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
full interview_hans peter brondmo_1.mp4
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:00:00] My name is Hans-Peter Brøndmo and I run everyday robots.
Speaker 2 [00:00:05] It's over now. Good. Oh, we're done. That's it. So what kind of a world are you building here? What is the MO of everyday road?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:00:18] So starting with the small question.
Speaker 2 [00:00:20] I'd just like, I'd like to start...
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:00:24] Um. So. My mother recently passed away, and before she passed she was rather ill for several years and she had Parkinson's and several other ailments. And she lives in Norway, or lived in Norway. And we would speak every weekend on the phone, and every time I picked up the phone with her, I called her, she picked up the phone, she would... Very quickly. She didn't even ask me how it's going. She would just say, So, Hans Peter, where are the robots? And I'd say, you know, it'll be a little while, but they're coming. And she'd go, well, they better come soon. For my mom, they didn't come fast enough to help her, but it gave me a lot of sort of anchoring and faith in what we're doing, because there are so many people out there who, if they could get a little bit of help, a little of assist, of course the aging being a big group, but so many different parts of our lives where if we can get a help on the side, it could be a mother or father with three children. It could be. A busy workplace. It could be an older person in an institution or assisted living or even trying to live at home. And with Parkinson's, one of the things that happens is, which was my mother's ailment. With Parkinson's, which was my mother's ailment, what happens is you lose something on the floor and you can't pick it up. Very simple things. You shuffle your feet and maybe kick over a carpet which might in turn cause you to stumble later and fall. And these little things were big things for her. And so what ended up happening, what we're trying to do here is we're tryin' to solve the little things. The little things that make life smoother, better, easier. Wide range of different use cases and different kinds of people. So I envision a world where we're getting more assistance and help and I think this is particularly important given the long-term prognosis of sort of the change in demographics. When I came to the U.S. And I remember this statistic because it was the year I came the U.S., which was in 1982, when I came to U. S. To study in college, there were ten people of working age for every person over 64 globally in the world. Today that number is four globally and in much of Europe and the developed world, Japan, it's approaching two. So this is not a question of whether we should do it, it is a question how quickly can we do it because we need assistance. We can't have people doing the tasks that needed to do. Where machines can do them, we have to have people doing the tasks that really tap into what it's like to be human and what people can really uniquely contribute.
Speaker 2 [00:03:39] So, I mean, you have said that you wanted to make robots boring, right? I mean is that sort of that kind of the idea and that the act to be able to have robots act to make your everyday life?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:03:52] I think robots will invariably have some degree of presence and persona because they're these things that move around in our lives. So boring in the sense that we kind of want them to fade away a lot of the time, but at the same time, if something moves next to you, you're going to assign it a certain sense of agency or a certain sense. Even if it's ever so, you know, algorithm based or. Or programmatically based, you're going to still assign it agency, you can assign it some kind of emotional quality. So I don't know if boring is the right word anymore. I think maybe quiet, maybe they should hover in the background when you don't need them, they shouldn't be invasive in any way, but they will also have personality just by the very nature of the fact that they're moving. Think of a dog, right? You can have a young puppy. I just stayed with some friends last night and they have a near two-year-old little dog and it's rambunctious and it is jumping around and so on. It has a lot of personality. I said with some other friends a few weeks ago and they have a 13-year old Labrador or something and it barely moves, right? It's very boring except when it fires up and they're going for a walk or something like that. So I think these machines are going to take on sort of qualities of creatures that sometimes you want them around and you want to laugh at them and other times with them even, and sometimes I think you're just going to want them to. You know, discreetly fade into the background.
Speaker 2 [00:05:22] Well, I mean, it's interesting because you're sort of broaching that whole idea of anthropomorphism, right? You know, the idea that you kind of can't... It's a human condition, you know? I mean we can't not assign some kind of a mode of quality to these things. And no, I look around and you look at your robots and your robots don't... They don't look like they don't have heads. I mean they're not supposed to look like human beings, right, but at the same time we're still... You kind of can't help it right and you kind of go oh it's kind of cute there's something like that is that that's something that you you face and when you're like designing these guys
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:06:01] Absolutely. We made some very deliberate decisions early on. One was, let's not try to make them look like people. They're creatures in my view. Like, you know, a dog has a lot of personality, a cat has a lot of a personality, and a parrot has a lot of personalities. But they're not people. They're just creatures. They're different. You know, we're all a part of, like, this incredible conscious world we live in. I think robots are going to be showing up in that world in their own way. And taking on their own sort of identity, but we don't want it to look like, or even feel like, a person. That doesn't mean we couldn't speak to it, and we couldn't answer potentially through speech, but the robot itself is its own new thing. And so we made these two decisions. One was not to make it look like a person, the other one not to put a screen on it. So our robots don't have any screens, and that's actually so we can't cheat. Because screens are like, they suck you in, they slide up, they sort of become these things you poke at. I don't want to go over and poke at a robot. I want the robot to sort of show up to understand what I want, do what I need, and help out, and again, like sort of hover discreetly in the background the rest of the time. So I think it's important to not think of it, it's not anthropomorphic as much as it is sort of, it becomes a creature of sorts. And just like a parrot, it's anthropomorphical, but it's got a lot of personality potentially, right? And so I think we need to look at it in a continuum, and we need look at something new, something different, something we don't really understand yet.
Speaker 2 [00:07:33] We have filmed a bunch of artists who use robots in their work, and they have very different ways of looking at it. Some of them look at, oh, it's a tool, right? It's a toy, you know, it dons a tool. And others are saying, well, actually we're giving it a certain amount of agency, trying to create what it is, whatever the hell it wants to do within limits, right. Now I have an algorithm, you now, and then there are others who sort of say, you know what, they're going to become more clever than we are at some point. And so we just need to understand that we are one of the, it is yet another species, like in the world. Do you have anything to sort of say about those things? If those are sort of the artist versus perhaps what you were doing and maybe the difference here.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:08:18] I love the fact that artists are playing with this technology now. I think it's so important and I think so necessary. And the reason is that it's not oftentimes the artist's idea to answer questions, it's the artist role to answer the questions, the artist roll to basically ask the questions. And so when you look at a continuum of how artists choose to use this technology from, you know, just sort of pure tools, and that they program, and it's very predictable. To maybe more algorithmic based, maybe marrying artificial intelligence with robotics, having more input based sort of feedback loops, et cetera. I mean, this is all a continuum of exploring what these things are in everyday life. What are they gonna be? What are gonna show up like? So, and really asking the questions and then letting you experience oftentimes the answer. And so, I think that's why I believe art. Is so important in these formative processes because it brings a different mindset, a different way of thinking about what it is we ultimately could achieve. And, you know, I often tie it to this term unintended consequences. People often almost use that as an excuse, right? Well, there were all these unintended consequences, well, of course, if they're intended, then you kind of know the consequences, but if you, so you're never gonna know what the unintended consequences are. But what you can do is you can ask a lot of questions in the creative process. And that's what artists can do, right? They can come in and ask questions that ultimately make us look at the machines differently, look at robots, look at technology differently, and therefore kind of learn more earlier and maybe have more intended consequences because we've kind of said, oh, if we do that, this is a consequence of that's the emotive aspect, not just the rational. Aspect, but the emotive aspect of my interaction with these machines. So whether it's a one-way presentation that an artist has done where it's highly scripted and they're trying to sort of say something or ask some questions that way, or whether it's fully interactive thing, which is more the direction we're interested in and pursuing here, I think it's so critical for this phase of, and every phase of development actually, and for every phase in life, but so critical in the particular phase we're in right now.
Speaker 2 [00:10:41] Yeah, I mean, it's really sort of the interdisciplinary quality of all of that, right, having different ways of looking at any given problem, let alone robotics, right? I mean isn't that something that's a cross-pollination that works for you?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:10:56] Yeah, the interdisciplinary aspect of, you know, we've had philosophers working with us, we have economists for obvious reasons, we have anthropologists, we have designers, we now have artists. So we try to bring in people who just come to this from a very different vantage point, different way of thinking. And even on the team, you know, when I first, when this team first came together and I started running it, which is six and a half years ago now. When I started running this team, it was like many teams in Silicon Valley, it was very male centric and robotics is no different than any other area and you had a bunch of, it kind of had the standard profile of an engineering team. And I remember sitting down with a group of men early on, like I was two months in and I'd assembled sort of what I thought were some of the thought leaders and some of people on the team and I asked them in a conversation, we had a brainstorming conversation about what this was all to be about. And I asked them what was, about 30 minutes and I stopped the conversation. I said, is there anything that's not right in this room? Like anybody noticing? And the first guy said something about the lighting. And I thought, you know, that's creative. But then the second guy, to his credit, said, there are no women in the room? Like bingo, right? We're building robots that are gonna live amongst us, that are living our everyday lives. And so we put a lot of effort into just creating a sort of a group of people here who come from very different parts, walks of life, and they ask different kinds of questions again. I mean, it all comes back to what are they challenging? What are the questions? What are things they're noticing? And that requires just, you know, culturally, you know. Obviously, gender is important, but the whole sort of cognitive space needs to be a mix. And so it's what kind of background you have, it's the life you've lived, the path you've walked, all those things come together to bring up the interesting questions.
Speaker 2 [00:13:00] And so that brings us to Katie Kwan, who you have brought in to do what exactly.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:13:08] We're still discovering that. Katie and I were introduced by one of my colleagues here, one of the guys who works on the team, very kind of casually. He knew that I was interested in exploring different ways of thinking about robotics. And the way I think of it, and we'll see what she says, but the way think of is it's like we immediately clicked around some kind of key perspectives on what you can and should do, the questions you should be asking, et cetera. Katie's such a unique person because she's a dancer, But she's also an engineer She's now doing a PhD in robotics. And so she can actually get in there with the geeks and the engineers and talk about code and get stuff. But then she can also get up and move in a way that brings a tear to your eye. And she understands what movement means from the perspective of emoting. And so one of my favorite moments was when she first came in, a lot of people were kind of, especially a lot of the engineers, were kind going, well, what's her role? What's she doing here? What's her OKR? Twitter her. Her, you know, what results is she going to deliver. And she did a workshop early on, so a series of workshops, and it was a really cool workshop. And it was workshop on movement, and it's back in COVID days, right, so everybody was on Google video chat and all that stuff and Google video calls. And so you had this whole screen of people. It was about dance, but it was really about what it means, like what do different movements mean? And how do they emote? And you had all these people who probably hadn't gotten up from their desk for days, right? It was early COVID, we were all sitting there, and they were starting to move around, and there was music, and they would do something. And I was sitting there and I was going, yes, that's exactly what we need. We need like people to think, what does movement mean? And then you see the whole sort of screen in front of you, and it becomes this little performance art piece. Of just a bunch of people and she gave them some briefs and some hints about what she wanted to mode and people tried different ways of doing that. And so I think bringing her in, bringing Katie into everyday robots was an experiment, it was a risk and I think you will see some of the things she's creating and I think it's just amazing. I think it brings a whole new dimension to what this... This stuff we're building is about, and again, it pokes at a bunch of the questions, a bunch of the things that we ultimately need to figure out together.
Speaker 2 [00:15:39] Yeah, I mean, she's also teaching the robots to do things, specifically, certain kinds of movements and things that perhaps someone who was not a choreographer, was not an dancer, would not understand how to do that.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:15:53] What we learned early on, and I think maybe the original insight that we had, which was the foundational insight for this project, was that you can't program robots to live among humans. You can't programming to help us. The world is just too messy and complicated for a computer to be programmed to deal with it. So you have to teach them. And so everything we do is based on this premise that we're actually teaching the robots, the robots are learning, they're learning by doing, they're practicing. And they're learning in simulation. So let's think of it like a giant video game. And every night when we go to sleep, they are playing in the video game and they are learning new things in the game. And then the morning that those things kind of get put on their computers on the robots and then they try them in the real world. So they're basically, I think of them as dreaming. They go dream at night and then the simulations generate algorithms they can put on the robot. And so our whole premise is that robots are learning machines. And this of course is built on the fact that artificial intelligence and machine learning has gotten to a point now where you can take it from the virtual space, from playing chess and AlphaGo, the famous project that our colleagues at DeepMind did to beat the world champion and probably the most complicated board game Go, etc. And we're taking that technology and bringing it into the physical world, the real world. We think of it as embodied intelligence, intelligence in the world. And so. This notion of teaching robots was central to Katie's work because I really wanted her to say, well, what can we teach them behaviors when they move? Can we teach him to work together in flocks? Can we them to behave like a flock of sterlings or a flock or a fish in the ocean and respond to the world around them? Can they learn how to do that by watching, of course, watching things that do that, but then also... By practicing and getting reinforcement, getting told, yeah, this was great or this was not in that moment.
Speaker 2 [00:17:59] And when I'm looking at it, I'm look at it like a little robot classroom, you know, and I look at some of the robots around and they're trying to pick up some very basic stuff. Like being able to pick this piece of trash and put it over here and put over here. It's a slow process, right? It's all really because I can see they're they're struggling, right. They're not they're not quite there. How does that how does that work?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:18:25] Well the way I think of it is we're trying to pack a few billion maybe, hundreds of millions for sure, years of evolution into like a decade. And so when you think about how you and I evolved, you know, we evolved both physically and evolved, with our current abilities mentally and language abilities, et cetera. That evolved out of evolution and out of just trial and error, right, nature's way of creating sort of new, new. Capabilities and survival ultimately, right? So what are we doing with the robots? Well, we're kind of trying to give them some, I mean, of course we're cheating a little bit because we know some of the things we want them to do. We know what their morphology is, what they look like. But we're trying to essentially give the robots that same ability to learn. And so, yes, you're right. Initially, it's very simple. It's picking something up. It's learning to sort trash. Like, okay, well, what goes where? This plastic should not go in the organic session. So pick it up. Well, where should it go? Go over here. If you do that right, robot, you get like a little treat. You get a positive reward. If do it wrong, you don't get anything, or you get a negative reward. And so every time they do it, they learn. So they learn over time, oh, I like getting treats, so I'm going to do, and these are digital treats. They're just little thumbs up, basically, in the special algorithm. And so they learn to pick something up and drop it in the right place. And then if they haven't seen it before, they might actually pick it up and say, I don't know what this is, and drop down again. But then a human behind the loop somewhere. Saying, oh they didn't recognize that, let's label that so that the next time and let's tell them what it is that's this and then the next time they look at it and they look something that almost looks like it and they try and they say well if it almost looks like that other thing then I can try it over here in the compost and they're learning but yes it's very simple it's they're learning how to navigate socially among people so that they don't bump into things they're learning to sort things they are learning to wipe things they learning sort of basic skills and basic capabilities to be. You know, and then full on tasks to kind of be amongst us in ways that feel natural and where again they can kind of fade into the background but do what they need to do and deal with all the variability and uncertainty that our lived environments constitute.
Speaker 2 [00:20:36] In a way, you're sort of reacting to the dystopic quality that has come down to us through science fiction and every other means of what robots should be taking over. Robots, if they're too clever, you better watch out because ultimately they're just going to become some minor speck in the universe.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:21:00] Yeah, the dystopian narrative is obviously alive and well, and it is in all aspects of humanity. And I kind of, you know, yes, we need to listen to that. We need to hear it. There's truth in some of that, right? And at the same time, aliens could land tomorrow and take over as well, right. So that's another dystopia narrative, or the one that I'm most concerned about right now is the climate. And I think we've done some things there that are much bigger threat than any robot will be for a long time. So this idea of the robots are gonna take over, I think. Could there be a day, sometime in the future, where the robot somehow gets mad at us and take over? I guess, but I can't even imagine what that would look like. I work with these things every day. We're pretty far from that point. And I do think we need to be very sensitive to the social implications of what has happened, right? These robots are impacting how we work. They're impacting the workplace. They're affecting, and they will ultimately impact. Even our social abilities in nature, because we're going to have to engage with them and we don't want them to come and interrupt if we're having a great conversation. So there's all kinds of things that we are working on that is very important in terms of them integrating into the lives we choose to live. But the dystopian aspect makes for good Hollywood movies, but I see so many other reasons to be concerned in this world. I don't think robotics is near the top of my list right now.
Speaker 2 [00:22:27] But as you just sort of mentioned that there is a sort of narrative, which is not entirely wrong, about automation. And sort of the idea that robots will be, as they have, taking over a certain number of jobs and that sort of thing. And I think that can also be highly exaggerated. But it's still something that is a very real world concern to a lot of people.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:22:49] This will have impact. When these machines end up doing what we're trying to make them do today, it'll impact our world. Just like every other technology over the last, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, really every other technologies since fire or before that, tools, had impact. So are we being thoughtful about that impact? Are we, again, why are we working with Katie? Why are we work with philosophers? Why are we working with political scientists and anthropologists and economists? It's because we have the opportunity to have dialog about what that impact might actually be and understand more of it and then start preparing for it. But there's no question that jobs will change. Jobs are constantly changing and they will change because of this. The question then becomes, well, are there new jobs? And if so, is the net benefit to society, the people who are potentially disrupted by technology. Are they being helped to find new things? Is society providing for them? And ultimately in my view, which isn't dismissing in any way, it's something I'm actually quite active in, but ultimately those are policy decisions more than anything. Are we living in a world where the politicians and the policymakers are willing to even tweak the way we think about how we distribute wealth, how we distributed benefit and value that's created by these things in a way that's equitable. And where people can get proper education or can live a full and meaningful life, even if they don't have to wash floors anymore. So this is a big and complicated question, so I don't want to, it's hard to just skim the surface on it, but one of the things we do is we spend a lot of time thinking about this and having dialog about it with a wide constituency of people in order to a net positive over time.
Speaker 2 [00:24:50] Underpinning a lot of all of this is AI, right? And, you know, at this point it's almost a cliché. It's kind of like, well, AI is all around us, you know, everybody says it, right, because it's in your refrigerator. Oh, and my stove is talking to me, you know, and all of those kinds of events, as I said. And I didn't even say, hey, Google, and it still asked me. I didn't understand that, you know, or something like that. Can you describe a little bit about the sort of underpinnings of AI and kind of what you're doing here?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:25:20] So AI has become like all things for all people, right? In our particular case, we use the word pretty carefully but also pretty ambitiously and broadly. Or I should say deliberately, but ambitiously. And so what is really, so the underpinning in our robots is that our robots are learning machines. They are basically learning from the experiences they're having, they're learning from the data they collect, they're learn from everything they do goes into kind of the data repository, and is then used to learn. Not unlike a little child. A little child is poking at things and pushing at things when they're like an infant. And they're learning about gravity, they're going to pick something up and drop it at falls. And so in a sense, we're trying to take those same learning abilities and make them available to the robots. And of course, robots are, you know, they're flocks, they're big, they are all connected together. So when they start learning, they all learn very quickly, right? So they can learn together. And so AI for us is really the underlying algorithms and the underlying data infrastructure and the underlining systems that allow the robots to learn from their experiences. Because they're not gonna live amongst us if we try to program them. They have to be taught to live amongst us because the world is just too broad and complicated for them to, and too unpredictable for any engineer to be able to program the robot.
Speaker 2 [00:26:54] How do you feel, this is kind of more of a philosophical question for you, I guess, is that you're working in a field which is not necessarily a clear outcome. I mean, it is something where you're experimenting, effectively, right? And how do you treat that idea effectively? Yeah, I don't know where this is going exactly. I know where I'd like it to go. But it may not get there in my lifetime for all we know.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:27:26] There's a lot of uncertainty and being comfortable with uncertainty is part of the creative process, it's part of innovation process, it's a part of invention that we're doing. So we have to be comfortable with the fact that we don't know exactly where it's going, we don't know exactly what it's gonna look like, we don't know exactly what they're gonna do, but my approach to that is you put a stake in the ground and you just say, well, let's try to get them to do this. And if we can get them to do that... I think that generalizes a little bit. So can we get them to sort the trash? Can we get to wipe a table? Can we got them to draw pictures on a wall using AI to draw the picture? Can we them to dance and move in swarms and feel comfortable around, or people feel comfortable around them when you're walking around them? And can we solve some of these fundamental problems? And then we put all that together and we say, okay, how far away are we from really like building a business? And we have a business model, we have business case, but we don't have a working business yet, but we have the business model. So we have that a model that says, well if the robots are able to do these things we're trying to get them to do, we think we could actually turn that into a business like this. And then over time that could become a business like that and then we could evolve. And then one day they're gonna be able to help out in facilities for the aging and they're going to help in hospitals and they gonna help out people who need assistance in their homes. And so I think, ultimately, the process is definitely one of a little bit like a bumper car ride, like where you're bumping into things, whoops, not that way, not that way. Oh, I can make it through there. Yep, that worked. And in some ways, bumper car rides are sort of, you know, they're just going around in circles. We're actually trying to move it a little bit forward. So maybe it should be more like, you know, driving in Rio de Janeiro or something. But it's like you're basically in a place where you are always exploring and always pushing the boundaries. To discover what the path is forward. And while that is concerning at times, why that is. There's a lot of uncertainty. There are sleepless nights if you can't get it to work. There's always risk in situations like this that somebody will say, well, you've tried this for long enough now, it's not working. Those risks are real and everybody has to be comfortable with it. And it's super exciting because I don't know what tomorrow's gonna look like. I don't know when the next big breakthrough is gonna come. So there's always something like that's evolving and you're always a little bit on your toes and working with incredible people who are all kind of on this, we call it moonshots because you're kind of. Trying to figure out how to get to the moon, and the proverbial moon here being our future where robots help us.
Speaker 2 [00:30:07] Well, yeah, it's great, and, you know, in effect it's kind of a thing, well, we don't care about failure, right, because maybe it's just kind of built in, in effect, right? I mean, it kind of like you have little successes and little failures.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:30:21] We care a lot about failure. We actually celebrate failure because once we fail, it's like that Edison quote, I'm gonna misquote him here, but something about like, I didn't fail, I just tried 10,000 things that don't work. And so every time we fail at something, we learn something. And so failure is part of the mode. If you can't deal with failure, you should not be working on something like this. And failure's not the goal. Failure is a tool. Failure's a modality. Failure something you have to accept and embrace as a part of the process. And even the robots themselves, I've talked about the robots learning, well I don't know what the percentage is, but I would guess 99% when they first start learning is actually they fail. But every time they fail, they realize that they shouldn't try that again. And so then the 1% where they did something right, they get that little treat, they get a little reinforcement, and they go, oh, I should do more of that. And so the whole system is based on sort of learning, and if you don't embrace failure, you're not learning very much.
Speaker 2 [00:31:25] You're sort of dancing around the creative process in a way, right, for this. I mean, it's creative for the people around you. It's not really necessarily creative for the robots, right? They're not quite there yet, right. But you're kind of teaching creativity in this whole thing, aren't you?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:31:41] Creativity is a huge part of this thing. And, you know, even there's a mural on the wall that I'm looking at here as I'm speaking to you, and the very top word is creativity, and then it's got a bunch of arrows, and on the bottom it says teamwork, and in the middle there's like a bunch of knobs and levers and glass bowls and everything else. And yes, like we're kind of, we're jumping into the beginning of that funnel with a buncha stuff. And then out ultimately with good teamwork, out ultimately comes discoveries and new things. It's the research project, the creative project process. But I think. I also think in some ways it's somewhat human-centric to say that the robots aren't being creative because they're not humans, they're being creative like we are, but we see them do things that we never told them to do. We see them, for example, we had an intern last summer, this summer has just passed, we had a intern who used a new artificial intelligence technology now where you can of just give a text brief, so you can say... Show me a picture of a robot dancing with ghosts. Literally, picture of robot dancing with ghosts and the artificial intelligence will actually present you with a picture that it makes of what it thinks a robot dancing with ghost might look like. Then the robot, using that as its brain, went on a whiteboard and drew the picture. And on the bottom it drew the prompt. And there's actually a bunch of these pictures around here, you might see some of them. And so the little text on the them. That's what the robot was told to do, by text. It was literally told, oh, you can speak it to it. And then it went back, consulted its big AI brain, came back with a picture, and drew it on the wall. Now, I don't know if you wanna call that creative. I mean, it was unpredictable. We didn't know what the picture was gonna look like. So I think this notion of art and AI right now, I mean it's a hot topic, and it's very interesting. And some people are very much pushing back on it. That's not creativity. But I mean I look at what birds do when they fly in the sky. And that's beautiful and creative, as far as I'm concerned, when you have, like, Stirling's flying and, you know, huge flocks in the sky. And I think that's incredibly creative. It's a creative expression. And just because maybe I take a picture of it and it's my picture and that's very creative, the birds were the inspiration. The birds were creating the beauty and the creativity in themselves. So it's an interesting, you now, sort of spectrum, the spectrum from, like us, you And then like, well, what are all the other beautiful things? I mean, nature is incredibly creative and beautiful and creates these incredible patterns and structures and everything else. So that's a different form of creativity, but it's still very beautiful and creative. So it depends on how narrow you want to define the concept of it, I guess. But yes, a lot of creativity amongst the teams here. And I would argue maybe on the fringes that the robots can kind of be creative too.
Speaker 3 [00:34:43] Can I ask a follow-up? Sure. Do you think that establishing that idea that robots create to teach us something about our own, perhaps the way our minds work through creative process is something like an algorithm?
Speaker 2 [00:34:59] I'm sure the answer is going to be there.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:35:03] I think the question of whether we can learn from artificial intelligence, whether we can learn from robots doing creative things is a very interesting one and I think my belief is the simple answer is absolutely yes. If I can learn creativity by studying the creative process of an artist or a sort of school of thought etc. And I can from a book or from a webpage. Or from a podcast, and somebody just took their particular view of creative process and they said, you know, here's what it is, now I can learn. I'm not going to copy their creative process. I might try to imitate it to some extent, but I'm going to make it my own. So if a machine does something and I think it's creative, if an AI comes up with something that I think is interesting and creative, of course I'm gonna learn from it. I'm going to learn from it by observing it, by trying to understand it, by trying see where it came from. It didn't come from, ultimately it came from some kind of human mind because the human designed the algorithm, or the humans designed the algorithm, but that's kind of like saying that Picasso's approach to creativity was not really his because it was built on the artist before him. And so I think we're learning a ton about creativity from the machines and from them doing things that were highly unexpected and not predictable, per se. And it's fascinating and actually really stimulating and fun.
Speaker 2 [00:36:43] So, essentially you've got a big engineering shop here, because engineering is so important. What happens when you drop a choreographer in with all those engineers?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:37:00] One of the reasons that bringing Katie in was both very uncertain and risky and stood the high probability of failure or failing, but also was so important was that she comes in with a different mindset than the engineers. And what is cool here and what's cool around sort of this notion of creativity in this context, and is that the more people can ask. Questions around what we're doing and the more they can bring their own sort of mindset and think way of thinking to what we are doing, the more we are going to learn and I think the more creative it's going to get and that creativity then brings us into this cycle of innovation and creation, etc. And so we have a business model out here, we have the vision for what our business could be. We have like crazy research over here which is basically like just trying to solve really crazy problems. And then we're sort of trying to anchor ourselves on a path along that way, continue. So it started out with all crazy research because we saw some really hard problems with a very foggy vision. And then the vision for the business kind of become more and more clear, but we're still on a part there. And it might turn out that that vision like isn't really here, it's over there and that we need to sort of do this. And as we're figuring out how to navigate towards, because I don't think you can, you can't scale impact, you can scale purpose without profit. So I think we have to build a business, and that's very clear. That's what we're gonna do. And the creative process, working with bringing a dancer into this, was a part of just like poking at it, right? Saying, does it really work? Is it really, you know, can this stand the test of like what an artist would wanna do with it? And if so, what does that mean? And how does it feel? And I think this notion of the emotional piece of it. Is not always, doesn't come straight out of the engineering work, right? It comes out of design, it comes out art, perhaps it comes out of a different way of putting it together. So, very, very important to bring these different voices to the table as we guide our moonshot towards, you know, a moon that might move, right, it might move many, many times as we're finding out the right path to get there and the moon we want to land on or the planet we want it to build.
full interview_hans peter brondmo_6.mp4
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:00:00] Everyday Robots was always a kind of walk the fine line of crazy project. We were trying to build these machines that would live amongst us one day and work alongside us and be a part of our everyday life. And to date, that's been the subject of science fiction. We made a lot of progress. We made lot of a progress in getting these robots ready for the real world, safely operating amongst people across a number of Google buildings. And we decided early this year. It was going to take a while, and it was going to cost a lot to get these robots into the real world. And so there were some fundamental research problems that still needed to be studied. And so in late January, we made the call to put the project into more of a research orientation and change the focus and probably delay for several years the actual entry into the world.
Speaker 2 [00:01:12] How does that feel?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:01:16] You know, you don't do things like everyday robots without being kind of all in. It was such an audacious and big bet. It was, you know, you have to lead people, in my role in particular, you have lead people towards a future that you can articulate, a vision and a mission that was driving us. And so when you let go of that, it's obviously difficult. It's difficult, and people process it differently from For me, it was seven years of hard work and hard to let go of in the beginning, but then you also step back and you say, well, why did we make this decision and was it the right one for now? If we'd gone for another year and then made the decision because it was going to be too expensive or take too long, then that would have been perhaps even worse because then people would have spent another year working on something when in fact they could go out and work on something else. So it felt, it was difficult, but... You know, you move on and you see the wisdom in some of these decisions with hindsight, for sure.
Speaker 2 [00:02:27] Does the creative process come to an end? This was a creative journey in many ways.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:02:34] It was a hugely creative journey. It was hugely creative. And we were given the opportunity to play with the creative process in so many dimensions. It was just really astounding. I have a huge amount of gratitude and learned an incredible amount from that process. So the creative journey is not over. It's just started. These robots are gonna happen. Everyday robots are going to be amongst us in the near future. Whether that's five years or 10 years or even 20 years, my crystal ball isn't quite clear on that, but it's going to happen. And so what I'm particularly excited about and proud of from what we did was we approached this in a unique way. We integrated philosophers, artists, we integrated people and ideas into this process at an early stage in order to really explore what is ultimately gonna be a society changing, life changing, happening when it happens. And so in that regard, I think the culture we created, the people we included in the journey, they're gonna go out and a thousand flowers will bloom. And as they do, I these people will carry with them that creative spark that we started with Every Day Robots.
Speaker 2 [00:03:56] When we talked to you earlier this year, you spoke very eloquently about the importance of failure in creative endeavors and business endeavors, et cetera. Do you see this moment as a moment of failure?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:04:14] You know, the word failure, so in one way, yes, it was a failure, right? It was a failed to launch a product, but was the process of failure, was what we learned a failure was the inevitability of this thing happening in the future a failure and us potentially illuminating what that path could look like and, you know, a lot of people learning a lot that they will take with them. I think it was, you know, I often like to flip failure because what's failure all about? If you're open during failure and you're curious, it's about learning. And so we learned a ton. We failed in a very concrete way in terms of launching a product into the world. But everything else around that to me was sort of hugely generative in the sense of just an incredible learning experience.
Speaker 2 [00:05:06] So what did you learn?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:05:08] Oh, we learned so much. We obviously learned how hard it is to put robots in the world that can be fully autonomous and work alongside us and express themselves in ways that are safe. And one of the things that several people said as we were wrapping things up was they were sitting back and being a little philosophical. And they said, isn't it weird? We're surrounded by robots every day. And They're doing things. They're cleaning tables, they're sorting trash, they're inspecting conference rooms, they're moving around amongst us, and it's become completely normal. We don't even notice it anymore. That was a moment for me, because I had the same experience. I'd have people come into everyday robots, and their eyes would get really big, and they'd see these robots roaming around. And it would be a reminder for us every day, oh yeah, this isn't normal. This is not what the world looks like outside. And so, very quickly, we as people normalize. And so one of the big learnings was it won't take long for people to just, you know. Adopt and normalize these things in our lives. But we also learned the importance of, I mean, one of the early experiences I had, one of the things I learned from this project early on was when something moves, it hits us emotionally in a whole different way than when it just shows up on a screen. And so when you put a wheel on a computer brain and you make that computer sufficient enough and strong, powerful enough that it can drive a robot around autonomously, the way that robot moves amongst us has a huge impact on how we feel. And so I remember I was sitting once in an office and a robot went by, this was early on a robot, went by and as it came by, I looked at it and it looked at me. It just turned its little weird looking head and as I went by it sort of did one these as it drove forward, so it kind of kept eye contact with me. I had this momentary experience where it's like, I feel seen. The robot saw me. The robot likes me. You know, there was sort of this… And of course the robot… It turned out afterwards, I went and asked the engineers, is this something like that's meant to happen? They said, oh no, that was a bug. So it wasn't even intended to do anything. But it did this little head movement where it looked at me and I immediately had the sense that I felt seen as a person. And so we have this innate experience of movement. If it's fast and sudden, we back off. If it slow, if it's gaze, all these things, we have innate and very sort of basic responses to them emotionally. So when you're putting machines in the world that are gonna operate on their own, how they move and how they engage with us is very important. And we also don't wanna use that for manipulative reasons, purposes, right? So you could easily see people like with, that's one of the reasons I always had a hard time with these cutesy faces that people put on robots. Because it's trying to make you feel remote in a way that I don't think is genuine and authentic. And so what we would do is we would work a lot just on movement, which of course is also where the dance efforts came in and our sort of art explorations, which was how does a flock of robots moving together make you fell? How do you engage with them that way? And that was a big part of the thing we explored from a learning perspective. One of them was around that.
Speaker 2 [00:08:43] Does innovation ever happen in a straight line?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:08:48] If it does, I've never been a part of it. So innovation is never a straight line. Innovation is a bumpy ride. You go forward, you go backward, you go up, you down. There are probably even more dimensions you're operating in than the spatial ones. And so it's a very messy ride. And I think... Fundamentally happens is you have an idea, you have a vision, you have something that you think is going to manifest or you want to manifest, you desire to manifest, and then you basically try a bunch of stuff. This is where failure comes in or the willingness to take risk. You try a bunch of things. And as you try those things, you realize, you learn. And you realize what works and what doesn't, then you iterate quickly, hopefully. And you can't be too attached to anything, right? Attachment gets you stuck, and so you have to be willing to let go of things. However brilliant you think your idea is, you have be willing let go it, which is also why I really believe that innovation's a team sport. I think that idea of the lone genius, even somebody like Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was an incredible character. But he wasn't Apple. Like, the people behind him, around him, he inspired them. But they were the ones who ultimately have done great things, and there's so many examples of that. So I don't believe in sort of this lone genius model. I think it's a team sport. There's lots of people. And if you create the right culture and the right environment, and you bring different types of thinkers in, that's why we did artists, and we did philosophers, and did economists, and we did labor rights people. We brought people in who might not see the way we did. We also tried as much as we could to create a culturally and ethnically and otherwise very diverse group so that people came in with these different ideas, different ways of challenging what we were doing. And as they did, innovation started happening out of that because whenever we thought we had a brilliant idea, somebody would come in with a different perspective. And sometimes that perspective was not the right one and we would debate it and we would let it go. So very open, curious. And very bumpy ride.
Speaker 2 [00:11:11] Can you see future endeavors taking this same kind of multi-disciplinary thinking outside the box approach?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:11:21] By future endeavors here, you mean things I would do in the future?
Speaker 2 [00:11:26] Will you carry this idea with you, that remaining seemingly unrelated, often surprising characters into the mix will strengthen?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:11:40] I think the only way to innovate and to really break through is to bring in a large number of opposing, conflicting, challenging voices. And so bringing the way we did things, bringing that into my future work and my future path regardless, even in my personal life, as I think about openness and curiosity in of learning and expanding, I'd say it's become sort of a... It's become a way of living. And I don't think there's really any other way to stay curious and open and keep learning other than to challenge yourself. So for me, that's just kind of an operating rule. And if I was ending up in a situation where that wasn't fully endorsed and accepted, I wouldn't end up in that situation very long.
Speaker 2 [00:12:34] So it seems to me that the underpinning of our series, which is how art and science interact in the creative process, feels like it's something that's innate for you.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:12:49] You know, when I went to graduate school, actually undergraduate, when was an undergraduate, I was at MIT just when the media lab at MIT opened. And it's called the Laboratory for Arts, Media, and Sciences. And when I when back to graduate school, the first project I worked on there was a furry computer. It was actually one of the puppeteer, one of The end. From the Muppets, one of the people who made the Muffets, she designed this robot and then some technologies, put some computer equipment in it, and it was a furry computer. Then I started working with a documentary filmmaker on my master's work there, and she and I collaborated on, I was more the technology side, she was the artist and the storyteller. And ever since, there's always been an element of creativity and art in everything I do. Even to the point of, if it's not directly in the work, then I bring it in to my life on the outside, which I consider myself a fledgling artist within the realm of photography and I do that specifically to activate different parts of my brain. Different ways of thinking, different ways of seeing, different way of being. And so, yeah, it's like a hugely important part of just what the future will bring. When I was nine years old, I took the first picture that I still know, that I had, one more time. The first picture I'm aware of taking I took when I was 9 years old. And it's a beautiful, if I may say so myself, a beautiful little portrait of my mother and my infant sister at the time. And ever since I've been taking pictures. And for a long time I just did. I just took them, I collected them. And then practice of art and exploring and seeing differently eventually became more apparent why I was doing it. Why was that important? And there are several reasons, but I think very central to it is it activates a part of the way I see the world and the way think and the way observe very differently than if I'm just doing my left brain rational activity. I'm educated and an engineer. I went to MIT. It's left brain central. And so I think this has always been a way for me to bigger and more open way of seeing the world. And so, when I take pictures now, it's always about seeing something, seeing something in the light, seeing something. And I think that seeing differently and seeing more openly actually then in turn activates a a different way of seeing me in my day job, or for me to see in my job. And that synergy and that dance, it's become almost addictive to me. I can't not do it because I feel I stifle the way I kind of look at simpler problems that might otherwise, or maybe even complex problems that might need different ways of looking at them. By stepping out and focusing on my photography for a while, and focusing art in general, I find that it just... Opens my brain up and I can come back with really creative and interesting and oftentimes less attachment to what I'm trying to solve as well.
Speaker 2 [00:16:15] Can I ask you to say that again more concisely, because I was also hearing a fair amount of...
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:16:22] Say it one more time. Okay, I'll try to tighten it up a bit. I recently came across a picture that I took when I was nine years old, and it's the first one I've known. I recently came across a picture that I took when I was nine years old, it's a beautiful portrait by myself of my mother with her infant daughter, my sister at the time. And ever since I've been carrying a camera, since I was 9 years old I'm always carrying a camera with me. And what I've come to realize is that my photography is a way to see the world differently. It's a way to just stop, look at the light, look at the context of what's going on. Look for moments, look for opportunities, look for these little things that otherwise would be invisible. And I like to call my photography invisible moments because it's those moments that are there for all of us to see. But if we don't freeze them, they disappear. And in activating my brain in that way, I find myself coming to other problems, more sort of left brain problems. And being more open, being more curious, just looking at them differently as well. So I think your brain is this complex apparatus that needs to be stimulated in so many ways. And I think the way art stimulates your brain really is generative for other aspects of our life as well, personal, professional, et cetera. I don't think I heard a single cab honking. You're like, no, don't jinx it.
Speaker 2 [00:18:00] You spent 70 years at CERN, or some time at Cern, when were you there?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:18:05] I was there in 86, 87, for a little under a year.
Speaker 2 [00:18:13] What did that experience teach you? Were you involved in the arts program?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:18:29] I was at CERN in 86, 87, and I worked on a control system for the proton synchrotron. We could spend the next half hour with me explaining what that is, but that's probably not a good use of our time. So the idea was essentially to rethink. It was just when graphical user interfaces, the Macintosh, these early computers were starting to be kind of more. More visually oriented, and we were trying to basically build a system for physicists and scientists to make it easier for them to configure all their equipment that they used for their physics experiments. So in a sense it was, I mean, you could argue at some level that there was a marriage there as well of sort of visual design and creativity with, in this case, hard science because they were trying figure out how to make protons collide in a big beam hype. And they needed to control all this equipment. And to date, it had been complex computer programming exercises. And we were trying to just put a, I was trying to put a more accessible interface on that. So much like what's happened to us as consumers, where everything's just a button click and really simple, the previously was quite complicated. I was try to do that for physicists back in the late 80s.
Speaker 2 [00:19:46] So the robots have a future. And art.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:19:50] I think it's almost impossible to imagine a world where robots and art don't dance together. I think, again, I was mentioning movement and how important movement is to our emotive response and what do robots do? Well, they move, right? That's what makes them robots. And so I think that both in terms of a tool that allows us to potentially do a whole series of. Of experiments and work that otherwise would be very difficult to do, a very precise tool, a very... A very flexible tool in so many ways. I think robots are also going to be a part of art just because they can move, they can express, they will be our partners in creation in so may different ways in the future.
Speaker 2 [00:20:40] So what's that doing? We're going to want to do that one again. Let's just.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:20:44] Too much background noise.
Speaker 2 [00:20:46] Trust me.
Speaker 3 [00:20:46] I put in a bunch of mumbling and stuff. Okay, try it again. Please.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:20:51] Um. Robots and the arts, I think, will be tied at the hip, joined at the hip, whatever that term is. Robots in art are inseparable. I think the robots move. When they move, they express. They express emotions. We're going to be seeing robots as tools for artists, as expressive vehicles for artists I think all over the place. I think we just scratched the surface on it. It's just too powerful not to happen. Of course, there are also really useful tools for a painter, for example. For. For highly precisely being able to move something and take potentially AI-generated art. And we did some of that with our robots. We actually had the robots, so you could say to the robot, give it a prompt to say, go paint. I think one of the things we said was, go paint a robot family surfing in Hawaii. And the robot literally picked up a marker, went up to the board and went to an AI, a generative AI, got an image, transferred that image into something it could draw, and then would draw a picture of that on one of our whiteboards. So the expressive and creative potential is just limitless.
Speaker 2 [00:22:10] So what's next in your life? Where are you headed? What are you going to do? Tell us about your photography and.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:22:19] Friday, Sicily.
Speaker 2 [00:22:21] You started telling us about it.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:22:24] Nah, I know where you're going. One of the things, I've been through a few of these cycles in my career where something changes, right? You're on a wild horse, you're riding down, and suddenly the horse throws you, or you decide to go in a different direction than you were. So what do you do in those big changes, right, when you have these moments? It's easier to let fear be the guide, right, and say, oh, I need to find a new job. And of course, if you have a big mortgage to pay and you've got. You know, a family to support, or children, college funds to fund, there are many constraints in our lives. And if you are able to take some time when that happens, to really step back and not just stay in the program that you've been in, I think that can be very helpful. And so I'm trying to take advice for myself, give myself some advice on that. And so my next endeavor. Likely include, if not be solely focused on, a year of studying art, and specifically around my photography. But I want to study art history, I want get deeper in certain areas. I want look at generative AI and some of the artistic potential that's coming out of the AI world. And of course I want a look at photography and my own photography and deepen it. And I think by activating those neurons and by sort of shifting my perspective. I never want to have a monetary relationship with my art. I'm fortunate that that isn't necessarily my calling. I'll give away. Anybody who wants my pictures, just email me, and they can have them. What I'd like to do is to activate different ways of framing problems, different ways looking at the world. And what better way to have a different way to look at the world than through a lens on a camera. So a big part of my path this next year that I want to dedicate myself to is studying that deeper, understanding it, so that when I do whatever I do next, TBD, that practice of thinking differently and looking at world differently can be brought to bear on whatever's next. When you live in Silicon Valley. In particular, you know, there are new ideas and new inventions and new dumb ideas, new good ideas, exciting ideas every day, right? If you tap into that, if you call your friends up, they're going to tell you about them and you're going have yours and you are going to have ideafests. I think that, you know, and then there's this cycle thing, right? Right now, it's all the AI stuff, and that's become the big thing. Everybody thought, like, innovation was dead, and boom, suddenly AI happens, and there's going to be something after AI as well. I'm not too concerned about, like the next idea. There'll be many of them. I'm particularly concerned right now about our climate and what's happening. So if there is a good idea for sequestering some carbon or doing better at getting green energy out there, you know, I'm pretty excited by that. In terms of concern that the next big idea is going to pass by, no, we're only scratching the surface on good ideas. So rather stretch your brain a little bit in that sense of go see some art, go listen to some beautiful music, go take some pictures, go make something, because I think that's opens up to those ideas. It's the ability to look at the ideas and select the good ones, look at the ideas, and select the ones with potential and actually turn them into something that's generally, you know, exciting and new and useful and helpful to society. So, I'm not worried about missing out on some new idea. They keep coming.
Speaker 3 [00:26:17] Do you switch or you... No, no, no. Stay there. Did we talk about... Did you speak to Katie specifically and her part in Everyday Real West? I think we talked about art and what is generally influencing, but if you could maybe talk about Katie specifically and what you felt she was.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:26:39] Yeah.
Speaker 3 [00:26:42] And maybe how that has influenced your views going forward. Future question.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:26:52] When I was first introduced to Katie, I had been sort of putting on some feelers and saying, look, we should do this artist in residency thing, and some of the, to some of my colleagues. And then one of them one day said, I think you might want to meet this woman, Katie Kwan. And so she and I had breakfast, we recount that breakfast slightly differently, but it was very apparent to me right away that there was some special energy there and a fit and match for what we were doing while... She was studying to become, you know, studying, doing her PhD in robotics and obviously very smart and accomplished. She had also been a dancer. And so in doing all that, she brought this way of thinking about what we were doing that I hadn't heard before. And so I was, it took me about, I think, 133 milliseconds to make the decision that we needed to see if there was a way we could work together. Now we didn't have budget for this. This wasn't sanctioned, there's some kind of you know, project thing within the big organization. So I think one interesting lesson in this is these things don't happen through a normal process. You have to allow for serendipity. You have allow for the crazy. And I think with inviting Katie in, we allowed for the the crazy and it might have blown up and not worked at all, but given her particular interest in robotics, her strong artistic background, and her personality, both as a leader and a guide in this for the team. We were able to create some real magic, I think, or she was able to create some magic with the team.
Speaker 3 [00:28:29] That's great, and then I was just curious what your main focus, your main subject of your photography is.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:28:42] I shoot with a digital, but a very manual camera. So my style of photography is very observational. And even if I'm doing fine art or if I am doing landscapes, I kind of shoot as if I am doing street photography. I often shoot from down low. I shoot wide open. And I shoot the moments that, I try to capture the moments, that again other people wouldn't necessarily see. So, they're an incredible number, amount of beautiful landscape photography out there. If I do landscapes, there's going to be some angle to it that's a little different. Literally angle sometimes. I often shoot down low, so I get people from different vantage points on the pure portrait view. I was in Svalbard, an island group up north of Norway, last summer on a boat for 12 days. It was an Explorer vehicle, specifically for photography. And everybody on that boat had giant lenses. They had these 300 millimeter, 500 millimeter, giant zoom lenses. And they were all trying to take pictures of polar bears. I had my little 35 millimeter lens in my camera, so I didn't take picture of the polar bears because I knew there would be lots of those. I took picture of people taking pictures of the Polar Bears. Or of the boat and the hardware and the ice in the background. There was something different. So I like to, my photography is really about exploring sort of energy almost, dynamics. Of course the energy of light. But also the energy of people and that sort of pull and push and dynamic. And so I shoot fairly openly and then I go back and I look at what was the energy in that? What was the thing that made me look at that twice and say, oh, that's somehow interesting because it's something I haven't quite seen before. And at least that's what I try to hold myself to, sometimes creating something I hadn't seen before
Speaker 2 [00:30:32] So you're describing something that in no way a robot could replicate.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:30:40] Could a robot ever do what I do with my photography? You know, I'm afraid of the word never. It's, you know, when you see what's happening now with generative AI, when we see the learning potential of machines through the new technologies, I think they will learn to do things. And they will do things, the interesting thing about robot intelligence, or even artificial intelligence, is it's not human intelligence. Dogs are intelligent. Larvae are intelligent. Butterflies are intelligent, trees are intelligent in their own way. They have their own type of intelligence. And so artificial intelligence, robot intelligence will be different. They will do different things. Create the same pictures I do, if we give them a camera? No, but will they create interesting pictures? Will they create creative and new expressions? Absolutely. Will that help us see the world differently, perhaps, and open and expand our way of looking at the world? I think so.
Speaker 3 [00:31:43] Can I just follow up on this thought? Last question, given you're an artist and someone who works with technology, do you find a kind of similarity or difference between your approach to taking a photograph compared to your approach to developing a new piece of technology? That intuition or more strategizing, what do you think?
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:32:20] When you're innovating and developing new products, technology, capabilities in any form, I think there's a process, a multi-stage process. There's the early process of discovery where you don't really know what you're doing yet. And I think people too often rely on market studies and research and things like that. And I'm much more intuitive in that way. I sort of think of something, work with my team on something, and then we start trying it out. And there's that discovery phase where you're making and creating. It's very similar to my photography in the sense that, you know, photography is about discovery. It's about being open and looking and trying to find something that might just be interesting, literally capture a beam of light. And so the invention process is about those beams of light, it's about these moments where something gets illuminated. That's the direction. And then you're probably wrong. So you do it again, or you keep adjusting. And so in some sense, I guess there is an interesting parallel between, in my case, my artistic practice and photography, or any artistic practice, and invention and innovation, just in the sense that there's a process and you keep iterating in that process. And it applies as much to, I think, inventing products, as I was saying, as it does to capturing and creating something as an artistic expression.
Speaker 2 [00:33:46] I just want to ask one other question. This is somewhat going back over things. But to what extent does or can art inform technology? Thank you.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:34:10] How does art inform technology? I feel like... It's a process question, to a great extent. I see art as the practice of asking questions more than necessarily coming up with answers. I see Art as needing to be comfortable with open-ended questions, or not needing to. I see artists as encouraging us to be open around questions, not always looking for the answers. When we build a product, when we solve a technological Challenge. It's about locking it down and getting to clarity on, oftentimes, very complex and complicated questions. So in some ways, they complement each other. Art complements the technology development, because it just makes your brain do different things. It allows you to stay more open to the questions, maybe for longer, as opposed to try and lock it down. As an engineer, I was trained that success looks like. A very clearly defined set of repetitive capabilities and actions, as an artist you're more, again, willing to stick with the uncertainty, the discomfort of the questions that you're facing. So in that way I think the dance between art and technology is one of sort of push and pull. It's one of technologies pulling towards clarity and definition or product making or any kind of business endeavor in many ways. Art is pulling towards openness and questions and challenges and challenging us to think and observe and to even feel differently. And so those to me are, you know, if you look at the cycle of life, if we just look at the whole thing, why are we here, what are we living for, it is so much around that balance of being able to feel and experience, but then also being able at some point step in and say, OK, now we need some structure here. We need to create some solutions to these potential challenges or problems we might have. So I feel like they're kind of like dance partners in that way.
Speaker 2 [00:36:34] And Garten Science are my dance partners.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:36:39] Science, you want to say? Science maybe, or technology? Technology. Yeah. You know, we started this project with KD.
Speaker 2 [00:36:57] See you again.
Hans-Peter Brøndmo [00:37:02] I invited Katie to come be a part of Everyday Robots because I was excited by dance and movement as a way of robots expressing themselves and feeling more comfortable around people. What I came to realize in the end was that not just dance, but the arts in general and technology are really dance partners. That ability to move fluidly between the questions and the challenges posed by art and the need for certainty and definition and clarity, which is the quest of building technology, was just a perfect push-pull, yin-yang, whatever you want to call it, in terms of, yeah, dance, a dance of just these two forces, opposing forces, ultimately can create something really beautiful and illuminated in such powerful way that just can't be done without that sort of mix.
