 Welcome to the AI for Good Global Summit, and I'm delighted now to be joined by Brendan Schulman, who's with Boston Dynamics, and who are behind the famous Spot the Robotic Dog, which we'll be seeing on video here. So on a more serious point, what's the purpose of Spot the Robotic Dog? Yeah, so Spot is an inspection robot. Basically its primary use is in industrial applications. So imagine a factory that has equipment that's running all the time and that occasionally gets overheated or starts wearing out. So Spot does autonomous inspection rounds in a facility like that to figure out if there's something that needs to be repaired or maintained before there's a failure that would be very costly to that facility. Spot is also used in public safety applications. It's been used to rescue a three-year-old child who was kidnapped in a crashed car in Florida last year, and is also used for tasks like bomb disposal. OK, now Spot was taken for a VIP walk through the summit. What's the purpose for you coming to a summit like this? Is it relevant? Oh, this is a wonderful summit. There are so many questions about the capabilities of these robots, how they interact with people, what are their applications, and also the intersection of AI and robotics and the sort of merging of the technologies that we often think about as artificial intelligence, and also the robots that we've kind of come to know over the past few decades, often in science fiction movies. How do these two things relate? What are some of the concerns and issues that we need to talk about and work through together? To me, this is a great opportunity to show off the technology, hear what people think, and just interact in a collaborative way. What do they think? What do they tell you? You know, it's kind of 50-50. People think robots are creepy, and they also think robots are amazing and exciting and wonderful. And I think a lot of that comes out of science fiction portrayals of robots, particularly those that walk and interact in spaces where people live or work, and then people also see the promise and opportunities that this kind of technology will advance. So having a robot with legs is not just a theoretical experiment, it's something that is in use today. There are over 1,000 spot robots deployed around the world doing all kinds of useful sophisticated tasks like power plant inspection and public safety. So how can AI-powered robotics like yours help with the UN sustainable development goals? So the spot has what we call athletic intelligence. It understands its environment and is able to navigate over uneven terrain and up and down stairs that can even autonomously open doors. That means that a robot like Spot is very useful in an industrial facility to help modernize and improve the facility, make production more economical, make production more environmentally friendly, and also make work safer. So when we talk about people who are working in these facilities, they're often engaged in dangerous tasks, and what a robot does, especially one as capable as Spot, is it helps keep people away from those hazards. You can send the robot in to inspect a hazardous situation, maybe a chemical leak, or to engage in the kinds of labor that would be really injurious to people or potentially put them at risk of something like a fall or a confined space with chemical hazards. Interesting, and also, and we discussed a little bit before you came on, there's the safety, like you said, and the ethical issues as well. Yes, so one of our top concerns from the beginning when we started selling Spot about three years ago is that robots need to be used ethically and responsibly. And we have on our website our principles of ethics. One of the top concerns we've seen, and some of it is science fiction based, but some of it is real, is that robots might be here to be weaponized and to be deployed in communities and to harm people rather than help. We spent 30 years developing this technology to help humanity, and so we don't want to see robots being used in that way. It's both unethical and also unsafe to have robots with weapons walking around. We have seen a number of recent YouTube videos, typically the viral sensational ones, in which people have taken this kind of robot and mounted guns to them, just to sort of experiment. And we think that's deeply wrong, and we are not only prohibiting that in terms of our own policies. From the beginning, when you buy Spot, you are prohibited from weaponizing the robot or using it to harm or intimidate any person or even an animal. But we also are calling on policymakers to work with us to prohibit this kind of misuse as a matter of law. Yeah, that's what's interesting. So, because they're talking a lot about governance here. So how do you do that? It's one thing to say, you know, let's have a better world with our robots, but how do you actually make it become reality? I think you need to legislate it. So we have our own terms and conditions of sale, so we can take our own action against our customers, but that's just one company and one product. We really think that society needs to set the norms for this kind of general purpose robot and to prohibit them from being weaponized. So the way we're doing that is to work with legislators. We've started in the United States, but we would welcome collaboration with anyone around the world to establish a set of policies that would be enforceable as a matter of law that would make it illegal to mount a weapon onto a robot of this capability. Fascinating. Thanks very much. It was great to talk to you and talking about Spot as well. Thank you, Chris. So that was Brendan Schulman from Boston Dynamics. Much more on AI for Good coming up.