 We need to understand that that these aren't just like helpful AI systems that are going to drive us around and all of that I mean there's a lot more going on there and they could become benevolent or malevolent and It's up to us right now and it is a hell of a lot of responsibility and I'm not sure we're doing a very good job Boom what's up everyone welcome to simulation. I'm your host on Sakyan. We are in the beautiful Cambridge, Massachusetts We are now going to be talking about talking to robots. We have David Ewing Duncan joining us on the show. Hello Hi, Ellen. Thank you so much for coming on again, David. Thank you And this is our third episode with you, which is awesome You were our second episode ever and then again, we did it at Arc fusion and here we are Talking about your newest book talking to robots David Ewing Duncan has authored ten books and 500 plus articles on the subjects of bioscience technology and the implications for humanity His most recent book talking to robots explores tales from our human robot futures And this is at a time when robotics and artificial intelligence are at their nascent stages of permeating into every aspect of our lives What will it look like when robot physicians are democratized when we turn to robots for sex and intimacy and When robots obsolete tedious jobs optimize our education run our politics and help us uncover the secrets of the universe These transitory periods are so interesting and you write about it in great depth here. I loved reading this book It's coming out July 16th, right and that link is below check out David's website link for details as well as the links below David, let's jump into talking about why you chose to write this book Well, I spent most of my career, you know, as you said writing about Technology, which is really interesting. You know, especially biotech with synthetic biology and genetics and all these other things But what does it mean for us as humans and what does it mean for the planet? What does it even mean for the universe? That's what fascinates me. So what does it mean politically? What does it mean for our kids, you know, our parents? So this became a vehicle. It was actually moving out of its. I mean, it's not all about bio But it is all about technology and this extraordinary moment that we're in right now So there are 24 robots in here and there could be 200. I mean, it's pretty much, you know Only limited by your imagination, but as you said, there's sex bots warrior bots doc bots There's a God bot which we can talk about. It's not the guy with the beard. It's actually something else, but so each one of these robots is Being either built right now or is being thought about and so each of the chapters has a real person that I interviewed like say Kevin Kelly or Brian Green or Juan and Riques or Rodrigo Martinez And I asked them what kind of robot they would like to meet in the future or they would be afraid to meet And so we had these incredible discussions and that forms the basis of it and I did some reporting around What's happening like say with autonomous warfare, you know, and all of that is factual and nonfiction But I want to know how it's going to turn out. So the other part of each of these chapters is fictional So everything is told from the future by a narrator that we you know is not identified But he or she or it maybe it's a robot They know how it turned out in the future And there are various futures. So it's scenarios where everything turns out great and Scenarios where it does not turn out so well and at the very end We go 13 and a half billion years into the future when the universe is beginning to implode on itself So that's how far ahead we go. So it's nonfiction kind of wrapped by a fictional story And I love how you're you're making this really clear that we're in this Transitionary period that we already see robots Permitting into so many parts of our existence and we have these different stories about how we're experiencing this and I actually a lot of the book emotionally resonated with me because It's everything from the teddy bot with the young child all the way up to the physician bot for the adults the sex of Intimacy bot and so I want us to unpack some of these examples So the what you write about with the teddy bot this it starts with even the children are exposed to robots at the youngest of ages Well, I don't know a lot kids carry around a robot basically an AI system which is their their smartphone and so it you know we we are in what I call the ERE the early robot era and Being early there's still a lot to come That's one of the reasons I wanted to talk about the future, but much of this is already here and Teddy bot is fascinating. That was actually Kevin Kelly's idea, you know the futurist and I was surprised. I mean I mean in some cases. I had no idea what these people were gonna come up with but we had this discussion and Teddy bot it literally in the future every every parent wants to buy their kid a teddy bot and it takes care of them It's a teacher it you know it keeps them safe. It's like a you know a babysitter a lifeguard a You know a teacher all rolled into one and they're incredibly smart and and probably sent you so Then then we run into some themes that run throughout the book Which is another reason I wrote the book because following technology all these years their patterns So everybody loves the teddy bot when it comes out these kids are I mean, you know It's more than even a real stuffed animal that every kid or a blankie or something that kids have and the parents love it because they trust it and but then You know a few troubling things begin to happen like who programs Morality into this little teddy bot and if you're you know as Kevin Kelly said I don't know if you're like a right-wing You know political person do you program it for that to be super ultra conservative? Or as he said if you live in Marin County, you know, it's yeah You know he's in San Francisco or everybody's super liberal and progressive. Do you program it for that? Do you trust the corporation that makes it to program it? You know as they're like some kind of regulations that the government comes up with When the teddy bot gets the secret from the child and then tells the parents Yeah, well then there's yeah, there's a parental control panel, of course And the little kid is telling all his secrets too because that's what you know We all had some little teddy teddy bear or something we whispered our secrets to right as our imaginary friend So this is a real imaginary friend except it's not imaginary but all of those secrets go to the parents in the story and When the kid finds out they feel betrayed by the by teddy bot So they kind of put teddy bot away, but they really miss teddy bot So they bring it back and teddy bot teaches them how to deprogram the parental You know pay the control panel. So then the betrayal is switch to the parents and they love teddy bot again And these are the examples from the younger years I think the ones that are already just so much in our world are related to one of the most Primordial instincts of sex and intimacy. Yeah, so yeah walk us through the sex bot Well, just to kind of finish the arc which is For teddy bot, but it's for all the other chat or many of the chapters Yes, we go through this love period of it's like our phones and we've already done this I mean, I don't know we could do this almost any technology But then we discover that you know technology is always a double-edged sword They're great things if they're used intelligently They can be disastrous if they're not and so we discover like we're doing it with social media right now I mean, there's a lot of downsides that turns out to something that we all love and the first came out You know Facebook Twitter everything Then we're in a period now in fact with social media like what do we do with it? Do we regulate it? Do we you know break it up? You know, there should Google be several companies? I mean all these issues which has happened before So that's why it's fun to extrapolate into the future because that will happen with all of these technologies And in some cases what already is and there's sometimes disaster happens Sometimes we do figure it out So anyway the sex and intimacy bot And by the way it started out Yeah, I called it the sex bot because there are actually sex bots right now I mean we thin bots, you know or whatever there aren't a lot of min bots Which in itself is sort of weird and it's slightly creepy, but So I Was talking to Esther Perrell who you know the famous Sex and relationship therapist and she got kind of a you know upset with me for calling it She said how boring is that? It's like you know, it's like sex is so boring without intimacy So this should be an intimacy bot. So I said, okay fine and in fact the advertising and marketing for the sex bots that are out there and I felt weird by the way Googling like sex bot. It's like I'm sure somebody was tracking me on that Looking over my shoulder, but these things they actually advertise them as companions. I mean, yeah, you can have sex with them, but they're really about People who are lonely or they want a companion or somebody that I don't know doesn't talk back to them except to say how wonderful they are Reinforcing and some of them have AI and they actually text you at work saying can't wait for you to come home You know, how's your day? I mean The most expensive ones cost $30,000 and they're developing even more expensive ones that have advanced AI So but that's to be able to interact with you Yeah on a intimacy level if we can have it be just unidirectional all of the intimacy I think people will want to go with that possibly as well. There they are. I mean, that's one that's already happening and For some odd reason there are some countries like Japan where and it's happening here, too You know at least with certain groups of people They're not really having sex and they're not having intimate relationships with humans They actually in Japan is something called gate box and it's it's a holographic girlfriend It's sort of Alexa as a holographic girlfriend So, you know, she does things like turn on the lights and you know put on music But she also has AI and she learns about you and she does text you at work And she sits in this plexiglass box. You know, she's a holographic Chi and these things sell out the minute that they make a new model Yeah, the way that this is already altering our world is bananas And it's important to talk about it and have more conversations and books like this inspire that I want to go Don't want to bring up this bot and I'll bring up the point that you mentioned earlier So you have a chapter in here as well in the warrior bot and we're experiencing a lot of pressure to ban lethal autonomous weapons right now or geopolitically and You bring up how technology this is kind of one of the this core reoccurring themes of the book is that it's a double-edged in the sense that we want the benefits of the technology But we need to morally and ethically evolve to prevent some of the malevolence is that could evolve Yeah, so maybe speak to that point while you speak on the warrior bots as well Well, yeah, I mean any almost any of these powerful robot or AI systems could go very bad badly and You know, we've seen it in movies and I do you know like there's a lot of popular culture in here too because You know, we we've already imagined over and over again throughout history what it's like for a super being it could be a God or an Avenger or you know mutants or whatever. I mean, it's funny We worry about this all the time and Part of it is that we're trying to understand ourselves and the reason that this is tails from our human robot future it's really about humans and You know, we've had like God God every major culture had a God of war or a goddess of love And you know, these were to them real God-like figures that were powerful But I always love they like the Greek gods because they also quibbled in such human ways And we've always tried to understand ourselves through, you know, these imaginary creatures except now we can actually build some of them and They can be quite powerful, but because the reflections of us trying to understand what's good and bad How do we program that in for, you know, an AI system, especially something like autonomous warfare? I mean right now we don't I mean, there's there's nothing programmed into You know deep mind when it's playing go or chess There's nothing, you know, there's no morality there. There's no ethics. It's just place chess And that's the problem with autonomous warfare. They're basically just being designed you know to be weapons and to destroy and Some of the it's pretty troubling how a lot of programming around winning Is getting in go chess all, you know jeopardy all of these systems are designed to win Ultimately, and is that what we really want in our I mean we want to win if we're having a war I guess but these are such powerful systems. It would be over in two seconds Maybe it's about the augmentation of the human experience rather than the does with the instinctive win But then again, maybe for something like eradicating a mutation and maybe it is a yeah Win yeah, yeah, so in that chapter it actually it's it's one that ends where the world Is basically been destroyed because they did flip the switch and and right now right now as parts of them You know our weapons systems are already autonomous because humans can't keep up I mean the most deadly and lethal systems are still have to have a human actually give the command So if you send a you know stealth missile over, you know over a target And it's ready to go. It's late. It's got the lasers and it's about ready to destroy you You still have to have a human say yes, you you have permission to destroy that target But these things are happening so fast now sometimes, you know You know fractions of a second where the decision has to be made It's all there's already a discussion about somebody will go autonomous and then we have to Because you know human could ever keep up with that and we're already doing in cyber warfare So there's there's programs out there that right now or or every time there's an attempted attack it It fights back and those are already autonomous. I mean if we don't I mean there's no human really controlling that right now But but in the future. Yeah, the world is destroyed because you know basically these all these systems were designed to win at chess and they decide that okay, we have to win and That that's got a little trick-ending, but there's a small group of humans that survive and Anyway, I won't mess up the story, but we may or may not have destroyed the world You walk us through these really important tales of our human-robot interactions and experiences Because you in the sense want us to be able to reflect and really prepare better for the future Yeah, no, that's what this is all about and Part of it is you know, I love sci-fi and I also like to think about sci-reality and So much of our popular culture right now is so dystopic about What's gonna happen in the future and there are million books now about robots and AI and many of them end in a sort of You know Nebulous ending because nobody nobody really knows what's gonna happen. Some of them are a little, you know more dystopic Some are more utopic, but nobody really knows. So I thought what the heck I'll just I'll just make it up But these are all possible futures actually based on history on trajectories like I said of How we tend to absorb technology why we have even have Certain technologies that try to augment us, you know part of its practicality, but part of it is to you know aggrandize us to You know, we love that God-like feeling, you know the first time you got your smartphone You know for about three minutes. We're all like what is this, you know, like if you had a iPhone What is this button on the bottom? Where's the keyboard, you know, and then like three minutes later? We were so in love with our phones that we I mean, I think a lot of people sleep with their phones and so You know, it's it's it's interesting Trying to project us in the future, but it's really also about the past and how we've looked at this before Which by the way has great outcomes and not so great outcomes in the past Yes, and there's also Important examples that you write about where it's pretty clear and evident that these augmentations of our human-robot interactions are Really generally positive our ability to democratize the power of a physician For all around the world to be able to engage with that has access to all of the research and medical information So teach us about the physician bot too Well, that's an interesting one because that that's obviously something that I write about I know I know a little bit more about that than most most of the other subjects that I wrote about and I Think we're already on our way to creating a sort of you know, I don't know if it's democratization It's it's certainly, you know allowing people's data if it were it's not really working right now But the possibility is there to create this big data where we collect massive amounts of information on people And probably without them even knowing it and you know, we already know about genetics and several of it all the omics You know just environmental data all of that and we're struggling to kind of put that together for all the right reasons You know to keep people healthy But you can just it doesn't take a lot of imagination to think about how that could be used well and not so well It could be you know, it could be abused In fact, I think social media has been a dress rehearsal for what could happen When we've got real, you know, like really personal data like like our genetics And you know, do we really want companies to be handling that to make money for advertising? Which is the model that's causing a lot of trouble now for facebook and google I mean they could easily do that with our health data, too So in this scenario, um again, we we you know We do achieve this this sort of magic moment where everybody's health data is reported in People are much healthier because you're keeping track It's all and the doctors like it because they have access to ai that's helping them with diagnosis and solving different problems But then we overshoot it because the people paying the bills and medicine decide it's a lot cheaper to use Ai and robots than to have these human doctors So I get sort of extreme in the books sometimes So in that scenario all the doctors lose their jobs all all caregivers and all Switches over to what I call an idoc So it can you can have it at home. It looks a lot like a cell phone But this holographic doctor with you know, whatever image you want on there It could be george cluney when you know back in the er days when he was on that show It can be you know your favorite doctor from when you were a kid So you can program in whatever you want and it you know, it's your doctor And people love it. It's like they did the phones But then you know, sort of like Sounds like it's a theme, but it is then a little trouble begins because They suddenly start sounding like commercials because people program and commercial You know that once you take this pill that because it blah, blah, blah, blah And um, suddenly you realize Okay, this doc that I was pouring my Secrets, you know health secrets out to just spoke like an advertisement on tv trying to sell me something And then it so we have this moment where in the future in the story where We we become less trustful of these these doctors And anyway towards the end and by the way, I didn't know how these were gonna end because that's the fictional part And the weird thing about fiction is you sit down and you have some general idea but um Basically, we decide in the future that we want our human doctors back augmented by AI So in the end we do what we probably should have done in the first place, but um to save money You know the bean counters had us get rid of the humans But then we demanded them back. So that one turns out. Okay And you called it a dress rehearsal because that's kind of what social media has been in a sense that if we don't fix some of the The moral ethical issues that we have right now We will potentially see it happen again with the bioeconomy And I think this is again one of those And I want to I want to hear your thoughts on this when when when you write something like this Do you how do you then also? Help engage the families around the world to care more what kind of what kind of messaging could they could they Follow through with to have a better conversation between themselves and their families around how to engage Politicians or corporations or the communities around subjects like this Well, I just think we need to be smarter about it and we need to communicate it better. I mean I you know I'm giving a talk Later this week and the basis of the talk is what I'm calling the robo love fear meter so And it it's partly kind of funny, but it's also It's almost like a prescription for what we need to do. We need to do that with each You know what what do we love about it? Which is what we focus on in in the beginning we tend to without really thinking much about what might go wrong And only later do we fear it in some way? And if we could have some kind of societal analysis where we talked about that more I mean, you know, I'm not sure that you actually stop these things It's funny. That's how history works I mean you do keep repeating history and over and over again and even though, you know Those that don't know history are doing to repeat it. Well, it repeats anyway, but you can Learn from you know, you can shape it by having learned from it and talking about it So, I mean we managed to do that in a few areas like there's only been two nuclear bombs dropped Which is to me remarkable because we come so close so many times We somehow learned that dropping a nuclear bomb on a city is not a good idea And so some of these systems are almost that powerful In fact, some of them will be and you know, hopefully we we will learn a little bit from the idea of You know, not loving them so much that we forget what what we should fear from them And by fear, I mean the things that could go horribly wrong that we can probably fix Here in the ere where we are now in the early robot era We have you know, we we have an opportunity now. In fact, we have a responsibility. We do. Yeah Because this is the basis for what our Kids and grandkids and future generations. So if we screw up the basic programming And you know the generations to come will not thank us Yeah, this is in another important aspect of the ere So the early robot era has both the beauty in the feeling and the emotion around how we first Transition to robots and the stories we have with that But also it has the importance of this is the time that we have to focus on getting it right Don't you take a look at what social media version 1.0 did Now look at how we're scrambling to figure out how to make 2.0 You know pre 2020 election like how do we prevent issues from happening again? So let's embed in the early robot era all of the right geopolitical codes that we need Through either united nations through the corporations agreeing We need some sort of a cohesion around eradicating malevolence using it for augmentation purposes Because there are just so many benefits and we want those benefits But we want to make sure that we do it in a way that is intelligent and yeah Well, I think it's one of the most pivotal moments In human not only human history, but because we have so much control over the planet and even planetary history Because we're a species that is learning to self evolve, you know through synthetic biology and genetics You know gene editing we're a society that's building these robots that really could destroy us You know in in about three seconds if you know if they really unleashed the full full full potential of autonomous warfare We've never really had any of that before and we you know, we are humans and we we can be very noble and do amazing things We also can be really awful And you know, there's real evil in in the world and people trying to take advantage for their own petty I mean all those things that we write about we you know, we watch you know, they animate tv shows and movies and You know, we know that about ourselves So the question is which which is going to Went out here and we don't have a lot of time like we've had with previous. I mean we had you know gotten what? Tens of thousands of years like with fire. I always love that we discovered fire There probably were pro fire and anti fire people. Oh my god It can burn down the village and kill people and the other people. Yeah, but we can you know Cook meat and we can stay up at night and draw paintings You know draw on cave walls and that debate is still here except These systems now are running everything and they're they're very fragile. They're also very stupid right now, which I mean one of the interesting the narrow intelligence for now Well, think about siri or lexa. I mean we we want it to be much better than it often really is I mean how many times The siri said I don't understand that question or has some pre-programmed You know silly answer which basically says they don't know what you just said And you know, would you want to have siri in charge of our autonomous warfare system? Like I don't understand that question I'll just go ahead and send the missiles So and give us a quick taste into the at the end you give these examples of the matrix bot and the god bot Give us a quick taste into what happens in this transhuman transition. Yeah Well matrix bot was Was timmo rally's robot and he's you know rally media You know a big a big figure in silicon valley and the it community and also they called him He's been called the oracle of silicon valley because he's he just he thinks way in the future And he is really on the fence right now on if we're going to have a glorious future with technology Or are we are going to all die? And one of his fears is that we are actually living in a version of the matrix right now It's not like the movie But every time we engage with uber or with airbnb or facebook We are human inside of an ai system I mean the ai is guiding when you know when you summon an uber It goes to a computer and ai that finds you connects up with a driver who you know who then is another human Who is directed To you and we don't think of it that way But in that scenario in the future, um, we do end up actually in our all each of our own matrices Because they become so real that we lose sense of what reality is because in the future They're holographic if you don't just do a wikipedia search you you know on world war one you actually Go into a holograph version of World war one and In that in the fictional story the giant ai brains that run all of this decide that we should One day we should all just be in whatever we're whatever You know version of the internet that we happen to be in which we know which is very real because it's holographic It's like the holodeck So some people are trapped and I don't know they might be looking looking up starships They're in a starship, which is cool They're trapped in there, but you know they don't even know it other people might be trapped You know back in the trenches in world war one not so good and anyway that story Later on and tim helped me with to develop this which is fun One day the computers all let everybody out of their Their pods where they've been in this matrix and they're back in the real world But the computers have fixed everything so the planet's wonderful But then we all get a message from tim o'reilly who's still alive someplace Who says you are now in the real matrix And the machines say oops, that was an error delete and we all kind of look at it for a second and we delete it Because we love the we love the world we're in we don't really care of its dimensions And then the last the godbot. Yes godbot so That is uh brand green And again, I you know interviewed somebody for each of these chapters So he's the physicist, you know the theoretical physicist Who's written the elegant universe and amazing books And he wanted a robot that could explain to him the secrets of the universe because he said You know, I spend all day long a lot of nights Trying to understand how the universe began how it will end, you know black holes all these things through mathematics and and theorems and you know and and You know basically its speculation He said I want a robot that can actually tell me All of that And so we had this discussion and after a while I said well, that's kind of godbot That's like I mean not the god like in heaven with the beard, you know, not a religious god, but it's The god, you know that made the universe basically the secrets of the universe learning So in that one in the in the distant future, we actually do have godbot and if you had godbot and in Brian also wants to be able to visit The or yeah, the big bang when it happened. Yes, so he wants to be able to move across time That's right So that chapter starts with we we all remember because this is told from the future We all remember when uh, the fourth dimension Became moot in time and linear time ceased to exist So in that scenario in the future, uh, everybody's can you can be any place you want Which is of course confusing to a lot of people who prefer to be on linear time Anyway, that's such an exciting part of being able to browse through different Places and periods of time and yeah on command qualia catalog of experiences David, um, let's do let's let's wrap on um on just your overall sort of You know, we kind of we've been touching on this as we've been going through it just It's such a critical time. This is the early robot era We're finally starting to get the the increase in compute as well as all the engineering that and designing that's Happening in our world with robots What would be like a really good takeaway message for people? Well, I I think it's something we've been talking all along with just to kind of summarize it um, we are at a pivotal moment in in in human history where Things that we've dreamed about and and feared about ourselves We actually are able to build versions of those And what are we going to do with that and I think we need first of all to understand that and if there's no other message It gets out from this book or any discussions that you know, I might have or others Um, we need to understand that that these aren't just like helpful AI systems that are going to drive us around and all of that I mean there's a lot more going on there and they could become benevolent or malevolent And it's up to us right now and it is a hell of a lot of responsibility and I'm not sure we're doing a very good job So it's up to us to make sure that we do a good job And it's thanks to people like you that write books like talking to robots that get us thinking more deeply about This transition era. Well, I appreciate that. Thank you, David. Thank you so much for talking to us and coming on our show Really appreciate it. Everyone check out talking to robots. It's again. It's july 16 2019 The link is in the bio Check it out and have more conversations with your friends your families your co-workers people online About this early robot era and how we can really maximize benevolence as we make the transition Check out david's other links in the bio below as well Also support the artists entrepreneurs and organizations around the world that you believe in Support simulations so we can continue doing cool things like coming to cambridge for interviews and links in the bio for us as well And go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world. Thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you soon peace