Helen Hastie

speaker

175 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 8 Jun

Helen Hastie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Discovery · The Life Scientific: Helen Hastie · 8 Jun 2026 podcast

Thanks for having me.

So we see in the media and in sci-fi movies, these robots that are highly functioning, that can do many, many jobs and are social and cognitively quite intelligent.

Now, we are far from that.

We do have some robots that can perform very, very well on specific tasks, but these tend to be very narrow tasks.

So we are quite a long way from these all functioning, intelligent robots.

Sure.

So robots that generally look like humans, not necessarily those with legs, but in some kind of human shape, can be really useful for certain settings.

But we have to be really careful.

There's a phenomenon called the uncanny valley.

And as robots become closer to looking like humans, particularly in terms of detailed looks, this can actually be quite unsettling.

So it's good that robots look a bit like us, but

Not too much like us.

Yes, most definitely.

And it's very dependent on the task.

So robots in the home, maybe it's good they look a bit like us.

But robots working in factories or warehouses or stacking shelves, it's actually better if they look like they know what they're doing in terms of the function that they're designed to do.

Exactly.

So it's very important that we install the appropriate amount of trust.

So it's important not to overtrust robots and it's also important not to undertrust them.

For example, a robot that's used in surgery that is highly accurate, maybe more so than a human.

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