PJ Vogt

And it's funny you bring up BattleBots because a lot of teams who entered this had BattleBots history.

Interesting.

They were used to building robots for interesting purposes.

And when they caught wind of this, they said, we can do this.

We can scrap together some money and this will just be fun.

I'm going to tell you what happened in this robot race in the desert, not because I care so much about these early robot vehicles, but because I care a lot about the engineers who were making them.

These would be the people who would later go on to lead development for the billion-dollar companies creating today's driverless cars.

And these people had very different views about how to get that technology ready, different values when it came to things like the acceptability of risking human life.

Abstract differences that would become very concrete later on, to the point where people would be charged with federal crimes.

That's the future.

But listening to this part of the story, what I listen for is, how much of it can you detect already?

How much are the differences already present?

The first engineer I want you to pay attention to is a man named Chris Urmson.

And way back in 2002, how did you end up being part of the DARPA ground challenge?

Chris, these days, the CEO of a large tech company.

Back then, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University.

When he first got recruited for the race, he was out in the field observing a robot as it crept across the Atacama Desert, training for its future deployment on the surface of Mars.

So Chris would join Carnegie Mellon's Red Team and help build a car called Sandstorm, a bright red Humvee with the top lopped off, a plethora of futuristic sensors mounted to it, like scanners a crackpot would use to search for aliens.

You can see Chris back in that documentary.

He explains to the filmmaker at the time that the hard part, of course, isn't the vehicle, it's the driver.