Tomorrow, Today - Artificial Intelligence, Robots, Love & Humanity with Dr. Julie Carpenter

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Julie Carpenter to discuss artificial intelligence, the future of robots, and what these technologies mean for humans. How do we understand our identity as technology continues to advance, and how far away are we from the dystopic future painted in futuristic movies? Dr. Julie Carpenter is a world-leading expert on robot-human relationships. She made headlines in 2013 when she released her groundbreaking new study on the emotional ties between military personnel and military robots. As a result of the study, which revealed that soldiers often name and even fall in love with their robots, and hold funerals for robots that have been destroyed, the public came face-to-face with a reality that had previously only been considered in the realm of science fiction. As autonomous systems proliferate in both the military and civilian spheres, Carpenter’s research will become extremely important; it will help us understand not only how we will have feelings for robots, but also the ethical, social and practical consequences of developing relationships with machines. Carpenter has inaugurated a complex and perhaps uncomfortable discussion about an issue which, bizarre as it may seem to us now, will eventually touch everyone who interacts with autonomous machines. Support this podcast by subscribing to the Poor Proles Almanac patreon at www.patreon.com/poorprolesalmanac You can find Dr. Julie Carpenter on Twitter at @JGCarpenter

to Tomorrow Today, a podcast where we talk about the future of tomorrow. But today, I am your host, Nash Flynn. I am here. As always, I'm trapped. Please someone help me with Andy of the Porpo's Almanac. Andy, hello. Why am I not Andy of tomorrow today? Because we're doing tomorrow today. If you were going to introduce me, you'd say, Nash of death and friends. I've never said that about you. You haven't ever said that. We've actually never said the name of my other podcast on the show. Whose fault is that? I think it's yours because you're the one that's supposed to introduce. me. It's 2023. You can introduce yourself. Oh, okay. Well, I am the host of the Death and Friends Podcast, one of them, I suppose. You are the host of the Porpo's Almanac. How are we doing today?

Wonderful. Good. Good. I'm glad. I'm very happy for you. I feel like you're going to bring things down. So happy. No, no, I'm not this time. Everybody always expects the guests that I have on this show are going to be sad and a bummer and about grief and death. And we do talk about it this week, But not like in its major forms. Like this talk was not really supposed to be. Like death peripheral? Yeah. Like it was not supposed to be about death.

But I snuck it in there. You know what I mean? Like I just little, I'm going to regret that noise. You like stuck your foot in the door as it was closing on death. And you're like, nah. Yes. Let's say that that's what I meant by that noise. Let's say that.

Anyway, this week I had the absolute pleasure of talking with Dr. Julie Carpenter. is a researcher and academic, a film theorist, and just an all-around delight. She's got a book coming out in 2023. It's called The Naked Android, Synthetic Socialness and the Human Gays, and you can check out her TED Talk, which is called Humans Plus Robots, Colman, Dream Machines. She is absolutely wonderful at titling things. I would also like to add that.

Is it the humans and robots together are the Dream Machine, like the Dream Team, but because they're a robot, it's a machine? Or is the robot the Dream Machine? or is the robot the machine and the person is the dream. Okay, okay, okay. So I can't answer that because this is definitely something she should have answered. Well, you know, but I do think it is all of those things. All of the above?

All of those things. It's like one of those puzzles where it's like how many different points can this corner touch? And it's all. It's all of them. It's actually the Venn diagram of those things is a circle. It's all connected, man. The universe. It's beautiful.

It's like 1978 and you hit your first joint. Exactly. I actually had a super, super fun time with this conversation because it was the most fascinating thing I've ever heard in my life, to be honest with you. We talked about everything, all of the things, the entire human consciousness. It was a wonderful conversation. We talked about Y2K, which I know everybody misses deeply. Can we for Y3K? Please bring it on sooner rather than later.

I am very tired of this podcast. Wow. I'm just joking. Anyway, we talked about being a millennial. We talked about the rise of technology. We talked about how robots help us understand humanity. And we talk about a little bit about death. Who won't lie about that?

Okay. I wanted to do this introduction, and I wanted to bring it back to us, you and me in the studio. And I want you to tell me, like, when you remembered, like, your first internet use, like, walk me through. Because we're both millennials. So we both grew up without the internet and then the invention of the internet and then the advent of social. media as it became. So tell me about the first time you got online. So I don't remember the first time I got on the internet.

Okay. That's not an auspicious start. But there's a big butt here. Okay. It's a big butt. It's a big butt. It's my favorite kind of butt. It's big.

First grade, we had like one of those floppy disk computers. Oh, sure. You shove the thing in. So like shove it right in. Sometimes it shoves back out. We have this computer. It's got this stupid game on it. I'm six.

And we go up in groups to like. It's two kids at a time at the computer for some reason. So you get to name your character and they do the thing. So I named my character poop. Yeah, you did. I did. And like 10 seconds in the kid that I'm like with yells to the teacher, Mrs. Owensow, he spelled poop.

So like it's like the third day of school. And I didn't go to like orientation because like my parents weren't those kinds of people. They had an orientation for first grade. Yeah, like the half day like intro. like, welcome to your new school, blah, blah, because I didn't have a kindergarten there or anything. So I get sent to the principal's office. I don't know where the principal's office is. So I just walked around the school for like 20 minutes and came back.

And she's like, okay, is everything all set? And I was like, yep. And the day kept going on like that. And that is my first time with the computer. Wow. That is, please someone update this Wikipedia page because that's the most origin story I've ever heard. That's where it all started to go wrong. That's where it all started to go wrong.

The big butt. The poop story. It's funny, though, that you say that because I have an Animal Crossing Island that is called Fart. So we're just out there wilding. Tale's oldest time. I mean, I was 32 when I made that island and you were six when you made poop. So, you know. Listen, late bloomer.

It's okay. Yes. By like three decades. I don't remember the first time I was online. I do remember my father created my first, like AOL. screen name and he didn't know anything about me he still really doesn't and he really wanted a son so my first this is true my first a I am like in what are they called screen names yeah well I've read to reach for that my first AOL screen name was B ball 726 because my dad thought I liked basketball

and my birthday is July 27th but he didn't know that so he just got close yes it sounds about So it had nothing to do with me at all. I don't even know where he got basketball from. I played soccer. He went to some of those games. It's okay. My dad went to my basketball games. He was the guy that was reading the newspaper at the YMCA,

like his foot sticking out into the court. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to care when your kids are playing sports, I suppose. Maybe that one's not his fault. But not knowing my birthday was pretty harsh. My first screen name was Philly, and then, like, I think my birthday or something like that. Like, P-H-I-L-I, because I like the 76ers. Oh, wow. Basketball.

Yeah. Look at that. The overlaps going on here. We tied it all together. It's beautiful, really. Cohesive themes on this podcast. That's what we're saying. We do it all.

We plan these chats well in advance. This is all scripted material. I mean, how could you not think it's scripted material? Right. We're actually not even real people. This whole podcast is run by AI. In honor of our great deity, Dr. Carpenter. Dr. Julie Carpenter.

Thank you so much for inventing us and giving us souls unlike the Google AI. And history. We talk about that too. We also talk about Elon Musk. It was an absolutely fantastic conversation. I hope that before you jump in, you take a moment of silence and think about the first time you interacted with the internet. And if it's a really good story, please go ahead and tag me on social media. I would love to know it.

Do you think there's some libertarian dad out there who's going to give his kids their first social media handle? And it's like Elon Musk rules 420 for like a six-year-old. I do believe that happens. But, you know, I want to end on this because I really want this to be. a positive, optimistic experience. And not like aliens or robots are going to take over and kill us because we're obviously stupid. I mean, maybe that would be an optimistic choice given the current state of things.

But, okay, here it is, ready? You never know the last time you're going to do something, right? You never know the last time you pick up your kid and put them down or the last time you drive past your old house, whatever. Today, as we sit here, we don't know how much longer the Twitter code will hold. To be fair, when this actually comes out, it might have already done. Yes, so this might be a little nugget of history. A time when we thought the Musk Tusk wouldn't fail.

But it has repeatedly over and over again. Anyway, here's your moment of Zen. Please think about the internet. I stole that from John Stewart. For the internet. For the internet. So, just to get us off the ground here, I really, really want to talk about how you got into this field.

And I know that you've answered this question a bunch of times because you started off in film theory. And now you work in humans sort of versus and row. So I want to hear you tell me again how you got here. I have to step back and say I like humans versus robots. I often, I don't think of it that way, but that sounds like a great, like, film franchise or something. It is versus robots. So how did I get into it?

So a hundred years ago, when I was an undergraduate, they didn't have really anything that was specific in psychology or communication. or communication, or even art history, which is where my interests were before that, about how humans specifically would interact with the emerging technologies. But one school that they had that interested me was film theory, right? And this was the internet was sort of emerging. I mean, we had just all gotten like emails on campus, right, that weren't even widely used yet. So, of course, there wasn't a specific field in it. And I wasn't sure I knew as a movie lover that film theory would hold my interest as an undergraduate, right?

And would be fascinating to me. So the short version of this is that when you think about what film theory is, which is sort of like dissecting and taking close cultural looks at who is doing the writing and the directing and the editing of film. films, who decides what stories get to be told, what genres are popular, what ones blow up existing paradigms, you know, and why? What messages does the audience take away? What messages do different audiences take away? You know, how are things culturally embedded? And when you think about all of these questions that media theory delves into, you can see sort of how that informed, one of my first jobs after college, which was in communications that turned into web development. Like a lot of jobs did then, if you weren't afraid to learn to code, and I already had some

background in it because I was lucky enough to have early home computers and things like that. If you were brave enough at work to raise your hand and say, I don't mind doing the web stuff, then all of a sudden you were the web admin. And that's really how I started with that. And from doing the back end stuff, and I'm not going to claim to be any great engineer or web developer, because this was 100 years ago, right? We're still talking.

Certainly, this was a time when because people were learning to adopt the web, and I was initially working at the back end of it, I was dealing with the companies, individuals, the organization's trust issues, funneled through me about messaging. Like, they were so embedded in the idea of print to communicate to the people, the members of their organization. Like, they didn't even really get that if they, if there needed to be a correction on

the web, I could do it in seconds. So if there was a mistake, it wasn't like, oh, my God, you know, take the website down. You know, all our members are misinformed. You know, like they didn't, that's, we're laughing now. But people didn't understand the mechanics of the back end was really a black box. It was a mystery if you didn't know how to code, really. And that's sort of where that mystique in some ways about engineers and coding began. It was just a complete mystery to people how this happened.

So those initial trust issues for me sort of start began turning the light bulb on. like this is really powerful medium. Yeah. Right? Yeah, for sure. And it's funny, you know, that you say that, you know, we're laughing at it now because in truth, you know, it's 2022. I'm an adult.

I grew up with technology. I could still, I still don't always trust that what I'm typing in an email gets to the person. Like I don't understand that process at all. And sometimes I'm like, ooh, but I also don't really understand the post office. So for me, writing it down is not better. Like I don't understand any of those things at all. Right. I mean, that does come down to very nuanced things about trusting the system. What feedback the medium gives you to engage you and make you trust it, right? Like if you have the ability to get a rebroad or something and even trust in yourself. Right. Right. If you have a mental model of yourself, like the funny thing is, it's like when I was started as an undergraduate,

I did not think of myself as technical at all. So the fact that I work in technology now is hilarious. But also, but I really was technical at the time. I just didn't think of myself that way. And again, I say that because I was privileged enough to have a nerd father who would spend our last penny on technology, emerging technologies. I say privileged. I don't know.

It was a little crazy. But, and so he got some of those early home computers. And I was the kind of person. They're used to, this might be too much history. You're going to edit it all out. But there are going to be people, other people in Gen X and older who are going to remember this. And this might be new for some people. There were magazines like Basic.

And all it did, it was the magazine was called Basic. And it was basic language, the computing language, because that's what you used on your VIC 20, you've mixed before. And there would be hundreds of pages of basic language code programming, not for you to copy, paste off the web, but you actually hand-entered all of the code from the printed magazine. And something about that, I would spend, you know, here I am like, I don't remember 12, 13 with this VIC-20 computer and basic magazine and something in my brain enjoyed entering all the code, you'd enter pages of it just to make the computer thing flashlights or to, you know, to make a little dot pong around on the screen or something about that whole process appeal to me

to this day who knows what it is. My brain just worked that way. Oh, that's so funny. It's, it's hilarious to me though. So I'm a millennial. So I grew up in like the Y2K. And the only coding I ever learned how to do. And this is true, is because I had a MySpace page when everybody had a MySpace page. And we all were like, oh, that's how you make font bold. You just go in the coding section. Yeah, yeah. No, and again, I'm not claiming to be an engineer, but I think I was at all, at all.

I'm not, no. But I think that that sort of thing, absolutely having that sort of childhood, again, where my father was always enamored of emerging tech, whether it was seriously going back even further into the 70s, Texas instrument calculators were some of the first real home computers in a way that you could get, you know. And so I wasn't afraid of technology. I was really interested in technology. So it just things my interest. So one of the things I also wanted to talk about, because you sort of mentioned it as being 100 years ago, so I also remember 100 years ago. we're sort of in like this Y2K era and I was I was a child I was I'm not going to do the math I was probably 12

we're just going to ballpark that one right we'll just say 12 yeah we'll say 12 and I remember on new year's eve of 1999 everyone this big panic like you were calling all your friends did you shut your computer off because the computers are going to explode if you leave them on there was this like real fear that that was the end of everything and not just that technology would fall apart but that we were sort of going into like is this the maybe end of humanity like I remember following a slide last night and being like god I hope we wake up on earth tomorrow morning and technology was sort of like how we were building and and forcing that fear into that that robots computers wouldn't know to change the year and of course we woke up and everything was fine and you know we've never looked back but so do you think

this kind of cultural shift of this building of this ideology with us all of this adaptive technology and that fear sort of built in led to like where we are now which is basically online all of the time. You know, that's interesting. Of course, I was older than you during the Y2K thing and I know that you read a little bit about me on my

webpage where I talk about Y2K because I was working in the financial sector and banking at that time doing this web work and public communication was my job. So I was the person that handled the journalist phone calls.

saying what's going to happen to everybody. And also just people who would see the name of the organization, our head banking unit. And like I had people just calling me what's going to happen. And so clearly there was this panic. And I was oddly calm about it. Even though we had a two-person engineering team, the engineers were a little worried.

That was their job. But I didn't feel I was the one running around, calming people at the organization going, that's not going. I was oddly calm about it. But to lead to your overarching question, my subjective opinion, having been immersed in banking, was that that was clearly something people worried about all their finances. What are the banks going to go into chaos? Is that going to screw up my mortgage, my loans, my business?

And as sort of as you were alluding to, then that would be the economic trickle down. So in a lot of ways, the banks were sort of that median that people would reach out to. I was in the thick of it. And did it lead to cultural shifts? The funny thing is, I feel like you said, that we woke up the next morning and people forgot about Y2K. And it was a people moved on. Now, that's not to say that there was. just a wide acceptance of the web.

And it was like, we woke up and went, whew, let's party. Because there were still a lot of trust issues. I mean, that was also around the time where retail was just starting online. And people were very mistrustful still after we lived and survived through I2K about the idea of giving people your credit card online. Right? This was about the time Amazon was starting online and other businesses.

And people would say, you're crazy if you give anybody your credit card online. It's nuts. It's wacko. So I think it took Y2K was a really significant time leading up to it because of the fear, the mistrust, the unknown. But I feel like once we went past it as a culture, by and large, people moved on. And also that's because the Internet wasn't as big a part of their life. on people's whole livelihoods weren't entwined in it. You didn't have a smartphone you picked up.

And the first thing you did in the morning was check all your social media, right? So your life wasn't as into it. So once it passed and your banking was safe and your finances and the world didn't end, then there were other issues with the web, right? Like I was talking about, that slow cultural trust. You had to build trust. Retailers had to build trust the whole experience of the web. It really was what people referred to it as the Wild West to them.

That's really West-centric, too. But it was really crazy. And so I don't blame people for being mistrustful of the transactions, being transactional financially. But it's interesting to me, like where we started at Y2K and where even we were after the fact, you know, where we had this significant mistrust to where we are now, which is like, I don't remember the last time I held cash. Like I just trust that the banking systems know what I have in my accounts based on the cards. My cards are saved in all of my like various accounts.

I summon strangers cars from my phone. You know what I mean? Like all of the things that we were taught in the 90s are really like out the window now because we're so perpetually online. And I think COVID was probably the straw on the camel's back on that one because now we're just so used to it. Absolutely. And another thing, obviously, COVID did a lot to push us back to clear. clearly to remote instead of in person. It shifted a lot of things in our life, pushed us online, pushed us to have to trust different mediums as ways to communicate or to try to put our trust

into it. We had to be vulnerable to learn new mediums, right? Because you are vulnerable every time you learn anything, really, a new application, new software, anything, a new way of thinking. Because as you learn something, you can feel stupid and nobody likes to feel stupid, really. So learning can be uncomfortable. I do love to feel safe on Microsoft Teams. Every single day at work. It's just one of my favorite pastimes. No, no, no. Don't say, yeah, teams. I'm going to zip it up on Teams. Oh, do you have Insider Microsoft? No, no, no, but I'm sure I have friends there probably work on it. So I'm not going to criticize their hard work. We love Microsoft Teams. It's, the user that's the problem. No, no, no, I would never say that either. It's, you know,

getting back to what you were saying about trust, trust is something that, look, there's two things that comes to mind. So first of all, one is the definition of trust, which is when you believe that you and the other entity are aligned and working towards the same goals, right? So that means you have to be getting some sort of communication feedback, something that feeds into your belief that you are aligned towards achieving the same thing, right? So the other thing that comes to mind when you were talking about this is I was also gloriously working at another organization right after that, right before HIPAA was being developed. At the same time, patients were gaining access to medical records online.

So electronic medical records are something else we take for granted now, but our incredibly complicated privacy and trust systems for us to use. And, you know, of course, COVID pushed all of that forward, even though we had that ability before. Certainly now people are going to forever take for granted that they can do entire doctor's appointments remotely, right? Entire. You could just like chat. Right. Like, hey, doc. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, we moved therapy on line. I'll be honest with you. That terrifies me a lot because I feel like for therapy purposes, you really need to be removed from your environment in order to do therapy properly. There's something fundamentally strange about sitting on your own couch in the environment which you need

therapy from to be like, hey, doc, things are not going on. Well, you know, that's interesting. So I'm not a clinical psychologist. I'm in a different area of psychology, but I would say to that that you need to go wherever you're comfortable and feel that you can do the talking, right? No, that's true. Yeah. You know, then you need to be in an environment and have the experience where you feel that you're getting what you need out of it. So remote might not be the best or even just moving to another room or turning off the

video or, you know, and closing your eyes. You know, they're all. And that's not a, these are not toss away comments because these are, what you're talking about is negotiating and navigating a new way. of getting a clinical treatment, right? So that's really important. And what you're saying is you're not quite sure that it's working for you yet. It's a process you're still navigating.

And that's that kind of area of tension that I always work in. That's my little niche right now. That's fun. I was thinking specifically like during COVID when like everybody was trapped in their house. So you were talking to your therapist from the. only place you were like actually allowed to be to your therapist who was stuck also in their home. And like what a strange breach of that relationship where you're like, I can see inside your house, but we've both been stuck here. So we have nothing else to do. Like I wonder how therapists

really also navigated that mental health wise. I'm sure that that was difficult. But we have to remember two therapists are highly trained. Hopefully if they've said that they're going to do the work remotely, that's because they're comfortable doing it that way. A lot of A lot of therapists have home offices where they can even receive patients and everything. So, you know, one hopes that if they take that or if that's part of their clinical job that they're comfortable doing it. Yeah. I mean, you have to trust both the robots and the humans in that scenario.

Sort of. Brought it all the way. Yeah, well, actually, I mean, therapeutic robots, that's a whole other thing to the chatbots or another thing people turn to. It's funny that you mentioned that because we've actually talked on this show about physical therapy with robots and using VR as a way to help stroke patients recover. It's a really, really fascinating approach to, I think, using robots in replacement of human interaction. And I will let you respond to that if you would like to. Robots as replacement or so robots are a medium.

So they can also certainly be an extension of a clinical psychologist. another place, somebody could use the robot as a medium to make somebody feel more comfortable to have them have a focus for someone to talk to. That seems like an incredibly overly technical way to do it in these day and age when we have Zoom. So then what you're talking about, it would be having the robot, whatever form that would be an embodied or voice or whatever, which would those are two very different environments and experiences for the patient. But I have said before when people ask me this kind of question, well, there's two things. So one is robots or artificial intelligence in general, let's say, for therapy.

I'm completely against that for the next 100 years. they can perhaps be used as the tool with a clinical psychologist or trained therapist, but they don't have the subjective understanding of the human experience. So that is no. But having said that, there are studies that show that sometimes people with different types of neurodivergence do feel comfortable speaking to actual robots, physical robots, because, they feel less pressured to react in what's considered a normalized way. They don't feel judged for any of their behaviors or mannerisms. Then there's also like just having a voice interface, like picking up your phone and

having a chat bot, which is becoming more common, often for cognitive-based therapy. So, for example, getting over a fear or an anxiety, mitigating an anxiety about something. And those have been shown to be really helpful for people. And those are complete AI. And there have been situations, again, where people feel sort of not being judged by this technical other, relieves them of any stigma they might feel attached to seeking treatment. So that's an interesting door. But as far as AI being the lone therapist, I'm going to say hell no, for now.

I'm with you on that one. I do think it's super fascinating that neurodivergence approaches it slightly differently or is comforted by interfacing with robots. That's really fascinating. The study we talked about was Dr. Rachel Prophet is working on specifically VR, so people who have mobility issues who use VR. if they can't get to a clinician and navigating. I think she works specifically with stroke victims getting access back to the arms.

So it was really fascinating. And I think it reminded me every time I looked at more of your stuff, I was so reminded of that, it's sort of very physical interface between humans and robots. And I want to stay on this topic. It's very clear path through because I want to talk about Elon's purchase of Twitter really quickly. Do you think it matters? Who owns the robots?

Yes. Are we going to talk, do you ever talk about Elon or the robots? Because I have thoughts on both. They're the same thing. Yeah, well, boy, those are two very different topics. Yeah. So I'll give you an example of who owns, doesn't matter who owns the robots. So a lot of times when I start talking about data and your data privacy and data collection, because a robot in order to interact with you, like any AI, it has to do a certain amount. of learning about you, whether that's you manually putting things in like settings and preferences or just learning things about your preferences and the ways that you interact and the things that you might like. And it can triage that information with other data that whoever makes this entity that you're interacting with has purchased, right? So they have a really, So that's why when you go, wow, this targeted ad sure nailed what I was just talking about with somebody else. It's not because it read your mind or listened to you.

It's because companies are very good at triaging the data. So they see if you just texted a friend, it's not that they read your text. It's looking at all the data about you and your friend and what you might have in common. And then bam, you get this targeted ad. And you're like, so sort of like with robots, think about all the data they can potentially collect. about you visually, things that you say. You're inviting the technology in your home, as we already have. You know, we have tracking on our phones, right? It can find us really well. We have already let things like digital assistance like Alexa into our home, which is, you know,

people must have a certain amount of trust than what is Amazon doing with all that data when it's potentially listening or not listening to what you say, right? So I would say that that factors in. That was a very long way to say. So people will have different reactions about companies that make the robots. So for example, let's say a robot is made by a company you've never heard of and it's a very cute, adorable robot. You might go, oh, if I had the money, I would certainly welcome this adorable robot into my home.

if I told you Amazon made the robot, and it was still the same cute little robot, would you invite it into your home? Some people would. Some people might start to have second thought. Some people might go, wow, who cares? I mean, it's great. It's Amazon. It's a trusted company that I know. It might make them trust it more.

But I would urge people to think about all the data that they're giving away essentially because that data. And it's something we all know. I don't have a robot in my home, but I negotiate that that too. We all do because we need technology really to be productive, at least in this world, unless you're completely off grid. So we all have to make these choices. Getting back to your original question, yes. And then so not just from the user's perspective, who makes it, but of course then that's attached

to what I'm saying really think about behind this. you should always question who's making the robot and why. Unfortunately, these are things we don't do, especially when it's presented to us and packaged to us as entertainment or something cute or something helpful. A lot of times, again, it's that black box of technology and also because we're so immersed in technology and new technologies coming all the time that there is very much, I think, an entertainment aspect to it. for a lot of people that don't deeply question. And I don't blame, who has the time to deeply question the technology of every smart appliance

you might have in your home? But I would urge people to think about it because the people making these smart appliances absolutely are thinking about it. To give you an insight, you know, if you have a smart refrigerator, right, I guarantee you They are absolutely thinking about how to inventory what's in your refrigerator. And they're going to sell it to you in ways like, oh, we can tell you when you're out of milk or we can tell you when you need to, and you can order this from your, or the refrigerator will order it for you automatically.

But it's also gathering all this data. How much oat milk do you drink? What brand do you prefer? You know, do you have baby food in there? Do you have, you know, all of these things so it can infer. about your life. And that sounds creepy, and it is, unfortunately. So there's a lot going on in the world right now, but these are things to think about how much of your data do you want to give away for convenience and are you comfortable exchanging for convenience? And I think to your point, too, they do package it as like,

this is for your convenience. But I think on the flip side, too, what capitalism tends to do there is if they can streamline everything, then all you have to worry about is your productivity, right? So if you're working at nine to five and everything else is done for you, your refrigerator's ordering all your food, your cat litter box cleans itself, the doors open and close, the lights, you know, turn on and off, you have to have a five to nine, right, then to become stress on how much more can you produce, how much more can you give back to a society that does everything for you so that we can keep making and considering. and developing technology and robots to put back in your home that you need to pay to afford.

Right. And there's, I'm really glad you brought this up because this brings up all of the socioeconomic garbage that comes with this, not just this, the whole capitalist purchase, you know, make products and purchase the products and that whole circle thing. And that encouraging us to work jobs to keep purchasing things that are supposed to make our lives easier. So, I mean, that gets to the, there's a difference between choosing. Like, I can choose not to have a voice interface assistant in my home like Alexa because it's something I don't need and I don't want personally. Let's say that those are my choices. But that's because I have that social, economic privilege that I can choose to do that or not, right? There are times where technology is

great. I don't mean this to sound like this is me versus technology because that's really not what my job or I see my job is about. I see my job is for, if anything, I'm advocating for the users. And so technology, as we've hinted at, can be really beneficial in therapeutic uses, for people with disabilities. Anybody who has any kind of challenge, it can bring great convenience to your life, but only if you can afford it. So that sort of brings me to if we wanted to talk about meta. And the whole idea of, I think one of the problems with the whole theory of the metaverse was, in my opinion, was that Mark Zuckerberg had planned for this. I think he said he wanted to aim towards 2030 for having something like a more tangible, widely accepted, what he pictured more

as a metaverse and everything up till that point was sort of development. But they really also banked on people adopting expensive headsets. I mean, besides the fact of wearing a headset and and trying to also unlike Second Life and some of the, the also, you know, massive multiplayer online environments, you know, all of these other things where people could also connect to each other lacked some of that socioeconomic divide that just by you needed certain, not just an understanding of the technology itself, but you had to buy it and have access to it. And you think of that's not just, you know, people with privilege who want to play in the metaverse. This could become, if you're going to sell this as they

tried to as something that can help people with education or something like that, that's going to turn into schools that can afford it. Parents that can afford this at home, those that can't. And I mean, whatever form that headset takes, whether it turns into glasses, access to the metaverse, whatever, one of those big things that I think they didn't count on was the socio and the interest in it in general. There are a lot of issues, but the socioeconomic one is one that I don't think we discuss enough in technology and there is still a great divide, especially with these emerging technologies. And I think one of the things that I was struck most by it's like the people that can afford those kind of technologies don't really have other concerns,

right? So they can go out and do those things because they have the cash and the capital and the ability to do those things. They can go out in real life and do some of those things. They're not going to be the people that need to, like either people who have chronic illnesses or people who are disabled, like those people who would actually use those technologies aren't going to be in the same tax bracket as people who can afford them. Not typically, right? I mean, you don't want to make sweeping, right? But yeah, so there, I mean, no, but exactly. I'm not negating what you're saying. I totally, that's absolutely true. And so you can't, he bet on something that he himself, I believe, said was really going to come to a different, a completely different, more integrated experience, whatever he thought that was going to look like glasses, contact lenses, eye implants, who knows, you know, who knows what they thought it was going to be eventually in 10 years or 20 years.

But in the meantime, just the money thing. And again, we saw that with early internet with computers, right? And then we saw that with smartphones. And we're going to see that with every emerging technology. You see that, you know, that's actually a big issue with self-driving cars as well. You know, they're really designed in many ways to be on the road with other self-driving cars. And we're all sort of unfortunately now living in the beta experiment where they have self-driving vehicles, right, or have a pretty high ability to be autonomous on the road with the rest of us. I say the rest of us because I'm not driving an autonomous vehicle or not driving it.

I don't know what that is. But, you know, when it started, when people start talking about autonomous vehicles, some of the ways they were selling it was this, it's. can help people with chronic illness. This can help people who have mobility issues. This will be a life saving for people who cannot afford cars, right? We're going to have all these shared vehicle services and this utopian thing. But in the meantime, there's going to be a what,

you know, 50 or 100 years of people who can only spend a lot of money on a car that has very different associations with it than what's the way. they were talking about in the utopian ideals. Everybody was trying to get money and get traction in the market. And one of those things, we talked a little bit about the metaverse to jump back just slightly, one of the things that scared me at first about the metaverse is it starts to feel very much like in this vein of the rich living in entirely different existence than the rest of us, right? And what I always worry about with those kinds of things is that they will start to sell the

afterlife. Like as soon as we could figure out some kind of way, to upload a human consciousness into something that is not biologically going to break down. Those people will be immortal. The people that can afford it will be, will achieve some kind of immortality in whatever form it is. And the rest of us will have to continue on be biological. I always find these things so interesting because the people who often want to be immortal are the ones that I least want to remember after their own. And I find maybe that should be a core of mine somewhere.

But it's, you know, I think about it. I don't need to follow it immediately with this. But, you know, all right. So here, I'll use these examples. We have all seen some of these with holograms, right, of deceased pop singers or pop stars, which I personally find fairly disturbing. But people are going to have very subjective experiences. Like if I remember growing up,

listening to, let's say, Whitney Houston, and I remember having that parapsoscial relationship watching her become a great pop star as a teenager, barely in early 20s, and soaring in the heights and all of her emotional ups and downs, and then her horrible, you know, unexpected death, and then now she's a hologram. I find it disturbing. Somebody who is much younger doesn't have those associations might go, wow, that is the coolest technology. I want that technology. We saw that with the Kardashians. Didn't Kanye essentially buy a Robert Kardashian hologram for Kim as a birthday present or something? So that was really a socioeconomic look.

We can bring your father back. We can piece them together with AI and everything else. As a legacy, I mean, you can't go into this without very, personal opinions on this. Many of us want to make a mark in the world and have some sort of legacy. Sometimes that can drive people, that can be a driving force into having children into doing the work that you do, into documenting things and creating your own artifacts with meaning, right? Photographs. For me, it'll be in many ways I hope the work that I've left behind, whether that's books or publications, things like that.

And I find the idea of trying to replicate somebody who's been gone. Clearly it's ethically complicated. I think in the end, if people really want to truly interact with it, there is that black mirror episode. That's what I'm thinking. I think that there's a spectrum of what's going to happen. This is how I'm going to call it. I'm going to call it right now.

I think the halves, the people that have money, are going to have ranges of things that they can buy to bring people back, so to speak. One might be a hologram, you know, it might be a web-based message, it might be AR, you know, different ways to bring parts of people, or something up to something eventually, you know, 50, 100 years from now, pretty fully functional like you might see on Black Mirror, like a full-on robot that can mimic to a certain degree what somebody was. But I'll go back to some things I've said in my TED Talk about robotness versus humanness, right? I think that I'm not going to make a judgment on things like

the holograms and things that can give you little pieces of who somebody was because they're new artifacts. I look at photos of people and pets and so on that are gone now. And that's meaningful to me. So, you know, we read books by people who are gone, letters from people, you know, emails. So if holograms become the new thing or, but what I get concerned about, those are little pieces, artifacts of memory. But I get concerned about when we talk about replicating the entire person to go on and on and on and essentially live in some ways, mimicking, like you were saying, something that's organic. And I struggle with seeing a scenario where that ends well for the human.

I think that there might be therapeutic, maybe cases for it if the person was working with an actual you know, again, this was in collaboration with a therapist. But I think to just like, you know, like in the case of Black Mirror, just send someone in a box, a robot and say, here is a replication of this dead person or animal or whatever it is that meant something to you. Our brains are not prepared for that and those sorts of interactions. I don't think that would end well. And I'm actually really glad we got to this point because I, I know that everybody that listens to the show is very, very tired of me bringing it back to the sphere of death because that's where I'm interested. And my last several interviews have been death focused.

But I do want to talk about this because I feel like one of the problems that we're having in modern society. And this is true of everybody on every class in the West is that we don't actually face death with any finality at all. We don't understand it. We don't interact with it. Our dead people die in hospitals. They go immediately to a mortuary. We see them again looking like they're sleeping and then they go away. And we're not actually grieving healthy.

We're not actually dealing with death healthy. And the more we rely on technology to provide what grief is supposed to do, the less likely we will actually have this interface of what we decide is, you know, the human concept of death, this humanity piece that we're starting to miss. That's interesting because you said that through a very specific lens of what I would say, very Western and sort of Christian roots of how to handle and modern Christian roots. What I'm saying by that is other religions handle death, even in a hospital setting, differently than like what you described, and might have rules, for example,

about when someone's buried, how they're buried, how you see them mourning period. So there are traditions that people can adhere to already to make their peace in whatever way they're want with the situations. But I think we're both getting to the same point that psychologically drawing out and denying the finality of something that is part of organic life, I'm not sure really behooves the people that are left behind to get on with their lives. like I said, I think that much like a photograph is today, you can have a meaningful touchstone. There's nothing wrong with that and whatever technology form that takes. I cherish I have somewhere real to real tape, old tape recordings of my grandmother's voice. And, you know, I cherish those.

So it's, I understand wanting that. What I personally don't understand, frankly, is the idea of people who want to insert themselves and purposefully insert. We have to talk about consent now really briefly. You know, there are people, unfortunately, like we'll talk about pop stars. I won't pick on a particular one, but they're gone and they were gone. Way before this technology came to be what it is today. So there are states had to consent to you can reinvent.

this person, right? So people are going to have to start thinking about their wills and say, you know, we already saw that with social media and Facebook like 10 years ago. People were starting to say, what's going to happen to my social media after I'm gone? How do, you know, what? Right. You're going to have to start thinking about consent about technology. if there is wider acceptance and access to tools like this, do you want to be resurrected as a robot? You know, I personally, not that I can imagine why anyone would want to resurrect me as some kind of animatronic thing,

but I would put a non-conc, you know, if I had a choice, I would say no right now. Yeah. Because of what I know about the limitations of AI and the potential dangers of people then interacting with a false meaning, which is funny that I actually even use that term because that goes back to the film theory nerd, the movie Metropolis, the very early movie with the, I'm sure you've seen in black and white, the male creator creates this female robot that gains autonomy and the robot's name.

he's actually without consent creates a robot, a female replica of a woman he has a crush on. And her name's Maria and the robot's name is false Maria. So I was just using that film thing when I said like a false version of me. So isn't that interesting how it sort of goes back to that? It's all. It came full circle on a callback. We came full circle. Yeah.

We did. And it's funny that you mentioned that though, because lately I've been thinking a lot about this piece of it, this kind of interaction with what happens to our social media is what happened to our voice after death. Because I'm not sure you saw, but Anthony Bourdain had a documentary come out recently. And they took parts of his voice that he'd recorded over his whole career, and they had him read some of his post-humorous letters and things. And he sort of narrates the documentary. And I'm like, I'm not sure he would be cool with this. I didn't know him personally. I wouldn't be cool with it just for the record. But what an interesting way to force some

to talk about their experiences without their consent or agency to do so. That is an interesting one, too. It's hard to guess what Anthony Bourdain. I didn't know him personally either. But I think in many ways, if you were a fan of his, if you watched his shows, if you read any of his books, he certainly portrayed himself as a rebel in many ways and as sort of old school also. And it's hard. to imagine that he would consent to it. On the other hand, he very much liked sharing his narrative and parts of himself. And so maybe he would have embraced it as a new technology, but we don't know because he did not get consent. And the consent thing has already come up, you know, in robots,

and AI when people, for example, somebody, a male creator, I forget what country it was in, made a robot version of Scarlett Johansson. Now, I would imagine it looks a lot like her, but again, it was because he claimed he had the hots for her. So he spent his time building a robot. Now, you know, and I'm, that's a whole other topic about sex robots and loving robots, and that's a whole other thing. And I'm not, that's a whole other topic. That's not the issue. The issue, The issue is the consent for me. And clearly, and I think most of us, many of us, but I think especially women because or anybody in a marginalized group or because of the way we are forced to interact with the world and protect ourselves in certain situations, you find yourself especially vulnerable to things like that, right? Right.

There's a power imbalance. And so it's especially, it's very creepy. Yes. That part of it is creepy. The consent part. If he had asked her and her and her people had said, okay, I would have admired his work and said, that's great animatronics, right? But the non-consent part. But is it, you know, is it fundamentally different than fan art in a way? You know what I mean? No, and so that's a good question. Is it different than Fatt and Art and Fanfic? Because I was just talking about photographs being sort of an artifact that I could say that holograms could potentially be a thing.

But I think that when he is openly claiming, he's making robots that look like public figures who make their money off their image. And this is something that fanfic can run into as well, right? There's a point where I'm not a lawyer, but there's got to be a point where you're using their image in a way that's not legal and going to take away from their brand, I imagine. And a lot of fanfic at this point is still written and doesn't involve imagery, though we do see fake porn images and, you know, fake porn videos. But that's a whole, that's in some ways, how do I put this?

You know, porn is like a bazillion dollar business around the world. And if somebody really wants to sue people in porn for image things, a lot of times people who work in the sex industry are the leaders in technology, in finding new technologies, and utilizing them in ways so they can conduct their business in a safer way, right? And do transactions. And I'm not sure where I was going with this, except I was going to say that they're a very powerful industry. And so when this guy or other people start saying,

I'm making an image of this person for the purpose of sexualization, I think you're going to find, and we've already seen some real, sex workers around the world saying we don't want robots to be able to do that because it infringes on our work. That actually brings up all kinds of interesting. I mean, it's just a hornet's nest. We're in the middle of technologies that are entering our everyday lives and we're still navigating and negotiating all of the ethics and how we're supposed to interact with them. And I just want people to stay safe physically, emotionally, privacy, data.

Yes. You know, and enjoy and enjoy the technologies in safe ways because they can be fun. And they can be, they can help us all a measure of light. I want to end on this because I think we've wandered into the negative territory of robots. And there are, you know, faults in the system. But in your TED Talk, you talk a little bit about how you sort of look at it anthropologically and how robots sort of give us an understanding of what makes us human, what sets us apart from robots, and how understanding where we intersect with robots,

where I think you use war as a case study, where we're different, where we're the same, help us understand what makes us as people human. Can you talk a little bit about that just to wrap us out on something? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I just, you know, I'm trying to think about how to put this. So of course, they're all different kinds of robots. When we even just say the word robot, it's interesting to me what comes to mind for a lot of people. Of course, there's industry robots, there's NASA, Mars exploratory robots. There's all kinds of robots on factory lines. But often when you say the word robot, what comes to mind is something human-like or animal-like, often something that's going to interact with you in a way that or communicate with you in a way that's meant

for you to understand. Look at R2D2, right? It's Star Wars. I love science fiction as are great ways to show examples of how things can interact with you. Art2D2 doesn't talk, right? Clicks and whistles and turning the head, but you feel like by the cadence of those chirps and everything that you understand it. And I think R2D2 in many ways is also a great example. We think as the cute sort of harmless, helpful friend robot. In the TED Talk, I talked about embodiment a fair amount because it is how we know the world in many ways through our bodies through what we can and what we can't do. Robots, of course, even if they were built to look exactly like us, have different capabilities and limitations, right?

It could be getting all kinds of information from other AI sources while it's talking to you. It can have all kinds of vision and strength capabilities that you'll never be able to realize, right? Or at least probably not in this lifetime. And that's why you would want it in your home to collaborate and cooperate with because it supposedly has these abilities. So it knows the world in a different way, yet in many times we're creating these robots. to resemble humans. And that's for a couple of reasons. One is because we assume that people will enjoy interacting with human-like things,

especially if we make them look non-threatening, if we make them smaller than us, if we make them certain colors even, right? That has been a big historical trend, if you look at the color of what most robots have been. things that designers are making and developers are making choices about. Yet there are some good reasons to make robots appear human or animal-like. And that is everything that we have built in the world is generally to work around us and our human-like bodies.

Unfortunately, things are often built for a certain able-bodied type of person. But you think about your home, if you didn't have a robot that had two human-like, like hands or the ability to move around, it's not going to be very helpful to you in the home. Yet it has all of these different abilities than you. So I think it's easy to get sort of lulled into this idea that this technology is what it appears to be on the surface, which is human-like. But we have to remember that it knows the world in a different way. and it can become meaningful to you in a pet-like way. Robots might become meaningful to you in a companionship way,

or they might mean nothing to you and be a tool. You could categorize them differently. There's nothing wrong with any of those ways of interacting with a robot. But you could say ultimately the difference, I mean, besides the obvious ones, between being human and working. robots, no matter how advanced they get or people think of them as sentient or believe them to be sentient. And that is, you know, we have a sense of time because we only have a certain amount of

time on this planet. And robots don't have that same sense of self. So I'm not sure that's the positive note you want to end on. But I think it's an interesting one. And I think it also harkens back to different parts of our conversation where we talk about how things get sold to us in certain non-threatening ways that are going to be a convenience and help us, and that they may very well be conveniences and charming and entertaining and all of these things. But we also have to keep in mind that they are very much technologies, and they are the product of the decision makers behind them. And often there are technologies that, especially smart ones that can be updated and change and terms of service can change and all of those things. So people are going to either be

forced into learning more about the technologies they let into their home or just sort of embrace it as the new new. You know, I mean, there's a spectrum in between, but that's where we're going, I guess. That was my very long answer. It was a good one. I actually, I actually love right where we ended, because that's where I end most of my tomorrow today interviews is, you're going to die someday. That makes a different than robots. But you know, it's, again, that comes down to sort of like your own personal beliefs, right? That actually, not to be depressing, but, you know, I do, talk about it in my TED talk. You know, as humans, we may not think about it every minute, but we're fragile. You know, robots have their own fragility and their own weaknesses, but are also

replaceable and we're unique. And sometimes I feel maybe it's just me because I work in the business, but it's hard to remember the value of the flaws in each other. And it's not about technology replacing people. I think it should be about technology adding to our experiences as humans. That's what I would like to see. Yeah, I agree. I would like to see us sort of re-weaponize our fear about a biological ending and use that to say, okay, fine, we only get 80 years, 100 years. Let's make it the best 80 to 100 years or however long you get because you don't know. And use robots in your life to make those years matter more to you. Absolutely. The full experience. Absolutely. And I think that's their utility.

in my opinion. That's one of their utilities. I mean, you know, that's very broad. We might have different robots for different things and everything. But yes, I think that learning to live with robots means understanding their place in your life, whatever that is, and understanding that they can have meaning, but they're robots and they don't replace people. Absolutely. Well, thank you so, so much for joining us, Dr. Carpenter. It has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. This has been a really fun talk. Thank you, next.