SGU Episode 949

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SGU Episode 949
September 16th 2023
Sci-fi futuristic robot Artist: Pickgameru
SGU 948                      SGU 950
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
CH: Christian Hubicki, professor of Robotics
Quote of the Week
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
Isaac Asimov, American writer
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Guest Rogue

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, September 13^th, 2023, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: Evan Bernstein...

E: Hello, everyone.

S: And we have a special guest, Christian Hubecky. Christian, welcome to the SGU.

CH: Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

S: This is actually in podcast time. This is your third time doing a show with them, although this is your first actual presence on the show. So this week's episode is mainly going to be a one-hour live show that we recorded with you as a guest at DragonCon. They only gave us an hour, and we figured we need more than that for a full show. So you agreed to give a virtual interview with us after the facts. Now it's like a week after DragonCon. This is the week that the show is going to come out. We're just going to have a little preamble discussion before we go to the live DragonCon show. For those who don't know, you'll hear again in a bit, but Christian, you are an alum of the Survivor TV show.

CH: That's right. That's right.

S: Yep. We talk a little bit about that on the show. And you are a professor of robotics at the Florida State University as well.

CH: That's right. That's right. And I got to say, as a professor, I'm not used to being cut off after an hour. The students stay until I'm done.

S: That's right. You leave when I say you leave.

CH: That's right.

J: It was fun. So when we got together with Christian at DragonCon, we had never met in person before. We emailed each other a few years ago, I think. But we had really good discussions over a couple of meals during DragonCon.

B: Oh, yeah.

J: Because we're all super into it. Of course, we're all super fans of robotics, and we like artificial intelligence, and we're really getting into it. I'm like, damn, these conversations were really good. We should have recorded them because we asked a lot of wacky questions, too. Because we'll ask anything when we're at dinner, we're like, so what are sex robots going to be like?

CH: That was not recorded, thankfully, for my tenure back, and I'm glad for that. But otherwise, it was fantastic. No, that was good stuff.

J: Christian's like, I've got 15 of them. They're awesome.

B: And don't forget, guys, guys, don't forget, Liz and Courtney, they watch Survivor every season. And they were very, they were very psyched.

S: Yeah, they were big fans.

CH: But I'd say what relevant to discuss that speaking of sex robots, Jay, then it was something that came up in casting interviews when you're interviewed before you go on the show. And so I was prepared that I was to be interviewed by like a Hollywood casting person. I tried to prepare myself. What are the stereotypical questions that people are going to ask you? And one of them, of course, would be about sex robots. So I had some pre-canned jokes. So I, of course, had, I didn't study sex robots in robot school. That was one of them that deployed.

S: It wasn't a course.

CH: No, I didn't know. It was capped out. I couldn't get in. But yeah, I would, though, recommend the reality casting process to anyone trying to go on a job interview, because there's probably no harder job interview than whatever curveballs they try to throw you in order to see how you'll react on a reality show. So highly recommended for at least the experience.

Dragon Con reflections (3:25)

S: This is our first time back to DragonCon since the before time, right? The pre-pandemic. What did you guys think about it? Did you guys have a good time?

J: Well, I made an observation and I talked to several people at DragonCon. I did notice that the overall quality of the costuming was not at the level that it's always been at for all the DragonCons we've been to.

S: There were some standouts, but it was a little underwhelming this year.

J: And I thought about it and I talked to some people at DragonCon who made similar observations and they were saying that they noticed that this happened post-pandemic. This is a post-pandemic thing that's happening at DragonCon. And we were surmising it's probably because people are financially strapped and they don't have like the five grand it probably takes them to build some of these costumes, some of the more outrageous ones.

E: Or invest the one thousand hours it takes over the year to build the costume you're going to make.

S: I know for us, because we had some really good costume ideas percolating and we back burned them all. And then even though we went this year, we decided late and so you didn't have as much time to invest in it because it was up in the air. You didn't know what was going to be going on with the pandemic and everything. But it's bouncing back. The numbers haven't completely bounced back yet to pre-pandemic levels.

B: Christian, this was your first DragonCon. What's your take on it?

CH: Indeed it was. I'll tell you, I was overwhelmed. I actually showed up on Thursday because I was giving a talk at Morehouse College in Atlanta just for general robotics purposes. So I jumped over to the conference just to get my badge and everything. I was just swept away by just the wild amount of costumes. I had no baseline and I got to see the big Zelda Korok protest, the Korok rights protest, which is probably the best thing I've ever seen. So I got to say, I enjoyed it. And I guess I was also taking in the fact that I had to give two full hour long talks. So I think I was overwhelmed by that as well. But I had a great time. I know me and Emily had a wonderful time hanging out with you guys and also just running around the conference scene and what happened.

S: Yeah, I agree. I think a lot of the best costumes I saw this year were ones I've seen in previous years. And so they don't have the same impact. It's like, oh yeah, there's the guy from Lord of the Rings, yep, saw him. For you, it's the first time. It's like, oh my god, that's amazing.

CH: Yeah, there was a Mark Hamill, which I double take that was really close to a Mark Hamill. That was crazy.

E: I remember, yes. Last Jedi, Mark Hamill.

S: I saw him and it's a double take. Wait, is that really him? No, no, it's not him. But for a half a second, you think it's him. There are some people, there's a couple of people who lean into the fact that they look like a celebrity and then dress like them. There's also every year there's an older Scotty from Star Trek walking around, like the movie version of Scotty who's a dead ringer. Yeah, but that, the Mark Hamill.

B: Yeah, it was a double take for sure too. Christian, what about you? Did you see any stars, any celebrities?

CH: Honestly, I didn't. I missed the whole celebrity thing. The only times that I've met a real superstar celebrity, I remember almost nothing from the interaction. They could have been speaking the Charlie Brown adult voice as far as I was concerned. I just remember the experience that I was in their presence. I said things. Hopefully they weren't overly embarrassing and then they kicked me out of their house and we're done.

E: They slammed the door on me.

J: There is something about it. There is really something about charisma and that type of human interaction. When you're meeting someone that's famous, because we've met lots of famous people throughout the years and you realize everybody's just people, right? They're all people. But every once in a while, when I met Prince, I had the opportunity to meet Prince. And my God, wow. That was not a normal meeting of a famous person where you're like, oh cool, I'm seeing this famous person. That guy had charisma that was palpable. And it was surreal. Plus, he's so incredibly famous. When I met him, he was unbelievably famous. So it was just very strange. So it is a pretty interesting experience. There is something mammalian about it. It's hardwired into us.

Steve on the UFO panel (7:43)

S: Yeah, I was busy doing a bunch of panels. The most surprising panel to me was the UFO panel.

J: Yeah, I saw that. Bob and I saw that. Well, Christian and I were there too. Yeah, we saw that.

E: You were finally convinced, Steve, right?

S: Well, no, it's just that I saw all the panels I was going to be on. Really, UFOs? Isn't this like, didn't we beat this dead horse already? But it was one of the most popular panels that I did. It's very hard to predict what people are going to want.

J: It's because of how in the news it's been.

S: I know. And even among skeptics, there is something a little bit different, I think, about this, what's happening now with the UFOs. And I think because the UFO community has managed to really snooker the government into lending them credibility, that people are like, whoa, whoa, this is before Congress and this is the Pentagon. Something's got to be going on. Even though it's the same crap as we've been seeing over the last 30, 40 years.

E: They've got NASA tied into it too, Steve. Talk about legitimacy.

S: After the panel, the next day, somebody recognizes me on the street and wanted to talk to me about the panel. Meanwhile, I'm late for another panel that I'm going to.

CH: You have like six panels, Steve. It's ridiculous.

S: Well, it was always the whole, yeah, but did you see this video? You know that? So listen, I'm late for a panel, email it to me and I'll take a look at it. I gave them the info at email and I never got it. I don't know if I remember or whatever. But the one thing that really, I mean, I knew this, but like it was really central to the discussion was the fact that, because we are always trying to talk about like how silly the conspiracy theories are, et cetera. But one of the problems that we have is that the government does hide things and especially surrounding the UFO phenomenon. Like for example, there's a lot of UFO sightings around military bases. And it's we know from now historical records that a lot of them were, oh yeah, that was the, they were testing the spy plane whatever. Of course, the government's not going to come out and say explain the UFO sightings as secret military testing. And so there is a layer of secrecy that's built into the whole thing, you know what I mean? And so it makes our task very difficult because we have to say, yeah, the government is not telling you the whole story, but not in the way that you think. And that's a challenging sell, you know?

B: And they're happy to let the whole UFO phenomenon take take control.

S: Yeah, it's good cover.

E: Yeah, oh absolutely.

B: It's great cover.

E: That's the margin in which they exist almost entirely, frankly.

S: And also like, yeah, there, there, like, there is a deep state, you know what I mean? Like, of course there is. There's a bureaucracy. There are people, there are career people who like, they work for the government from administration to administration. And the oversight of these entities is complicated and imperfect, but that's still different than we've been breaking the law for 50 years, right? I mean, it's like an order of magnitude different than what the UFO people are claiming, but it's not a clean narrative on our side either, because it's like, yeah, there is that kind of stuff going on. It's just not at the level that you're claiming.

CH: n a way that makes it more of an important skeptical lesson that just because there's not a cleanliness of narrative, it still doesn't change the underlying state of the evidence and what you can support with the evidence, what you can believe. What bothers me slightly about the current phenomenon, and I actually got contacted through my work email.

B: By an alien?

E: First contact.

CH: We're not supposed to talk about that, Bob. It was a survey intended toward academics and it was, it is seeming to probe attitudes of academics toward UAP research and yes, it said UAP, not UFO, and I was like, okay, this is starting to send off my antenna a little bit, my little alien antenna, as to what's going on. So I took the survey and what it did is it presented me with a bunch of academic articles about UFOs and asked if this changed my opinion of the literature. My answer was no. You're not going to hand me three studies and expect me to change my opinion on this overall phenomenon, and I kind of might have left some flaming comments at the end of that survey. After it was done, I was like, wait, why didn't I save what those articles were? I went and found some of the articles and some were published by the editor-in-chief of the journal that they were published in, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's just like, this is like your gold standard of evidence, and it was like in a journal that had nothing to do nominally with aerodynamics, it was like in a journal on entropy, and I was like, okay, how much is this being pushed into the academic sphere? It's hard to tell. That's one thing that I would worry about is if enough academics get snookered, it becomes a little subfield. Now, I think like all of them, they'd probably eventually deflate over time like a flan in a cupboard, but that is one thing I thought was interesting. Then he mentioned NASA. I remember I saw a talk by the current NASA administrator, and in the talk he was giving to kids, he was talking about one of the big reasons NASA should go out into the space is so that we can meet aliens out there instead of down here, where we're seeing all these alien contacts, all these alien contacts, and it's the same talking point, Steve, where these airplanes are locking on with radar and getting a range and confirming, we know these things are happening, and then they're going off at an impossible speed, the same old same old, but I was like, wow, so this is high level, again, these are administrator-level people at NASA, not necessarily the rank-and-file scientists, but that's the thing I worry about, that basically, it's the next generation of, wow, there's really something to this UFO thing.

S: Yeah. Meanwhile, it's a giant nothing burger. I mean, literally, when you dig down.

B: There's not even any ketchup on it.

S: This is the same stories they've been shopping around for 30, 40 years, sometimes literally the same ones, and the quality of evidence is abysmal, and it's more blurry photos or dots of light or things that are indistinct.

B: And the fact that we keep going back to it, the fact that with the proliferation of high-quality cameras in everybody's hands, we're still not seeing those videos, those good videos, and there's no reason why you wouldn't have four or five different videos of the same event from different perspectives, which definitely lead credence to it, right? If you saw five videos, each from a subtly different angle, like, whoa, that would take some work to fake. The thing about-

B: Not one. I've never seen them come across anything like it.

S: As cameras and videos have become more common, we're seeing more blurry photos, but we're not seeing better quality data. We're not seeing, oh my god, that's really something. That's not a plane. You know what I mean? We're not seeing that. The other thing is-

B: They live in the blur.

S: The evidence is the blur. If you think about the government, and just one point that I think is important to emphasize is, remember what they're alleging? They're covering up the biggest story in human history of all time without even anything close to this story, and they've been doing it for decades, and it's an international conspiracy, and yet they've managed to keep any smoking gun from getting to the press. No way. That's impossible. Think about the Vietnam War. How long was it before the Pentagon Papers were released? Information like that where no one's denying that they're real, no one denied that the Pentagon Papers were legitimate. They were verified. They were released to the freaking New York Times. You know what I mean? Why isn't there a Pentagon Papers of the UFO movement, and no of the MJ-12 documents are not real, those that have been completely debunked? You know what I mean? There's the alien autopsy video, and that turns out to be crap. It always craps out.

CH: It's interesting you bring this up, Steve, because you're talking about the extreme end of the massive conspiracy, where you have the whole government in it. I remember in the past you've covered actual academic studies people have done on the numerics of how likely a conspiracy is to fall apart when it's so big. It's kind of funny, like on Survivor, I got to experience the extreme opposite of that. For those who don't know, the format of the show is Survivor. Basically you vote each other off the island. Basically, if you're going to get voted off, there's a tiny conspiracy that's launched against you that you have to uncover in order for you to find out, oh, they're coming for me. I've got to make sure that it's not me. It's only a handful of people. The conspiracy may last a few days or perhaps a few hours or even minutes. Literally, it was five people who got together in a conversation around camp when you weren't there and said, hey, let's vote out that person. Even there, there were times where we were going to make sure that we don't hatch the plan a few hours too early, because what's going to happen? It's going to leak. It was interesting, kind of from a skeptical perspective, to want to have to try to ferret out real conspiracies on a short timeline. It was also the other end of the spectrum of the massive, now to the tiny conspiracy, which was highly plausible.

S: Absolutely. There are conspiracies all the time. We don't deny that. People get confused. You don't think there are conspiracies?

CH: Of course.

S: No. We're talking about grand conspiracies. It's all about the size and the duration. How many people would have to be involved across how many institutions for how long? It just gets exponentially more difficult to maintain a conspiracy the larger and longer you have to maintain it. And again, the academics have showed this mathematically, that these things just implode at some point. There's just no way the biggest story in human history has been covered up for 50 years without one good photo getting out, especially now that everyone has access to digital information. Somebody would like the Snowden thing. He blew up that conspiracy pretty quickly. There's no way that they would be able to keep this under wraps for this long.

CH: And not to labor this issue for too long with you guys, but the one thing I noticed as a person who doesn't deal with this day in and day out like you all do, when I sort of checked in on this whole UAP thing, that's when I found Mick West. I know you know Mick West.

E: Oh, sure.

S: Yeah, we interviewed him.

CH: He would take some of the famous recent videos such as the Gimbal UFO and just break it down in such phenomenal detail to the point where it's just like, oh, what else could it be other than this? And you can't always do that, of course. Sometimes you're in that low information zone. You just have no information to know what it could be. But sometimes just seeing such a calm and academic breakdown of a thing without any sort of bombast is, at least to me, so convincing. Maybe not everybody, but to me who was catching up on this, I thought it was incredibly compelling.

S: His videos are very compelling and he basically deconstructs the narrative, right? Because he demonstrates like, no, these pilots actually did get their angle of attack wrong. They got the geometry wrong and he proves it. He really demonstrates how they got it wrong. So the appeal to the expertise of the military pilots is flawed. They make the same kind of mistakes everybody make. They make errors of thinking, errors of perception, etc.

Special Report: The Future of Robots (19:43)

S: All right, before we go to the live show, Christian, I did want to chat with you a little bit about robots. Again, we're going to be talking a little bit about them during the live show, but we didn't really talk about the future of robotics. And I'm interested in what you think about that. How quickly are we heading to any kind of real game change in terms of robots in our lives? Is there anything that you think like, yeah, this is going to be the next big thing?

E: The Roomba 2.

S: A slightly better Roomba.

CH: I would accept a better Roomba 1 at this point. As an academic in this space, I had the luxury of not having to hype up a product I'm selling. I can sort of look at the state of where robotics is right now. I'm generally impressed with the rapid progress of what people can do with robots in a particular setting, such as you can get a drone to race really fast. You can get robots to actually run really fast now. But the question isn't about what can you get them to do one time for a camera. What can you get them to reliably do in our lives? This is something that we see a bit in the AI, the current "AI revolution" is that we are getting some of these tools that are really impressive what they can do sometimes. Auto-correct and voice recognition, they've been working on this for a long time and now they're really good. But I wouldn't trust my life on it. I wouldn't want this thing, if it gets the word wrong, my life is over. Wheras if you have a robot that's up in your grill and it falls on you, that could really hurt you. You have to be really reliable if you want it to get up in your space. The classic example is you see the Boston Dynamics robots doing back flips and dancing on YouTube videos. They're incredible and they're real and they're amazing. Everyone respects what they do in the field as far as I'm concerned. But even they would admit that they will show news organizations when news organizations come and interview them. They will show the robot going around and they'll show the robot falls down sometimes. They know it and they're trying to improve it. I think that I view robotics on a sliding scale of environmental control. We know that robots are in factories right now, many, many. There are millions of robots in factories and quietly doing the job of making our stuff. Those are highly "controlled environments". I talk about this a lot. I might talk about this later, who knows? The reason they're so good is because they know what to expect that's coming at them. When you step out of the factories, what is the next step of uncontrolled but still kind of controlled environment? To me, that's the road. That's cars on the road. There are rules to the road, but there's also unexpected things that happen. We have this whole autonomous car push and we are pushing forward, but I think a lot of people at this point are asking, hey, where's my self-driving car? Where is it? There are some cities where you can have them pick you up in a cab, but there are some questions as to how much oversight there is by a human pilot, and that's not always known. I think there's a little bit of coming to reality as to where we are with these systems. Those are sort of, let's say, semi-controlled environment because there are rules to the road. What rules are there to your home? I know you talk about this in your book. I know you talk about this. I find it funny that I came to a similar conclusion, but there is so little control for a robot in your home. The companies that want to do home robotics, like a robot that will make cook for you or maybe a robot that might help grandpa off the couch, they know these are not products that are going to be ready soon. What they are doing is they're starting research institutes to answer those basic scientific questions of how do you fold the laundry? What are the algorithms to fold the laundry? Dealing with these categories of objects that robots have to deal with that they don't have to do as much in factories. Soft cloth folding, that's an active field of research. How would you, if you're cooking a vegetable, how would you know how to slice the carrot? The carrot's a different size. There are institutes that try to come up with control policies to handle that. We all know it's still at the basic to applied research stage. That's a long way of saying, Steve, that I think we have to wait a bit for robots to be in our homes. I would not expect it, in fact, if I were an audience member, I would apply your skepticism to whenever you see a product, something that seems like a product that's going to be in your home that's a robot anytime soon. If you see an advertisement or you see a cool YouTube video and say, oh, the robots are coming, you've got to ask yourself how often does it work? Just to belabor this a little bit longer, there's a great example, there's a company that I have ties to, it's called Agility Robotics, they make humanoid robots. They want humanoid robots to go in factories. If you're asking where they're going to show up next, there are multiple companies popping up seemingly almost every day that for some reason there's an intended market for humanoid robots in factories. Now, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard that, but it seems like people are really investing a lot of money because they want to put robots with a human form factor to do human form factor tasks. That way you are in a factory where things are semi-controlled, but they're not bolted to the wall or you don't have to roll along the floor. People have done live demos and where a humanoid would go and pick up a box and go put down a box somewhere else, basically sort of like doing this box stacking task and they did it live in front of a major industry conference. This is a great test for how close we are and they had multiple robots running around. It was a very impressive demo, but occasionally the robot would just fail. Sometimes the robot would just collapse out of nowhere, it would just onto the floor. People will clip this and put this on YouTube and they would say, and people say, hey, look, the robot worked for five minutes and gave up on life as a metaphor for humanity, I guess. But when they tallied it all up, it was like 99% reliable, which that sounds good. I would take that as an academic, 99%, but in this case-

B: I'm not 99% reliable.

CH: But I bet those, Bob, if you had to pick up hundreds of boxes a day, my guess would be one out of a hundred of those, you wouldn't collapse on the floor and die. And so there's still some ways to go. And I think everyone, to my eye, I think the people I talk to in the industry believe that, too. But they're banking that they can sort of close that gap. So where are robots going to be? I think first they got to be doing more things in factories. Then we got to start seeing more reliable cars. And if we start seeing more reliable autonomous cars, then I think we start thinking about where are we going to see these other places in our lives?

J: Christian, what about the big advancements that we're having in artificial intelligence? So these robots are largely controlled by collections of algorithms, right?

CH: Correct.

J: So, OK, so I'm just following the trendy news here for a second. So we have, we're hearing lots of stuff about like chat GPT and BARD and all of these companies are investing billions of dollars into artificial intelligence. If we have an artificial intelligence breakthrough, would that have a direct impact on how quickly developing robotics? Would you find at some point, wow, like all of a sudden, the software is working way better than we thought it was that it was working a few years ago because of these recent advancements. Would that have an impact on how fast things move?

CH: That's a great question, Jay.

J: Thank you.

CH: And I think it's one of the questions I think to have the answer to is my answer is it could. It depends on the nature of the breakthrough. And these things like large language models, people are trying to incorporate them into how robots do tasks. Like there are researchers who want to take a task such as chop the carrot, use a large language model to develop the steps along the way that would chop the carrot, have the robot try to do those steps to break it down to digestible tasks. Also, another example is stable diffusion. And for those who don't know, that's the underlying technology behind those image generation AI software where you create a picture of a cat, Pokemon on the moon doing the Hokey Pokey or something, right? People are also using those methods to take different examples of robot tasks and stitching together the robot doing a somewhat different task. Like, for instance, if you wanted to spread Nutella of different viscosities, you could have a couple of example, it's very I actually have a friend who's working on this exact problem, spreading Nutella on bread and using the stable diffusion to take a couple of different examples of robot motions, just like something like DALL-E might take examples of images to generate instead of a new image, a new policy, a new task that it can do. And so people are you doing these things, but and they are helping. But the question is, what would be the next big thing that you would need to now say, aha, this is we now have the algorithm to put robots in our spaces and be much more reliable and more versatile and get things done without having to have an expert engineer program every single motion. That's not sustainable. And what you'd be looking for is some really good jump in the generality of what a robot can do based upon a reasonable set of data. You're also looking for something that's going to give you more confidence in safety. And often that isn't in the field of AI traditionally, it's in the field of controls. Controls is an old field. It's hundreds of years old. It's a mathematical field. But one thing that people like about controls is that given certain assumptions about your system say what you will about assumptions, but given certain assumptions, you can make some guarantees about performance. So there are some people who are really trying to mix sort of like the peanut butter and jelly of of AI and controls to blend those together to have the what's a virtuosity of AI to do cool new things with sort of the performance or stability guarantees that you get out of control.

S: Christian, so you're talking about like what spaces the robots are going to be going into. And I agree, it's going to be factory than semi controlled spaces. And the home is going to like the last space is going to get into. But there's also the question of are the robots, especially when you're talking about the home, the robot, because robots are already in the home. It's really more of a question of are the you know, how general purpose versus narrow purpose are they going to be? Because I'm pretty happy with my Roomba. I think it does exactly what I want it to do.

B: Meh.

S: Does it impress me? Well, I have a higher end one than you. I do. I agree. I think the crappy ones are crappy. And if you get it, if you get a high end one, though, it's I mean, I'm quite impressed with it and does it's fine.

CH: It's decades of engineering that went into that.

S: I think it would be a very long time before we have an all purpose humanoid robot in the home. But I think more Roomba like things might be in nearer future.

CH: Oh, for sure. I mean, like and just like you go from, let's say, controlled environments to more uncontrolled environments, you would go from specific tasks to more general tasks. So imagine this is just me coming up with a random pitch here, but a Roomba that maybe had a little arm on it that maybe can pick up some things and help move them around. Imagine you had a Roomba instead of just sweeping up the floor. You'll pick up the kids toys or something along the way or maybe put them in the box to put them in the toy box. Maybe that'd be a niche product, but maybe it's something that where the company start thinking it into something getting a little bit more general. But it'll be incremental, I would say. Now, I say that, but I also say to any funding agencies listening, I would say by the end of the next funding cycle, I think we have this problem cracked where it's fully general. But I mean, but that is the dream. And that's the kind of thing people like me are motivated by is that we know that with one humanoid presence like ourselves, we can do a lot of stuff. Does that mean it's the best way to do things? Of course not. Of course not. But we know that this kind of generality is possible. And is that generality always what you want? I mean, no, not necessarily. I don't need my car to be a plane and a spaceship. My car is a fine car. But there are times where it's nice to have some generalized, some generalized equipment. The fact that our computers think about all the things our computers can do. I mean they went from word processor and maybe email sender and maybe paint MS Paint thing to just anything you could do so much on a computer these days. And that versatility really shines. So I think we see that, like, what if there was a machine you could have in your home that is like, I need to fix the roof. Can you go fix the roof, please? And it can just do it. But that would be that would be awesome. Like, there are so many little things. And it's like, oh, my shower, like my the knob of my shower got broken. I wish I didn't have a handyman to do that. Robot can do that. That would be awesome as a somewhat recent homeowner I now understand the value of a handyman and not just calling the landlord. But there is value because there's so many tasks that need to be done for us to live. And so and some of them, so many of them, I just do not want to do. And so that's one of that's one of the potentials, I think, of a generalized robotics. And that that would be exciting. Exactly the avenue which way to go. It's hard to know if I knew that I'd be probably a lot richer. But I think that moving just finding the low hanging fruit and moving forward from that I think that that's a good way to go. Just kind of generalized piece by piece.

S: Yeah, totally. So I mean, the question of specific task versus generalized capability is an interesting one, because I think it's different for a lot of different things. I generally tend to like prefer that I have something that does one thing really well but sometimes the versatility is worth that. I remember when smartphones first came out and I'm talking pre iPhone, like the first real smartphones. And I was very resistant to them. It's like, you know what? I just want a good phone. I don't need to do anything else with my phone.

CH: Blackberry.

S: Well, I think they were, yeah, they were like the Blackberry. I never owned a Blackberry. I don't need to like do email and texting on my phone. I just want a good damn phone. And they were a bit clunky as a phone. I wasn't willing to sacrifice the phone app to get versatility. But then when the iPhone came out and that generation of smartphones came out, the versatility was so off the hook, it became worth it. Then it was like, OK, the camera is not as good as my camera, but it's in my phone, but I have it with me at all times.

B: [inaudible] UFO happens to appear.

S: Exactly. So, yeah, it's interesting the trade off and there are thresholds. So I maybe the same thing will happen with robotics that we have a bunch of specific task robots until somebody could make the iPhone of robots, basically where it's so versatile and good enough at so many different things that that becomes worth it.

CH: I totally agree. And particularly what the example with the phone on a camera is perfectly apt because if you had asked me in the year 2000, hey, Christian, do you want a camera on your phone? I'm like, what are you duct taping to my phone? Why would you like cameras were much more people didn't run around with cameras all the time. They were more like if you were, you were like a hobbyist or a tourist. And but and also what are you going to do with the camera? Are you going to go develop the film in the middle of the day? What's going on? But it ended up being this ubiquitous thing we now all have. We all take for take for granted we have a camera, even though it didn't seem obvious at the time that, of course, we'd want a camera at all times. Think of all the things you could do also because we didn't have high bandwidth Internet or social media to share things at the time. So the point being is it could be unexpected the avenues in which these things finally crack wide open. I think that that level of humility of knowing what it's going to be and the creativity to think of what it could be is important when we're trying to project the future on this.

B: Oh, absolutely. Hugely important underappreciated. You just can't just can't anticipate that that's that texting will basically supplant using the phone. I really saw that coming.

CH: For sure. And I'll say that in terms of robotics, one other angle we haven't really talked about is that we can get these robots to do a lot, but they're still kind of expensive. And I mean, that's the elf in the room. They're still pretty darn expensive. I mean, a humanoid robot like sort of an Asimo, that's sort of Honda's robot, which you could never buy. But there were competitors such as Hugo and similar ones that are like these sort of like they look like little spacemen walking around. They're made by Japanese and Korean companies. And it would cost half a half to a full million dollars to buy one of those things, probably 10 years ago there about. I mean, and now you can get one for about one hundred thousand. So that's order of magnitude. That's that's coming down, but it's still very expensive.

S: Yeah, you need a couple more to get down to the prosumer.

E: Runs on a lithium ion battery, right?

CH: Absolutely does. I mean, Elon Musk wants to have his Tesla box because he invested in that. He unveiled his Tesla bot in the last year and he wants it to be down to twenty thousand dollars, like the cost of a car. And it's like it's one of those things that I'm like, I'll believe that when I can buy one for my laboratory, because that's just it's just right now there's a long way to go to make things cheaper. We're getting better at this and in a number of ways like we're finding that we can get away with cheaper sensors. We can find ways to make actuators cheaper. We can we can be smarter with how we use them so that we can drive down the cost. But it's still a ways to go.

S: All right. Well if there's any big robot breakthrough, we'll get you back on.

CH: Thank you. Appreciate it.

S: Christian, thank you for being so generous with your time. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. And we're going to transition now to our live show from Dragon Con.

[commercial brake]

Live from Dragon Con 2023 (40:26)

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. (applause) Today is Sunday, September 3^rd, 2023, and we are live from DragonCon. (applause) Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody. (applause)

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey, guys. (applause)

S: Evan Bernstein...

E: Hello, Atlanta. (applause)

S: And we have a special guest this week, survivor Christian Hubicki. (applause) Christian, welcome to the SGU. Now, I understand you're a longtime listener of the show.

CH: I am. Yeah, I have a vintage t-shirt on and everything from the first NECSS in 2009 in New York City.

G: Wow.

CH:' So it's pretty close to OG. Yeah, yeah, I've been a long time fan.

S: So you sort of cross a lot of lines with us. You're a skeptic, you're a fan of the SGU, you're a proper nerd, as we like to say.

CH: Indeed.

S: You're an actual scientist, does robotics, and you're kind of a celebrity because it's the Survivor's.

CH: I forget what letter of the alphabet celebrity I'd be. Probably in the M to P range. But yeah, absolutely. Thank you. I'll take it. No, it's been a lot of fun. So like I said, my background's in robotics and I'm now a professor and I run a research lab. So that's my day job. And at night, they throw me on islands. So what could I want?

S: Yeah, I got this photo off of the, I think it was the Survivor Wiki. You look pretty fierce. Pretty fierce. You were in the David and the David versus Goliath group.

CH: That's right. Our season was themed after David versus Goliath. And I guess the idea that some people were big, strong favourites and us weakling underdogs. Naturally, I'm a big, strong favourite. No, that's not fair. So for some reason, they threw me on the David tribe. And but that was a lot of fun because I got to talk about algorithms on television, which I'm not sure they do much on Survivor normally, but in my case, they made an exception, which I appreciated of them.

S: And that actually made it to air.

CH: That actually made it to air. That's the other thing.

S: This is the other photo I pulled. This is like you're famous. You've had to stand on this pole. How long did you last on this pole?

CH: Five and a half hours. Yeah, it was a good time, to be honest.

J: I can't even sleep five and a half hours.

CH: Well, I mean, they put you in like this pain position, like you're being crucified or something and like, and you're designed to go numb. And I'm just trying to find ways to pass the time and not think about pain. The best thing I could do was try to recite my master's dissertation to the host of the show. And then he was the one in pain.

B: Yes.

S: That was psychological warfare.

CH: I wasn't trapped in there with him. He was trapped in there with me. (laughter) But he learned a lot about robotic exoskeleton control in the process. So I consider it a win.

B: And you won. You won that grueling challenge.

CH: Yeah, yeah, that was that was that was good. That was a fun time. And and I got to say all the things I wanted to say to the host of the show. And so I don't think there's when you're that level of celebrity like Jeff Probst, the host of the show is most people can't keep them held captive for one hour, one hour and five. So you got to hear my review of all the seasons. So I'm sure you really enjoyed that.

S: You have [inaudible].

CH: We're on speaking terms again, thankfully.

S: What was the most surprising aspect of your whole experience on Survivor?

CH: I mean, the one was how fun it was. It was I mean, yes, starving was was not what that part was not fun. But I honestly don't feel like you're starving after a while. It was honestly it was the the intellectual rigor of a game of deception and political intrigue that you're playing solid for a month. It's one of the most interesting things I've experienced in my life. There were times where I like people are trying to mount a vote. For those who don't know, the game is not just don't starve. That's a component of it. It's also about voting out your colleagues. So and we're not going to vote it out. And in a game for a million dollars, people get pretty competitive.

S: That was a pretty good experience for academia.

CH: Yeah I'd say departmental meetings have a different take to them as a result. But the and so like that experience of trying to like we've figure out what does this person think the plan is? What do they think I think the plan is? What do they think that I think that they think is the plan? That and all what you're not eating is it's a lot. But it was an incredible amount of fun.

Christian and Robotics (45:19)

S: Let's talk about robotics really quickly. We're going to be talking to you about an item in a bit, but just to give people a flavor of what you do for your day job. So when are the robots actually going to take over the world?

CH: What time is it? So my background is in legged robotics. That's what I was trained in. That's what I did my doctorate in. So walk basically bipedal humanoid walking robots. It's a fun time. Makes for a compelling survivor audition video as well. Just a note to anyone who's interested. But it's I particularly focus on the control algorithms. How do we make them faster? How do we make more agile? How do we make them better at not falling down and more efficient as they move along. And that's and there's a there's a little bit of math and coding and programming in it. But a lot of fun experimentation along the way as you're basically pushing robots over and hope they don't remember the experience of doing that. So yeah, so and so now I want to research lab down at the FAMU FSU College of Engineering. It's a joint program between Florida A&M and Florida State University. I run the lab there. My students do excellent work that to making robots walk better. We have a couple of humanoid human sized robots in the lab. One that looks like an ostrich called Cassie. It's about three and a half feet tall. The other one's a humanoid robot called Digit, which is about five or five and some odd feet tall. And we're trying to get it to do more stuff more autonomously because robots, you can make great YouTube videos of them doing cool stuff. And that YouTube video is very reliable. It runs every time. Unless it's on my computer. Whereas real world robots if you're going to put them out with other folks, with other real people doing real jobs, you've got to count on them. And that's a real long term academic effort between academia and industry to make that happen. That's partly what I'm doing for my career.

S: Yeah, we were chatting about this. You think that one of the biggest public misconceptions is how reliable robots are. Because they see the video, they go, that robot does that every time. You ask it, does it backflip? It could do a backflip. But really, that's like the video, how many trials was that?

CH: Right. And the short answer is, we don't even know how many trials there are. You have to really rigorously document that. And if you're a company, you're not interested in documenting your failures to the public. Although I will say, the companies that do, they've actually been quite open when they do interviews, say, hey, it doesn't do this every time. We have a lot of work yet to do. Yes, our Boston Dynamics videos look awesome, but there's a lot of work, they're honest about it. But we don't know how big is that gap. I honestly don't know because we don't have that kind of data. And that's something that we academics, given that we're in the publishing business, should be doing.

E: And the media wants to see the successes. They don't want to see the robot fail any time after time.

CH: It's funny the first once or twice. But yeah, it gets old after a while.

B: But what's the difference between it does a backflip successfully, the next three times it does it, it fails. What's the difference? Is it how subtle, it must be a nuanced difference that it can't replicate.

CH: Well, I mean, with a robot, so many things can go wrong. I mean, it could be the core algorithm that you're working with. It's just not robust enough yet to just tiny changes in how you start it and move it. I mean, it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be. That's what the other people shoot for. And companies like Boston Dynamics, they do excellent work. They're like the best at it. They're among the best. But it also could just be silly things like the hose in your robot hydraulic was loose that day. And that created a thing.

S: A little friction of the joints.

CH: A little friction of the joints. Friction is very hard to come up with a good model of that we can rely on for robots. And that's a major problem. Other things that are hard to predict are going to act. Collisions. Two things hitting each other. And it could act one way and almost, you have two situations that look almost identical. But they sort of bounce off into different directions. And legged robots are all about impacts. What are those feet doing to the ground? Impacting them, right? Over and over and over again, every step. And if your control algorithm is good, it should be able to handle that variation. But that's a long process and it's difficult. It's hard. So I really respect everyone in the field who's tackling it.

S: Yeah. All right.

News Items

S:

B:

C:

J:

E:

(laughs) (laughter) (applause) [inaudible]

Exploding Batteries to Deorbit Satellites (49:10)

• Using Lithium-Ion Battery Explosions to Deorbit Satellites

Dark Stars (58:10)

• JWST Might Have Spotted the First Dark Matter Stars

AI Drone Racing (1:08:15)

• Champion-level drone racing using deep reinforcement learning

Settling Mars (1:16:59)

• Just 22 people are needed to colonize Mars — as long as they are the right personality type, study claims

Stress Patches (1:27:32)

• Is Meghan Markle's stress patch legit? Here's what experts say.

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Science or Fiction (1:32:39)

Theme: Robotics Item #1: According to the International Federation of Robotics, in 2023 there are 35 million industrial robots, and 43 million service robots worldwide.*  Item #2: The first robot-assisted surgery was in Vancouver in 1984, with the Arthrobot, which assisted in arthroscopic procedures. Item #3: Arguably the oldest robots include water-powered, clock-driven figurines dating from 3,000 BCE, and a steam-powered pigeon that could actually fly, dating from 400 BCE. * The shownotes page for this episode on the SGU website did not have a link for any article to be referenced for this item.

Answer	Item
Fiction	35/43M robots worldwide
Science	Robot-assisted surgery
Science	Oldest robots

Host	Result
Steve	sweep

Rogue	Guess
Evan	Robot-assisted surgery
Jay	Robot-assisted surgery
Bob	Oldest robots
Christian	Robot-assisted surgery

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:40:12)

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.  – Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), American writer and professor of biochemistry

Signoff

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

(applause)

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

[top]                        

Today I Learned

• Fact/Description, possibly with an article reference
• Fact/Description
• Fact/Description

References