Catie Cuan

And they will be threatening and confusing to us if we do not carefully examine how they move.

Before AI, programmers needed hours to script a simple dance sequence for a robot to perform, just like they needed hours to script the robot to open a single door.

With AI, you can teach the robot to open just a few specific doors, and it will learn to open all of them, even ones it hasn't seen before.

It's also true for dance.

You can teach the robot to dance with a specific person, and it will learn how to dance and move with many others in many different environments and circumstances.

This is what I did at Everyday Robots at Google.

Rather than teach one robot, I used AI to teach 15 robots how to move together as a flock.

We imagined a world where you could walk down a hallway filled with robots, and they would part to make space for you, like a flock of doves or a crowd of people on a city street, where a robot could navigate seamlessly and even beautifully through a busy, chaotic Times Square.

I hear you on the walking down a hallway filled with robots.

It's fascinating because my mom actually came and saw the flocking project at Google X. She was watching me from the side and thinking, oh, I don't know.

These robots are following Katie around and they're moving according to her commands.

And she was a little bit skeptical.

But when she wandered through this group of robots...

The smile that she had on her face, I don't think I've seen my mom grin like that, interacting with any piece of technology in her whole life.

And I asked her, you know, what was that for you?

Why did you notice yourself smiling and laughing?

And she said, well, it felt like I was interacting with a bunch of puppies or sort of this alien species that I wasn't afraid of that kind of opened my eyes and

opened my imagination to a different way of being with robots.

And mom was like, it was fun and different and unexpected.

I would say that removing friction is certainly a way of describing it.