Lex Fridman Podcast
#329 – Kate Darling: Social Robots, Ethics, Privacy and the Future of MIT
15 Oct 2022
Chapter 1: What is the background of Kate Darling?
The following is a conversation with Kate Darling, her second time on the podcast. She's a research scientist at MIT Media Lab interested in human-robot interaction and robot ethics, which she writes about in her recent book called The New Breed, what our history with animals reveals about our future with robots. Kate is one of my favorite people at MIT.
She was a courageous voice of reason and compassion through the time of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal at MIT three years ago. We reflect on this time in this very conversation, including the lessons it revealed about human nature and our optimistic vision for the future of MIT, a university we both love and believe in. And now, a quick few-second mention of each sponsor.
Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got True Classic Tees for high-quality t-shirts, Shopify for e-commerce, Linode for Linux, Insight Tracker for biomonitoring, and ExpressVPN for privacy. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I hate those.
And since I do this podcast, I'm able to control whether we do them or not. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by... I believe in you, sponsor. I've been wearing their t-shirts for a while now, so I don't remember.
But I do remember that I've been loving it for a while now. Anyway, the sponsor is True Classic Tees. They're high quality, soft...
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Chapter 2: How did the Jeffrey Epstein scandal impact MIT?
slim-fitted t-shirts for men. They also make all the other menswear staples like polos and workout shirts, and they're all built with the same flattering fit as their t-shirts. It's kind of fascinating how something like a t-shirt can feel good and look good, and the way to achieve those two goals are very subtle design decisions. So it's fascinating because I'm a t-shirt person.
I usually just wear a black t-shirt, a bunch of black t-shirts. True Classic Tees is an example of a company that delivers. Now that I've tried it, that's all I've been wearing. I feel amazing. Get comfortable and upgrade your wardrobe with True Classic. Get 25% off at trueclassic.com with code LEX. Free shipping included. Unpurchase is over. $100.
100% risk-free guarantee with 30-day return policy. This show is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere. With a great-looking online store that brings your ideas to life and gives you tools to manage day-to-day operations. I've been using Shopify for a while to sell stuff, but my use cases are pretty simple.
And I think that's probably true for many people, for many merchants. You just want to sell a couple of things that you care about, and to a small set of people that are interested in that kind of thing. But I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs that really use Shopify to run a business, small business, medium-sized business, all that kind of stuff.
I think it's 1.7 million entrepreneurs that use it. Yeah, it's my favorite.
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Chapter 3: What are the sponsorships mentioned in the episode?
As far as I'm concerned, if you look on Reddit and all those other kinds of places, Shopify is the recommended place to sell stuff online. Super easy to use, super easy to set up, all that. Get a free trial and full access to Shopify's entire suite of features when you sign up at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Shopify.com slash Lex.
This episode is also brought to you by Linode, Linux virtual machines. It's an awesome computer infrastructure that I just love everything about it. It lets you develop, deploy and scale what applications you build faster and easier. I use it for small personal projects. I hope to one day have huge projects that I can run on it. I think the big competitor is AWS.
There's probably a bunch of others, but AWS, it's lower cost than AWS, better customer service, the simplicity of everything. I just love it. Obviously, computer infrastructure, the compute has to be really good, right? The actual systems have to be really good. The distributed compute has to be good, but...
The interface from a user perspective of how you set everything up, how you scale, all that kind of stuff also should be good. I think that's actually more important. the ability to set stuff up, to monitor, all that kind of stuff. And that's really why I love Linode. And of course, the number one reason, or should I say the number zero reason, is that it's Linux. I love Linux. All things Linux.
Visit linode.com slash lex to get $100 in free credit. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data.
They have a bunch of plans that collect a bunch of information from your body and you use machine learning algorithms to analyze your blood data, DNA data, fitness tracker data, all of that to give you a picture of what's going on inside you and give you recommendations for diet lifestyle changes. I wish they gave like dating advice or career advice or
Or just like food advice, what I should eat today based on my body. That's probably the future. My body is giving me very noisy signals about when it's hungry and what it wants to eat. I wish I had higher resolution signals. Or like the signals that it's sending needs to be interpreted. There's probably a lot of signal there. It's just my brain is too dumb to interpret it.
So I would love to understand what my body's telling me. That's why I love InsideTracker, is that it's listening to your body to give you advice about what you should do with said body. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to InsideTracker.com slash Lex. This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet.
I also use them to feel good about my life. But that's because I have a strange relationship with software that's really well designed. Anyway, it's like a good VPN should be. It's fast. It works on any device, including Linux, Android, all of that good stuff. And it's a base level of protection that everybody should be using.
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Chapter 4: How does humor play a role in robotics discussions?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's cool. It's one of the most – like I – I mean, because I have eight robot dogs now.
Wait, you have eight robot dogs? What? Are they just walking around your place?
Yeah, I'm working on them. That's actually one of my goals is to have at any one time always a robot moving.
Oh, that's an ambitious goal.
Well, I have like more Roombas that I know what to do with, that I program. So the programmable Roombas. Nice. And I have a bunch of little, like I built, I'm not finished with it yet, but I bought a robot from Rick and Morty. I still have a bunch of robots everywhere. But the thing is, what happens is you're working on one robot at a time and that becomes like a little project.
It's actually very difficult to have just a passively functioning robot always moving. And that's a dream for me, because I'd love to create that kind of little world. So the impressive thing about Boston Dynamics to me was to see hundreds of spots. And the most impressive thing that still sticks with me is there was a spot robot
walking down the hall, seemingly with no supervision whatsoever, and he was wearing, he or she, I don't know, was wearing a cowboy hat. It was just walking down the hall and nobody paying attention. And it's just like walking down this long hall. And I'm like looking around, is anyone, like what's happening here? So presumably some kind of automation was doing the map.
I mean, the whole environment is probably really well mapped. But it was just, it gave me a picture of a world where a robot is doing its thing, wearing a cowboy hat, just... going down the hall, getting some coffee or whatever. I don't know what it's doing, what's the mission, but I don't know. For some reason, it really stuck with me.
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Chapter 5: What ethical concerns arise from marketing to children through social robots?
Now with the new image generation and the language learning models. And so we're starting to do some research around kids and young adults because- A lot of the research on like what's okay to advertise to kids and what is too manipulative has to do with television ads. Back in the day where like a kid who's 12 understands, oh, that's an advertisement. I can distinguish that from entertainment.
Chapter 6: How do kids perceive social robots and their advertising?
I know it's trying to sell me something. Now it's getting really, really murky with influencers. And then if you have like a bot that a kid has developed a relationship with, is it okay to market products through that or not? Like you're getting into all these consumer protection issues because
you're developing a trusted relationship with a social entity, but it's, and, and so, and so now it's like personalized, it's scalable, it's automated and it has, it, it can.
Chapter 7: What challenges do companies face in addressing algorithmic bias?
So some of the research showing that kids are already very confused about like the incentives of the company versus what the robot is doing.
Meaning they're, They're not deeply understanding the incentives of the system.
Well, yeah. So like kids who are old enough to understand this is a television advertisement is trying to advertise to me.
Chapter 8: How does the discussion of love and relationships relate to robots?
I might still decide I want this product, but they understand what's going on. So there's some transparency there. That age child. So Daniela DiPaola, Anastasia Ostrovsky, and I advised on this project. They did this. They asked kids who had interacted with social robots to
whether they would like a policy that allows robots to market to people through casual conversation, or whether they would prefer that it has to be transparent, that it's like an ad coming from a company. And the majority said they preferred the casual conversation.
And when asked why, there was a lot of confusion about, they were like, well, the robot knows me better than the company does, so the robot's only gonna market things that I like. And so they don't really, they're not connecting the fact that the robot is an agent of the company. They're viewing it as something separate.
And I think that even happens subconsciously with grownups when it comes to robots and artificial agents. And it will. Like this Blake guy at Google, sorry, I'm going on and on. But like his main concern was that Google owned this sentient agent and that it was being mistreated. His concern was not that the agent was going to mistreat people. So I think we're going to see a lot of this.
Yeah, but shitty companies will do that. I think ultimately that confusion should be alleviated by the robot should actually know you better and should not have any control from the company.
But what's the business model for that?
If you use the robot to buy... First of all, the robot should probably cost money.
Should what?
Cost money, like the way Windows operating system does. I see it more like an operating system than... Like this thing is your window, no pun intended, into the world. So it's helping you, it's like a personal assistant, right? And so that should cost money. You should, you know, whatever it is, 10 bucks, 20 bucks. Like that's the thing that makes your life significantly better.
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