down and actually I'm not sure I want to describe this example because it has to do with drilling oil out of the oceans. But we have a huge number of robots in space to do some space exploration. And so I think the kinds of big human problems that we're facing, I think I know I'm sure that people are working on like firefighting robots and all sort of manner of robots that can respond to these big climate disasters. And we also certainly just in many cases don't have enough people to do those kinds of jobs, not just because they're dirty, dull and dangerous, but because we don't enough humans who are able to assist with a lot of those tasks. And so I think that what I imagine in terms of a utopia is more being able to tackle some really, really hard challenges using this set of tools, using this robotic set of tool that I believe is particularly special because they can reach out and touch the world, right? It's a very different set of challenges when you're only thinking about maybe a systems challenge or a network challenge when you have computers that are more than welcome to tackle those things but you need a body if you're gonna fight a fire or if you gonna collect the trash. You need something that can reach out and touch the universe. And so for me, I feel extremely inspired by all of these positive applications of robots. And I think that they can help us unlock even more human potential to solve some of these grand challenges.
Speaker 2 [00:47:30] I want to follow up on what you were talking about about the engineering way of thinking and doing versus the way an artist might do things. I think you show an understanding of that engineering way. I think that you sort of had to adapt to that. What about the other direction? Do you think that do you really baffle some of the engineering folks, some of your colleagues, that they just don't understand how you do what you do?
Catie Cuan [00:48:01] I think, you know, I feel that most of the people I work with at everyday robots are really, a lot of them are self-selecting, so they really want to see the robot move and dance and make music and do things that are a little outside of the fray of what the robot is used to doing. I think the cases where I maybe detect some friction, not necessarily between myself and the engineers at Everyday Robots, but the sort of. Like macro robotics community, maybe it's at Stanford, or some of the conferences I've gone to, is like the nomenclature. I mean, in dance, you learn a vocabulary of movement that is specific to dance. And you can describe, not just with the words, but the literal emphasis, like how you're emphatic about certain kinds of movement. And I think that can be really freaky to some engineers who I meet, where I see the robot moving its arm in a certain way, and I'm like. Did you see that beat? I loved that moment. Did you when it hit and they're all looking at me like, what is she talking about? Because you have this, and that's sort of a cultural set of norms around dance. I've learned because of my prior, it's not the worldwide existing all dance sounds look like this. It's a Bay Area, New York, whatever nomenclature that I've learnt from being entrenched in both these communities. But I think people will feel a little alienated sometimes when I start to use vocabulary like that. I also think sometimes people will feel a bit alienated because they don't know why. They're a little confused. I'm like, let's get the robot to pirouette three or four times, and then zip down the hull and wiggle its arms around. And everyone looks at me like, why would you want a robot to be able to do that? And I think we run always so far in the other direction, which is. I want a robot to grasp this knob and pull it as slowly and efficiently as possible. Like, fine, great, like, cool, that's less of an exciting problem for me than let's see how dynamic and how interesting we can make these robots. And I think we need to explore those edges of the design space. Because someone will. Right? Like if you put a bunch of robots out in the world... And you haven't tried and explored all of these interesting edge cases and all of these exciting bounds, you know, if you haven't t tried to get your robots how to dance or to play karate or to make sandwich or to do karate, excuse me, or to make sandwiches or something, and then you send them out to millions of people, somebody is going to think about wanting to experiment with those things. And so as a, being in the very privileged and unique position that I'm in, where I get to work with a lot of robots before they've gone out into the real world. We have to do those experiments now, because somebody's going to, and they'll have real implications for the ways that our robots show up in the world.
Speaker 2 [00:50:52] In your 50 years in the future looking back. How would you think we're gonna look back at what you're doing at your work now?
Catie Cuan [00:51:03] I think we're going to see dozens, if not hundreds, of PhDs in choreo robotics. I think that we're gonna have all of the formalisms that we do in academia around this as a field, the exact same way that we around human-computer interaction or computer graphics, which was not a huge field, you know. 80 years ago and is now, and we'll have conferences, we'll have journals, we will have opportunities for people to share their research and we will really have some clear, you know, agreed upon literature as a field that sort of defines what coreo robotics is. I think we'll definitely have that in 50 years. I think we're also going to have maybe coreo-robotics principles that people can design against. So if I'm Jane Schmoe and I want to make robotics company number 5,800 and whatever. Maybe I now have a set of agreed-upon design principles that are choreo robotics related, much the same way that we do now with sort of design thinking or operational excellence, this sort of company-wide formalisms that we have in business and design. I think we'll have the same in robotics, but we'll them with choreo-robotics. And then I think what I would love to see is robot dance performances and all manner and modes of robot art being made and being made by as many people as who ever want to make them. Right? Not only developers, but by floral designers and by costume designers. And I would like to see all of these creative applications of robotics and choreo robotics just really exponentiate. I would be so. Curious to see that and then I think in you know 50 years like Everything changes and nothing changes right so a couple of generations ago People still went to bed at night Not everybody, but a couple generations ago people were largely still asleep when it was dark and awake when it Was light they largely still lived with their families For one or two generations until people launched and went to college or didn't left the house. What have you so like some things It's both such a long horizon and no horizon at all, and when what I love to think about is what is so different between my generation and my parents and what is really fundamentally the same. And the things that are fundamentally the same are those deep humanist qualities and those are the things I think really unite us and define us regardless of all the tools that we're surrounded by and regardless of the ways that we navigate throughout the and organize our economics. We still tend to have a lot of these fundamental shared characteristics as a species, and I think that will obviously continue, you know, 50 years from now. And so what do we want? We want to feel loved. We want feel united. We want feeling supported, heard, that our needs are taken care of, we feel safe, and how might robots enable some of those lower order needs in ways that people still feel empowered by? Those are the kinds of questions that will still be here 50 years form now.
Speaker 5 [00:54:13] You mentioned early on about how you felt that committing to being an artist was irresponsible. I'm wondering if you could offer a general comment on our culture that sees science and math is essential in education.
Speaker 3 [00:54:35] Mm-hmm.
Speaker 5 [00:54:36] Art is sort of a luxury.
Speaker 3 [00:54:37] Mm-hmm.
Speaker 5 [00:54:39] You know the balance of these things in our culture. Do you how do you feel about that? What do you what do you think it ought to be?
Catie Cuan [00:54:47] That's such a good question. Ruminating on being an artist is somehow being irresponsible and a science person or a mathematician is being really essential. I go back and forth on this all the time because we've had art a lot longer than we've had math. You know, people very abstractly, right, we had... People putting their hands on walls of Lascaux Cave and dancing to Buffalo that they had painted long before we were doing calculus. And that kind of necessity to express, to demarcate, I am here, I exist, I can create, it's like a real, I think a fundamental human need the same way that love or food or shelter will be. And at the same time, we have a lot of culture and a lot politics around who gets to be an artist, what kind of art is valid, what does it bring? What does it add to society? That I feel a lot tension around. I think when I was wanting to be a dancer, I felt like the only successful path I could have to be dancer was to have a very classical training and to join a very class company. And if I didn't do that, I was a failure. That wasn't the right way to dance, or that was considered the sort of holy grail, whereas my dance career was much more varied. I had a company, I was doing a lot of freelance, I dancing for people in projects and museums and art galleries, and my world view of what an artist was became much more broad than my original conception. And I think. Scott Hartley, who's a colleague of mine and wrote a great book about this called The Fuzzy and the Techie, talks a lot about how we want so many people to study science, technology, engineering, and math. But if you have an excellent engineer and they don't necessarily have a vision or a creative idea of where to apply those skills, you might wind up doing a lot more of the same. And so, if you want innovation and you want expansion, opportunity, exploration, you need to employ a really creative headspace. And that's something that artists are uniquely suited to do well, is to create something from nothing or to conceptualize what something could be and try to wiggle yourself there and then maybe bring the people along the way that can help you realize that vision. But it's the creating a liminal space or an opportunity to explore and imagine and build something that doesn't exist yet. I think that's where. Artists are so foundational. And so, you know, since then, maybe I've felt that, like, culturally it was not the right or how do I rephrase this? I think for a while my idea about what being an artist was actually a little more narrow than it should have been. I also know my fiance is an artist and he's a full-time working artist and we've talked a lot about when you're not doing the thing, are you still it, right? So, if I'm... If I'm not dancing right now, am I a dancer? If I am not dancing, let's say I haven't booked a job in six months, do I still get to call myself a dancer. Why is it that I feel there's this extra pressure on artists to sort of validate that they exist and that they're doing the thing by actively engaging in the work. Whereas if I was sitting across from a chemist and they didn't have a bunch of beakers in front of them, I wouldn't accuse them of not being a chemists. Because they self-define as a chemist. There's a sort of like rarefied association We have about artists need to be X in order to call themselves an artist whereas I think what's more important and Possibly more true is if you self identify you have that practice You believe that you are an artist and that's the value one of the values that you bring to the world You are allowed to to engage with with your artistry regardless of what it is you're doing maybe for your employment or on a regular basis.
Speaker 2 [00:59:08] Thank you.
Speaker 4 [00:59:08] Just one more, yeah.
Speaker 2 [00:59:09] Can I follow up on that? Yeah, sure. OK. It has to do with this sort of theme of creativity in our show. And one of the people that you interacted with yesterday said, oh, I'm not creative. And looked at you like, oh, you're the creative person. And I'm, not because I'm an engineer. That was the implication. Is that true? Can you not be creative if you're an engineer? Is there a way to be creative? And you sort of alluded to it, because it's just a talk over about that.
Catie Cuan [00:59:40] Everyone wants to put their finger on creativity because there's a likely economic benefit to being able to say if we can foster more creativity we're going to have innovative solutions to problems, we're gonna have increased joy, better retention or something, I think There's a real economic incentive to figuring out what creativity is, and there's a well-being incentive too. I think if people feel creative within certain bounds, it might have a positive health impact. So I think, I know there's lot of curiosity around how do we put our finger on what the creativity thing is, lots of definitions for it as well. I think creativity in the way that I think about it is exactly what I described as being able to look at and not look at. Creativity is the practice of instantiating something where before there was a void. And what you instantiate, whether it's a dance or a video or blah blah, you have to make it. You have to build it. You have layer. It's not a snap my fingers, kaboom, here's a composition that everyone will now hear at symphony halls at Infinitum. There is a. Ongoing step-by-step pursuit of what that entity is that you want to build and so I think creativity is it's not only the instantiation of the idea or the inception of the ID excuse me it's the realization of the idea and what what I think maybe this engineer that you're referring to was saying is maybe she feels she can do the realization, but she might not have the instantiation, right? She might not the sort of random chaotic experience of, ah, here's the thing I want to create. But she could be really great at the building of the thing and the refining of the things. And so I think like the definition of creativity for me feels like it's both an instantaneous and a forever kind of practice. And being able to own and say, I feel creative. Comes from having done that many times and then being able to take a step back and critique it and decide how you wanna do better and decide which directions you wanna move in. My dad's a very creative person. He's a cinematographer, a photographer, and when we were little, he would take my sister and me to gallery openings all the time in San Francisco and stand us in front of a photo and say, what do you like about it? And how do you think they made it? What do you they were thinking about when they made? I was like Seven, you know, looking at these gorgeous photos of the Malecon or cathedrals or whatever and thinking, why would somebody stand there and take a photo? Why would somebody do that, right? It's because you're creating an artifact. You're creating a cultural artifact. You're capturing an experience that you're having. You're sort of living through that object and experimenting and interacting with other people. Because it's there for me to have this sort of passive experience. And you're providing a point of view. You're saying, I deem this worthy. It is important. I think it's important because of x, y, and z, or it's urgent for these reasons. And being able to engage with any of those kinds of questions feels like the sort of practice of creativity. And not everyone might have a formal practice around that. I have a very formal practice around how I make dances and how I code robots to be in dances because I've been doing it for a while. But for people who don't have a formal practice, they might not be able to identify when they are or aren't being creative. Do I think that everyone is a creative person? Yeah, absolutely. You make your lunch and you choose whether to put mayo on the left or the right piece of bread. That's a big choice. Right, you've made a choice, it's taking you. From point A to point C. But do I think that everyone has the same ownership around it, or they self-identify as a creative person, or they feel like they're creative in their work on a regular basis? Probably not. And that's sad for me, only because I enjoy and I feel so alive by that process.
Speaker 4 [01:04:03] So, you've talked about your scientific brain, you've talking about your artistic brain. How did the two coexist inside Katie Kwan?
Catie Cuan [01:04:17] Oh my gosh, I don't know if I know how to answer that. How do they coexist?
Speaker 4 [01:04:21] Yeah, well, in other words, you've made distinctions between them.
Speaker 3 [01:04:26] Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Speaker 4 [01:04:26] But yet at the same time, it's all the same person, you know what I mean? And so it's just like, oh now I'm turning to scientific brain, now I turn to my artistic brain, or is there just kind of a mixture of the two as you walk through your life and your professional life?
Speaker 2 [01:04:42] Let me put it another way, because I think you've gone over some of this before, is that when you're with your artistic peers, when you are, look, why are we talking to you? Because you may not be a one-off, but you're like a ten-off. There's not a lot of you. We talked about this yesterday. Okay, there's not lot of other choreographers who have this real deep ability to talk about robotics, for example, okay? What's likely, you're talking to other people in the dance world about this sort of engineering side of you? Do they go, okay, that's really weird, but you know, it must be unusual. It'd be like if I was a filmmaker but an incredible specialist in some kind of cancer drug.
Speaker 3 [01:05:23] Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 [01:05:24] Yeah.
Catie Cuan [01:05:29] Yeah, totally. I think I want to come up with a really tangible example that might help with this. Yeah, I have, I want to talk about Claire, I think, but I don't know if she's the right person to talk
Speaker 2 [01:05:54] I don't know if it's going to help, but when we were talking about Kim and Kim said, I'm not creative, but she said it with a certain kind of awe about the fact that you were. You had this special success that allowed you to do things, and she, I think, regretted it a bit. She didn't feel she was up to that. But I also know that artists and creative, creative, as we call them, okay, and a lot of folks are daunted by what you would be doing in science and in technology, okay. That's a little bit scary for the other, the other half of the world. So I'm just curious about that kind of tension because you sort of have both, I think it's a nice getting into, you have both of those things are somehow engaging in you. And, um, is it something you're conscious of or is it just something that's just You win. You know, you use a certain kind of knowledge this way and then you turn around and use your
Catie Cuan [01:06:56] I certainly feel... I have a good example. So I went to a wedding in June, and it was in Wyoming. And it was fiance, friend of his from Arts Conservatory, many, many people there, all artists, a lot of dancers, actors, musicians, and a dancer I really admired for a really, really long time. And I were chatting quite a bit during this wedding. She's extremely decorated. She's had one of the most successful careers you can have in. I mean, I would, she's been on Broadway, she danced with all these famous European choreographers, really, really extraordinary person. And she was asking me about what my experience is like working with robots with pure curiosity and open-endedness. I think, and I don't know if she's typical of what a lot of artists might experience in this space, but I think she thought, you know, what I was doing as being quite experimental in a good way, you know. In dance as a field, especially, it is very hard to make a living as a working dancer. And you don't have a long time to do it. And there are thousands of people coming out of school who are awesome and young and sexy and great dancers and not a lot of jobs for those people. And you have this incredible skill set, which is your dance training and then all of these other auxiliary things like discipline, teamwork. Uh, diligence, being able to identify and solve, you know, problem solving. But there's not a lot for you in the classical dance world that will support you over the course of your entire life. And, and even if you're successful for a while, you might not be successful five years from now, and, and there's a precarity to being a dancer that I think a lot of dancers certainly share and there is a lack of agency on certain occasions, you know, if you're dancing for someone else you're really realizing your vision and if their vision, excuse me, and if they don't want you, you know, there's, as the classic saying goes, another two or three thousand great dancing young women in New York who are happy to take your place and I think that precarity is very real for many people and for many dancers and when you start to explore or how might my skills be really valuable in some of these other contexts. I think that's empowering for people, or I would hope. I'm actually now remembering a couple of dancing people from the Old Guard who are sort of more, no, this isn't dance, this is silly, it's ridiculous. Why would you dance with a robot when you can dance with other people? There's a sort of purity to it that I would always push up against, but I certainly know a few... Dance naysayers who don't think that this kind of work is valid or that it really belongs, that's fine. People are always going to be critical. What I also try to provide in that context is like, look, it's great if you sit and listen to a choir sing. It's also amazing when somebody grabs a loop pedal and starts changing the sound of their voice or grabs a microphone and then you can hear them at the back of the room. Or if somebody picks up an electric guitar versus an acoustic guitar, like we can... Extend our artistry and augment our artistries through some of these tools. It's not an affront, it isn't an insult to some of the other forms, it's something new. And when you make something new, people are always going to have some criticism and critique. It doesn't mean you should stop doing it. If it feels real and true and honest for you, you need to follow those innate messages, those voices that are telling you that's the direction you should go in. So, I think there's certainly some. Critique on both sides. I'm just pondering Andy's question too. How do these things exist? I think when I'm feeling a little too conservative, like when I am feeling a little too engineering-robotic-sy, I know immediately. I have this very physical reaction of like, you need to stand up, you want to walk around, you have to wiggle a little You need to do something totally different. Maybe I've been using this framing where these two things feel really different, but they're not for me. Of course they're not. It's like saying I was a chef who made Mexican food and now I make French food and I'm never going to touch cayenne pepper again for the rest of my life. Of course that's not a real thing. Of course everything you do is some combination of these dualities, but the context is always changing. The thing you're working on is always changing. The people that you need to be accountable to are always going to be expecting different things and I think it's, it feels for me like it's all a part of the process. It's all part of a creative process. It has to be both. If it was only ever, you know, and even when I'm doing my robotics homework, I'm thinking about, you're standing and wiggling my arm around and gesturing in space because that's how I think. It's what helps me clarify what the questions are. Whereas if I'm doing my dance stuff and I'm dancing just for people and I want those people to dance, I'm also thinking, my language there has changed. When you're programming and choreographing robots, you need to decide, am I going to do all this code serial or parallel? Is it going to be blocking or non-blocking? All those design choices start showing up in my human choreography because I'm so used to having to make those decisions when I program robots.
Speaker 4 [01:12:46] That was a hard one, I know. Well, yeah, I don't know, but you are so, you are, to us, really sort of like what you're saying. Like, you really do have these two things going on in front of you. And I think we all, we find that really kind of fascinating, frankly. I mean, we make movies, right, and we have movies, and, you know, our, like, for the smaller, we always say, but there's always this... Really with the time. Yeah. Okay, but okay, but what we're saying is that there's a craft Yeah, yeah, and that craft is the different part of your brain. Yeah For us is the science part of our brain, right where we have to kind of look back This is kind of thing that goes on right, you know, I see it in novelist you see people write it's kind of like Oh, I did this wonderful great at work Now I have to move it back and make it work make it work right, sort of shaping it, and that's a different kind of creative process. And that's kind of what I was getting at, because it's like, in your work, in the brain, it takes a lot, there's all of that, there is that stuff kind of banging around. And so how you deal with it, how you do robots, how do you deal people, how you are in the world, is framed by those things.
Speaker 3 [01:14:02] Right, mm-hmm, yeah. Yeah, just in light of the general wrap-up, where you're being influenced by the engineering, the science, and the way that level of production that you look at into your own evolution, where do you see yourself in 30 years? I mean, you've done this, you can really predict, but do you have a feeling, this is where I'm going, or I'm just like, I'm enjoying this process so much, I'll just go with it? Part of that is being the artist. That visual experience of dancing and the march of technology forward that you are helping to design in some ways, you'll have surprises that come along. We never thought I could do this. Oh, look at this, we go this way. Maybe, you know, just that blend, but you have a personal vision or desire to be somewhere in 20 or 30 years.
Catie Cuan [01:15:00] Wow. Um.
Speaker 3 [01:15:01] I mean, we all have to think about it. Yeah, yeah, totally. We've got so much time on Earth, and we're thinking about it, some days we just spend our days going forward, and somehow we'll get through this. Other days, like, yeah. I probably want to do this, and yeah, we're inspired.
Catie Cuan [01:15:17] I just had a birthday, so I'm ruminating on this. Like, um.
Speaker 3 [01:15:21] Have a great day.
Catie Cuan [01:15:25] I think, okay, I mean it's so cliche. All cliches are true though. That's why they're cliches. Like being alive is really extraordinary. I mean, it's awesome, right, to be in the world. You know, to have the sun on your face, to hold your partner's hand. It's like, whoa. And sorry, I just got so emotional thinking about that. I think it's like you're. Yeah, that's the fundamental part of being human is that we're all going to die. Your mortality is what defines you. People ask me a lot about that with robots because it's like, oh, our robot's going to die, that sort of thing. It's a different kind of liveness, obviously, but this is what makes life so extraordinary is that, we all are not going to be alive at some point. Whether your consciousness is on, you know, whatever beliefs you hold that's specific to you but that is one of the unique things that we all share is that we are here right now. We don't know how much longer we will be here. We don't if it will be four days or 20 years or a hundred years. We don't what's going to happen with our brains and our bodies and how they'll all move forward and how do they become organic and what kinds of trees will grow. I mean that's like the beauty and the tragedy of being alive and that's also so when i think about what does that mean for my career is like oh i think in you know i certainly didn't think six years ago i'd be sitting here talking to all of you i didn't thing i'd been making dances with robots as my job i i thought that also even four years ago I didn't, think it would be a job and now i am certain that it will be a, job for hundreds if not thousands of people because there's a real need for it, like this is. I mean, really, there will be many, many people who are pursuing this intersection for a long time. So, I think what are my goals, you know, you talk to anyone you admire, I'm surrounded by an amazing mentor network and everyone tells you to do the thing that they're doing.
Speaker 3 [01:17:36] Bye!
Catie Cuan [01:17:36] You talk to a professor and they're like being a professor is the best thing in the world. You have academic freedom, you can study whatever you want, you get to discovery the scientific process of students and you're thinking, oh man perfect, I gotta do that with my life. And then you talk with people who are working in industry, I get to sell. Ship products to humans, real people in the real world, they get to use these things. The decisions I make can affect thousands if not millions of people and you're thinking wow that's amazing, so inspiring. And then you talk to a bunch of artists and this is the only way to live in the world is to be an artist. What else could you possibly ever want then to express and I'm thinking man these are great and That's part of the irony, too, and the privilege, jeez, how lucky am I that I can even think about doing any number of those things, let alone doing them at a high level and in a way that can actually positively impact people's lives, right? So that's like a real, real gift. And I work extremely hard, I work like a maniac, and I know that it's always a combination of like luck, timing, hard work, circumstance, you know, being. Born in the place that I was at the time I was, of course. So if I think about what I want to be doing in 20 or 30 years, I want be working on problems I think are impactful, and I want to be making and creating work I think is beautiful and important. And the work that I make right now, personally, feels like it's coming from a deeply, a deep examination of what does it mean to be a woman who is getting older. And can both create and also be subjugated. And I feel that tension really strongly, not only as a dancer, also as an engineer, and also at the place and time I am in my life. And what does it mean to learn, I think, given that context. That's where all of the AI kind of comes into my work and imitation learning is like. So, how much of learning is really from you? How much of learning is just a by-product of the data that you're surrounded by, which is what it is, obviously, for robots? But that same application, really, for people and the way that we learn and what we choose to learn and what we chose to focus on. So, I think in 20 or 30 years, knock and wood, I hope I'm still around. Who knows? I mean. But COVID has obviously been an incredible, extraordinary tragedy and a real stressor for a lot of these kinds of questions. And we've seen that people have left their jobs and moved on to other things, moved to different places, moved closer to family, because when you feel that your mortality is more acute, you make choices that are a function of your values. So in 20 or 30 years, What I want to be doing is working on problems I think are important, critical, can help a lot of people and I want be making really beautiful, intriguing and strange work. Yeah. I don't know if I'm ever not going to make art. I'll try, like, sometimes I get really mad about it and I'm like, no one wants to see this, no one cares about what I'm making, blah blah blah and then I like, make this thing anyway and I am thrilled that I made it. Maybe it goes somewhere, maybe it doesn't, but... It has to happen, otherwise, why? Yeah, so I don't know, 20 or 30 years, feels like a long ways away and no ways away at all.
full interview_catie cuan_hans peter brondmo_1.mp4
Catie Cuan [00:00:01] I guess when I met you, I didn't know anything about everyday robots. I didn't know anything about the project. It was so secretive. All I knew is that while I came to this building, we had breakfast. I had no idea what the robots looked like, how many people were on the team, what your goals were. And I think we didn't talk about any of that stuff actually when I first met you. Right. It was sort of.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:00:28] Probably mostly media is asking you questions about why you have this love affair with robots.
Speaker 3 [00:00:32] Mm-hmm.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:00:33] Like, what were they doing, like, what was that all about, and what was dance and robots, what did it have to do with each other?
Speaker 3 [00:00:38] Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:00:39] And I remember I was fascinated by the way you talked about it. What was your, like, when you left, what were you thinking?
Catie Cuan [00:00:48] Oh my gosh, that's such a good question. I remember I got in my car and I felt like I'd had a really extraordinary experience getting to meet you and I feel like we had a lot of alignment around the way that we were thinking about technology and I've been really fixated on this idea of epigenetics lately, so the way that we have these external factors influence our genes and I certainly feel that technology is one of those factors that has done that, like the generations that we've lived. And worked alongside our tools, are like just as important as our animals or the fact that we're now conditioned to live inside of spaces or not, or feel hunger in different ways because we've satiated our need for food. I feel like technology has provided this sort of externalized factor and like robots are very similar in that way. And I felt like you sort of shared this broad philosophical view on what robots could be and what they represent, not just what they are now. Whereas I think so many people become fixated on what is the tech? What does it do? What's it going to do? How do we improve the sensors? How do you improve the actuators? And I felt like you were thinking More about this macro. What do robots represent in our lives? How did they affect us? Philosophically and that felt like a very humanist way of approaching a Co-existing relationships between humans and robots. Yeah, and that was really inspiring to me So I didn't know anything about the project, but I felt like. Very aligned with your general vantage when it came to tech.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:02:21] And then what did we do next? I don't even remember. I probably had 17 other conversations that day. What was the next step?
Catie Cuan [00:02:30] Yeah, so then you and Denise brought me in to present something in the downstairs and I talked about bicycles, do you remember this? And how people were really afraid of bicycles when they first were introduced in New York City and like the New York Times said they were gonna ruin society. And I talked trains and like all of these other instances of new technologies and how they were always really fearful for people initially and then eventually they became. Esthetically interesting, they created a design community around them, and they became a part of culture. And so taking something from a sheer research, business-y type of space into something that's been embraced by culture, I was like, that is the responsibility of artists and philosophers.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:03:14] Yeah exactly and so yeah it was a tech talk and we had a few people there and yeah I remember now.
Catie Cuan [00:03:22] And then you were like, let's, why don't you give a talk to the team? Actually, so after that, we met, you, Denise, and I did, and then I met with a couple of other people at Everyday Robots, and then you're like, why don't you give talk at Everyday U? And I was like, no one's gonna come to this, they're all gonna be so confused as to why they're inviting this choreographer to come and talk about dancing with Robots. And then I think 100 people came, which was almost the entire team at the time.
Speaker 3 [00:03:49] Good time, yeah.
Catie Cuan [00:03:50] And there were a couple of movement prompts where people were like trying to touch their hands over their head
Speaker 3 [00:03:55] and
Catie Cuan [00:03:55] and touch their nose with their eyes closed and that sort of thing. And then after that talk, a couple of people on the team reached out to me directly and it seemed like we were navigating our way to some sort of...
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:04:08] Or some sort of idea. I remember now. Thank you for reminding me. I completely forgot. So if you could have asked me a question then, knowing what you know now, what would you have asked?
Catie Cuan [00:04:23] Ask you a question then, knowing what I know about the team now.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:04:26] Yeah, so knowing what you know about the project, the team, what you've learned. So if we were sitting there down in the courtyard having lunch the first time, and you would have asked me a question then, knowing what know now, what would you have asked? What question would you want to ask me?
Catie Cuan [00:04:44] Yeah, I think. I mean, I know we're on this sort of moonshot. Feeling like a member of the team now, I feel like we're in this moonshot, but I think what I would have asked then, knowing what I know now. How are the things that we build less of an expression of our existing biases and more a representation of our imagination?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:05:18] Yeah, that's a great question and great reflection.
Catie Cuan [00:05:20] Because I think being here now, these feel a little, I mean, beautifully so, like the amalgamation of everyone's collective experience, which is great. And the plus on that. What is the representation of our magic? What are the things that we can create that no one has created yet, right? And how do we imbue those expectations inside of the things we build?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:05:48] When I look at the robot standing behind you there... I think about that was a robot we built, we designed almost five years ago.
Catie Cuan [00:05:59] Yes. Exactly.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:06:00] And we started building them maybe three years ago, so they've kind of been a workhorse for the last two to three years. And then we didn't really know what we were building, remember? Yeah. And so you don't remember, but you know now.
Speaker 3 [00:06:13] Well, I've heard.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:06:15] And so we did the best we could, knowing what we did know and knowing what don't know. And so I think your prompt, your question is an interesting one, right? Because like now we know a lot more, but let's put ourselves five years in the future or ten years in future and say, well, could we imagine what it would be then and then use that as the prompt for how we think about it now. And I think what's so cool about some of your work, right? And especially sort of when they flock and when they move together. What's so exciting about it to me is that it pokes at that, right, because it's like, there will be a day, like, you know, you and I have talked about this before, but I remember, but like, I want the robots to break into like a flash dance kind of thing, or what's it called, a flash mob, right. Where they just suddenly come together and they do a little performance and then they go back and start sorting the trash again. And it's like where I want them to sort of go to a conference room together and like just move towards it and then when people come over, they kind of look a little embarrassed and they scuttle off. But like what does that, like what is it?
Catie Cuan [00:07:17] But why are you interested in that?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:07:18] Because it pokes at the question you asked. Because I think what happens is, it starts triggering our imagination around what are these things? What are they in our lives? How do they interact with us? How do we interact with them? Why do they go in our conference room, for God's sake? They don't do anything there other than clean the tables. But so we would kind of prompt it. I mean, they wouldn't really be thinking we should go to the conference room because they don't think. They act, but they're also autonomous. They work on their own. So, what does that manifest in our lives, right? What does it become? And so, by doing the work you're doing, you're triggering those questions, those manifestations, right, you're sort of saying, because, you know, when I dance with your robots, right when I engage with them, when we interact with them I'm not thinking, oh, this is very useful. Right. I'm thinking, this feels really interesting. But this makes me kind of imagine what the future can look like. This makes me think about what is the possibility of like a group of robots hanging out together and helping us out. And being kind of little creatures and being, and feeling like, especially, I love what you've done with music, right, because when you pull the music in, then it could be a little creepy to have a robot come up and look at you. But when every time it moves, there's a little harmonized sound that comes out and then there's others around. And all of a sudden, what otherwise looks like staring feels like curiosity.
Speaker 3 [00:08:53] Yes, yes.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:08:54] It feels like it brings up a lot of sort of emotions and so I think there's something in what you're doing that's actually prompting at exactly that question. What does this feel and look like in the future?
Catie Cuan [00:09:08] And I think that's partially why I'm, like, interested in epigenetics, right, is because so for many, I mean it's not that long ago, it's like a hundred years ago. Think about what's happened in the last ten hundred years. It's pretty spectacular, right? Like, I can be in touch with anyone on planet Earth immediately. I can see them... As can the robot. Yeah, as can the robots. I can even see them in two dimensions. I can hear their voice. I can their eyes move. And that's a type of interconnectedness that I don't, we've never really experienced as a species. I found out, you know, the number of humans who have ever lived and died on planet Earth is not that many. Well, it's a lot, but it's 110 billion, right? And so then you think about that and you're like, oh my gosh, I am one in 110 billion. Like I am of these weird atoms who's like ping ponging around in the universe. It's the universe is huge and you feel this like, I don't know, for me, when I start to fathom that type of scale, both in terms of time and space and existence, It feels like... I don't know what the next hundred years is going to be.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:10:09] Okay, so let's get back to quarterly planning and what are we going to do next quarter and how are we going to deliver and how we're going to make this a business?
Catie Cuan [00:10:15] Yeah, totally. But that's the push-pull, right? This is the tension we're always talking about. It's like, you can't be too big.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:10:20] Because you've got to get some shit done. It has to be big, because you have to use the big thinking as a way to provoke the questions and to imagine what it could look like. One of the analogies I like is kind of pointillism or like a painting that when you're up close, you can't really see it.
Catie Cuan [00:10:37] Yes.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:10:38] But when you step back, the further you step, the more your eye integrates and all of a sudden you see that it's like this beautiful, you know, mural or painting. And I think that analogy for, like, when you get too close and you just look at the thing, all you see is a bunch of dots. But when your able to step back then you can kind of see something evolving, something emerging, which is maybe still a little bit abstract, right, it might be, but you can feel it and see it. And I think the artistic element of your work. Has been giving us that opportunity to sort of look at it from afar, right? And that's to me is so much of what's going on. And then there's the quarterly planning.
Catie Cuan [00:11:17] Exactly.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:11:18] And there's the execution and it's getting the robots to behave and actually turn on when you hit the on button and like all the everyday stuff that also needs to happen to support the work. But I think, you know, one of the things that has been very interesting for me is the easy path for you, easy, would have been to program the robots, to do something very predictable. That might have looked really cool and you did some of that as you were getting to know the robots. You made them do certain things. But to me... That is sort of fundamentally uninteresting in the context of what we're just talking about because, and we've spoken about this before, of course, but... What I think is interesting is the fact that you're now bringing machine learning and AI to it. Because now the robots are learning to do certain things. They're behaving in certain ways that are unpredictable. And just like humans are unpredictable in many ways, there's a sort of a basic expectation around behaviors. But then what you're gonna say next, I don't know. And part of the excitement of the conversation is I don't know. And so what I think it's interesting is the work you've been doing. You know, with the flocking and the robots dancing, or the robots behaving around people and the music, which is driven by algorithms, not by programming, right? And so the fact that I'm interacting with the robot is causing the robot to behave in terms of sort of certain machine learning algorithm, and then that's in turn generating the music because the music is driven its movement.
Speaker 3 [00:12:49] Yeah.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:12:49] I mean, to me that's like, that's mind blowing, right? That opens, opens, truly opens up for a whole new way of kind of experiencing this type of technology. So in doing that, right, in going into that space of AI and machine learning, like what were some of the hard parts? What was like, what, I mean again, easy path would have been you program them, they do something cool, you film it, and you put it on the internet and it gets a bunch of likes, right. Boring. The hard part is what you're doing now. What's been the biggest challenge for you in doing this?
Catie Cuan [00:13:24] Well, I think to even investigate your question a little further, it's like, you gave me that prompt. That was, you know, a partial side effect of the kinds of goals or aims that you had too, right? Like, you're saying, oh, it's not that interesting to you. Somebody else would have been like, that's really interesting. That's perfect enough, right. And I think part of it is, as you've just described, a reflection of maybe these bigger themes that we've been going back and forth on, is it feels more novel, even if it's, not just novel, like it's more impactful. It's more meaningful, right, it it's like something that's harder to do. Is also going to have more of an impact.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:14:05] Yeah, novelty is obviously a side effect, but I think the impact is definitely it because it's so unknown what it's gonna feel like and look like and be, it allows us to again, provoke what the future might feel like.
Speaker 3 [00:14:22] Mm-hmm. Right?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:14:25] And provoke what it would feel like to just hang out with a bunch of robots every day and have them kind of do stuff in the background. I mean, they can be very quietly in the back ground just doing very mechanical program things, or they can say, hey robot, I could really use some more water right now while I'm talking to Katie, and now it hurt me, so let's see what's gonna do.
Catie Cuan [00:14:42] Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I hopefully won't do anything too wild. Okay, great. We have time now.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:14:49] So as they act in our world, you're bringing us to that other place where it's unpredictable and it's beautiful and it sometimes a little bit scary and it is uncertain. And all that lets us peer into the future a little and say, that's what it could be. So if it is, what do we do about that? What do we think about that?
Catie Cuan [00:15:13] I also think a lot of artists I really admire, even if they haven't exclusively worked with AI or machine learning, there's always like, we even talked about this I think when we first met, is I was like, there is this total dearth of beauty when it comes to robotics. Like no one is making robots that are beautiful, no one has made...
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:15:28] Except for our friend 021 here.
Catie Cuan [00:15:30] Well, I mean, arguably, it depends on the... They get really upset. But I think, like, great art is not just beautiful. It's like beauty in service of something that uncovers something a little bit deeper and more profound. And so, like you can take what is a beautiful object or a beautiful painting or beautiful music or whatever, but for me, I think having something that's a little subversive underneath the beauty is what gives you this gut feel. I mean one of my mentors, I've told Denise this a million times, so one of Provocation for me where she's like you need to know if you're hitting people on the head the heart or the groin and you need To be clear about it because if you are not clear about So I think like I mean we're working where there are lots so you have to hit people in the head for sure But I think that there is like some hitting in the heart when the robots move
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:16:20] Tell me when you want the groin experience so I can stay away.
Catie Cuan [00:16:22] Obviously, this will not be within the halls of alphabet any time soon, but I do think her underlying point there is it's not enough to have one lane, right? And I feel that way about beauty. I mean, for me personally, as an artist, I might not feel that in 10 years. I might be like, all I ever wanna do is create a beautiful vase, and that could take me 50 years to figure out how to craft a beautiful base, right. But I think for me, what I'm interested in is what. Takes us maybe a step beyond just having something be beautiful, just having something be cheap, like thrills on the internet, just having something done, finished, and perfect, right? Like you like the imperfection.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:17:02] Yeah, I don't want to throw anything or anyone under the bus, but there are all these robots that do spectacular tricks on the internet. They do backflips and they jump around and they even dance. But that stuff is all 100% programmed, right? It's marvel of technology that they don't fall over and that they can do these things and the mechatronics, the mechanics and the electronics are amazing. But it's sort of like, it's just kind of click bait. It's just sort of, you know. For me anyway. I think what you've been doing is you have been touching the heart, right? Because when I was walking around with them the other day, and you were running them in the atrium over here, I felt something, right. I don't know exactly what it was, but you were definitely getting to my heart. And I was looking at them like these little creatures that just sort of emerged out of, and they were hanging out together, and were a little curious about me, I was a little curious about them. And that was the experience I was having, and you didn't know what was going to happen next. I didn't what was gonna happen next, I knew it wasn't going to be dangerous, and I knew that it was really sort of sweet and beautiful, and so, but it was also, it was a little subversive, because it was like, they were hanging out, if I went too fast towards them, they backed up a little bit, it seemed like, you know, there was sort of this whole notion of they were engaging with me, and I felt something, really, and it was important, right, that notion of... Like, oh, they're bringing up a bunch of emotions. First, maybe in the beginning, a little bit of uncertainty, a little of what's really gonna happen here, should I get too close, are they gonna bump into me? And then over time, I learned that no, they're just kind of like hanging out, they're moving together, and they're sort of being a little shy, and like I was having all these human emotions and feelings that I was kind of projecting onto these machines.
Catie Cuan [00:18:47] Plus I think it evolves, right? So like something that I feel really committed to in my work with all robots is like, I can't stay the same, right. So if you get it immediately, for me, I feel like I haven't been successful, right, it's like, you should feel some ambiguity, right and then like, because a lot of dancers are always asked to explain like, what did you learn, you know, in your 25 years of dance training? Like, what do you know? And... Language is a very narrow way of describing what is a kinesthetic physical experience. And that's why when you hang out with a bunch of other dancers, there's this sort of frequency that, like when you've spent that much time thinking about how your body moves. And I think a lot of musicians, a lot of actors, like anyone who has a kinesthetic practice, maybe your judo master or your master potter or anyone who has this type of, I mean, it could be a photographer, like you're a photographer. But just this like a cute understanding of how the way that your body takes actions in space will impact your environment and vice versa. I feel like that kind of in-depth investigation. I want people to experience that when they see my work, right?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:20:12] And this gets us something that I'm really excited about right now and which I call it embodied intelligence. Yes. Because I think that, you know, so much of artificial intelligence has been about automating kind of what's in the head. Right. It's about doing better chess games or solving, you now, like doing incredible sort of technology to help us do things on the computers. You know, and there's all kinds of different examples of that. But what you're really talking about is not the intelligence in your head or even the humanity in your heads, it's the full body embodiment of being human. And so whether you're a star athlete or an artistic performer or any person, your intelligence is in your body. It's also in your heart, but your full body, like without your body, you would never be able to learn anything. And without your head, your body would be kind of more like. You know, well, it wouldn't do anything either. So it's that combination of the embodiment and the experiences we have. We know that if we touch something that's sharp, we're gonna cut ourselves, we shouldn't do that again. We have those kinds of experiences. But that whole aspect of intelligence, I think, is incredibly important. And I think that when you apply dance or sort of that aspect to it, it becomes, you're starting to bring that up, right? Yeah, it's one of my favorite parts, I think, of the work you've been doing.
Catie Cuan [00:21:44] And when you say like embodied intelligence, like what does it mean to have a body? What does it like, what does it mean for a robot to have a body, what is it mean for a person to have body? And what does it mean first to have a body in like 50 or 100 years?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:21:57] Exactly. I mean those those are the interesting questions and you know, I'm a couple years older than you and so like Just a couple. I'm getting older. Yeah, exactly.
Catie Cuan [00:22:06] We're all spiraling towards the, yeah, yeah.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:22:10] The Grand Void, so, but in that, like, you know, my lived experiences in my body have lasted longer and so there's certain things I've learned because of that and I've experienced and then, you now, and so time, age, presence, place, all those things impacts, you know, and that's who we are.
Catie Cuan [00:22:32] And you're impacted by them emotionally that affect your life experience.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:22:35] Have you ever had any kind of surgery where they put you under with one of those, where you totally like lose track of time? When you sleep, you kind of know you slept and you know you wake up and you know that time has passed. But when they give you those surgery drugs, you're like gone. Yeah. And then you're back and it's as if there was nothing in between. Right. And it could have been hours, it could've been like, you have no idea of that difference. So yeah, it is weird.
Catie Cuan [00:23:03] Yeah, and I, that's why, but I think people always ask me like, oh, what's the definition of a robot? And I'm like, well, you need to have something that computes, you needs something that can actuate and you need something that senses. But then, if you think...
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:23:18] That's a boring definition. Yeah, we've talked- Yeah.
Catie Cuan [00:23:20] It is.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:23:21] Yeah. No, I think it's... It's just mechanical. A robot is something that makes you feel like you're more human, makes you, help you be more human. It's because a robot can have seven arms, it can have one arm, it could have wheels, it can legs, it a long neck, a short neck. We can design them ultimately to be anything. But I guess what you were getting at is sort of more the, okay, so what's the need to be a robot? Well, it needs to be able to compute, it has to be to have a body in some of form, and then morphology. I mean, isn't the more interesting question about what is a robot, it's like, what do you want a robot to be? What is it in our world? What is in life? What is, like, why do we need them? Like, why should they be a part of our life? You know, these are sort of the, back to your point about existentialism, these are the existential questions. Like why do you need to spend money on building robots? Well, I think it's because it can teach you something about being human. Mm-hmm, it can help us be more human, it can, let us explore, I mean back to your epigenetics, it's even like impacting what it means to be human as they enter the world. So I mean a robot is something, it is a creature, it something new, something different, something we don't know what is yet. So of course if somebody wants a description of well is that thing I chat with on the internet, is that a robot, like we can get into that, but I think that's the question. And actually. You know, I don't say boring disrespectfully because I think you're actually poking out the real question as to what it means to be a robot or what is a robot, right?
Speaker 3 [00:24:53] Mm-hmm.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:24:54] And what is a robot both in terms of its own thing, but also what is the robot in terms of our experience of the robot.
Catie Cuan [00:25:00] Yeah. Well, when you were talking about embodied intelligence and the sort of needing to have a body to be able to experience the world in some way, I think there's also this whole school of thought around, how do we improve AI and get robots to learn things in this two-dimensional space? And what's exciting about being able to work with robots is you have an intelligence that can actually reach out and touch the real world. But I think even a step further, like, This is really going down a rabbit hole. But I ascribe to a lot of philosophical thought that consciousness is sort of a general property of the universe, and we are more radios than we are instantiators of that consciousness. I actually think that we more so tap into what already exists as part of being on this planet. And then.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:25:45] Now the consciousness is out of the hole.
Catie Cuan [00:25:47] But, but, this is important because when we first met, you were like, we were talking about consciousness and you were, like, I hate that word, and I think consciousness is BS and whatever, and, but what you were talking about- I'm serious.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:25:58] I was feeling very small and insignificant because I couldn't understand it.
Catie Cuan [00:26:02] Well, but nobody can, that's the whole point. And so people always want to talk to us about it. Oh yes? Explain it to me.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:26:12] No, I think you're poking at something really interesting. So I was joking. I can't explain consciousness. But I think that. I have a practice where, you know, a mindfulness practice, right? And so one of the things you do in mindfulness is you sit around and you just observe your mind, right. You literally just sit there and say, oh, that was an interesting thought. Oh, that's a bad feeling. Oh, my knee hurts. Oh, I hear that truck again. That's really annoying. Oh, now my thoughts are coming in and my feelings are showing up and my aches and pains are showing up. And you're just like saying that is consciousness. The stuff just shows up and it shows up. And where does it come from? And so when we think about machines. And we think about the definition of consciousness, it raises some really interesting questions, right? People say, well, can a machine be conscious? Everyone wants to know. And then the secondary question, everybody wants to know. And then, the second question is, well are you going to take over the world? Right? Yeah. And it's like, those aren't really the... So the answer is, I think, is maybe and no. Or maybe and if they do, you know, well we took over the world and we don't treat animals very well, so maybe they take over the world one day and they don't treated us very well. That's so far away and it's so insignificant right now relative to so many other problems we have to deal with. You know the question of like could a machine develop consciousness we don't even know what human consciousness is correct if it did then do you think it would be our kind of consciousness you think a dog is conscious you think your cat is conscious I think so I think they have consciousness and so your idea of like this cosmic consciousness is like that I think there's sort of this idea we live we have experiences they emerge and so when I look at the robots dance with you I look in them well they're having experiences as they emerge. They don't have an awareness of those experiences per se, but does a snail have an awareness of its experience? It can feel pain, presumably, but does it have an awareness? And if so, if it does not, is it conscious? I think there's a level of consciousness there because it reacts and is aware of the experiences around it in its way. And it's not our way, it's very different. Yeah, what do you think? Like if you take it from that global idea, your global notion of radios and the universe of consciousness, how does it end up, like where do the robots fit in?
Catie Cuan [00:28:23] We know our minds are imperfect, right? We know that our minds our fickle. We know memory is not airtight, that we tend to experience memories and events of things that are.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:28:33] And that biochemical inputs are influencing our mind and our feelings.
Catie Cuan [00:28:38] And encoding in some way, and then you try to parse out that encoding years later, you could absolutely get it wrong, and people are known to have imperfections in the ways that they recall their memories. And we also know that memories are very visceral, right, the like sound associations and all those types of things are really important. And so I think this like, to take a step further, the fact that we don't understand human consciousness very well, we don't understand like most of the brain very well at all. And this is again, back to my point I made earlier about trying to explain. You know, 25 years of dance training is like, I mean, it's in my every, like the encoding of the body has changed as a result of this imbuing this function of dance on you over and over andover. So I think there's like a very, this lack of understanding about consciousness feels very liberating to me. And it's like, okay, well, there's so much that I don't know about my own mind and the way that I work. And I'm in this present moment and I'm trying to dance and dance with these robots and get them to do things. And it is emergent, just like you said, It's a sort of emergent property of the mind. And I think are robots capable of having that kind of consciousness? There's so few bounds around it anyway that trying to approach that question is like, am I going to have orange juice for breakfast in 30 years? It's like completely non-important. It just doesn't strike me as something that feels like the right framing of the problem.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:29:53] I'm going to push you on that a little bit, and actually I have a question for you first. So do you think that your consciousness is different when you dance than when you're reading a poem?
Catie Cuan [00:30:08] How so?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:30:09] Like when you're experiencing something physically, and you're not in your head, like your body's been trained for 25 years in dance, so when you are doing that, you're no thinking about dancing. You might have a notion of what happens next, but you're experienceing, right? Do you think that, is that a different kind of consciousness, or is it all just a part of something greater?
Catie Cuan [00:30:37] Well I think we talk about flow state a lot, right, like a lot of people who have a practice like that will be inside of some sort of flow state, you know, whether you're doing karate or whatever. I think when you read a poem that absolutely is a physical practice, right? Because your eyes are working and you're craned over and like you have some sort of two-dimensional plane that you're facing towards.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:30:56] Listening to it on the podcast.
Catie Cuan [00:30:57] Or you're listening to it on a podcast, there's some sort of sensory experience that's happening. But I'm not sure in terms of my consciousness being different when I dance versus when I do something else. There's that nice metaphor people always talk about with the default mode network in terms of your brain, where you've been sledding down the same path of a snowy hill every single time, and it becomes an encoded path. And I think when I'm dancing, I feel like those paths. Become less, they're less deep. You know what I mean? Like they become more. It's it's more uncertain
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:31:39] Maybe the question wasn't a good one, but I think what I wonder about is, so we humans have had a lived experience, and we've had even a generational experience, which is where the epigenetics come in, and so we have a sense of, we have consciousness and a sense of awareness, depending on how mindful we are and how aware we are, but we walk through the world with some understanding of what's happening around us, what we're feeling what we're experiencing. And in a sense, you could argue in its simplest form that that is sort of the root of our consciousness. It's like, you know, the awareness, like we know we are, we know, we don't know what the future's gonna look like. We have some vague memory of the past. But so now we're walking with our, we're taking the afternoon walk with our dog. And the dog does, it remembers that it's been there before because it's all excited. It knows that when you come home, it's time to go for a walk. So it has awareness as well. And it has a sense of consciousness, but it's very different than ours, it can't speak and remember in the same way we can. And then of course if a butterfly has consciousness, and I kind of believe it does, then it's very much imbued as a function of its manifestation in the world, how it can see, how its senses. So the robots, can they be conscious, can machines be conscious? And not conscious like you and me, they're not going to compete with us for consciousness, but can they have, like, is there some sense of awareness? And if not, why not? Right. I mean, if you don't buy the argument that a butterfly has a degree of consciousness or a cow or a horse or a dog.
Catie Cuan [00:33:17] Retrieve.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:33:17] Or a tree maybe, I could even go that far, I would go with you there. If, you know, wherever you want to do the cutoff, is a rock, is a stone of consciousness, maybe that's a little too far for what I can wrap my head around right now. But if it's living, it has an experience and a history and some degree of awareness and consciousness about the world around it. It just isn't the way we are. And so in that way, wouldn't a robot be able to have something like that?
Catie Cuan [00:33:45] I think, so there's this great essay, Thomas Nagel, What is it like to be a bat? And he's like philosophizing all about what is it to be like a bat, and thinking exactly about what you just described. So given the bounds of my physical capabilities, the fact that I can fly, I have this kind of sensing, I have a particular diet, I have collective organization with other bats, what is like to a bat right? And how is that somehow different than the kind of consciousness that we experience? I think... I could agree with you that like robot has a real manifestation in the world. It experiences things. It has a history. It has memory. It has body. Like if we want to say that the summation of those things equals consciousness. Okay, you know, do I do I think that like you need to have some kind of organic something in order to maybe elevate to that next level of uncertainty to become the radio wave? Yeah, maybe. So I think like we could both be right. Like we could say that the robot's gonna have its its experiences of consciousness, which is somehow a function of the way that it senses its memory, its body, its association with other robots, it's the way that it learns with people, and that there could be something uniquely living.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:34:49] Organic.
Catie Cuan [00:34:50] Organic.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:34:51] Exactly, to be of nature. Yeah, and so I'm not actually interested in whether I'm right or you're right on this one. I'm interested in the fact that this is the kind of conversation and question that I think is very important for us to have in the way that it helps us think about what these things end up being in our world. And the work you're doing, because it's pushing at some of the edges of this and provoking and bringing up provocations around it. I think that's what's so compelling about it. That's why it needs to be a part of the dialog. It needs to a part every thing like this, because thing meaning every kind of, when somebody does robots, and somebody is going to do robots the way we wanna do robots. It might not be us, we don't know yet, but once somebody does it, it's gonna have a big impact on what it means to be human. Yeah. And so that ultimately also pokes at. What is consciousness? What it means to be human is to be a conscious being in some ways. So if something new enters the world, then what's it mean? So I think what you're getting at here is like, I think it's exactly this kind of conversation and this kind provocation that's so important in the collaboration we've had, right? And the work you've been doing here.
Catie Cuan [00:36:04] Well, I feel like you and many of the people here have created an environment where those kinds of investigations are valid and where you actually stick your flag in the dirt and show something at the end of it. That's always the push ball.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:36:23] Because all we do is publish papers and write big ideas and like, okay, that was a good paper and here's another good paper and interesting ideas, but we got to actually sort of see if it works.
Catie Cuan [00:36:32] And you've really pushed me to do that, right? And said, I don't only want to see the slide decks and the ideas and the iterative, but let's really build it and make it. And I think that creating that environment for engineers, not only engineers, but all of the other diverse people who have been here, I mean, I heard you saying we've got anthropologists and designers and philosophers to actually. Put your hands around the idea and shift the play-doh the way that you want to, I think is, where does that happen right now? Where is that kind of creative, intellectual freedom married with this real technical rigor, I think, is so unique about this space.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:37:15] Well, it's also so cool that we are in an environment where you can actually do that, right? And that's part of what you're saying because, you know, I think X, right, where we kind of grew up and now we've left it a little bit, but we're sort of like still the mom and dad kind of environment. We come home for dinner and to do our laundry. You know, X is this incredible place and I think that the whole environment here has been one that said, oh, if you want to run that experiment, let's run it. And I just had a sabbatical this summer and I just got back and one of the reflections I had was, what an amazing privilege.
Catie Cuan [00:37:53] Yes, agreed.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:37:54] It's an amazing opportunity to be able to sit with and really ask those questions without being asked, okay, so when are you going to ship the product in the next three months? Because if you start shipping the product the next few months, you're going to ship something that will kind of do something and maybe move the needle a little bit. And that's ultimately going to be important. There needs to be a business here. But the questions are so big.
Speaker 3 [00:38:18] Mm-hmm.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:38:18] And they're so important that we can't ignore them against the backdrop of, well let's just get really utilitarian and ship something next week. And if we do, we just limit it down to lowest common denominator, this word used in Silicon Valley a lot, MVP, minimum viable product. It's fine for certain things, but I don't want this thing to be minimum viable. I think it's going to be a lot more than that. And, you know, we need to limit our ambitions to what the technology can actually do, but we also need you to push us and say, yeah, but I want it to do more. I want to do these things. Well, we never designed it to that. Well, that's okay. Let's do it anyway. Right? And you and I have had those conversations and you've had many of them with the engineers. Right? They first, when Katie walks in the room, it's like, oh, we're a little bit scared, really excited. What's she going to ask us to do now? And then, when they hear it, they go... Well, yeah, I think maybe we could do that, right?
Catie Cuan [00:39:17] Well, and I feel extraordinarily lucky, like as an artist, to be able to work on this scale and with all of the people here and to have this, I mean, the duration I think is the biggest thing that we talked about at the beginning, is you were like, well, what are like some, what's five or 10 ideas that you can come up with right now? And I sort of fed you whatever was on the top of my mind, but I was like, whatever I work on immediately is gonna be a lot less interesting than what I could work on in six months. You really gave me that freedom to actually investigate and to have a long arc, right? And that's a huge privilege for me. So I felt. Both that it's been this like tremendous extraordinary opportunity that I am so lucky to be able to do and that it has been so hard and so painful and I have like you give it 150 percent but it's because when you have the people and the circumstances where you feel like it's aligned you're like I have to give it everything like why not you know I'm I'm here like we only I get to do this once you know and that's We all get to do this once, or maybe more than once, but you...
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:40:24] You sort of see what I say.
Catie Cuan [00:40:25] Exactly, yeah, and that has felt like what a privilege and what a joy so lucky. Yeah
