Will your humanoid robot compliment you? And the end of 23andMe?
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Because when it comes to your business, it's not just about keeping the lights on. It's about keeping everything secure. The other kind of term that is doing the rounds, vibe coding. You know, because AI is so wonderful and great and so powerful...

You or I don't need a software engineer to create our app or our video game or whatever. We can just talk to our machine and it'll just do it. So I've been trying to vibe code a video game for the past day. What's it about? Think Super Mario Brothers, but instead of Super Mario, replace them with the Swedish chef and he's having to avoid meatballs and fight a meatball monster at the end. How's it going? My vibes are not immaculate right now.

I would rather see, I have to say, a Danny in the Valley game. I'm thinking like Mario Kart, but with you in a Tesla. I would love that. You've got to be in a Tesla, driving around, pointing it and trying to catch tech bros. So anyway, so that's my life. Hello and welcome back to the Times Tech Podcast with me, Katie Prescott, in the City of London. And me, Danny Fortson, in the Valley, Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley.

So in today's episode, Danny, you have been continuing your very extensive, diligent research into your new obsession, humanoid robots. Yes, you'll thank me when you have your own humanoid robot podcast producer or the one that you were saying earlier that you would love to just hand your child off to a random humanoid in an airport. It's not a random humanoid. I think they might be more reliable than some humans. But before we get to that...

Dani, have you ever done a 23andMe test? And do you know what I'm talking about?

I do. I have not, and it seems I will never. Yeah, it's a shame, isn't it? I mean, I don't think I'm going to get to do one either, and I have always wanted to, unless they can find a buyer. So last week we discussed a very buzzy Silicon Valley biotech startup, which is creating a drug to extend the lives of dogs, which is right at the start of its journey. And 23andMe was once a similarly high-flying, buzzy biotech tech startup coming out of Silicon Valley.

And yet it seems after many years, it is no longer. Yeah, that's right. They filed for bankruptcy this week. And I think that it's an interesting story for my perspective for a few reasons. One is the arc that it followed, which is in certain ways atypical, but also many ways super typical of what happens in Silicon Valley, i.e. most things fail. This just had a kind of higher highs than most.

And also who ran it, Ann Wojcicki, who's part of this modern day Silicon Valley kind of tech dynasty, if you will. And also just this whole idea of, do you know, this consumer genetic testing. This was going to be the future. This is going to be a thing that just like everybody was doing. It was going to unlock personalized medicine, all...

all of this stuff. And it just feels like, you know, this was the company leading that charge. And here we are, you know, it's bankrupt and people are picking over the pieces. Funny. I mean, you say it's followed the arc of existence in Silicon Valley. I was really surprised reading into it just how old it is. I mean, it's almost 20 years old. And just to recap for people who haven't heard of it, this is saliva genetic testing kits. So the idea being that you get a kit

that you then post in, you spit on it. You spit in a tube. Send it off and it tells you more about your heritage. So it was being used by individuals, but also as gifts. They have a big gifting section. And it revealed all sorts of things over the years that were very controversial, not least...

Children found out that they were related to one another. People found out that they were related to one another because they discovered they had the same parentage, for example. Help kids who perhaps had parents from sperm banks and stuff like that. So it was a rich pickings of stories for journalists over the years. Yeah, and it was founded by a woman, Ann Wojcicki. She is the sister of Susan Wojcicki, who Susan ran YouTube for many, many years.

Ann Wojcicki was married to Sergey Brin, obviously one of the Google founders. So proper Silicon Valley royalty. Yeah, yeah. So both of these sisters for many years were running these multi-billion dollar tech companies and very intertwined with the whole kind of Google alphabet universe. And also their mother, Esther, I interviewed at her house near Stanford.

She wrote a book on parenting and how to raise like really accomplished, competent... Sisters who run multi-billion dollar tech companies. Correct. Correct. So they just had this whole kind of aura around them. And then there's that brief window during the pandemic where there was...

wave of SPACs. Do you remember SPACs? I do, yeah. Shells, essentially. Yeah, cash shells that were like, you know, when money was just falling from the sky, all these people ran out. They raised money for these cash shells that would then go look around for companies and kind of allow them to reverse into them as a way, almost like a backdoor to the public markets. 23andMe did one of those deals. They went public. Their shares rocketed. They were worth $6 billion at the peak. And then like,

Virtually every single spec, like nine out of 10, was a disaster because all of these companies hadn't gone public because they weren't really public ready yet. And so as they started showing what their actually business was and how it was growing or how it wasn't, investors just absolutely hammered the stock and it went down 95, 98% or whatever. All of those deals almost universally were very, very, very bad for investors.

And obviously 23andMe is no exception. It's interesting because you can see why there was huge demand for the product. People really, really want to understand their heritage. It was a simple system. It had great marketing behind it. Yeah. I wonder how it got to the point where it's filed for bankruptcy at this stage. Well, let me ask you a question. So you never did it? I bought one for my dad. Okay. One Christmas. Would you ever buy it for him again? No. No.

And we weren't that excited by the result as well. Exactly. It's like a one-time purchase. And I think the market for that is like, am I going to spend a couple hundred bucks on this thing? That's going to kind of like, it's a little bit of a gimmick. Like, okay, cool. That's interesting. Now I move on with my life and I never think about this thing again.

Because the companies that were doing it for health have been doing really well because you can see how that has a good corporate market, an insurance market. But in terms of the genetics, I see your point. You do it once and you go, okay, cool. And also, you know, there's another company, Color Genomics, who we had on the pod years ago. And they were doing things that were, again, more health related of like finding like the BRCA gene, you know, for breast cancer and things like this.

And even that, that's like, not everybody wants to know if you get some really scary results. Like they have these genetic counselors that will be like, okay, let me walk you through your results so you don't completely freak out. It sounds like really good on the high level, but like as a business, these things are tricky. And so a lot of these companies have been forced to kind of like pivot into, as you say, the corporate market or, you

What 23andMe tried to do, they signed this deal with GSK, the big drug maker, to kind of help them tap into this reservoir of millions of people's genetic information to try to help them with their drug discovery process. But again, obviously that didn't quite work as a business. But what's interesting is that Ann Wojcicki, she's going to bid for the company out of bankruptcy. Right, so it might not be the end for all of this. It might not, but again, you're kind of like, what is the business?

You know, because it's a one-time gimmicky thing that people don't seem to get a lot of value out of. But what's crazy is that the underlying technology is incredible. Like you can kind of sequence somebody's genome now for a couple hundred bucks.

And if you can kind of get to that point where you're actually starting to deliver on things like personalized medicine and all the kind of stuff, that is the promise of the Human Genome Project from 25 years ago. But again, it's been a much slower boat as these things tend to be. Well, maybe that's why she wants to buy it out of bankruptcy.

In terms of its data, in terms of all the data that this company must have from customers, what's going to happen to it? Do we know? Big question. So you have like the California Attorney General has been like made a public statement urging people to like very seriously consider deleting their information. Right. And asking the company, rather asking the company to delete it. But it's basically now it's an asset in an auction.

And the company has said that there'll be, their quote is, there'll be no changes to the way the company stores, manages, or protects customer data. But presumably there will be some value to millions of people's genetic data. But I guess it gets back to the question of why this business went bankrupt in the first place is like, how valuable is that? Kendrick Lamar once rapped, "'I got millions, I got riches building in my DNA.'"

Well, you know what? Turns out he was wrong because DNA is worthless. Worthless, Katie. So Danny, talk to me about humanoid robots because a few weeks ago I got a press release in my inbox telling me about a robotics company in Texas that's raised over $400 million. Wow.

And I thought, well, this is one for our humanoid robot correspondent out in Silicon Valley, the lover and great, great connoisseur of humanoid robots, Danny in the Valley. So you went to meet them, I think. I did. I mean, can I just, a minor editorial point for those listening at home. I am not a humanoid robot lover. Okay. Okay. A connoisseur and...

Yes, thank you. Adore? I don't know. Interest? You are interested in? Yeah. It's your hobby. It is. I'm interested. I'm interested. In a purely platonic way. Robots. What were they like? What's interesting about Apptronic is they're based in Texas. But I spoke to them just having come off this NVIDIA thing, which we talked about last week, where there was robots, robots everywhere.

And one of NVIDIA's big bets is to kind of create the iOS of humanoid robots. And you listen to a panel where all these humanoid robot CEOs are like, this is going to be the robot century. There's going to be robots everywhere, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the question remains, what's the killer app? Because a lot of these companies talk about

labor shortage. We're 10 million people short in terms of factory jobs. I don't even know what that means, but supposedly that's the case. Do you want humanoids there? Do you want them? A lot of people talk about elder care. Do you want humanoid robots in like care facilities? So, but it's nobody, it's, it is kind of

It's almost a solution looking for a problem, but it's not even a solution yet because they're not good enough yet. Completely. I thought when we had the boss of Ocado on recently, he was really interesting about this. If you look at the robotics that they're developing and they're very efficient factories, they don't look like people. Yeah.

They're designed for the spaces that they're serving. And actually your point about, you know, in human care is a really, really good one. You want a humanoid robot where it fits the environment. Perhaps in a factory, actually, you don't want an army of people who...

aren't maybe made looking at my hands and arms for the for the factory that they're working in yeah and you need something a little bit more efficient because there's been many kind of like robot winters before being like oh the robots are coming like never mind this is really hard and then it kind of goes away and it comes back goes away and comes back there's a lot of enthusiasm now because like with everything whether it's vibe coding humanoid robots

AI has removed a lot of the previous limitations and people are very excited about just the progress that they're seeing and expect. And the industry is reaching this kind of inflection point. So loads of companies are scrambling to be in a position to kind of reap these rewards. And one of those companies, as you say, is Apptronic out in Texas and their flagship robot called Apollo.

It's described as a general purpose humanoid robot. It stands about five foot eight feet tall, weighs in at about 160 pounds. Meaning it has, you know, it's not flabby. It's got good BMI. Okay. So it's about the same height as me and we won't talk about weight. But unless I'm mistaken, you haven't been speaking to Apollo. I have not. I have not. I've been speaking to Jeff Cardenas, who's the CEO and co-founder of Aptronic.com.

And we covered a lot of ground, but we spoke about the history of the company and what he thinks the applications may be, and then about the robots themselves. We should start with a little context. So the catalyst for the industry in his eyes was really something, or at least the modern industry, was something called the DARPA Robotics Challenge, which came about after the Fukushima nuclear disaster back in 2011.

Because obviously there's a nuclear meltdown. It was unsafe for humans to go in so the next best thing of course is robots and so there's this Competition that DARPA which is part of the Pentagon launched and that was where Jeff and his founders kind of came in and started working on this design and apptronic was eventually founded in 2016 and He has since raised over 400 million dollars

They've got strategic partnerships with Google DeepMind and deals with Mercedes-Benz and GXO Logistics, which is one of the biggest kind of shipping companies, logistics companies in the US as well. Wow, it's a lot bigger than I thought it was. It's kind of hard to understand how big it is. But yeah, they're an interesting company. So why don't we go over to Jeff and hear it from the horse's mouth. We were coming off the DARPA challenge and

there was only a limited group of people that the DARPA challenge convinced that humanoids would be a reality. There was a lot of blooper reels of, you know, robots falling over and kind of calamities from the DARPA challenge. I think some of those might've made it look worse than it actually was, but it was enough for me to say, you know, I think this is going to be a big part of the future that they're going to be much more versatile than they were in the past. And to me, the humanoid form factor made a ton of sense.

So we bootstrapped the company. We knew it would take a long time. We knew that technology was going to be the key driver. I used to say to my co-founder, Nick, this isn't a market problem. This is a technology problem. Can you do it? And how long is it going to take? And so we just basically built a lot of different robots over the years. But when you say bootstrap, what does that actually mean? Because trying to build something that...

most people would say is impossible or a pipe dream. Yeah. Like actually, what does that look like on a weekly or monthly basis in terms of, you know, paying the bills and actually still running a company? Well, it's exhausting to look back on, but we, uh, we didn't know any better. I think, you know, you, you hear all these stories and I think sometimes it is better to be naive about what you're getting yourself into.

What it looked like was we were building the company on revenue. So, you know, until this round, we had more revenue than money raised.

which is something that I'm actually very proud of. Wow. But what it looked like was we basically did a lot of projects. So we've done 15 unique robots since we got started, nine iterations of humanoids. We were part of the Iron Man program for U.S. Special Forces. They had heard about these crazy guys in Austin building these really unique robots. So we did a liquid-cooled full-body exoskeleton and then a cable-driven or a tendon-driven exoskeleton robot.

We did different mobile manipulators, just mobile robots that grab and move things that were heavier payloads and humanoids. But the dream was always the humanoid. I always viewed that as like the personal computer, the foundational platform that was really going to scale. We came from this lab called the Human Centered Robotics Lab. So my view was that what we wanted to build was human helpers.

The question was, how do you get there? And we were really inspired by Boston Dynamics. We'd seen the path that they'd taken. They'd worked both in private industry and with the government. They'd been paid to build these robots and that really advanced a lot of their technology. So we were...

seeing that as an opportunity and who doesn't want to try to build Ironman suits. So we knew that that was a, not the core path that we wanted to be on, but our view was that this would give us a chance to actually implement a lot of our ideas and advance a lot of the core technologies. And it did, we learned about actuators or the muscles. We did motor drivers, uh,

We did a whole host of things that then applied to humanoids overall. The way I sort of saw this was we were putting, say there's 100 pieces that we have to put together to fully realize a humanoid robot. Everything we were doing was giving us a piece of the puzzle that we would need to realize this dream that we had about robots becoming an everyday part of our lives. And so where are we with this?

AI enabling robots to operate in unstructured environments, i.e. the real world, where they can kind of just, you know, be like, oh, there's a set of stairs there. I guess I'm going to walk down those there. No, I'm going to pick up a bag of chips, which requires a different bit of pressure than if that's an egg or whatever. We're at the front end of a paradigm shift in AI.

But I think it's important to say we're at the front end of it. So we're at the beginning of a new stage overall, but we're at a stage where anything's now possible. Maybe everything is fair game now for what these robots will be able to do in the future. What is the, I know we're talking about humanoid robots, so maybe this is an irresponsible way to put it, but what's the killer app? Is it Rosie the Robot? Is it the $20,000 robot in your house that means you never have to fold a shirt or

wash a dish, do laundry, sweep the floor, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, usually the first question people ask me is when is this thing going to do my laundry? So I think, yeah, I think Rosie the robot for me personally, I think sort of the objectively good future for these systems is probably something like elder care or assistive care. I think if you look at human life and you think about where robots have the biggest potential, my view is where you could improve human life the most is how we age and

And I think if you pair man with machine, I think that robots taking care of us as we age will be probably the biggest one, the most important application for improving the human experience overall. What was the pitch to the investors? In other words, you have all of these savvy, and it's a really interesting group because I think it was like Mercedes. You had a couple like...

industrial partners, you had some, you know, just financial investors. So it was like a diverse group of funders. But what was the, what's the, what's the picture you painted for them that got them to, you know, part with so much money? The way to think about it is this is the evolution of computing. So computers are getting good enough that they're going to go from the digital world where they're sort of trapped behind a plane at pane of glass, and they're going to go into the physical world. So this is robotics.

And in order for robots to scale, they have to become more versatile. And the pitch was that the humanoid robot is the most versatile form factor. So my simple pitch was and is, today we've got thousands of robots that do one thing. The future looks like one robot that can do thousands of different things. And this is the biggest market that there ever was or will be. The physical world is where everything happens.

And if you look at the total addressable market of a product like this, Elon kind of says this over and over. This is the biggest product that there ever was or will be. And I think that's true. And there's only a handful of teams in the world that really understand it and know how to do it. And I think we have a unique point of view and legacy in this space where this is anyone's game to win. And I think we have a good shot to win.

What is your unique point of view on all this? As I said, I was just at this humanoid robot summit surrounded by robots. I was just at the NVIDIA conference this past week. Again, robot dogs, humanoid, robots everywhere. Yeah.

So we, I mentioned we came from a lab called the Human-Centered Robotics Lab. There's similar debates and maybe fears in robots and robotics and humanoid robots as there was in computing. Kind of this idea of man versus machine versus man and machine.

We've taken this view of human-centered design and human-centered robotics, where if you look at the design of our robot, let's say this is the design of our software, we're really thinking about how can humans and robots work together in all these environments. And so we're trying to do this in a responsible way, and we're trying to do this for the benefit of humanity as a whole. And so I sort of think of this as we have a similar point of view that Apple brought to computing, and we want to bring that point of view to robotics. Yeah.

Do you guys think about who is designing these? And without getting too kind of squishy, like how these things should make people feel? Because it feels like there's a huge social element here of like, again, elder care, robots in the home. It feels like there's a pretty wide gap for a lot of people to be like, yeah, I'm going to have this humanoid environment.

Who's just going to park in the corner at night or do all this work at night and then just like, yeah, my kids are over here, my dog's over here and my elderly parents here. And we're like, we're totally comfortable. Yeah, we think a lot about that. So in robotics, that's called HRI, human robot interaction. So this is something that we studied in the lab that we came out of, you know, for a decade.

My co-founder, Luis, is actually running one of the biggest studies, at least in the U.S., that's been done on this. But yeah, we think a lot about it. And I think it's simple, is sort of approachability. Like what kind of world do you want to live in?

We shape the tools and the tools shape us. These robots are going to be, you know, a big part of the future. They're going to be everywhere in all facets of life, you know, in the industrial setting, they're going to be in our homes, they're going to be in retail environments and healthcare. And we want robots that are designed around humans using and interacting with them. And we call this human centered design.

I sort of have this joke called like the scare test. So if the robot was behind you and you turned around, you didn't know it was behind you, you know, how would you react initially? Would you be terrified or like, Oh, you know, there's Apollo. And, you know, we just want this to be an optimistic future. I think, you know, this is coming, whether we like it or not, this has been my view, you know, from the beginning. And what we're trying to do is,

shape it for the benefit of humanity and shape a positive optimistic future and so um yeah there's a big part of what we think about and you know like i said this is similar to the ways that apple helped shape the personal computer era i think those same ideas really apply and are even more important when we start to think about robotics why does it have eyes

It's interesting sort of lesson in how we got there. I mean, it has eyes so it can see. So it looks out of the head. That's a simple answer. Fair answer. Yeah. But why not the camera somewhere else? And, you know...

We actually found that by accident. And this is where all the iteration comes. So the most obvious answer was to have a screen on the face. If you have a screen on the face, then even for human robot interaction, you can display these eyes that are emotive and raising eyebrows. And you can do all sorts of things. As we were working on the robot, you're teleoperating. This is like puppeteering the robots. And you're using this to train these models.

We can talk more about that as well. But we had these cameras on the forehead and we had the screen on the face. Hmm.

And it was hard to actually see out of those eyes that were on the forehead. And so we just moved them directly to the eyes where the robot was. So when the human was controlling the robot, they could see from the robot's point of view. One of the things that we found when we did that was it really changed the experience of interacting with the robot because it was authentic.

And this whole idea of human robot interaction is trust. You're going to be working with and around these robots. How do you build trust with them? How do you understand intent? And so for us, just having authentic eyes that it's looking out of, not be a mask or a screen, really changed the way that we perceived it in a way that we felt was really positive. So we just kept running with it.

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I imagine if you've been doing this for almost a decade, there are some things that you were like, as with any product, you try things and you're like, you think it's going to go one way and you're like, oh, actually, wow, that's really surprising. It didn't work or whatever. I'd be interested if there were other things like examples of where you're like, huh, well, we're going to have to change that because that does not work or people do not like that. Yeah. I mean, all sorts of things that we could, we could.

We could talk probably this whole time about things that didn't work. Oh, I think one interesting thing is a question people ask is, does the robot even need a head? You know, I think once you put a head on a robot, one of the things I've argued is it really changes the way people interact and think it brings in science fiction to the whole conversation. Yes.

But if you don't put a head on the robot, it really changes that. There's been humanoid companies in the past that basically said, you know, the head becomes fragile if the robot falls. Then if you have sensing there, it can break. So let's put all that sensing in the torso and the chest.

And that really changes people's interaction. And so some of the early stuff we did, we didn't have a head on the robot. And I was always arguing, this is going to be so important. We found that out as we went ahead. I think character design is really important. I think if you think about the type of world we want to live in,

I think that you can have these lifeless machines that are maybe sort of less threatening to some people. But to me, that's actually far more dystopian than having robots that have some character and personality that where it's thought through, you know, the example of the screen on the face. I mean, I think robots,

Even the color choice and the material choice that you use, all of these things engender different types of emotions from people. And so we've been thinking about this for a long time. You know, I always believed a robot should look like a robot. We help build robots for a lot of different people. So I won't name names, but one of the groups we worked with early on was

wanting to put silicone skin on the robots and have synths, they called this, synthetic humans. And my view was just,

this is not what people want and this is not going to be successful. And so generally people will call these androids, but these are like, you know, very close to something called the uncanny Valley, which is creeps people out the creep factor. So my view is always, do you want a robot to look like a robot? Yeah. I recently spent a good amount of time at open AI as well as anthropic and I

Talk to them a lot about like the personalities of their, of their LLMs. They have whole teams who are tuning these things to like be helpful, but don't be sycophantic. Maybe have a little bit of sense of humor, but don't be insulting. Be aware of somebody's, you know, exhibiting dangerous behavior. Like there's a whole kind of, you know, it's all ones and zeros, but it's, it's, there's a whole lot of thought and differentiation around, um,

personality, effectively, of these systems.

I'm just wondering how you guys approach that. I mean, you talked a little bit about it before, but I was wondering if you could expand on that a bit. Yeah, we're thinking a lot about that. I mean, I call that more like character design. Yeah. I think in the future, you know, just like if you have an iPhone, you can pick different voices, maybe personalities of Siri. I think you'll be able to do the same thing with your robot in the future. So my Apollo could have like a different personality or character than your Apollo. Yeah, that's right.

And you might not call it Apollo. You might call it something totally different. You know, Apollo represents, yeah, the sort of character version of this robot. But when it comes to the home, I think you'll see different, you know, characters out there. So, yeah, we think a lot about it. And so what happens next for you guys? You guys have just raised, I think the official term is a boatload of money. What happens next for you guys? What are the hurdles you have to overcome?

Yeah. I mean, my view is the home is still a ways out.

I think just even the liability of the home, right? Even if you're 99.99% safe, if you're around a two-year-old or a 90-year-old, the implications are big. So my view is that the humanoid market is going to happen in three phases. Phase one is going to be in the industrial space, largely manufacturing and logistics.

The interesting thing there is we can separate the robots away from people and we can get very high density of the robots out there. So like with Mercedes, you could just be like, all right, this is the robot zone over here. You guys do whatever you're supposed to do over here, right? Yeah, initially you can do that. And then as we start to solve safety and the robots get better, you start to mix them around people. But those people are experts. They're highly trained. They're trained to be around the robots. They're working around all different types of machines.

Stage two is retail and healthcare. I'm super interested in healthcare. I grew up in hospitals. My dad and granddad were hospital administrators. So I'm very interested in that. And then phase three is going to be the home and assistive care in terms of like real market uptake in my view. So

The next stage is basically getting these robots into real commercial environments and what I call the commercial viability stage. So really proving that the robots can do real work with real ROI and really deliver value to the groups that we're working with. And so we'll be transitioning from pilots into the first real commercial contracts and then really ramping up production and scaling these systems out into the world. How old are you, can I ask? I am 39. I started the company when I was 30.

So when you're 49, are the robots everywhere at that point? I think there will be...

significant advancements in uptake in the next 10 years. So that puts us at 2035. Yeah. I don't know that there'll be everywhere, but there'll be many places and they will be in the home by then. The question will be to what degree? I think it is true that, you know, similar to Bill Gates saying there will be a computer in every home on every desk. I think in the future there will be a robot in every home.

I think many of them will be humanoids, but not all of them. There'll be different types of robots. I sort of hope for this Cambrian explosion of robots. I sort of think of the humanoid as the personal computer. This is the most obvious sort of form factor to scale initially, but in the future there'll be a bunch. But I think they'll be all across the industrial base. I think they'll be in hospitality and retail and healthcare. What's the healthcare application that you see?

More as a support staff. So one of the things I think is important to think about is there's this fear of robots replacing us in all of these applications. I think nursing is a really good example. So we have this massive nursing shortage today. An interesting question is why do we have a nursing shortage?

And if you really dig into it, what you realize is that roughly 40 to 60% of what a nurse does on a daily basis has nothing to do with patient care or their clinical training. They're doing all these support tasks. They're changing soil bed linens or fetching stuff from the supply closet. They're running around. They're really like holding the entire hospital up. It's like being a parent. Yeah. Most of parenting is janitorial. Yeah. And so, you know,

So you think about, okay, how do you address this nursing shortage? Because it's only going to get worse. There's some, you know, there's some stats out there that by 2030, we could be short 10 million nurses.

So one way would be like, well, you have a robot nurse and the robot's doing all this. Another way to think about it is what if you paired nurses with a robot such that you took off that portion of their work that had nothing to do with their clinical training? And then they were able to do two to three times more work. Right. And be more effective. Like what we want is we want human care in a hospital, but we don't have that today.

My mom works for a hospital chain and they're putting screens in all of the rooms. If you've ever been in a hospital, you page the nurse, you wait like an hour for them to finally come around. They're overworked and underpaid in many cases.

And so we don't have good patient care today. And so I think the idea for the future is that you will pair nurses with these robots and they'll do all of the work that the nurses can't do or don't want to do. And that will allow nurses to be, you know, much better at taking care of patients. I think that's a really positive, optimistic way of thinking about how this could scale overall. Finally, on the kind of the brains of it, the software. Yeah.

You know, you've referenced Apple several times. Is there like, who's going to create the iOS for robots? Is that NVIDIA? Is it OpenAI? Is it, or is it, because I think it feels like part of the problem is that like every robot company has to reinvent the wheel, create their own kind of system to operate their own robot. And if you have the kind of like a universal operating system that can be tweaked and applied to any number, that feels like the unlock. Yeah.

Well, there's iOS and there's also Android. So, I mean, we have a deep partnership with Google DeepMind and, you know, we were really dreaming about partnering with Google from the beginning. We felt like they had the best tech. We also felt like they were really doing it right. This idea of AI for the benefit of humanity was something that we really aligned with them on. So, yeah.

I don't know who's going to be the grand winner. I think a lot of this is about values, and we've been really excited to partner with Google overall. A lot of the things that you're seeing today, both in AI for robots and just AI in general, actually originated inside of the Google Labs.

So they have a legacy in this space and they've really been pioneers. And so we've been excited to partner with them. But I think the exciting thing right now is it's anybody's race. So if you look at who was winning the personal computer race in the early 80s, you know, it was very different 10 years later, let alone 20 years later. Yeah. So I think it's going to evolve over time and it's anyone's game to win. So I have a theory about humanoid robots. Oh, let's hear it. Yeah.

And it actually came from a male engineer. But I do think there is something... A male engineer talking about humanoids. It's important. I wonder if there's something about men of your generation who were brought up watching humanoid robots on films such as Star Wars. And this also applies to people like...

Elon Musk and all the people running tech companies. And the fact that it's an engineering problem in itself. It is a really, really hard thing to do to create a humanoid robot. As I said, it's not necessarily the most efficient way of doing something in robotics. But I wonder if there's this sort of existential, maybe romantic thing about trying to recreate in the real world one of these things that...

engineering men saw in science fiction. You're nodding. Yes, that's 100% accurate. Yes. I think it's a boys toys thing for sure. I think I mentioned this before, but because I'm a lover of humanoid robots, as you know. So I went to this, I was doing this panel at the summit before Christmas, and it was me and six other dudes on stage. And I said, like, this mantle is a problem.

Right? Because it's like with everything, it's all being built by, you know, like mostly white dudes. And when you think about design and social acceptance, like design really matters and functionality really matters. Anyway,

One guy like was vociferously agreed. And he's like, look, these all look, all these robots look like, you know, the action figures I played with as a kid. Like these are the kind of like the fantasy, my childhood fantasy come to life. And he's like, that's not necessarily what, how we should be building these things. If you're talking about what Elon Musk and others are saying, there's going to be billions of these.

They should feel more approachable and they don't have to necessarily look like the T-1000 from Terminator. And then you look at something like, there's a company in Australia called Andromeda and it is unique for a few reasons. One being that it's founded by a woman and that robot does not look like a human and doesn't look like any of the other robots. It's like multicolored. It's almost like a rainbow of colors and

It has like a more like a cartoonish face. It's much smaller, but it's just a completely different looking product. And it does feel like, you know, it looks, you know, it's like, oh, there's a little cartoon character who's also super helpful and nice. You know, as opposed to this kind of like, I may, you know, shoot a laser at you or I may, you know, change your bedpan. Which...

Which is actually a fair description. I've just Googled Apptronics Apollo robot. And it could do both of those things, right? It could shoot a laser at you. It could be quite alarming if there was a bunch of them. Or it could look, there's a picture of it helpfully carrying a red box. I think we're kind of, to his point, I think we're kind of

early but what's interesting is you know you see these hype cycles start to kind of gain momentum and there's definitely a lot of momentum around humanoids right now well what would you call your what would you call your humanoid robot he said you could name it whatever you want steve would you because that's your podcast editor's name you want to boss him around steve

Um, and then the question is, is like, what, what personality would you want? You know, cause you, I presume there'll be like, you know, here's your menu of 10 personalities. Like, do you want like, you know,

Aggressive. Like a gung-ho American, everything is awesome, like a movie. Or do you want like a snarky Brit where everything's terrible, the weather's terrible? How dare you. I want completely just anodyne, nice, does what it's told, sits in a corner, quietly behaves itself. Oh, wow.

I'm revealing too much, aren't I? Yeah, you are. This is so fascinating. We could go on and on about this. Just, you know. Just sit in the corner and do what I've said. Don't answer back. You'd want one with a personality in your house. Oh, yeah. Too many personalities in my house. You want a high five when you come into the kitchen. If I did something awesome. Wow. How about just for being you?

Morning, Danny. A little positive affirmation. Why not? So I'm bossy and you're a narcissist. I think that's where we've got to. This episode of the Times Tech podcast is sponsored by Vanta. Let's talk about something that might be keeping you up at night. Cybersecurity. According to Vanta's latest state of trust report, it's the number one concern for UK businesses. And that's where Vanta comes in.

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