Caitlin Kalinowski: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. Okay. So zooming out a little bit, just what's cool about people like you is you're thinking and building things that will exist in the future. You're kind of living in the future and designing it, and you are one of the few people who has a glimpse into where things are going. So I'm curious just to ask, say in five years, what is the vision you have of what is different about our day-to-day robots, devices? Just what does it look like just roughly? So in this job, we have this wild thing where we have to try to live in the future, and we have to try to live in the future far enough away that we can design something not only for two years from now or three years from now, but also something that will ladder up to what we want six years from now because in my field, it's a lot easier to make something and iterate on it and iterate towards a final goal than to do a one-shot thing perfectly. So not only do you have to have a sense of what the first thing needs to be like and look like, you have to have a sense of what the third thing ideally or the platonic ideal of the thing will eventually look like. So you do have to think about the future and live in the future. I have this weird thing where I love to think about the future, but I'm also a skeptic, and you really want me to be a skeptic because if I think everything's going to be fine, the hardware's not going to work. You really want me to be like, "This isn't going to work and this isn't going to work and this isn't going to work," and just be worried about all these things going wrong. So this is kind of an interesting disagreement inside of me of what I want the future to look like and what I think it's going to look like and what it's actually going to look like. I'm trying to guess. And so, it seems pretty clear to me that AI is going to have a foundational change in how we work and what we do over the next couple of years, especially. You're already seeing it. Obviously, anybody who codes is not coding by hand very much anymore. Any knowledge work, this is going to hit next, I think, and progressively affect our economy and our work, but it seems like the physical world is less likely to change as quickly outside of drones, self-driving cars. You're going to see more and more robots, but I'm not somebody who thinks that in five years, you're going to have 20 million robots. I don't think that it's going to be that fast. I think we have a lot of really deep work on supply chain when you do supply chain reliability, raw material access, and then we need to figure out how to make factories again in this country for high tech. So that's a lot of work, but in the interim, you're going to start seeing a lot of weird things on the street. You might see robots on the street. Have you seen any delivery robots in your world, Lenny, before? Like the little car things, not like anything humanoidy. Yeah.…

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