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Chapter 1: What are the implications of merging human bodies with machines?
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This is is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.
You just don't know what you're going to find.
Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. In 2014, Katie Kwan was a professional dancer in New York City living her dream.
Taking the train to Lincoln Center and dancing at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and traveling all over the United States to be in various shows. I did The King and I at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. I did Cinderella at the Gateway Theater. I had my own dance company, actually, and we did something between like six to ten shows a year.
But then her father got sick.
Yeah, it was very scary for our family. He had a stroke. And my dad, you know, English is his third language. He was in his mid-60s at the time.
Katie found herself there with her dad in his hospital room, surrounded by medical equipment.
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Chapter 2: How did Catie Cuan's father's health crisis influence her perspective on technology?
Because even though countless engineers are building machines to act intelligently, she says we also need to consider how they move.
We know that movement is incredibly impactful to us. We've created all of these adaptations to very quickly experience and observe emotion and then to categorize, is this safe? Is this unsafe? Is this welcoming? You know, what does it mean? And this is why when people talk about nonverbal communication, you can express so much through simply the way that your body moves.
Okay, why is that relevant for robots? Because robots will often perform motions that are, quote, utilitarian, right, that are picking up a cup, moving it to a different part of a table, screwing a bolt into a piece of equipment. But the way that the robot performs that motion is deeply impactful if it's done near humans.
You ended up working at a place called Everyday Robots. At the time, this was Google's robot AI moonshot lab, as they called it. And the idea there was to design robots that could help people in their everyday lives. So how did you bring your perspective as a choreographer and a dancer forward? to making that a reality.
It was such an ambitious moonshot because we really did want to bring robots into people's everyday lives at the same scale that people are used to with all different kinds of technologies, whether that's a smartphone or a car.
And so it was not only about can we get robots to do things that are useful like sort trash or wipe tables, but also can we build robots that are welcomed in these environments so that if you have a robot inside of an office or a shopping mall or many years in the future inside of a school or a nursing home –
What are the levers that we can push and pull to make these robots evoke sensations that are positive instead of negative? If a robot slides politely out of a doorway to let you pass, it might make you feel seen and acknowledged. Here's Katie Kwan on the TED stage. If a robot marches quickly towards you and avoids you at the last second, it might cause revulsion and fear.
Robots are beginning to show up in our everyday environments, from sidewalks to offices, backyards to hospitals. 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.
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Chapter 3: What innovations are being made in robotics and human interaction?
And Jim volunteered to be that first human subject.
What exactly was Jim volunteering for? A new way to do amputation that keeps the brain-body connection intact. So a quick anatomy lesson. In a healthy leg, when you flex your ankle, muscles in the front contract and stretch the muscles in the back. Extend your ankle and the reverse happens.
The movement keeps muscles strong and registers in the brain, helping you understand where your limbs are in space.
So that's called proprioception?
Proprioception. But with a traditional amputation, that connection between the muscles, nerves, and the brain is severed.
The current amputation paradigm hasn't changed fundamentally since the U.S. Civil War and breaks these dynamic muscle relationships and in so doing eliminates normal proprioceptive sensations.
Hugh Herr explains on the TED stage.
Consequently, a standard artificial limb cannot feed back information into the nervous system about where the prosthesis is in space. The patient, therefore, cannot sense and feel the positions and movements of the prosthetic joint without seeing it with their eyes. My legs were amputated using this Civil War era methodology. I can feel my feet. I can feel them right now as a phantom awareness.
But when I try to move them, I cannot. It feels like they're stuck inside rigid ski boots. The limbs are not directly controlled by my nervous system. I can't think and move them, nor can I feel my limbs. It feels like I'm walking on powerful robots. It feels like I'm being walked. It feels like I'm in the backseat of the car.
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Chapter 4: How can technology enhance human capabilities without compromising humanity?
For sure.
It's been about a decade since the procedure was first performed. Since then, how many people have had the surgery?
The surgery itself, over 100 people to date. And at all levels, you know, below the knee, above the knee, below the elbow, above the elbow. The electromechanical integration into those new surgically constructed tissues will take longer. But I think in about five years from now, from a commercial setting, the full bionic reconstruction can be happening clinically, which is quite exciting.
So how many people could qualify for this kind of a prosthetic surgery?
A lot of people qualify. We can apply the surgical technique in an acute case at the time when the limb is amputated. We can also pursue these regenerative and surgical and electromechanical strategies as a revision. So it is possible for someone like myself that already has an amputation to undergo this reconstruction surgery to go from the past to the future.
Wow. I mean, in your TED Talk, you said that you, because of the surgery that you received, you were not a good candidate for this technology. Has that changed?
It has changed. And I'm actually thinking carefully about when to go under the knife, when to receive these interfaces for myself.
And right now, if one chose to do this, how much would they have to pay? Let's say they had the surgery covered, but for the limb and the technology, how much would that cost?
So in five years, when this entire bionic reconstruction is made available clinically, commercially— You know, for a bionic, say, foot ankle with the magnets and the surgery and whatnot, it's on the order of $100,000, including the surgery and the robotic components and the sensing components and the computer components.
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