Marc Raibert
speaker
243 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2024
last heard Feb 2024
Marc Raibert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · 16 Feb 2024
podcast
doing the things you normally do to make your product better and compete and selling and all that stuff. And that'll be the way it is with humanoids at some point.
You're not really... You're creating the category. Yeah. Or the category is happening. I mean, right now, the use cases, that's the key thing, having realistic use cases that are money-making and... in robotics is a big challenge. There's the warehouse use case. That's probably the only thing that makes anybody any money in robotics at this point.
There's old-fashioned robotics. I mean, there's fixed arms doing manufacturing. I don't want to say that they're not making money.
But it's also true that the companies making those things, there have been a lot of failures in recent times, right? There's that one year when I think three of them went under. So it's not that easy to do that, right? Getting performance, safety, and cost all to be where they need to be at the same time, that's hard.
Yeah, it has two or three or four.
I think that intelligence is a lot of different things. I think some things, computers are already smarter than people. Some things, they're not even close. I think you'd need a menu of detailed categories to come up with that. I also think that the conversation that seems to be happening about AGI puzzles me. It's sort of So I ask you a question.
Do you think there's anybody smarter than you in the world?
Do you find that threatening?
So I don't understand, even if computers were smarter than people, why we should assume that that's a threat. Especially since they could easily be smarter but still available to us or under our control, which is basically how computers generally are.
It's a little bit like that line in the Oppenheimer movie where they contemplate whether the first time they set off a reaction, all matter on Earth is going to go up. I don't remember what the verb they used was for the chain reaction, right? Yeah, I guess... It's possible, but I personally don't think it's worth worrying about that. It's balancing opportunities and risk.
I think if you take any technology, there's opportunity and risk. I'll point at the car. They pollute and about 1.25 million people get killed every year around the world because of them. Despite that, I think they're a boon to humankind, very useful. Many of us love them. Those technical problems can be solved. I think they are becoming safer. I think they're becoming less polluting.
At least some of them are. Every technology you can name has a story like that in my opinion.
It was born of me being a contrarian. Yes. It's a symbol. Someone told me once that I was wearing one when I only had one or two. And they said, oh, those things are so old-fashioned. You can't wear that, Mark. And I stopped wearing them for about a week. And then I said, I'm not going to let them tell me what to do. And so every day since, pretty much. That was years ago. That was 20 years ago.
15 years ago, probably.
It took me a while to realize I was a contrarian. But, you know, it can be a useful tool.
I'd rather talk about, there's a guy, when we were doing a lot of DARPA work, there was a Marine, Ed Tovar, who's still around, who his, what he would always say is when someone would say, oh, you can't do that, he'd say, why not? And it's a great question. I ask all the time when I'm thinking, oh, we're not going to do that. And I say, why not? And I give him credit for opening my eyes to
to resisting that.
When I was teaching at MIT, for a while I had undergraduate advisees where people would have to meet with me once a semester or something. And they frequently would ask what they should do. And I think the advice I used to give was something like, well, if you had no constraints on you, No resource constraints, no opportunity constraints, and no skill constraints. What could you imagine doing?
And I said, well, start there and see how close you can get. What's realistic for how close you can get? The other version of that is try and figure out what you want to do and do that. A lot of people think that they're in a channel, right, and there's only limited opportunities, but it's usually wider than they think.
Some people think I'm in a rut, right? Why don't I do it? And in fact, some of the inspiration for the AI Institute is to say, okay, I've been working on locomotion for however many years it was. Let's do something else.
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