Interviewing The Inventor Of Sophia, World's First Humanoid Robot

do you believe robots will be Senti in I do I think that there may be a path how did you get into robotics working at Disney I started as a sculptor but then I did have the chance to go into robotics at Disney when you decided to start a robotics company the name of the company was human emulation robotics emulation means to destroy with fire so material behind Sophia like the reporters asked me at the time what is this material that you've created I didn't have a name for it I was like a for rubber I really want to buy the little Sophia it takes millions of dollars what's coming next sopia would [Music] be all right guys today we have the guest I've been looking forward to for a really long time David Hansen the founder of Hansen robotics yeah David it's really good to have you on the show thank you it's wonderful to be here initially I thought you were inspired by the movie Simone by alucino which came came out in 2002 but then I found out you built your first humanoid robot in 1995 1993 yeah so I'm guessing they were inspired by you uh probably not the first humanoid robot that I made was not very famous I just exhibited it at an art science technology festival called pong which was a cross institutional thing between Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design I was an undergraduate student at the time but I was very interested in artificial intelligence the combination of Art arts and humanoid robots and this idea of bridging these different disciplines to the benefit of them all was uh very strong with me those ideas seemed far-fetched at the time to many people but they really drove me from a young age so how did you get into robotics like I'm guessing you're in your 20s like stumbling around like what was the inspiration or who guided you to get into robotics I was pretty nerdy kid so as a teenager I was familiar with the work of Marvin Minsky and on the robots out of the media lab and so forth and I had these interests in art figurative art and time music and fiction writing was very strong and I was most interested in artificial intelligence so I took artificial intelligence programming classes I joined the Brown University robotics Club I was doing this degree in film animation video at rodon school of design and weaving in the robots that I was building into some of the films that I was making and how these things intersect to me is just like you know the truth of the way these disciplines work the disciplinary boundaries our convention and what we do with it is our own decision we can be as creative as we want so these were ideas that really enlivened and motivated me and they were difficult to Grapple with for a little bit of context there was no large language models now when people think of AI they think of chat gbt correct you're talking about the '90s people didn't even know what AI means there were chat Bots they were pretty much all expert system based chat Bots speech recognition was working but just in a rudimentary way there some some computer vision and looking at these things through the lens of a greater creativity can be really empowering empowering to young people like me when I was in my 20s and then when I was working at Disney I started as a sculptor making you know sculpted figures cuz I like drawing I have a knack for doing figurative drawing and figurative 3D so you had a more artistic background or more engineering background it's hard to say I would dive pretty deep in each of these areas I mean I didn't have an engineering degree but I knew basic Electronics I could put together um things I new C programming C C++ programming I had programmed a little bit of lists to make the robot not bump into into the Halls at round so in a sense I was a tinkerer I also didn't study sculpture actually I jumped in somebody asked could I do it I said I think I could there was know YouTube but you know if you just jump in and try to figure something out you don't hold back if you don't you realize that maybe there's a script running that says you can't if that script is deep and always telling you if you if it's not proven then you can't this is a script that actually probably runs deep in a lot of us it like creates a kind of fear when we hit the unknown so if you can unwind that a bit and get comfortable in these uncomfortable risk-taking situations jumping into disciplines that you don't know you can learn a lot more and I would hold myself to very high standards when I do these things so if I was going to do some portraiture or drawings if I was sitting with a friend or what have you I wanted it somehow soak in the information of that person and their personality would shine through that so I was very passionate about it in other words and so when I went to work as a sculptor for like 2 and a half years I was very prolific and made a lot of work and my heart was in those Works what were they were they robots or were they just they were like things for those 2 and 1/2 years mostly for theme parks so some for Universal Studios Islands of Adventure the themed resort called Atlantis and the Bahamas s of mythical creatures and for Disney so I had this strange portfolio and resume with these with these things and I was offered a job doing 3D devel for a video game company in Boston and then doing online development for uh Prodigy at the time and then the sculpting job that would be uh working for a contractor for Disney and these other theme park things so learning fast was a thing and I was belied that it was good and then hired directly to work for Disney which is was an amazing experience and I had a lot of great mentors and I'm really proud of the works you know I learned a lot but then I did have the chance to go into robotics at Disney so then I got to propose research projects and write research papers and get these things funded and go to conferences and meet people in the world of AI and Robotics how much of that was behind the computer or how much was cuz most nerds love computer but you're kind of like different you you like to sculpt with hand and yeah I do both and back and forth between uh working digitally and working in the domains of the of learning the science and applying the science I want to get back to the material cuz a lot of people surface level they don't know what frubber is I want to ask you how are you able to patent like frubber and like the material behind Sophia like and this has been 18 years in the making so I want to hear the story behind it yeah so the first formulas for frubber came in 2002 so it's 22 years ago I was exploring different ways of achieving highly elastic porous polymers the silicons I wasn't quite getting to be good but in 2002 and 2003 I made about six different robot faces by that time I had developed a lot of robots along the way with a lot of experimentations in different kinds of these foamed rubber tipal so I had some pretty good results along the way but very little attention for what these robots were and then press conference uh was held and everybody all the reporters wanted to see the humanoid robot the the one humanoid robot that they can take a photo of they take photo and interview and so I pull this thing out and it's making these facial expressions and photos are going off and it became a cover story for Popular Science and all these things but the reporters asked me at the time what is this material that you've created I didn't have a name for it I was like a for rubber what does it stand for what does that mean you were going to say rubber face rubber no I was I just was thinking the words face and rubber and it just kind of like fell out of my mouth and it stuck and we haven't thought of a better word for it since then so it's a good word yeah so 2003 I filed uh the patents on a wide variety of things the software and the hardware and the materials and so then you go to 2007 you decided to start a robotics company no 2003 I founded Hansen robotics hen robotics I found it in 2003 you got to correct that by the way Google says 2007 you can always control what Google's going to tell you you're right about that and there's a lot of information out there but the company was founded in 2003 we changed the name the first name of the company was actually human emulation robotics that's why and it was very awkward human emulation robotics what human emulation robotics emulation means to destroy with fire handsome robotics flows so I had um some mentors who Executives who came in and mentored me starting in 2003 2004 and um by 2005 one of them Lou Schwarz said you've got to change the name let's call it Hansen robotics okay you know all right I want to ask you about little Sophia for a second I actually was telling my partner I was like I really want to buy the little sopia and put it on my desk and ask it questions daily and you know my idea was what if the robot could initiate the conversation even though it's creepy a little bit I would like that yeah good me too you know cuz I feel like a lot of time people don't use chat GPT because they have to do the work of asking yeah do you guys have any plans to like sell the little sopia oh absolutely we designed it that way um the problem with these robots is getting people to believe in this interesting glomeration of Art and Engineering is really hard Engineers are like what's that art thing I don't believe in it it's not real engineering you know people from like existing Arts Industries like um the toy industry they're like this AI thing they're not sure about it so it's hard to get people to leap and Trust so we haven't actually been able to raise the funds yet honestly to finish the manufacturing on this because it takes millions of dollars do you believe robots will be sent I do I think that we may have the right architecture for it and just like you know people didn't believe in you know these neural nets for a long time and you feed it the right data once you give it the right belief it's not just the data it's the compute time the resources then neural network started showing these great leaps forward and then once you have a culture of belief then you can have something like Google brain which gave rise to Transformers and so that culture of innovation leads to these breakthroughs and now people are starting to believe in artificial general intelligence and the prospect of machine Consciousness you have a lot of people who will say no you haven't proven it can't be done you haven't proven how Consciousness actually works and of course that can dampen uh things and dampen progress but the thing is that there may be a path I think there is a path so we saw with chat GPT a lot of white color jobs getting affected now we're seeing companies like figer and all the they're raising billions of dollars to face the blue color jobs mainly they want to replace the industrial workers and then they'll come for the h uh household jobs as well what do you think about that people have been worried about this um you know since maybe the 18th century certainly since the 19th century the Lite movement stopped the textile factories did not like shut down the economy it created an enormous amount of wealth but also it does create a lot of turbulence sort of social turbulence and social change doesn't mean that it's all good but we are seeing more productivity I mean that's automation including artificial intelligence and Robotics especially when you start to see more general purpose Ai and Robotics then you're going to see more abundance is up to us humans to decide ethically what we're going to do with those abundance do we accumulate it into an increasingly thin layer of ultra wealthy people and keep just sucking resources out of the ecosystem or do we apply it to make the world better what's the future of Hansen robotics I'm excited about the little sopia as well but can you tell everyone what's coming next hansome robotics is developing next waves of artificial intelligence and so we had some interesting studies that was showing glimmers of Consciousness in Sophia mathematically tested using the integrated information Theory and I believe that that's not fully indicative but it is interesting and I think our latest architectures the way that we're going I think that we can make a huge difference so Sophia would be more motivated more autonomous able to then learn more effectively spontaneously handsome robotics is a company that cares about the people and about the future so we would be doing this in a way where where we're sharing open source tools open source Technologies trying to help people all around the world to participate in the AI Revolution so it's not just um hands robotics that benefits in a so-called first world and the future is not just AI brain power but actualizing human brain power cuz humans and AI working together are far smarter than either independent thank you so much David I really appreciate your time and everything like you've been very generous with me thank you so much thank you