Startups
- Sometimes it really is a matter of timing, a little bit of luck—some things are just out of your control. You get a much deeper appreciation for the dimensionality of that challenge when you talk to a lot of founders.
Uncanny Valley
- “By moving away from human form, you can actually change the rules and embrace your strengths and bypass weaknesses. The human form has way too many degrees of freedom to play with. It’s kind of counterintuitive, but when you have fewer constraints, it’s almost harder to master the communication of emotion.”
- “You see this with cartoons, like stick figures. You can communicate quite a lot with just very minimal like two dots for eyes and a line for for a smile. I think like you can almost communicate arbitrary levels of emotion with just two dots and a line. And like that’s enough and if you focus on just that you can communicate the full range. And then if you do that, then you can focus on the actual magic of human and dot line interaction versus all the engineering mess. That’s right. Like dimensionality, voice, all these sort of things, they actually become a crutch where you get lost in a search space almost.”
- For example: they intentionally constrained WALL-E and saturated emotions in a smaller dimension. You end up getting more beautiful output because you’re pushing the boundaries of emotional space.
- “We stayed away from uncanny value just by having such a different, like mapping where it didn’t try to look like a dog or a human or anything like that. And so you avoided having like a weird pseudo similarity, but not quite hit in the mark. But you could just fall flat. We’re just like a personality or character emotion just didn’t feel right. And so it actually mirrored very closely to the iterations that a character director”
- So if you have legs and you’re a big humanoid looking thing, you have very different expectations in a much narrower degree of what’s going to be acceptable by society, then if you’re a robot like a Cosmo or a WALL-E.
Robot Mistakes
- “In reality, we realize very quickly that those mistakes can be endearing. And if you make a mistake, as long as you realize you make a mistake and have the right emotional reaction to it, it builds even more empathy with the character.”
- “And one of the things we realized is that you’re just way more forgiving when something has a personality and it’s physical. That is the key that unlocks robotics interacting in the physical world more generally, is that, when you don’t have a personality and you make a mistake as a robot, the stupid robot made a mistake. Why isn’t that perfect? When you have a character and you make a mistake, you have empathy and it becomes endearing and you’re way more forgiving.”
Waymo
- It’s been eye-opening on just how incredible that people on the talent is and how in one company, you almost have to create, I don’t know, 30 companies worth of like, technology and capability to like kind of solve the full spectrum of it
Levels of Self-Driving
- Level 0 (No Driving Automation)
- Level 1 (Driver Assistance)
- Cruise control, adaptive cruise control, etc
- Level 2 (Partial Driving Automation)
- Vehicle can control both steering and accelerating/decelerating (human sits in driver’s seat) (Tesla Autopilot)
- Level 3 (Conditional Driving Automation)
- Substantial jump
- “Environmental detection capabilities and can make informed decisions for themselves, such as accelerating past a slow-moving vehicle. But―they still require human override.”
- Level 4 (High Driving Automation)
- “Level 4 vehicles can intervene if things go wrong or there is a system failure. In this sense, these cars do not require human interaction in most circumstances. However, a human still has the option to manually override”
- Level 4 vehicles can operate in self-driving mode. But until legislation and infrastructure evolves, they can only do so within a limited area (Geofencing)
- (Waymo)
- Level 5 (Full Driving Automation)
- “Level 5 vehicles do not require human attention―the “dynamic driving task” is eliminated. Level 5 cars won’t even have steering wheels or acceleration/braking pedals. They will be free from geofencing, able to go anywhere and do anything that an experienced human driver can do.”
“So it’s very hard to go into a space that you’re not passionate about and push, like, push hard enough to be, you know, to, like, maximize your potential in it. And so there’s always kind of like the saying of ‘follow your passion’. Great. Try to find the overlap of where your passion overlaps with like a growing opportunity and need in the world.”
“If you were to insist I was a robot, you might not consider me capable in some mystic human sense” — Isaac Asimov