EVERY SPOKEN WORD
55 min read · 10,648 words- 0:00 – 15:00
The following is a…
- LFLex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Colin Angle. He's the CEO and co-founder of iRobot, a robotics company that for 29 years has been creating robots that operate successfully in the real world, not as a demo or on a scale of dozens, but on a scale of thousands and millions. As of this year, iRobot has sold more than 25 million robots to consumers, including the Roomba vacuum cleaning robot, the Braava floor mopping robot, and soon, the Terra lawn mowing robot. 29 million robots successfully operating autonomously in real people's homes, to me, is an incredible accomplishment of science, engineering, logistics, and all kinds of general entrepreneurial innovation. Most robotics companies fail. iRobot has survived and succeeded for 29 years. I spent all day at iRobot, including a long tour and conversation with Colin about the history of iRobot, and then sat down for this podcast conversation that would have been much longer if I didn't spend all day learning about and playing with the various robots in the company's history. I'll release the video of the tour separately. Colin, iRobot, its founding team, its current team, and its mission has been and continues to be an inspiration to me and thousands of engineers who are working hard to create AI systems that help real people. This is the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on iTunes, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter, @lexfridman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. And now, here's my conversation with Colin Angle. In his 1942 short story, Runaround, from his iRobot collection, Isaac Asimov proposed the three laws of robotics, in order: don't harm humans, obey orders, protect yourself. So two questions. First, does the Roomba follow these three laws? And also, more seriously, what role do you hope to see robots take in modern society and in the future world?
- CAColin Angle
So the three laws are very thought-provoking and require such a profound understanding of the world a robot lives in, the ramifications of its action and its own sense of self that, uh, it's not a relevant bar. At least it won't be a relevant bar for decades to come. And so, uh, if Roomba follows the three laws, and I- I believe it does. Uh, you know, it is designed to help humans, not hurt them. It's designed to be inherently safe, and, uh, we designed it to last a long time. It's not through any AI or intent on the robot's part. Uh, it's because following the three laws is aligned with being a good robot product. So, um, so I guess it does-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) It does.
- CAColin Angle
... but not by, uh, not by explicit design.
- LFLex Fridman
So then the bigger picture, what- what role do you hope to see robotics, robots take in our, what's currently mostly a world of humans?
- CAColin Angle
We need robots to help us continue to improve our standard of living. We need robots because the average age of humanity is increasing very quickly. And simply the number of people young enough and spry enough to care for the elder growing demographic is inadequate. And so what is the role of robots? Today the role is to make our lives a little easier, uh, a little cleaner, maybe a little healthier. But in time, robots are going to be the difference between real gut-wrenching declines in our ability to live independently, uh, and maintain our standard of living and a future that is the bright one, where we have more control over our lives, can spend more of our time focused on, uh, activities we choose. And, um, I'm so honored and excited to be playing a role in that journey.
- LFLex Fridman
So you- you gave me a tour. You showed me some of the long history. It's now 29 years that I- iRobot has been at it creating some incredible robots. You showed me PackBot. Uh, you showed me a bunch of other stuff that led up to Roomba, that, uh, led to, uh, Braava and Terra. So let's skip that incredible history in the interest of time 'cause we already talked about it. I'll show this incredible footage. You mentioned elderly and robotics in society. I think the home is a fascinating place for robots to be. So where do you see robots in the home? Currently, I would say, once again, probably most homes in the world don't have a robot. So how do you see that changing? Where do you think is the big initial value add that robots can do?
- CAColin Angle
So iRobot has sort of over the years narrowed in on the home, the consumer's home, as the place where we want to innovate and deliver tools that will help a home be a more automatically maintained place, a healthier place, a safer place, and perhaps even a more efficient...... place to be. And, uh, you know, today we vacuum, we mop, soon we'll be mowing your lawn. But where things are going is when we get to the point where the home, not just the robots that live in your home, but the home itself, becomes part of a system that maintains itself and plays an active role in, uh, caring for and helping the people who live in that home? And I, I see everything that we're doing as steps along the path toward that future.
- LFLex Fridman
So what are the, what are the steps? So, if we can s- summarize some of the history of Roomba, the ... you've mentioned, and maybe you can elaborate on it, but you've mentioned that the early days were really taking a robot from something that works either in the lab or something that works in the field that helps soldiers, uh, do the difficult, uh, w- uh, work they do, to actually being in the hands of consumers and, uh, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of robots that don't break down over-
- CAColin Angle
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... how much people love them over months of very extensive use. So that was the big first step, and then the second big step was the ability to sense the environment, to build a map, to localize, be able to build a picture of the home that the human can then attach labels to in terms of, you know, giving some semantic knowledge to the robot about its environment. Okay, so that's like a huge, two big, huge steps.
- CAColin Angle
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, maybe you can comment on them, but also, what is the, the next step of, uh, of making a robot part of the home?
- CAColin Angle
Sure. So, the goal is to make a home that, that takes care its- of itself, takes care of the people in the home, and gives the user an experience of just living their life, and the home is somehow doing the right thing, turning on and off lights when you leave, cleaning up the environment. And we went from robots that were great in the lab, but were both too expensive and, uh, not sufficiently capable to ever do an acceptable job of anything other than being a toy or a curio in your home, to something that was both affordable and sufficiently effective to drive, you know, be above threshold and drive purchase intent. Now, we've disrupted the entire vacuuming industry. The number one selling vacuums, for example, in the US, are, are Roombas. So not robot vacuums, but vacuums, and that's really crazy and weird, and, and it-
- LFLex Fridman
It's ... W- we need to pause on that. I mean, that's incredible.
- CAColin Angle
I ...
- LFLex Fridman
That's, that's, uh, it's incredible that a robot is a s- is, is the number one selling thing that does something. (laughs)
- CAColin Angle
Yep. They're-
- LFLex Fridman
Something as essential as vacuuming.
- CAColin Angle
Yep. So we're, we're, we're the-
- LFLex Fridman
Congratulations. (laughs)
- CAColin Angle
(laughs) Thank you. I still, it's kind of fun to say, but the, uh ... just because this was a, a, a crazy idea-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- CAColin Angle
... that, that just started, you know, in a room here. Um, we were like, "Do you think we can do this? Oh, hey, let's give it a try." But, um, but now the robots are starting to understand their environment, and if you think about the next step, there's two dimensions. I've been working so hard since the beginning of, of iRobot to make robots that are autonomous, that, um, you know, they're smart enough and understand their task enough that they can just go do it without human involvement. Now, what I'm really excited and working on is, how do I make them less autonomous? Meaning that the robot is supposed to be your partner, not this automaton that just goes and does what a robot does. And so that, uh, if you tell it, "Hey, I just dropped some flour by the fridge in the kitchen, uh, can you deal with it?" Wouldn't it be awesome if the right thing just happened based on that utterance? And to some extent, that's less autonomous 'cause it's actually listening to you, understanding the context and intent of, uh, the sentence, mapping it against its understanding of the home it lives in, and knowing what to do. And so that's an area of, uh, research. It's an area where we're starting to roll out features. You can now tell your robot to clean up the kitchen, and it knows what the kitchen is and can do that, and that's sort of 1.0 of where we're going. The other cool thing is that we're starting to know where stuff is, and why is that important? Well, robots are supposed to have arms.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- CAColin Angle
Right? Data had an arm, Rosie had an arm-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) Yeah.
- CAColin Angle
Robbie the Robot had an arm. I mean-
- LFLex Fridman
Sure.
- CAColin Angle
... robots are, you know ... they are physical things that move a- around in an environment, and they're supposed to, like, do work.
- 15:00 – 30:00
Mm-hmm. …
- CAColin Angle
and you're like, "Eh, it's close. Maybe we can-"
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- CAColin Angle
... "hold our breath and make it work." It's clearly more value than the, uh, the cost of the robot to bring, uh, you know, in the store. And I think that the challenge has been finding those businesses where that's true in a sustainable fashion. You know, the- the, um... when you get into entertainment style things, you could be the cat's meow one year, but 85% of toys regardless of their merit fail to make it to their second season. It's just super hard to do so. And, um, uh, so that- that's just a tough business, and there has been a lot of experimentation around, um, what is the right type of social companion? What is the right robot in the home that is doing something other than tasks people do every week that they'd rather not do? And I'm not sure we've got it all figured out right, and so that you get brilliant roboticists with super interesting robots that ultimately don't quite have that magical user experience, uh, and thus the... that value benefit equation remains ambiguous.
- LFLex Fridman
So, y- you as somebody who dreams of robots, you know, changing the world, what's your estimate? Why... w- how big is the space of applications that fit the criteria that you just described, where you can really demonstrate an obvious significant value-
- CAColin Angle
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... over the alternative non-robot, uh, robotic solution?
- CAColin Angle
Well, I think that we're just about none of the way-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- CAColin Angle
... to achieving the potential of robotics at home. But we have to do it in a, a really eyes wide open, honest fashion. And so-
- LFLex Fridman
So, another way to put that is the potential is infinite, because we did take a few steps, but you're saying those steps are just very initial steps. So the Roomba is a hugely successful product, but you're saying that's just the very, very beginning?
- CAColin Angle
That's just the very, very beginning. Uh, it's the foot in the door. And, uh, you know, I think I was lucky that in the early days of- of- of robotics, people would ask me, "When are you gonna clean my floor?" It was something that I grew up saying, "I got all these really good ideas, but everyone seems to want their floor clean."
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- CAColin Angle
"And so, maybe we should do that (laughs) and then-"
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, your good ideas then-
- CAColin Angle
"... earn the right to do the next thing after that."
- LFLex Fridman
So, the good ideas have to match with the desire of the people, and then the actual cost has to like the busine- the- the financial aspect has to all match together?
- CAColin Angle
Yeah, I- I- I, um... during our partnership back a number of years ago with Johnson Wax, they would explain to me that...... they would go into homes and just watch how people lived, and try to figure out what were they doing-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- CAColin Angle
... that they really didn't really like to do, but they had to do it frequently enough that it was top of mind and, and, uh, understood as a, um, uh, a burden. Hey, let's make a product-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- CAColin Angle
... uh, or, or come up with a solution to make that pain point less ex- less challenging.
- LFLex Fridman
And, and sometimes we do certain burdens so often as a society, that we actually don't even realize, like it's actually hard to see that that burden is something that could be removed, so it does require just going into the home and staring at, w- wait, how do I actually live life? What are the pain points? (laughs)
- CAColin Angle
Yeah, and it, getting those insights is-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- CAColin Angle
... a lot harder than it would seem it should be in retrospect.
- LFLex Fridman
So, how hard on that point, I mean, one, one of the big challenges of robotics is driving the cost to something, driving the cost down to something that consumers, people would afford. So, people would be less likely to buy a Roomba if it costs $500,000, right? Uh, which is probably sort of what a Roomba would cost several decades ago. So, how do you drive, which I imagine is very difficult, how do you drive the cost of a Roomba or a robot down such that people would want to buy it?
- CAColin Angle
When I started building robots, the cost of the robot had a lot to do with the amount of time it took to build it, and so that we would build our robots out of aluminum. I would go spend my time in the machine shop, uh, on the milling machine, cutting out the, the, the, the parts and, and so forth. And then when we got into the toy industry, I realized that if we are building at scale, I could determine the cost of the robot instead of adding up all the hours to mill out the parts, but by weighing it.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- CAColin Angle
And that's liberating. You can say, "Wow, um, the world is, has just changed as I think about construction in a different way." The 3D CAD tools that are available to us today, the, um, uh, operating at scale where I can do tooling and injection mold an arbitrarily complicated part and the cost is going to be basically the weight of the plastic in that part is incredibly exciting and liberating, and opens up all sorts of opportunities. And for the sensing part of it, uh, where we are today is instead of trying to build skin, which is, like, really hard. For a long time I tr- I, I, I spent, uh, creating strategies and, and ideas around how could we duplicate the skin on, on, on the human, um, body because, uh, it's such an amazing sensor.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- 30:00 – 37:22
Right. …
- CAColin Angle
showing a customer that, you know, if you let us build a semantic map of your home and know where the rooms are, well, then you can say, "Clean the kitchen."
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- CAColin Angle
Uh, if you don't want the robot to do that, don't make the map. It'll do its best job cleaning your home, but it won't be able to do that. And if you ever want us to forget that we know that it's your kitchen, you can have confidence that we will do that for you. So, we're trying to go and be a sort of a, a-... data 2.0 perspective company, where we treat the data that the robots have is- of the consumer's home as if it were the consumer's data, and that they have rights to it. So, we think by being the good guys on this front, we can build the trust and thus be entrusted to enable robots to do more, uh, things that are, are thoughtful um.
- LFLex Fridman
Do you think people's worries will diminish over time? Uh, as a, as a society, broadly speaking, do you think, uh, you can win over trust not just for the company, but just the comfort of people have with AI in their home, enriching their lives in some way?
- CAColin Angle
Uh, I think we're in an inter- interesting place today, where it's less about winning them over and more about finding a way to talk about privacy in a way that more people can understand. I would tell you that today, when there's a privacy breach, people get very upset and then go to the store and buy the cheapest thing, paying no attention to whether or not the products that they're buying honor privacy standards or not.
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- CAColin Angle
Uh, in fact, if I put on the package of my Roomba the privacy commitments that we have, I would sell less than I would if I did nothing at all, and that needs to change. So, it's- it's not a question about earning trust. I think that's necessary but not sufficient. We need to figure out how to have a comfortable set of what is the grade A meet standard-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- CAColin Angle
... applied to privacy that customers can trust and understand and then use in their buying decisions. That will reward companies for good behavior, and that will ultimately be how this, uh, moves forward.
- LFLex Fridman
And maybe, uh, be part of the conversation between regular people about what it means, what privacy means. If you have some standards you can say, you can start talking about who's following them, who is not, have more. 'Cause most people are actually quite clueless about all aspects of artificial intelligence, the data collection and so on, and it would be nice to change that to- for people to understand the good that AI can do, and it's not some, uh, some system that's trying to steal all the most sensitive data.
- CAColin Angle
Yep.
- LFLex Fridman
Do you, uh, think, do you dream of a Roomba with human-level intelligence one day? So, you've mentioned very successful localization and mapping of the environment, being able to do some basic communication, to say, "Go clean the kitchen." Do you, uh, see in your maybe more bored moments, um, e- once you get the beer, to sit back with that beer and have a chat on, on a Friday night with a Roomba about how your day went?
- CAColin Angle
So, to your latter question, absolutely. To your former question, as to whether a robot can have human-level intelligence, not in my lifetime.
- LFLex Fridman
You can have- you- you- you think-
- CAColin Angle
I think you can have a great conversation, a meaningful conversation with a robot without it having anything that resembles human-level intelligence. And I think that, uh, as long as you realize that conversation is not about the robot and making the robot feel good. That conversation is about you learning interesting things that make you feel like the conversation that you had with the robot is a pretty awesome way of learning something. Uh, and it could be about what kind of day your pet had. It could be about, you know, how can I make my home more energy efficient? It could be about, you know, if I'm thinking about climbing Mount Everest, what should I know? And that's a very doable thing, you know? But, uh, if I think that that conversation I'm gonna have with a robot is, um, I'm gonna be rewarded by making the robot happy, well, I could have a- just put a button on the robot that you could push and the robot-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- CAColin Angle
... would smile and, and that sort of thing. So, I think you n- need to think about the question in, in the, the right way and, and robots can be awesomely effective at helping people feel less isolated, learn more about the home that they live in, and, uh, fill some of those lonely gaps that we wish we were engaged learning cool stuff about our world.
- LFLex Fridman
Last question. If you could hang out for a day with a robot from science fiction, movies, books, and safely pick, safely pick its brain for that day, who would you pick?
- CAColin Angle
Data.
- LFLex Fridman
Data?
- CAColin Angle
From Star Trek. I think that, um, A, Data's really smart. Data's been through a lot trying to go and save the galaxy, and, um, I'm really interested actually in emotion and robotics, and I think he'd have a lot to say about that, 'cause I believe actually that emotion plays an incredibly useful role in doing reasonable things, uh, in situations where we have imperfect understanding of what's going on.
- LFLex Fridman
In social situations when there's imperfect information?
- CAColin Angle
In social situations, also in, um, uh, competitive or dangerous situations, that, um, we have emotion for a reason, and so that ultimately this- my theory is that as robots get smarter and smarter, they're actually gonna get more emotional.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- CAColin Angle
Because-
- LFLex Fridman
That's a fair thing.
- CAColin Angle
... you, you can't actually survive on pure logic because only a very tiny fraction of the situations we find ourselves in can be resolved reasonably with logic. Uh, and so I think Data would have a lot to say about that, and so I could find out whether he agrees.
- LFLex Fridman
What- if you could ask Data one question that you would get a deep, honest answer to, what would you ask?
- CAColin Angle
What's Captain Picard really like?
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) Okay, I think that's the perfect way to end it. Colin, thank you so much for talking today. I really appreciate it.
Episode duration: 37:38
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