Marc Raibert: evaluation

Transcript context

…So this might be a good place to mention that you’re now leading up the Boston Dynamics AI Institute newly formed, which is focused more on designing the robots of the future. I think one of the things, maybe you can tell me the big vision for what’s going on, but one of the things is this idea that hardware still matters with organic design and so on. Maybe before that, can you zoom out and tell me what the vision is for the AI Institute? I like to talk about intelligence having two parts, an athletic part and a cognitive part. An athletic part and a cognitive part. I think Boston Dynamics, in my view, has set the standard for what athletic intelligence can be. And it has to do with all the things we’ve been talking about, the mechanical design, the real-time control, the energetics and that kind of stuff. But obviously, people have another kind of intelligence, and animals have another kind of intelligence. We can make a plan. Our meeting started at 9:30, I looked up on Google Maps how long it took to walk over here. It was 20 minutes, so I decided, okay, I’d leave my house at nine, which is what I did. Simple intelligence, but we use that kind of stuff all the time. It’s what we think of as going on in our heads. And I think that’s in short supply for robots. Most robots are pretty dumb. As a result, it takes a lot of skilled people to program them to do everything they do, and it takes a long time. If robots are going to satisfy our dreams, they need to be smarter. So the AI Institute is designed to combine that physicality of the athletic side with the cognitive side. For instance, we’re trying to make robots that can watch a human do a task, understand what it’s seeing, and then do the task itself. OJT, on-the-job training for robots as a paradigm. Now, that’s pretty hard, and it’s sort of science fiction, but our idea is to work on a longer timeframe and work on solving those kinds of problems. I have a whole list of things that are in that vein. Maybe we can just take many of the things you mentioned, just take it as a tangent. First of all, athletic intelligence is a super cool term. And that really is intelligence. We humans take it for granted that we’re so good at walking and moving about the world.…

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