Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 46 | Kate Darling on Our Connections with Robots

Episode Date: May 13, 2019

Most of us have no trouble telling the difference between a robot and a living, feeling organism. Nevertheless, our brains often treat robots as if they were alive. We give them names, imagine that they have emotions and inner mental states, get mad at them when they do the wrong thing or feel bad for them when they seem to be in distress. Kate Darling is a research at the MIT Media Lab who specializes in social robotics, the interactions between humans and machines. We talk about why we cannot help but anthropomorphize even very non-human-appearing robots, and what that means for legal and social issues now and in the future, including robot companions and helpers in various forms. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Kate Darling has a degree in law as well as a doctorate of sciences from ETH Zurich. She currently works at the Media Lab at MIT, where she conducts research in social robotics and serves as an advisor on intellectual property policy. She is an affiliate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Among her awards are the Mark T. Banner award in Intellectual Property from the American Bar Association. She is a contributing writer to Robohub and IEEE Spectrum. Web page Publications Twitter TED talk on why we have an emotional connection to robots

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I tell myself, it's not about comparing. But then I start wondering, what can they lift? Are they adding more weight to their barbell than I am? And suddenly, I'm not training. Then I realize my journey is not theirs. I've earned every step. So I smile. My smile is the shape resilience takes to keep me moving.

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when they interact with robots? How should we think about robots when we're dealing with them? Today's guest, Kate Darling, is a researcher at MIT's Media Lab. She's not an engineer who builds robots. She actually comes from a social science background. She's interested in what people should do with the fact that we tend to treat robots as if they are human beings. We tend to anthropomorphize them. We assign attribute feelings and emotions and ideas to robots even when we know that they don't have them. You don't need to be looking like a human being as a robot to get.

get another human being to treat you like a person. We treat our Roombas like people, our laptops like people. So what's up with that? What does it mean for the future? This is an area where, as very often when technology is advancing, the legal system and the philosophy and how we think about these things lags behind. So anything we can do to get into our brains what's going on ahead of time will be very useful. There's one other thing, a big announcement that I have, and I wanted to share with you, which is that it looks like mindscape, will be getting ads, getting advertisements at some point. We're not absolutely sure, and I don't exactly know what it's going to happen,

but that seems to be the direction in which we're moving. I don't know when it's going to happen so, but I'll let you know ahead of time. I did go back and forth on this. I will be honest, because obviously, ads are good because they get money, and I like money. I will never, you know, try to pretend otherwise. On the other hand, you have to admit they kind of get in the way of the actual substance of the podcast. I won't try to pretend that either.

What pushed me over the edge into agreeing with the ad thing was the idea that it would get a lot more listeners. It's not that I'm just taking ads. I'll be joining a network which will publicize the podcast elsewhere, bring it to new audiences. And that I really think is important. Maybe I'm flattering myself, but I enjoy what we're doing here. I think it's interesting. It's important. I want to share it with as many people as we can.

And a big part of that is just getting the word out and being part of a network would be a huge benefit. to that. It won't change the substance. It won't change who I get, how long the podcast is, what we talk about, any of those things. It'll just be a new platform on which the podcast will appear. So I'll keep you updated on that. Who knows? Robots. Maybe the robots will be reading the ads. Maybe someday all podcasts will just be invented by robots and then consumed by robots. Maybe the human beings will just rake in the bucks at the end of the day. I don't know. That's what we're here to find out. So let's go. looking for real support. That's why more people are choosing orderly meds.com. Orderly meds connects you with real doctors and access to proven GLP1 medications like semaglutide and terseptatide. No guessing, just a more supportive experience, and all shift directly to your door in discrete packaging. Do your research, ask questions, then visit orderlymeds.com slash podcast for an exclusive offer. That's orderlymeds.com slash podcast. Individual results may vary now. Medical advice, eligibility required seaside for details.

Hey, everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and I Heart audiobook club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science, and what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating. some of these sections, and it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it.

I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me, and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Club on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Kate Darling, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Thanks for having me, Sean. So you're at the MIT Media Lab and you work on robots.

So I think that for many of the people in the audience, they will instantly assume that you spend your time building robots or programming robots or something like that. But that's not what you do. In fact, you come from a legal background. So tell us a little bit about how you got here and sort of, what your job is there in the robotic space. Yeah, I sadly don't build robots. I'm very bad at that, although I have tried. I made a little solar-powered robot that...

Oh, that's more than me. It moves. It like charges itself for that it moves a little bit. And that was my great accomplishment in robotics. But yes, it's correct. I have a legal and social sciences background. And the way I got here, the short version is, I love robots and found a way to do something with robots.

But the longer version is probably that I have always been interested in how systems shape human behavior. And so that's what originally drew me to law and later to economics and then to technology, because all three of those are systems that shape human behavior. Sure. But you have a wonderful story that I'm sure you've told hundreds of times. about the first time that you started thinking about how human beings react to robots. Yes, yes. I was still a law student at that point.

And I had bought a pleo, which is this baby dinosaur robot that came out in 2007, this Japanese toy. I bought it because, like I mentioned, I've always loved robots. This was a really cool one. It had all these motors and touch sensors. It responded to your touch. It was supposed to develop its own personality depending on how you treated it. It had this infrared camera in the snout. And then one of the things it had was a tilt sensor, so it knew what direction it was facing.

It knew it was upside down, and it would respond to that by mimicking distress and crying. It was pretty realistic depiction of being in pain. And I thought that was super cool and I would show it off to my friends and be like, oh, hold it up by the tail, see what it does. And one of my friends held it up for a very long time. And it started to bother me. So I asked him to put the robot back down. And then I started to pet it to make it stop crying. And that just kind of blew my mind because I wasn't a very maternal person, but also I knew exactly how the robot worked.

and I was compelled to be kind to it anyway. And so that really sparked my curiosity about human-robot interaction and our psychology around interacting with robots. And I soon discovered that it's not just me. Yeah. And it's interesting because it's teaching us, I mean, at the surface level at least, it's not, that insight doesn't teach us anything about robots.

It teaches us something about human beings, right, and how we interface with the world. Absolutely. the most fascinating thing to me about robotics is what robots can teach us about human psychology, human behavior, and interacting with each other. So what do we know? I mean, can we at this point identify the features that your little dinosaur had that made you connect with it? I mean, there's a whole gamut of different kinds of robots from Roombas to self-driving cars. I mean, maybe even we should count the little tomogachis, the little

pets that gets sold to kids, right? And we, to different levels, we anthropomorphize these for some reason or another. Oh, yeah. And it's not just robots either. We, we have this inherent tendency to anthropomorphize anything. You know, one of the first thing a baby learns to recognize is a face, whether that's a real face or just an image. And we have this deeply ingrained tendency to project ourselves and our own human-like qualities onto other entities. whether that's our pets, that we, you know, we see the dog looks guilty, whether the dog actually looks guilty, you know, we don't really know. Or I recently read the example that, like, people will see a monkey yawning in the zoo and be like, oh, the monkey's bored when really it's just showing off the teeth that can rip your face off. Right.

So we will often just make all these assumptions about others. Kids develop relationships to stuffed animals. We will, you know, we respond. to a lot of different things. One of the things that we respond pretty strongly to is movement. We've kind of been conditioned through evolution to

be able to recognize whether something is an agent and moving or whether something is an object because we've needed to detect natural predators. At least that's, you know, the reason that the evolutionary psychologists give us. But it's definitely true that studies show

that we're very quick to detect animal movement and autonomous seeming movement much more quickly than other types of movement. And the thing about robots is that they move in exactly that type of autonomous way. So robots are physical. They exist in the physical world, which we kind of respond to as physical creatures. They move in this autonomous way. And then there are different design elements that you can layer on top of that to make people really, really respond to robots as though they were a living thing. So the, you know, the baby dinosaur with the cute big eyes being one example.

But, you know, people will even have a response to the Roomba like you mentioned. Do you have a Roomba? I do not have a Roomba. No. Do you have one? Are you attached to it? I used to have one. We did name it, which a lot of people do.

And I was just talking to the people from Eye Robot that, you know, made the first, the Rumba, the first, you know, real successful robot vacuum cleaner. and they say most people name their Roombos. They'll send them in to get repaired and they'll want the same one back. They'll be like, oh, Merrill Sweep is broken. We don't want a new one. We want you to fix Merrill sweep.

So people really, and people feel bad for the Roombo when it gets stuck somewhere. So even just like a very simple robot that just moves around your floor will cause people to have this emotional response. So it's probably multifaceted, right? Because I think, I don't know anything about Tomogachis, but I do remember thinking that, you know, hearing about the fad when

they came out and people would care for their little virtual pets. And they were not embodied, right? They were just like on a screen. Have studies been done about the different roles of being anthropomorphic, having a face, moving, all these different aspects and how they play into how we project organic nature onto these robots? Well, yeah, there's, there are entire field that research this. So the precursor to human robot interaction is probably human computer interaction, which looked at, you know, the ways that people, or among other things, the ways that people treat computers like social entities and like that's... We certainly blame them when things go wrong. Let's put it that way. We blame them. Yeah, but people

are also polite to them. There's this really great study that, you know, Cliff Nass and some other people did back of the day where they showed that if you do a task on a computer and then you're asked to rate the computer's performance and you're asked to rate it using a different computer, you'll be more honest and more negative about how the computer performed than if you're asked to do it on the same computer because you have this instinct that you don't want to hurt the computer's feelings. So people are, we are such suckers for anthropomorphizing anything. You know, you mentioned the Tamagotchi. There's also that video game portal that was really in like 12, 15 years ago. I don't remember. In the game, you have this companion cube that comes with you that's just this cube

that's just with you in every level. And then at the very end of the game, I think it's safe to spoil it, given how old the game is. You're supposed to incinerate the companion cube to complete the last level. And the game designers were surprised to see that a lot of people would sacrifice themselves instead of burn up the cube just because we do, we do become attached even to virtual things. But physicality is an additional layer to that because there have been studies that show that people will treat something in their physical space with even more empathy and even more like a social actor than something on a screen. Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and IEAS.

heart audiobook club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science. And what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me, and I left it on the mic. That's great.

Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Book Club on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. When people turn to telehealth for weight loss, they're looking for real support. That's why more people are choosing orderly meds.com. Orderly meds connects you with real doctors and access to proven GLP1 medications like semaglutide and terseptatide.

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Eligibility required. Seasite for details. interesting and so I I will prod you to give the other example that I've heard you give not quite a study that you did but you asked a bunch of people to sort of bond with some robots and then you asked them to do horrible things yes this is with my friend hannis gosselt we took the baby dinosaur robot that I now have four of at home we took five of them we did this workshop at a conference I think we had like 30 people and we split them into five teams and gave them each a robot and told them to name the robot and play with

it and we had them personify it a little like they built like hats out of pipe cleaners and like did a little fashion contest and then after like 45 minutes of them bonding with this robot we unveiled a hammer and a hatchet and we told them to torture and kill them and it was it was really it was so dramatic that we actually had to start improvising because we had kind of expected there would be a split in the room. Some people would be like, oh, sure, I'll hit it. It's just a machine. And some people would be like, no. And we wanted to kind of escalate the violence and see if that split of people changed. That was our original plan. But with this particular group, this was all adults between probably 25 and 40 years of age, and they all absolutely refused to hit the robots. So we had to be like,

okay, what are we going to do? Okay, you can save your group's robot if you hit this other group's robot with a hammer. And so they tried to do that. And even that, they couldn't, they just couldn't do it. So we were finally like, okay, everyone, we're going to destroy all the robots unless someone takes a hatchet to one of them. And this guy stood up and like, took the hatchet and the whole room kind of stood around and we watched him like bring the hatchet down on the robot's neck and it was very dramatic like people wince they like turned their faces away we could see this on the photos that we took on our phones afterwards it was really interesting and then there was this like half serious half joking moment of silence for the fallen

robot so like super dramatic workshop you know very interesting not science like you mentioned. This was just a workshop. Like, there's so much going on there. But it did make me very curious what would happen to look at some of the factors in a more scientific setting. So it led to some research that I did later on at the Media Lab with Palashina Andandhi and Cynthia Brazil, where we were looking at the correlation between people's empathy and their willingness to hit a robot. Oh, okay. Good. Well, I definitely want to get into that. But first, this was done at a conference. I mean, did the people there were robot people, I guess, or what kind of people were they? I don't know. It was like one of, it was called Lyft. It was one of those like, uh, innovation conferences that brought together, you know, designers or technologists and all sorts of people.

Okay. And part of me wants to say, you know, that our immediate reaction, we're not in the room killing the robots. We're hearing about other people who are reluctant to do it. And our immediate reaction is, oh, that's silly. It's just a robot, right? You know, because we're outside the milieu. But in some sense, it's a feature, not a bug. Like it's part of who we are that our brains attribute, you know, meaningfulness and moral agency even to objects that we know are completely inanimate. I'm glad you feel that way. I do you as well. There are some people who say this is a bad thing and we need to discourage it. We need to educate people that they're dealing with robots. And to some extent, I think that, you know, there are some problems. that can arise. For example, people's behavior might be able to be manipulated through technology, and we might design technology in order to sell people products or even worse. And so those are

some effects that I think we need to be cautious about. But generally, I do not think it is a bad thing when a child is kind to a Roomba. Like, I love that people's first instinct is to be kind to another entity. And I think that's part of humanity. And I think that's something that we should encourage and not discourage. Yeah. And empathy, I had a podcast interview with Paul Bloom recently. And it's clearly been a very good podcast because I keep referring it, referring to it in subsequent podcast. But he wrote, he's a Yale psychologist. He wrote a book called Against Empathy. And his point is that empathy is usually very unevenly applied. We have a lot of, it's much easier for us to be empathetic with people like ourselves,

and that distorts our view of the world. We're nicer to people like ourselves, and, you know, we're kinder, more just and so forth. And so instead of being empathetic, he wants us to just be rational about what it means to be moral or immoral. I pushed back on that a little bit because I actually think that empathy is very important to being a rational and moral person in the sense that it becomes too easy to ignore people unlike ourselves

when we don't try to have empathy with them. Sure, it's easier to be empathetic with people like ourselves, but it's necessary and important to try harder to be empathetic with a wider range of people. I was not at the time thinking about robots at all, but you're saying that there's some kind of relationship

between how people interact with robots and how they're more widely empathetic. Is that true? Well, that's certainly what our very preliminary research indicated. We did look at the correlation between people's tendencies for empathy and how willing they were to hit a robot. And there seemed to be a connection there that people who have very low empathic concern for others, that they are much more likely to hit a very lifelike robot. And people who have high empathic concern for others are more likely.

likely to hesitate or even refuse. I, you know, I find Paul interesting because I both agree and disagree with him, kind of like you. Like, you know, I think that, yes, it's true that it can be problematic that we only relate to people who are like us or things that are like us. It can be problematic that, you know, we relate to robots because we see ourselves in them and not, you know, to certain other people that we don't see ourselves. And we've dehumanized entire swaths of other people. And of course, we don't want to do that in favor of things like robots that don't inherently deserve our empathy.

But there does seem to be something to the emotional part of empathy in that it kind of lights a fire in you and makes you care at all. Like you said, I think that it's too easy if you're a completely rational human to just not even care. And so I've noticed myself since becoming a mother that I've become so much more empathic generally, not just towards other mothers because I've had this experience. But like, for example, in Boston in the winter, I was like walking around with a stroller and people sometimes don't shovel the sidewalks in front of their house. houses. And I was like, what if someone's in a wheelchair? Like, I suddenly realized how awful it must be to be a disabled person in Boston. And so, like, I feel like by this emotion that I have extends and makes me try and think of other people as well in situations where I might not have cared before. Yeah, the flip side of both of those things, you know, your example of having become a mother and the fact that we feel empathetic towards robots, is that it points, it reminds us of how involuntary a lot of who we are actually is, right?

Like how much a lot of who we are is a bunch of impulses that comes up from beneath the surface, not rational, careful cogitation about right and wrong at a highly philosophically sophisticated level. Oh, absolutely. And I think it's, that makes it somewhat uncomfortable, it's somewhat an uncomfortable realization, but I think it's very important to understand how our relationships work, why we empathize with another entity, how communication works, and that relationships can be very one-sided. You know, we're learning so much about ourselves by looking at how people interact with robots or even computers because we're starting to realize that it's all about ourselves and all about us projecting ourselves onto others. and we might learn more about our human-to-human relationships, right.

I mean, I mostly want to talk about that side of things, but you did bring up, you know, you tossed off the comment that we know that robots don't actually deserve our empathy. So obviously I'm going to ask, like, do we really know that? As robots become more and more lifelike, do we reach a point where we start saying, you know, they do deserve our empathy? Sean, when I first got to MIT, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm going to be in the place where they're developing the cutting edge robotic technology. I'm so excited. And then like I got here and all the robots are broken or they're falling over. And like, we're nowhere close to developing a robot or an AI that can feel anything. I do think that it's worth considering, whether we need to treat robots a certain way because it might have an impact on our own behavior.

But I don't, like, I feel like the whole robots deserve inherently rights because they have consciousness. Like, that's a fun conversation to have in a bar over beer. But it's not really, I don't think we're going to be there anytime soon. It's not practical. Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's

audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science. And what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story. If I don't go through it.

But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me, and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh, my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Book Club on the IHeart Radio, app or wherever you get your podcasts. When people turn to telehealth or weight loss, they're looking for real support.

That's why more people are choosing orderly meds.com. Orderly meds connects you with real doctors and access to proven GLU-1 medications like semaglutide and terseptatide. No guessing, just a more supportive experience, and all ship directly to your door in discreet packaging. Do your research. Ask questions. Then visit orderlymeds.com slash podcast for an exclusive offer.

That's orderlymeds.com slash podcast. Individual results may vary not medical advice. eligibility required sea site for details. Yeah, and I agree. And I think that most of what you are thinking about isn't even trying to get there, right? I mean, you're not trying to build the most human conscious robot or even talking to people who do. You're interested in how we deal with robots that are by complete agreement, very mechanical in their insides, right? That there's no sense in which they have feelings.

Absolutely. We, you know, they don't feel anything, but we feel for them. And that's the interesting thing. And so what are the applications here? I mean, what good is a robot? What is it knowing that we care about robots? There are a couple interesting applications. There have been some very hopeful results in health and education with using robots.

For example, for quite some time now, researchers have been looking at how to engage autistic children with robots because they've noticed that kids on the spectrum will sometimes respond to robots in a way that we haven't really seen before. And the leading researchers in the field say that this is probably because the robot is, it's a very social thing that they treat as a social actor, but it doesn't come with all the baggage that an adult or another child would have. Very sympathetic. Yeah, very sympathetic. Sympathetic robots. Yeah. I agree with that. Maybe not just kids on the spectrum.

But the interesting thing is not only will they engage with a robot, they will engage more with other people in the room as well if you bring in a robot to play with them. And until now, it's been kind of these one-off studies in the lab that they've done, but they just recently last year did a longer-term study in people's homes where they put robots in kids' homes that they interacted with for like half an hour every day for a month. And their social skills went upward.

Like in a way that, you know, just, you know, on every measure that we care about for these kids, normally this would take thousands and thousands of dollars with a therapy to get those results. And they got it with having them interact with a robot. Now, the catch was that the skills decreased again when they removed the robot at the end of the study. But that shows that there's so much potential here. Another example I like to make is. Sorry, can I just ask for that study, what kind of robot was it that they were interacting with? I think they were using the Gibo platform.

Gbo was a consumer product for a few years, but recently shut their doors, but it's still used as a research platform. So I think they were using a Gbo. Was it, did it something that looked like a human being or looked like a pet or looked like a fantasy creature? I think the closest thing would be like the Pixar lamp. Oh, okay, okay. It has like a head that swivels and looks at you and it has like this animated dot in the middle of the head. The head kind of looks like a fried egg, but it's very cute. It will move around.

It really gives you the sense of interacting with a social being. It's actually really cleverly designed because when you try to make a robot too human-like or too close to something that people are intimately familiar with, really disappoints people's expectations because they're expecting it to behave a certain way. Whereas if you have this like Pixar like animated thing, people are much more willing to suspend their disbelief. But also it's interesting because one might have guessed that they would want something that was sort of tactile, you know, like furry like a cat or a dog or something like that. But this is manifestly technological. It is. There are furry ones, which is the second example I was going to talk about.

I suspect they use GBO for this study because, like I mentioned, robots are O's broken around here. And so it's very, very difficult to do a study in people's homes where you can't go and fix the robot and have that consistency that you need for a long-term study. And so they needed to use a product that was stable enough to do that with. And I think Givo was that's why they chose GVos. Sure. And so what was this other study? So the other, not necessarily a study, but the other robot that I think has a really promising application is the Paro baby seal robot. Have you seen that one? No.

So this one has been around for quite some time. They use it in nursing homes and with dementia patients. It's really cute. I might have seen it actually. Yeah. And it's been like on TV shows. It was on the show Master of None. You know, it's gotten some fame.

But it's super cute. It makes these little movements. It gives you the sense of nurturing, this baby seal. This one's furry and soft to the touch. And it turns out to be really important for people who are in a situation where they're just being taken care of by others. That's their whole life now to be given this sense of nurturing something that's psychologically really valuable for them. And I know it sounds super creepy and people are like, oh, that's so weird and gross that we're giving old. people, robots, instead of human care. But what it really is is a replacement for animal therapy.

And it's been very promising. They've been able to use it instead of medication to calm, distressed patients. And so it's really hard to argue that that's a bad thing, especially if you stop considering it a human replacement and start looking at it as animal therapy in a context where we can't use real animals for a lot of reasons. Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine people objecting this. I don't get it. Why would you object to this? It's a therapy. Is it, um, is that, is that sort of the dark side of this fact that we're reacting on the basis of our instincts, not our rationality? I mean, people have a reaction that there's something intrinsically off-putting or inhuman about a robot compared to some other strategy?

Well, I think people are just struggling with this. Like in, in kind of Western Judeo-Christian society, we have this really stark divide between things that are alive and things that aren't alive. And so our rational brains are like, oh, there's, they're robots or machines. They're not alive. And yet our subconscious behavior towards robots is very much treating them like living things. And I think that's just very confusing to people. And we haven't really sorted that out in our culture yet. Yeah. For the autistic kids, is there any more detailed explanation of what it is where the benefit is coming from? Why is it that the autistic kids are becoming more social in the presence of this robot?

I don't know. I'm not intimately familiar with that. I'm not sure that the researchers actually know, for example, why the robots work so well with these kids. But it's certainly an opportunity to learn those things by studying this in more depth. Right. I mean, for the dementia patients or for the elderly, you offered an explanation which makes perfect sense to me, that there's something that you get value from not just being taken care of, but your child. taking care of something, right? You are nurturing. That's something that is valued. I suspect having no expertise here whatsoever that a lot of, that we do a disservice to a lot of elderly people by removing all of their responsibilities and authority, right? Like just by trying to take care of them and put them in a very soft space where they can't do anything or be hurt. And giving them a little bit more autonomy would be better along many dimensions. Yeah. And I guess people don't like it because they say it's fake autonomy, like they're not actually nurturing something. And so they, they don't think

it's authentic. But I feel like, you know, the way that we treat people now, you know, we stick them in front of a TV or we medicate them or, you know, like you said, we give them no autonomy. I think that this is so much better than what we're currently doing. And on the other side, there's the fact that like it or not, we're being surrounded by robots, right? Like forget about using them for therapy or whatever. whether we're working in factories or driving cars or in our kitchen, do we human beings have to adapt to a new sort of way of dealing with the world when so much of the world is robotic and able to move around?

Well, yeah, of course. I mean, that's also why I'm confused. There are some people who are like, oh, it's bad that we treat robots like living things. We need to educate this out of people. But I think that's just going to be the new normal, really, because robots are moving into shared spaces right now. They've been behind factory walls, and now they're coming into all of these new areas, like you said, into people's houses, into people's workplaces, into transportation systems, hospitals, the military. And I think we have to roll with it and, you know, try to think about, you know, whether there are any, you know, harms that could come from people's interactions with robots, whether we need to, you know, think about consumer protection issues, for example.

but I really think we need to be leaning into the positive effects as well within the knowledge that, you know, this, I know this sounds like technological determinism, but, you know, it's true. These robots are coming. It's coming. No, I'm with you there, yeah. I can't stop that.

I mean, do you know much more about robots than I do? Do you know, do you have a picture of what it's going to be like 50 years from now in terms of how roboticized our daily lives are going to be? 50 years from now. You can change the number, but yeah. Like if you go 50 years back, like, and think of all the changes. Oh, my goodness. Well, I do think that we are going to see more robots in households and workplaces than we do right now. Like right now, we're at the very beginning of people like having a Roomba, having an Alexa.

You know, recently some companies have closed their doors that we're trying to, create household robots that do a little bit more than those two things. They tried and failed, but I think that they're just slightly before their time. I think we will have more and more robots in the household. They may not be Rosie from the Jetsons. They may be more single task robots, but that's definitely going to be a huge shift, I think. We are entering an era of human robot interaction. Right. And it's interesting to me that, you know, we treat them, we keep saying anthropomorphic, but that's not exactly right, right? Because we don't necessarily treat them like people, but like animals, right? Whether or not they are explicitly made to look animal-like.

So once we get, not like you say, Rosie from the Jetsons, but just super rumba's, it's going to be inevitable that we make them more and more human in our minds. I think so. Well, I'm so glad you mention animals, though, because I think one of the fallacies that we still have is that we constantly compare robots to humans and artificial intelligence to human intelligence, and whether that's in stock photo images, if you do a Google search for AI, you get all these human brains or whether that's, you know, talking about robots and job replacement. I think we're still very much thinking of robots as like recreating human abilities and human tasks, whereas it's so much better to think of them as an animal equivalent.

I'm doing research on a book on this right now that looks at all the analogies between our history of animal domestication and how we're integrating robotic technology now and in the future, because it's a much better analogy given that AI has such a different skill set than we do, and we could be partnering with it instead of trying to replace ourselves. Right, right. And it reminds me of, so I'll say something controversial here. and we'll get comments, I'm sure. But there's the issue of how we treat animals,

just as there's the issue of how we would treat robots, right? And, you know, I have a lot of vegetarian followers. I'm not a vegetarian myself, but I get that this is an important issue, and we should think about it, and I try to be open-minded and listen to both sides. But one argument is, you know, if you had, if you raised a pig, let's say,

from a little piglet, and it became your friend and your pet, then you wouldn't want to kill it and eat it. And I actually agree with that, and I don't think that it's a contradiction, or I don't think it's a moral failing. I think that it's just the fact that we grow attached to things, animals, robots, people that we get to know. And the problem with killing it is not that there's some intrinsically bad thing about killing it, but it's that our feelings are hurt when that happens. And I think that's a perfectly sensible moral way to live.

Wow, yeah, that is controversial, Sean. I agree and disagree with you. All right. So I think it's true that if you look at the history of animal rights and how we've treated animals throughout history and today, we're such hypocrites. And we love to tell ourselves that we care, that animals have consciousness or that they suffer.

But if you look at throughout history which animals we've protected and which animals we don't really care about, we don't really decide according to biological criteria. I grew up in Switzerland. People eat horse meat in Switzerland in the states that would, you know, people would never eat horses. We have too much of an emotional connection to horses. But, you know, if you tell that to a European, the European is like, well, what's the difference between cows and horses? You know, they're both delicious. Why not eat them both? So.

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massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science, and what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God,

I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to your say. The, Audible and IHeart Audio Club on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Right. So I'm actually, I'm trying to argue for both sides. I want to say the Europeans are completely right. What is the difference between horses and cows? But I want to say, look, if as an American, if the culture you grew up in says that you are, you know, turned off by the concept of eating horses, then don't eat them, right? I think, you know, I completely agree that we are hypocritical in practice.

You know, I'm not in favor of pain and suffering. And I think that we're terrible to animals, especially farm animals and so forth. And I'm all in favor of attempts to be nicer to the animals that we do raise for livestock. But that's a different moral dilemma than whether or not it's okay to eat them if they are raised humanely. I mean, so you think that just... Just because we are hypocrites, it's okay to eat them? No, I think it's okay to heat them. I think that the thing that is not okay is mistreatment, right?

But you're okay killing them? Yeah, yeah. So do you make sure that the meat you eat is humanely raised? Well, you know, I prefer it, but I'm also a realist about what actions I can take, you know, will change the world. I would like laws that make it not okay. to mistreat animals. That's the, like, it's the same thing with energy conservation, right? Like, or water conservation.

I'm in favor of social, collective action to fix these problems, not me trying to be individually virtuous. That's a good answer. It's a good answer. I have to say, though, I have too much of Paul Bloom's, you know, emotional empathy when it comes to animals. I've been a vegetarian since January. Oh, okay.

So. Good for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't do it. You know, I was breastfeeding and realized. that animals, you know, nurse, there are many animals that we eat also nursed their kids. And I was just like, I can't eat them anymore.

I will, yeah, look, it's a very emotional issue. I think it's okay, and it's in flux. I did see someone I was following on Twitter, I won't say who, you know, tweeted something about how it's better for the planet if you eat more plants and less meat, okay? And there were so many responses in the comments along the lines of, don't tell me how to live my life. I'm going to have a big old steak.

And, you know, just like comments that were pictures of steak. And they were like, like, I eat steak. This is not a thing. But people who eat meat are just as, you know, sensitive and defensive snowflakes as vegans or vegetarians are. So I don't think there's any moral high ground anywhere around here. Absolutely. I think they're defensive because they know there's no justification for eating meat.

All right. Well, that's possible. The way that I know there's no justification for my carbon footprint and flying all over the place like I do. But you do, right. Yeah. So again, like I, and I do it too and I know it's bad. I know that me stopping doesn't change anything really. So again, I'm in favor of, you know, collective action to fix this problem. But anyway, okay, I think that, you know, this is, it's important because, you know, it relates back to the robots because you, you know, you said, and I think it's correct, we're nowhere near making artificially intelligent conscious robots that we would have to afford the same

kinds of protections to that we would people, but in the living kingdom, right, in animals or plants, there's a continuum of consciousness and feelings, and we have to draw that line somewhere, and eventually it's going to become a much harder question in the world of robots, I would think. Sean, I have a question. Yeah. Why do physicists always want to talk about robot consciousness? Is that a physics thing?

Like, what, it's always the physicist. I don't think so. I mean, I actually don't want to talk about it. I mean, it's one extreme, right? Like, one extreme is the Rumba, another extreme is artificial intelligence. And I'm just making the point that there's a continuum between them and we are changing. So it's actually, I think the philosophers like to talk about it more than physicists because they will instantly leap to the thought experiment, whether or not it's anywhere close to technologically feasible. Yes, it's true.

Philosophers also like this. Yeah. It's true. Well, you know, as a philosophical discussion, I think it's absolutely. warranted and, you know, relevant. I just, like I said, I don't think it's very practical to discuss if we're looking at the, you know, near and medium term future or as far as my eye can see because we're not going to, like, we're not going to have machines that approach the consciousness of, you know,

anything that we believe would warrant rights. Yeah, of a mouse. We're not going to come anywhere close to a mouse, right? Yeah, and we don't give the mice rights either. Yeah, no, exactly, that's right. So perfectly fair. And so I do, and I do think it's important because of what the implications of your work

and what you're studying is much more about how humans deal with robots that we all agree are not conscious. So there's plenty to be learned there. We've given the examples of autistic children, elderly dementia patients. But then we have to start talking about the sex robots, right? You know, people are using robots for perfectly healthy grown-up people using robots for other kinds of purposes, let us say. So do you study that?

Is that something you learn about? I don't study sex robots. I personally would have no problem with it. But it's very hard to do sex research in America. I don't know if you've tried. I don't have to do either sex or drugs research, but I've been told by friends who do, it's very, very difficult in both cases.

We're very puritanical. Yeah, you can't raise money for it. You get ostracized by your colleagues. Yeah. I also, the sex robots, you know, I think they also get a disproportionate amount of attention. I mean, like you said, we have to talk about the sex robots.

Everyone wants to talk about the sex robots. I think there's some interesting issues when it comes to sex robots, and it does tie into some of my, questions around does the use of technology influence human behavior? But there's also a lot of kind of sensationalist headlines around the sex robots. We don't really have any yet. Well, that's right. We have sex dolls, I guess. Right. I mean, the reason why I thought of it was because this issue that we don't need to sort of make the robots look human in order to anthropomorphize them. I presume that for sex robots, it's a, it's a, it's a,

it would be, since they don't really exist yet, but it would be beneficial to make them look human, right? Or at least, you know, some exaggerated version, whatever someone wants. Oh, yeah, that's the sex robot that you want? Because if you go into a sex shop and you look the sex toys made for women, a lot of them don't really look like, you know, there's like there's dildos that look like dolphins. I see.

So women don't want it to look like men. I don't know. I don't know. just say there's like a lot of different form factors out there. But I think, but jokes said, I mean, you're right that the sex dolls or the sex quote unquote robots that we are seeing on the market do resemble female bodies and, you know, specific types of female bodies, which which is, which also raises some issues around objectification of women and whether I don't believe that sex robots are any sort of replacement for human sexual relationships,

but they might be something that people who don't have human sexual relationships use because they're better than nothing, or they might be something that supplement people's sexual relationships. So I'm not necessarily concerned about humans being replaced here, but I am a little bit concerned about kind of the form factors. And we just don't know whether people's behavior towards sex robots is something that is a healthy outlet, for example, for sexual behavior that we don't want performed among humans, for example, pitophilia. Or whether it's something that might perpetuate. normalize the behavior and make them want more of it. We don't know. And like I said, it's

pretty impossible to research. Well, yeah, I guess that's what I was going to say. So you're right, we don't know it. You could easily imagine it going either way, right, that having this kind of robot either is an outlet and therefore keeps real people safe from harm or it encourages it. And this is an empirical question. You should study it. But you're saying that it's just hard as a practical matter to actually study things like that. It is. I mean, in other countries, countries like Germany and Canada, they are doing some research on pedophilia, which you like absolutely cannot even do in the United States for a lot of reasons, including legal reasons. But, you know, as an impure question, it's also a very difficult one to get at. It's like the violence and video game debate. It's like the pornography debate. We have some research that tries to get at those questions, but it's not very conclusive. It's very difficult. to do these studies, but I do think that robots warrant

reconsideration of these issues because of their physicality. I think that it's so much more immersive and visceral to engage with a robot than with something on a screen. And violence is another example, which is probably analogous to sex in some sense. We could imagine that certain people have violent tendencies and maybe that could be ameliorated if they could take it out on robots. right? Or it would just encourage them. And, you know, it's very analogous to the video game debate also. But is that something where we're able to do research a little bit easier than the sex question?

I mean, the research is, well, anything is easier to do research on them sex in America. But it is a very difficult question. So, you know, some of the research that's been done on human robot interaction is starting to look at connections between people's tendencies for empathy and how they treat robots. like my research, but also other people are looking at this. But the question of does interacting with robots change people's empathies is a more difficult one that we would like to get at? And I'd like to think of ways to get at it. But it's going to take a while. And that's unfortunate because we kind of need to know sooner rather than later. As robotic design gets more and more lifelike, you know,

we want to know whether we need to be policing. people's behavior or having age restrictions on certain robots or even having legal, you know, protections for certain robots that restrict what people can and can't do with them in order to prevent people from becoming desensitized to certain behaviors. Yeah. Yeah. So do you do you collaborate with psychologists, sociologists? Do they, they studying these questions of how people's behavior can be changed by dealing with robots in different ways? You know, some people. have reached out to me. I've stopped doing experimental research. I haven't done any for a few years because I'm writing a book right now, but when I get back into it, I'm planning on getting in touch

with people because, yeah, of course, this is very interdisciplinary work. You need people who understand the technology, people who understand the psychology. And that's another difficulty in academia, even though nowadays we claim that, you know, interdisciplinary is important. The institutional structures don't always support it that well. And I'm fortunate to be in a... Well, yeah. You know, the media lab is pretty good at it.

So I'm hoping that I can do some interdisciplinary work on this and collaborate with a few other people later on. Yeah, it does the... I mean, you mentioned like it's happening, right, like it or not. And as slow as academia is, the legal system is a whole other thing, right? I did have a podcast with Alta Charo, who is a bioethicist and law professor. And, you know, biology is a area where things are changing very rapidly with gene editing and designer babies and so forth. And the law is always slow to catch up.

Do you think that how good a shape is the law in when it comes to our future robot interactions? Oh, terrible. It's terrible. And sometimes it's good that the law is so far behind. Like we would not have the internet as we know it if, you know, legislators had gotten their hands on it early. At the same time, now we're dealing with, you know, some consumer protection issues and privacy issues and other issues because the law is still behind, even though we've had the internet for a while.

So it's a constant struggle, especially as the pace of technology really picks up. And biology is a great example. I mean, wow. Yeah. We need people who understand policy and law and understand technology and biology and the cutting edge of innovation to be working together on this. That doesn't happen nearly enough. I'm part of this community of people who are trying to bring policymakers and roboticists and people who work in those fields together with, you know, some limited but some success.

We have this conference that's happening every year. There's about to be a policy workshop in D.C. With a bunch of policymakers. But, yeah, it's a constant struggle. The law is usually based on, you know, superstition or lobbying. And not based on evidence. It's also reactive, right? Like some terrible thing happens and then we pass a law against it if it's a new kind of terrible thing.

Oh, yeah. And we need more evidence-based policy. But for that, we also need to have the data, to have the evidence that we can point to. And in human robot interaction, there's still some open questions that haven't been explored. I mean, so both what are those open questions and what are the biggest legal issues in your mind? Like what do you wish legislatures or at least congressional staffers were worrying about? Oh, well, okay, so do you mean like in my personal focus in work or do you mean generally in robotics? Whichever you want to do

first. Well, so my personal focus is really on the ways that people treat robots like they're alive, even though they know that they're just machines. And so the thing that I really want policymakers to be aware of is, or in particular, consumer protection agencies, is the fact that if you take the persuasive design that we've developed on the internet, you know, getting people to click on buttons because there's specific color, using all these tricks from like casinos to get people to interact. with their devices more. If you take that and apply it to a social robot, it's just putting it on steroids.

You know, a social robot is going to be so persuasive and so engaging to people. And that plus capitalism is, you know, a recipe for some consumer protection issues that I think we will need to figure out sooner rather than later. So that's what I think.

But, you know, beyond that, there are many, many issues in robotics that really, warrant legal consideration from autonomous weapon systems to responsibility for harm to you know automation and and um the workforce i mean there are so many oh my gosh algorithmic bias is a huge one um that fortunately has gotten a lot of attention attention recently and there are a lot of great people working on that but uh yeah there's there's a lot going on actually one of you maybe not every listener is is very familiar with that what is the issue with algorithmic bias

So we like to think of artificial intelligence as being more neutral in its decision-making than a person. And so if you're a company and you want to remove bias from your hiring process, for example, you might think it's a good idea to take an algorithm to train it on, you know, what people have been successful in your company in the past and have it pick applicants instead of having, you know, a human pick the applicants who might be swayed by like certain names or who knows what. So companies have actually done this. Amazon did this recently and got in trouble for it because it turns out if you train an algorithm on historical data, which is what we do with all the algorithms, it will incorporate a lot of biases.

Like, for example, the fact that you didn't used to hire a lot of women in your company. And so now the algorithm is going to be like, oh, well, women haven't been successful in this company, so we're going to weed all those out. So that's a very simple example, but we are seeing these systems being deployed in areas like criminal justice, making decisions over whether people get out on bail or not, making decisions over whether people get hired or fired, entire rating systems for people's professions have been automated in this way. And it's heartbreaking because not only is the data usually biased, but we usually don't have any insight into how these decisions were made. A lot of these systems are developed by, you know, companies. It gets contracted out.

It's in a black box. It's protected by intellectual property. Or even, you know, the algorithm is so complex that, you know, humans can't. understand how it came up with the decision. We just trust that it was a good one. But there's a lot of problems with this, obviously. And data scientists, fortunately, are turning some of their attention towards this. So basically, I mean, it's a garbage and garbage out problem, right?

If you train a computer on your biases, it will end up reflecting your biases. Oh, yeah, of course. I mean, that's the problem with technology in general. like people oh my gosh we have someone here at the lab joy bolemweeney she does fantastic work she's a woman of color and she was working on this you know she was she's programming something that required facial recognition and she realized that the system couldn't recognize her face because her skin is black and it would only so she had to she had to wear a white mask so that the system would see her and we've seen this over and over again like photography

automatic faucets in the bathroom, facial recognition. Technology is built by largely young affluent white men who don't think to incorporate different types of skin color as just one example. And it's not their fault. Everyone has blind spots based on their life experience, but we need more diversity in the teams that are building technology. We need to be aware of the biases and the data

that we're training these systems with. And currently, I think we're a little bit too, we trust technology a little bit too much to be neutral. Yeah. And that goes back to something you mentioned in passing that I want to come back to about responsibility and where we put it. You know, we have increasing, things are being done in our world increasingly by automated systems, by robots, by computer programs. And sometimes things will go wrong. Sometimes it's inevitable. sometimes it could have been avoided.

But we have a system when human beings do something and it goes wrong for blaming them and holding them accountable and holding them responsible. And what do we do when the thing that went wrong is an automated system rather than a biological one? Well, it seems like an unsolvable problem. We do have some things that we can draw on throughout history to look at this. Now, of course, this isn't going to help in cases where we have a black box. problem, which is why the EU, for example, is looking at trying to have transparency in algorithmic decision-making so that you can at least see what happened in the decision-making

process. But when it comes to just these autonomous entities making a decision and causing harm, we can look at animals. We do have a history of assigning responsibility when animals have caused harm in the past. I think of this, you know, in particular when we think about robots and automated weapon systems and things where robots are causing physical harm. We've dealt with this issue throughout history ever since the first law is known to humankind. You know, what happens if my ox wanders off and gores someone in the street, who's responsible for that? And we've had different solutions to that. Like, it's not like we found the one golden solution. It depends a little bit on culture and other things, but we can

look at that history and try and draw from it a little bit. I was just recently talking to someone at a conference who is involved in some, he's a roboticist, works on autonomous vehicles, and he was talking to some lawmakers in England about how to regulate autonomous vehicles. And they were like, oh, oh, well, you know, we have this law of the horse from like the 17th century that, like, perfectly applies here. And so they started drawing on that. So, you know, it's not as new a problem as people think. Right.

Okay. Yeah. Actually, that does make sense. And again, it fits in with the, we can learn. something about how to deal with robots by studying how we deal with animals more broadly, right? I mean, I personally love that analogy. It doesn't hold for everything, of course, but it's pretty cool. Well, I wanted to, I mean, before I forget, you know, you mentioned the usefulness of these robots to autistic children or elderly people with dementia. I want to think about the usefulness of robots

in a similar way, specifically intentionally anthropomorphize robots to, you know, grown not regular people or the majority of people who we think about, will we be having increasing robot nannies or robot school teachers anytime soon, robot nurses? Well, whether we will or not is a different question from whether or not we should. Yes. I personally think it's so boring to just try and, you know, create robots that do something that a human can do. that's just like I understand that sometimes there's a need for that like for example for some for a dangerous job that you know we don't want people putting themselves in danger for yeah we might want a robot to automate that but the robot nannies or like people taking on a function that like relies a lot on human social factors I think that's um I think that would be better done by humans honestly uh if you look at robots have the comparative advantage right

No, absolutely not. And, and, you know, people argue, oh, well, you know, there are certain countries where we have overaging populations and, you know, we need robots to take, because we don't have enough people to do, you know, caretaking jobs, for example. But, you know, sometimes the problem there is very strict immigration policies and general, you know, issues in society that maybe aren't best solved by throwing robots at the problem. Like maybe we need to have a broader conversation about what it means, for example, for blue collar work. who've lost their job to not want to become a nurse because it's too feminine in their minds. You know, we have a lot of jobs and caretaking in the U.S. that, you know, where people are needed. And at the same time, we have people complaining that all the jobs are getting lost. And it's, you know, there's a lot of culture and identity and other conversations tied up in that that that we might want to be having rather than turning to technological solutionism. I guess, yeah, okay. I mean, it's a good point because I think that one of the first things that people, I think we've touched on this already, the first things people think of when they imagine the robotic future is robots that are exactly like humans, right,

that are conscious and look like human beings. And even if we put that aside and say, well, the robots don't need to be like humans, they can be different and have different things. You're saying that we still, you know, look at the functions filled by human beings and say, what if we filled them by robots? And we might want to say, well, what if they're just completely different functions that robots are much better at and we should be looking at those? Yeah, I think it's so much, there's so much more potential in thinking outside of the box here and thinking about, okay, what are robots good at? And how can we use that to make us more productive or have us do our jobs better? I think that there's way more potential in thinking like that than in thinking of how do we recreate human ability. Yeah, right in Pasadena, right near Caltech where I work, there is, I don't know if it's the world's first, but there is a burger joint that has a robotic burger flipper, right?

It puts the spatula over the burger, flips it, and you can watch it, right? They sell it as a tourist attraction, and I was never quite sure why that was an improvement over anything, but. I mean, there's some novelty effect there, I guess. There's some novelty effect. But so, okay, to close then, I'll just give you an opportunity to prognosticate a little bit. Like, what, or maybe if not you're directly predicting the future, give us a little bit of a hint for those of us who are not following the latest robot news, what we should keep in mind or keep an eye out for in the robotic future, not just building robots, but, you know, the legal and moral and personal issues that you care about. Well, I think one of the things that people really have trouble wrapping their minds around, but as people have more robots in their lives are getting more comfortable with,

is this idea that we do treat robots sort of like living things, even though we know that they're just machines. And so having that awareness, I think it helps you not be as surprised by it and helps lessen the confusion that we're seeing in our society at least. But another thing that I really want to point out is that the way that artificial intelligence currently is being built and learns is by collecting massive amounts of data and feeding it to the machines. And we now have the processing power to be able to do something with that data. And there's some really cool things. But a lot of data collection, I think, could be problematic for people's privacy interests.

And that's something that people don't think about a lot. And even I see it in myself. Like we have an Alexa at home. It's so practical to be able to order diapers, hands-free, you know, when you have a toddler. And so we don't mind having a microphone in our home that's listening to everything because we've traded our privacy for that functionality. And so we don't have an incentive to curb that.

The companies don't have an incentive to curb that. So we need legislation. to have our backs because, you know, I think privacy is, it's really important, you know, maybe not for me, but for the poor families who get targeted with advertisements, trying to sell them, you know, scammy loans or education programs. There are so many examples of how people get exploited by all this data collection, and I think we need to be aware of that. Yeah, I kind of have a fatalistic attitude towards this.

suspect that privacy is just going to go away. You know, I don't think it should. I think we should try to protect it, but people don't seem that interested in trying to protect it versus the pressure to give it up and the possible benefits they can get from giving it up. But like, we have to fight, Sean. We do. We do.

It doesn't impact you maybe as like a very privileged white man, but it impacts so many people who are, you know, less fortunate and they're just, I just, we have to fight this. I, and I don't believe that privacy is dead. I believe that privacy is an entire spectrum and that if we just let this unbridled capitalism roll over us, they're going to find newer and newer ways to just exploit people. And so we need to at least try to slow it down a little. All right. I will take that as a good optimistic message that we should, you know, even if it's a pessimistic message in the sense that there's this huge problem facing us, it's an optimistic one that we can fight and do something about it. I think so.

All right. Kate Darling, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Thanks, Sean. What if you could have even more and more and more help to pursue your goals? At LPL Financial, we offer more ways for advisors and their clients to thrive. So what if you could? Paid advertisement. Investing involves risk, including potential asset principal, LPL Financial LSC, member FINRA, SIPC.