welcome to the science for the public lecture series science for the public is an organization committed to bringing the science information to the general public this is our website good evening i'm a van stat for science for the public and i welcome you to contemporary science issues and innovations tonight the subject is robots as robots become an important part of modern life there is concern about some of their potential uses and the prospect of their autonomy to clarify the role and capabilities of robots we're most fortunate to have david mendell of the massachusetts institute of technology an expert in several areas of robotics plus author of several popular books on the subject dr mendell is a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and also the didna professor of the history of engineering and manufacturing at mit he has twenty five years of experience as an engineer an undersea robotic exploration including many oceanographic expeditions and also as a pilot an engineer of autonomous aircraft because he emphasizes the social and cognitive aspects of the relationship between humans and the field of robotics he brings a unique perspective to the science dr mindell has degrees in literature and in electrical engineering from yale university and a doctorate in the history of technology from mit he's a senior member of the institute of electrical and electronics engineers  triple an associate fellow of the american institute of aeronautics and astronautics and a fellow of the explorers club of new york city dr mendell is the author of several award winning books for the general public and the most recent of those books is the focus of tonight's discussion for titles and other information about his other books please see tonight's event page on our website it is a great honor to welcome to be here and i am looking forward to learning all about robots tonight the first thing is this kind of issues will start with a little bit of background if we could there are several concerns about robots and one of those is that it will replace human labor and other is robots in the uses for war and another one is that we will merge humans and robots in some way first off what about cuban said labor well we've had a complicated relationship with our machines for a very long time around the issue of labor what you find with robots is that as you found with mechanized machines before them rarely do they simply to come in and do a human job and replace that job they always come in and change the nature of the job change the nature of task rearrange the people around and the robots themselves are of course put there by other people so they're always embedded in these kind of social relationships around work which isn't to say that people aren't displaced here moved  around in certain places they certainly do lose their jobs other places there are more jobs around these things you have to always look at them as part of a larger system right so presumably humans would move off to new kinds of work war very interesting topic i've studied war for my whole career it's an extreme environment the book is really about extreme environments warfare like space flight has always been an advanced user of their knowledge so there are lessons that have been learned in these extreme environments about how robots are used how they change the nature of the work how they play out that are useful to think for thinking about robotics and more every day life in the in the years to come at the same time or as a place where there are life and death is that stay at the professional identities are very strong the ethical questions are very strong so again a lot of aspects of daily life are sort of heightened and brought to their extreme and it's a good place to study and also very important topic for the world that we live in right now there's a lot of kids i've been their organizations getting started now two very prominent scientists like stephen hawking are even worried about this  what are their concerns do you can you say what it is that makes people anxious about well there's a kind of cultural mythology of killer robots yeah which has been around for a how do you kind of negotiate that so you know how could you possibly unleash a decision to kill other people to a machine that you don't entirely understand what it's going to do that's a very important topic at the moment u s military policy is not to do that here and to keep the human somewhere in the approval chain which i think is very important and there are some forces pushing to change others resisting that even within the military so and then there's the kind of larger social question of what is warfare really about where is it really kind of legitimate warfare to just unleash machines but maybe that's ok if the machines  alive today in our country and in our town who may not be if it weren't for a robot helping out with some of the tasks in the recent wars that our countries fought so i it's a and and the in political and military environment we're in constantly changes so the robots that evolved in the last force won't be the ones that evolved in the next wars i right probably come back to this in a little while because you said some very interesting things in this book about it but i'd like to then ask just of this other concern i'm not sure whether it's always concerned the merge of our minds with robots and that goes certainly way back what do you think about that the oceanographic world and people would always there was a lot of talk about them like robots but in some way they were most like telescopes when working well if if our users who are mostly scientists were talking about the robot then we have failed as engineers which wasn't the job we want of the scientists talking about the ocean that the robot was just a way of them to look around in the ocean that's when we succeeded when the robot became invisible and just like a kind of appendage that you saw th and there are many many uses of robots that are very productive that way exactly i mean that's a major point in your in this particular book i think but one of the concerns has been well it's not always concerned if there are some people like well i think you know i'm shot for people who think that our entire being exists within our heads that's one way to approach it i think even in the last thirty years since a lot of those ideas first formed we've come to different notions about and different notions about cognition to begin with that cognition is a lot less separable from the body then people had used to think that the mind is not some pure machine right it just happens to live in a body that how we  process the world has very much to do with both our bodies and our brains on the one hand secondly that actually also cognition is something that is not locked within the skin but is distributed through social network and that is an idea called distributed cognition yet i find very compelling that in many cases the cognition that you find that's real the interesting important is the one that's done within groups of people and even for the sort of things i'm interested in groups of machines people and it's the sum total of those that does the thinking yeah what's interesting right into these world you know there was the kind of classic deep blue vs kasparov yes you know the pure brain versus the pure computer but in today's world the the best chess player is a person with a computer yeah more several people with several computers that's the best chess player we can think of and i think that analogy extends to a lot of others as well  related to the senses on the body and a lot of cognitive processing happens both in both of those stems and that also that it's very distributed interactive and and often sometimes even difficult to to figure out where the borders are between linked entities right it's very interesting if you make this differentiation and i hope you'll do a book on this in this book you have started out you started out with three myths and it sort of sets up the whole theme of the really useful it's a very useful way of thinking so the three of them one was the myth of linear vehicles still a lot of people called the miracles or human occupied vehicles like cars today and that the way that then technology would move toward remotely operated vehicles which was a human going through some kind of communications link and operating remote control and then toward autonomous vehicles and that this idea of the autonomy is vehicle that operated completely on its own was somehow the highest expression of technology and that technology was naturally moving along that progression and i certainly believe that and i got involved in operating remote vehicles and and beginning some of the early autonomous vehicles in the ocean it was very exciting and what we found over time though was that that was not a linear the sea floor and that that they've been operating that since one nine hundred sixty four and it's still there and they're remote vehicles are thomas vehicles they're all operated together and actually they're mixed in those operations in very interesting and it's even harder to draw those lines where you can see there are all different kinds of interesting hybrids and those hybrids are operating together so plus the autonomous vehicles and this gets to the third m social work environment and that that's actually the heart the most challenging problem not that we're kind of naturally gravitating towards this idea of full autonomy but rather that operating within a human environment  beautiful balanced kind of trusted way is actually the hardest and the most interesting and i think the most worthwhile problem and then you call this such a complimentary kind of relationship that as it has become indispensable in many many kinds of the many kinds of work so it terms of the myth of replacement then we were not going to be replaced is that the idea well you know in in many cases i think the people are often moved around sometimes through the other end of a telemetry link or through a computational system or human intentions or bedded in software but there are always people in these systems if you know how to look so we're not going to be replaced in the complete sense and then you are concerned that there this idea of full autonomy is all so you call it that sense you know right i think it's a myth that it's somehow the highest expression of the i simply yes i think full autonomy is something that is very interesting op to think with it's a very good research problem it looks very nice people who work in laboratories because it's almost always robots operating in a kind of manufactured environment that's free of a lot of different interferences and what i saw in the  thirty or forty examples in the book of as robots moved from the laboratory into real environments the human embeddedness is gradually kind of added in and so time after time you see these ideas over going to build this fully autonomous vehicle it's unmanned and then gradually as it gets it still does really interesting things there's still legitimate robots they still operate but either the autonomy is bounded in time where it is relatively short lived or it's bounded in space and and there's a lot of discussion about sort of how that works and so you know if you think about airplanes which something i were yeah the fully autonomous airliner takes off from an airport flies through some airspace you know maybe even avoids a thunderstorm in some weather and then lands at another airport if we solve the problem that's a ten years ago maybe even twenty years ago that problem is is put to bed for an airliner to take off from an airport that other people are using carry people fly over people's houses and other people who are on the ground fly through airspace that other airplanes are using landed another airport that people are using that's a tremendously challenging problem we've only begun to think that through that ok so the autonomy the full autonomy is sort of suburban environment for drive in a crowded messy urban environment right a lot of people around and you're deeply embedded in social networks we're only beginning to think that one through ok there's a lot of hype about  autonomous car and had to make a fine point about that that it's it's really complicated if you are you do have a social basis when you're driving in an urban environment period right and we're not is a question of time before robots will be learned like humans what's the story on that do robots learn ten robots learn like humans learn well that's very complicated question and i'm not sure on the best person to i certainly can't resolve it there are some amazing things in machine learning and deep learning would people have called lately where robots and other kinds of ai systems can draw on large databases and begin to distinguish things but they're still very specialized applications where there's a tremendous amount of human set up and human selection of the data and you know there is one good example where you can go out and you can train an algorithm on the internet to look at millions of pictures and pick out school buses ok and people have done that and they can say you know this is a school bus there's a school bus  but somebody else is shown once you take that algorithm that's been trained it's very easy to fool it into thinking it sees a school bus by giving it a little mix of yellow and white and black stripes and a wheel here and there and something that a human would never think  a social product right any kind of data that's out there has been created selected and other things have been eliminated by a person so there is no kind of neutral data in that sense and any scientist actually knows that because secure rich woman product and good data is a great human problem so even if you have an algorithm that learns through data data has to come from somewhere it's sort of selected that way actually in the book i make a point of saying i make no claim about whether these systems are intelligent or not i don't get into the debate about intelligence but i do say is there not in humans still very shaped by human thoughts about what the thing might be good for what the data is good for who might be using it what the task is and if those things are well crafted they can work for well i'd like to go to your very rich experience with robots  line one of the first remote robots certainly probably the first remote robot that was designed explicitly to do science in the deep ocean with gold jason and then kind of followed jason through it mature ration process and teething pains over the course of that decade with many other wonderful colleagues and engineers down there and this is you know that experiences shape my whole career in my scholarly work since then there were scientists who said you can never send a robot to the deep ocean it could never do oceanography where you know we have to be there only people can do if not a fee and they were right about that and nobody really ever claimed a robot was going to do any science yeah the robot was down there collecting data the robots didn't replace the scientists in any stretch robots turned out to be very good at digitizing the sea floor and collecting a lot of data  analyze in the way that they typically did back at their labs or by looking at a map and so there was very interesting debates about do you really need to physically visit the sea floor to be a real oceanographer was things evolved in ways that i found completely surprising for example the initial story about the robots was they were going to be cheaper and they were going to be safer and they turned out not to be cheaper and then not to be safer they were cheaper injury and the robots you know we had a cable that had thirty thousand pounds of tension on it than twenty five hundred volts on it and going into a big vat of salt water known as the ocean was a particularly safe thing and there were all these kind of hidden dangers  but what the robots did do was totally transform the experience of exploring the sea floor rather than just three people going in alvin and nine in the morning coming up at five o'clock telling everyone what they saw now you had forty people in a room in real time kind of exploring together yes the social experience was what changed and the kind of real time seminar of exploration changed radically and was very rich and  that's again where the robots didn't replace the people in that sense at all really change the task the social dimensions of the experience and at the time we were looking at pretty crappy video by day standards but boy how they w people watching that crappy video you were transported to the sea floor and you really felt like you were there right then there were limits to that feeling of presence to and that was a remarkably rich thing to go through and  gradually then i started to see other fields go through similar where they realize that remotely operated systems are not scary killer robots they're still operated by people and they transmit people through wires to entirely new experiences and has its pros of it has its cons and there's a set of phenomenon that go around long but it also opened up information that would have been certainly problematic in terms of  of obtaining right as i was thinking of the deep sea stuff you know because you can't always measure everything it's incredibly hot or incredibly dark or all those things and now it's wide open we're much more much more open to be there were you know shipwreck sites that actually there were archaeologists who said you can't do archaeology with a robot and we said you know a diver is never going to go three thousand feet down yeah i'm just not going to do it so it's this or nothing and that in that case  excavated sort of extract the entire thing from yeah so that's one area you did a lot well you've done so many things how about the space exploration part is that changed radically from i'm thinking of like the mars exploration and so on what's your take on well what this is what you have to remember book of the moore's rovers and i think there's a lot of things that are common with the work we experience undersea one of the big really detailed studies of how the mars rover scientists work and they end up with a very strong sense of presence in the action landscape and you think that would be impossible with a twenty minute time delay and yet they again partly because of the social nature of their work and the way they will work through the robot again the robots on mars don't do any geology right they're not robot geologists and he had their tools of human geologists on the earth that you know they have a little bit of autonomy features they'll do go here and there but they're very much under the command and returning their data to humans on the ground right and so you know that's also a very rich story it's not exactly the same but there are a lot of very common elements to our remote experience and once again that it simply opens up a world that you are more limited in actually if you're there because it's a this as you say are just amazed and it changes their perspective substantially evidently they would want to do it let's point in pasadena they would live for months and they would go to work yeah on mars every day isn't that amazing and and the only and the most jarring part of that was driving back and forth from their home to the control room and there's some similar things in oceanography where i've had colleagues now who have worked remotely from a studio not so different from this that bob ballard runs in rhode island with supposedly auton but really remote vehicle on the other side of the world and my friend said you know the only thing they didn't get right about that arrangement they should have had bunk bunk beds in the studio because the problem that was military things and i've studied the you know the well the first book i wrote actually was about the civil war and how ironclad warships which were in some ways even getting the roads ok change the experience of warfare for people i think the the predator and reaper drones are really like that term for them but that were used in iraq and afghanistan and are still used today had a similar effect on people yeah they're operated they were originally operated from relatively nearby but it of what they have all to the point where they're operated from the continental united states yeah even though they're flying on the other side of the world and that whole story is a very rich interesting story again the engineers who designed the thing man to do it would be a fully autonomous robot do you really give it much of a ground station why would you need an operator console for something that's on manned and turned out to be used in an entirely different way and it was really the users in the field under the pressure of war yet acutely after nine eleven that modified the system in such a way that it has a much much more complex ground station now than it did when it came out from the manufacture and there are upwards of one hundred fifty people more than one hundred fifty people that are required to operate it the air force actually banned the term and manned  did as armchair nintendo hurrell sometimes they're treated as sort of callous remote you know button pushing killers when the actual experience they have is a very unusual one where they're very you know they sit in  observe a house for a week at time yeah and then maybe kill the people who are coming in and out of the house because they have a very intimate portrait of the warfare they're fighting their heads and their eyes are much closer involved than pilots w flying aircraft above the battlefield who may just see it a set of targets at the same time their bodies are not physically exactly you don't get medals they don't get combat pay i but they do operate six days a week twelve hour weeks on these incredibly long shifts without the sort of well defined deployment of going overseas for six braai coming back it's raw it's a very different experience so it's very stressful in many respects i can appreciate that said you know my my my my buddies from from training you know mock me as an armchair warrior and i say to them how many of you have watched a group of people for a week have killed them then watched their funeral and killed all right they don't have you know they're really not in physical danger they to have to leave their trailer you know drive i rue the suburban streets and go live with their families right that's not that new of experience compared to pilots have always live come out now that it is very stressful but it is a different experience from the typical yeah holds good old kind of thing you know it's an evolved again since nine eleven an environment where there there are never enough aircraft there's never enough there's a huge demand for the imagery they're generating yeah there aren't enough operators there's not a well defined it's but it's better now but training and rewarding career for motion systems so the whole thing as it has been forced to evolve under the stresses of these two wars and other wars that we're right fighting and you know you could say well maybe they could organize it differently it would be stressful that may be the case but it hasn't been done that way so so yeah very interesting story the book has an account of it that was written by a ph d student of mine who is an air force officer who had a great deal of access to how these things are  study this yeah you know a military is a place where you have state controlled fighting and dying yeah and you know human societies have developed very strong social traditions over many centuries to control the stresses and excesses of those experiences that's why the military is organized and almost literally has a different set of laws from civilian world and the professional identities are it still goes wrong every once in awhile and so the there's and there's a lot of professional pride around that and those things are all called into question when the physical body is not at risk  fight and and that's really what's it's it's a social upheaval yeah in the air force particularly but in other services too that is only barely being dealt then i kind of went into this ten years ago thinking it's the the fighter pilots with the white scarves who are now i don't want to give up anything up and it's a lot richer story than actually that kind of resistance is is relatively small part of the story so but it's changing the way we do things now what's the area of these robotic uses that being there in rescue there in mining there are all kinds of things in our lives today but in your mind is there any area that is of particular interest particularly rich potentially yeah i mean i think that there's a lot of people thinking about this but again what interests me is not full autonomy but what i call situated out i mean the autonomy within a human social environment rather i mean warfare like it or not is a human environment and so there's a lot of camaraderie but conflict is a social relationships that whether it's a factory whether it's an airport whether any logistics center whether it's a highway how do you make these systems work where people can understand how they behave feel that they can trust them at least understand them well enough to know whether they're doing something brilliant or they're broken that i you know real problems it's not easy to figure out that sometimes  and engineering that relationship is really the challenge and again if i look at the fields of computer science and robotics as it's traditionally defined they're not even working on those problems they're working on problems environments and relate to people and at least don't get in the way and maybe someday actually participate in human relationships of all the things that you know  that it is complimentary this is where it is you said robotics engineers are still what i want same with very mechanically oriented this way and not looking at this will we proceed to start looking at this it's much more interesting that's what i'm trying to do yeah and i think you know you know there's a lot of people out there for example where we're going to solve the problem of human robot collaboration here's our new robot yeah ok and you're not going to solve the problem of human robot collaboration to just building a new robot right you're going to have to really engineer this this equation shift in one way and that requires different kinds of people with different kinds of skills people with robotics and technical skills too but also you know social scientists and organizational scientists people understand how to study work people who understand the sort of main work places are like have studied that for a long time and a lot of that thinking is not very well incorporated into the kinds of robotic systems that are getting made today so one of the things that really interests me is how do you really begin to my earlier books starting with norbert wiener and so i had if you i mean much earlier than him about really trying to think about machines in relationship to people and how you engineer people that marvin minsky who you mention is people are all kind of part of that tradition the pure you know some people find that very compromised i find it exciting yeah well that that it is true they say somebody said that that's one place where you could have anarchy everything is just fine you can automate education through our computers and video right and we're learning the limits of that as we go so it's a constant kind of back and forth right and you've been so innovative all your career you've done so many broadly speaking our goal is again to figure out how to design robots and robotic systems that are oriented around humans and the kind of integrity of human work and how to strengthen and relate to the people doing that kind of work that they're very good at automating people in there have been automating people out right and so we're we're building some very innovative sensors out of new kinds of electronics that will allow again these relationships to be better understood but we also have you know organizational experts and human experience to but rather really engineering a core of the robots to fit within the human work systems and you know that's a big job that's a big topic but there's a great need for yeah and one of the things we're finding is that a little bit of it goes a really long way right so we don't claim to have all this figured out it's a very long project to get it but boy if you just think about who your users are a little bit yeah you build a much better robot than a lot doing people much easier time relating to various interests around but most distant that are built they don't do that right we're familiar with that that's that's absolutely true and keeps hitting a block but it seems like so how old in but we're we're moving along great guns and it's very exciting and here in attempt to you know the book sort of ends with a description of this is how the world is today there are some things we've seen that i think are right some things i think are less good and let's let's figure out how to do how to do it for the future and you know how do we begin to tackle this big problem and really get ease some of this unease yeah  do that by being transparent and recognizing that robots are human products yeah and that they may not always have the right answer yeah the person who's on the front line who's rear end is on the line who's the one who's in the environment about your background you done so many interesting things i wish we could cover more of it but you have an interesting academic background where you started out with two different  things tell us about that please oh well i was always just interested in i'm a real aleck trickle engineer i love electronics i like building electronics i like building computers and that interest has never left me and i always knew i wanted to major in electrical engineering when i was in college and at the same time i also have always loved literature and stories and mythology and and so i ended up doing a double major in college and literature and and interesting thing about building a company actually is a lot of storytelling and of all interest the book is really about how do we tell stories about people and if there's one thing you can say about a story it has a protagonist and a protectionist is either a person or some being who behaves like a person and but as we are changing the way we think about who people are and changing the way we think about who robots and things are you have to think about telling different kinds of stories warfare may not be a heroic story and one that the traditional i mean heroism is actually a theme that runs through every single book i've written going back to just of campbell really which i was reading in high school which is kind of to me the birth story the heroes develop yeah and the way that the hero relates to the world and goes through trials and ends up at some new destination and if any thing robots challenge that we heard of and i want to got try to figure out what the new narrative this is is really interesting too and that one more thing here at mit you have so many hats you do the historical thing you do i think do you still do the aeronautical thing  several hats off and has a lot of different hats and people are performing at a very high level sometimes at too high a level because it really can be stressful people out there and at the same time you know i have this enormous privilege where i have a tenured professor ship and so i am do what i love yeah and try to make the best contribution to the world that i can make and that's a great luxury in today's world and so that challenges you to really rise to that and take advantage of it and do the best you can if i get bored easily so i like to keep myself because if you do keep yourself busy and i'd like to get bored if i do the same thing for too long yes well i'm sure of this will go on oh you know whatever comes next it sounds as though it's unstoppable you but in any case i thank you for this book and others but this i think is really valuable reading for people because companies or media or yeah like that but so dr been dealt thank you so much i really appreciate your talking with us it's been most interesting thank you