Lex Fridman PodcastRosalind Picard: Affective Computing, Emotion, Privacy, and Health | Lex Fridman Podcast #24
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
105 min read · 20,961 words- 0:00 – 1:00
Introduction
- LFLex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Rosalind Picard. She's a professor at MIT, director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, and co-founder of two companies, Affectiva and Empatica. Over two decades ago, she launched the field of affective computing with her book of the same name. This book described the importance of emotion in artificial and natural intelligence, the vital role emotional communication has to the relationship between people in general, and human-robot interaction. I really enjoyed talking with Roz over so many topics, including emotion, ethics, privacy, wearable computing, and her recent research in epilepsy, and even love and meaning. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or simply connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman, spelled F-R-I-D. And now, here's my conversation with Rosalind Picard. More than
- 1:00 – 2:45
Affective computing
- LFLex Fridman
20 years ago, you've coined the term affective computing and led a lot of research in this area since then. As I understand, the goal is to make the machine detect and interpret the emotional state of a human being, and adapt the behavior of the machine based on the emotional state. So, how has your understanding of the problem space defined by affective computing changed in the past 24 years? So it's the scope, the applications, the challenges, uh, what's involved. How has that evolved over the years?
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah. Actually, originally when I defined the term affective computing, it was a bit broader than just recognizing and responding intelligently to human emotion, although those are probably the two pieces that we've worked on the hardest. The original concept also encompassed machines that would have mechanisms that functioned like human emotion does inside them.
- LFLex Fridman
Ah.
- RPRosalind Picard
It would be any computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences human emotion. So, the human-computer interaction part is the part that people tend to see. Like, if I'm, you know, really ticked off at my computer and I'm scowling at it and I'm cursing at it and it just keeps acting smiling and happy like that little paper clip used to do...
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- RPRosalind Picard
... like dancing, winking, um, that kind of thing just makes you even more frustrated, right? And I thought, "That stupid thing needs to see my affect. And if it's gonna be intelligent," which Microsoft researchers had worked really hard on, it actually had some of the most sophisticated AI in it at the time, "If that thing's gonna actually be smart, it needs to respond to me and you."
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- RPRosalind Picard
"And we can, um, send it very different signals."
- 2:45 – 5:03
Clippy
- RPRosalind Picard
- LFLex Fridman
So by the way, just a quick interruption. The Clippy, maybe it's in Word, uh, 95, 98...
- RPRosalind Picard
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
I don't remember when it was born. But, uh, m- many people... Do you find yourself with that reference, that people recognize what you're talking about still to this point?
- RPRosalind Picard
The... I don't expect the newest students to these days, but I've mentioned it to a lot of audiences, like, "How many of you know this Clippy thing?" And still the majority of people seem to know it.
- LFLex Fridman
So Clippy kind of looks at maybe natural language processing, what you were typing, and tries to help you complete, I think. I, I don't even remember what Clippy wa- was except annoying. (laughs)
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah. It, it tried... Some people actually liked it.
- LFLex Fridman
Well, I miss it.
- RPRosalind Picard
I would hear those stories. You miss it?
- LFLex Fridman
Well, I miss the... the, the annoyance. It felt like, uh, there's a, there's an element-
- RPRosalind Picard
Someone was there.
- LFLex Fridman
Somebody was there, and we were in it together.
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
And they were annoying.
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
It's like a, it's like a puppy that just doesn't get it.
- RPRosalind Picard
Right.
- LFLex Fridman
That keeps ripping up the couch kind of thing.
- RPRosalind Picard
And in fact, they could have done it smarter like a puppy. If they had done, like, if when you yell- yelled at it or cursed at it, if it had put its little ears back and its tail down and shirked off, probably people would have wanted it back, right? But instead, when you yelled at it, what did it do? It smiled, it winked, it danced, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- RPRosalind Picard
If somebody comes to my office and I yell at them and they started smiling, winking, and dancing, I'm like, "I never want to see you again." So Bill Gates got a standing ovation when, uh, he said it was going away-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- RPRosalind Picard
... 'cause people were so ticked. It was so emotionally unintelligent, right? It was intelligent about whether you were writing a letter, what kind of help you needed for that context. It was completely unintelligent about, "Hey, if you're annoying your customer, don't smile in their face when you do it." So that kind of mismatch was something that developers just didn't think about. And intelligence at the time was really all about, uh, math and language and chess and, you know, games, uh, problems that could be pretty well-defined. Social-emotional interaction is much more complex than chess or Go or any of the games I, that people are trying to solve. And in order to understand that required skills that most people in computer science actually were lacking personally.
- LFLex Fridman
Well, let's talk
- 5:03 – 5:55
Diversity in computer science
- LFLex Fridman
about computer science, if things have gotten better since, since the work, since the message, uh, since you've really launched a field with a lot of research work in this space. I still find, as a person like yourself who's deeply passionate about human beings and, and yet am in computer science, there still seems to be a lack of... sorry to say, empathy for... (laughs)
- RPRosalind Picard
(laughs) Um-
- LFLex Fridman
In, uh, in us computer scientists.
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah. Well-
- LFLex Fridman
Or has it gotten better?
- RPRosalind Picard
Let, let's just say there's a lot more variety among computer scientists these days. Computer scientists are a much more diverse group today than they were 25 years ago. And that's good. Uh, we need all kinds of people to become computer scientists so that computer science reflects more what society needs. And, you know, there's brilliance among every personality type, so it need not be, uh, limited to people who prefer computers to other people.
- LFLex Fridman
How hard do you think
- 5:55 – 8:40
Emotion in AI
- LFLex Fridman
it is? How... Your view of how difficult it is to recognize emotion or to create a deeply, uh, emotionally intelligent interaction, has it gotten easier or harder as you've explored it further?
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
And how far away are we from cracking this...... the, if, if you think of Turing test solving the intelligence, looking at the Turing test for emotional intelligence?
- RPRosalind Picard
I think it is as difficult as I thought it was gonna be. I think my prediction of its difficulty is spot on. I think the time estimates are always hard because they're always a function of society's, uh, love and hate of a particular topic.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- RPRosalind Picard
If society gets excited and you get, you know, hundreds of, uh, and you get thousands of researchers working on it for a certain application, that application gets solved really quickly. The general intelligence, the lack, the c- the computer's complete lack of ability to have, uh, awareness of what it's doing, the fact that it's not conscious, the fact that there's no signs of it becoming conscious, the fact that it doesn't read between the lines, those kinds of things that we have to teach it explicitly what other people pick up implicitly, we don't see that changing yet. There aren't breakthroughs yet that lead us to believe that that's gonna go any faster, which means that it's still gonna be kinda stuck with a lot of limitations, where it's probably only gonna do the right thing in very limited, narrow, pre-specified contexts, where we can prescript- prescribe pretty much what's, what's gonna happen there. So I don't see the, uh, you know, it's hard to predict a date, because when people don't work on it, it's infinite.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- RPRosalind Picard
When (laughs) everybody works on it, you get a nice piece of it, uh, you know, well solved in a short amount of time. I actually think there's a more important issue right now than the difficulty of it, and that's causing some of us to put the brakes on a little bit. Usually we're all just like, "Step on the gas. Let's go faster." Uh, this is causing us to pull back and put the brakes on, and that's, uh, the way that some of this technology is being used in places like China right now.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- RPRosalind Picard
And that worries me so deeply that it's causing me to pull back myself on a lot of the things that we could be doing, and, uh, try to get the community to think a little bit more about, okay, if we're gonna go forward with that, how can we do it in a way that puts in place safeguards that protects
- 8:40 – 18:10
Privacy
- RPRosalind Picard
people?
- LFLex Fridman
So the technology we're re- referring to is just when a computer senses the human being, like the human face?
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Right?
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
And so what... There's a lot of exciting things there, like forming-
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... a deep connection with a human being. But so what are your worries how that could go wrong? Uh, is it in terms of privacy? Is it in terms of, uh, uh, o- o- other kinds of-
- RPRosalind Picard
Let, let's dig into privacy.
- LFLex Fridman
... more subtle things? Okay.
- RPRosalind Picard
So here in the US, if I'm watching a video of, say, a political leader, and, and in the US, we're quite free, as we all know, to even criticize the, you know, the President of the United States, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- RPRosalind Picard
Here, that's not a shocking thing. It happens, uh, you know, about every five seconds, right? (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- RPRosalind Picard
But in, um, China, uh, what happens if you criticize the leader of the government, right? And so people are very careful not to, to do that. However, what happens if you're simply watching a video and you make a facial expression that's- shows a little bit of skepticism?
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- RPRosalind Picard
Right? Well, in, you know, here, we're completely free to do that. In fact, we're free to fly off the handle, uh, and say anything we want, uh, usually. I mean, there are some restrictions, you know?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- RPRosalind Picard
When, when the athlete does this, um, as part of the national broadcast, maybe the teams get a little, uh, unhappy about picking that forum to do it, right? But that, that's more a question of judgment. Um, we, we have these, uh, freedoms, and in places that don't have those freedoms, what if our technology can read your underlying affective state? What if our technology can read it even non-contact? What if our technology can read it without your, uh, prior consent?
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- RPRosalind Picard
And here in the US, um, my first company we started, Affectiva-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- RPRosalind Picard
... we have worked super hard to turn away money and opportunities that try to read people's affect without their prior informed consent. And even the software that is licensable, you have to sign things saying you will only use it in certain ways, which essentially is get people's buy-in, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- RPRosalind Picard
Don't, don't do this without people, uh, agreeing to it. There are other countries where they're not interested in people's buy-in. They're just gonna use it. They're gonna inflict it on you. And if you don't like it, you better not scowl in the direction of any censors.
- LFLex Fridman
So one, let me just comment on a, on a small tangent. Do you know, with the, the idea of, uh, adversarial examples and deep fakes and so on... (laughs)
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
What you bring up is actually the, the, in, uh, one sense, deep fakes provide a comforting protection that, uh, that y- you can no longer really trust that, uh, the video of your face was legitimate, and therefore you always have an escape clause if a government is trying... If a, uh, stable, balanced, uh, ethical government is trying to accuse you of something, at least you have protection. You can say it was fake news. This is a popular term now. Uh-
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah, that's the general thinking of it. We, we know how to go into the video and see, for example, your heart rate and respiration, uh, and whether or not they've been tampered with, and we also can put like fake heart rate and respiration in your video-
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, interesting.
- 18:10 – 30:31
Forming a connection with AI systems
- LFLex Fridman
to the worry that you're expressing. At the same time, probably both you and I, and you very much so...You know, there's an exciting possibility that you can have a deep connection with a machine. (laughs)
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah, yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Right? So, uh...
- RPRosalind Picard
(laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- RPRosalind Picard
Those of us, um, I've admitted students who say that they, you know, when you list, like, "Who do you most wish you could have lunch with or dinner with," right? And they'll write, like, "I don't like people."
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- RPRosalind Picard
"I just like computers." And one of them said to me once when I had this party at my house, you know, "I want you to know this is my only social event of the year."
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- RPRosalind Picard
"My one social event of the year." (laughs) Like, okay. Now, this is a brilliant machine learning person, right? And we need that kind of brilliance in machine learning. And I love that computer science welcomes people who love people and people who are very awkward around people. I love that this is a field that anybody could join.
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- RPRosalind Picard
Uh, we need all kinds of people. Um, and you don't need to be a social person. I'm not trying to force people who don't like people to suddenly become social. At the same time, if most of the people building the AIs of the future are the kind of people who don't like people, (laughs) we've got a little bit of a problem.
- LFLex Fridman
Ho- hold on a second. So let me, let me push back on that. So, uh, don't you think a large percentage of the world can... You know, there's loneliness. There is, uh-
- RPRosalind Picard
There's a huge problem with loneliness, and it's growing.
- LFLex Fridman
And so there's a longing for connection. Do you, uh, e-
- RPRosalind Picard
If you're lonely, you're part of a big and growing group. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Yes. So we're- we're- we're in it together, I guess. (laughs) If you're lonely, uh, join a group.
- RPRosalind Picard
You're not alone. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
You're not alone. (laughs) That's a good line. But do you think there's a... You talked about some worry, but do you think there's an exciting possibility that something like Alexa and these kinds of tools can alleviate that loneliness, uh, in a way that other humans can't?
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, a, a great book can kind of alleviate loneliness-
- LFLex Fridman
Right, exactly.
- RPRosalind Picard
... right? Because you just get sucked into this amazing story, and you can't wait to go spend time with that character.
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- RPRosalind Picard
Right? And they're not a human character. There is a human behind it.
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- RPRosalind Picard
Uh, but yeah, it can be an incredibly delightful way to pass the hours. And it can meet needs, even, you know, I, I, I don't read those trashy romance books.
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- RPRosalind Picard
But somebody does, right? And what are they getting from this? Well, probably some of that feeling of being there, right? Being there in that social moment, that romantic moment, or connecting with somebody. Uh, I've had a similar experience reading some science fiction books, right?
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- RPRosalind Picard
And connecting with a character. Orson Scott Card, you know, just amazing writing in Ender's Game and, and Speaker for the Dead. Terrible title, but those kind of books that pull you into a character, and you feel like you're con- it, you feel very social. It's very connected, even though it's not responding to you. And a computer, of course, can respond to you.
- 30:31 – 39:05
Emotion
- RPRosalind Picard
- LFLex Fridman
So, in, in this process of, um, empowering people and sensing people and, uh-... what is your sense on emotion in terms of recognizing emotion? The difference between emotion that is shown and emotion that is felt? So, uh, yeah, uh, y- yeah, emotion that is expressed on the surface through your face, your body and, uh, various other things, and what's actually going on deep inside on the biological level, on the neuroscience level, or some kind of cognitive level.
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah. Yeah. Whoa, no easy questions here. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Well, it's like, yeah, I'm sure there's no-
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... an- there's no definitive answer, but what's your sense? How far can we get by just looking at the face? Can you get-
- RPRosalind Picard
We're very limited when we just look at the face, but we can get further than most people think we can get. People think, "Hey, I have a great poker face, therefore all you're ever gonna get from me is neutral." Well, that's naive. We can read with the ordinary camera on your laptop or on your phone, we can read from a neutral face if your heart is racing. We can read from a neutral face if your breathing is becoming irregular and showing signs of stress. We can read, uh, under some conditions that maybe I won't give you details on, um, how your heart rate variability power is changing. That could be a sign of stress even when your heart rate is not necessarily accelerating. So-
- LFLex Fridman
I'm sorry, from physio sensors or from the face?
- RPRosalind Picard
From the color changes-
- LFLex Fridman
The color changes?
- RPRosalind Picard
... that you cannot even see, but the camera can see.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm. That's amazing. So, so you can get a lot of signal, but-
- RPRosalind Picard
So we get things people can't see-
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- RPRosalind Picard
... using a regular camera. And from that, we can tell things about your stress. So if, um, you were just sitting there with a blank face thinking, "Nobody can read my emotion," well, you're wrong.
- LFLex Fridman
Right. So, so that's really interesting. But that's from sort of visual information from the face that's almost like cheating your way to th- the physiological state of the body by being very clever with what you can do with vision.
- RPRosalind Picard
With, with signal processing. Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
With signal processing.
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
So that's, uh, really impressive. But if you just look at the stuff we humans can see, uh, the-
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... the poker f- the smile, the smirks, the- the subtle, all the facial expressions.
- RPRosalind Picard
Right. So then you can hide that on your face for a limited amount of time. Now, if you, if you're just going in for a brief interview and you're hiding it, that's pretty easy for most people. If you are, however, surveilled constantly everywhere you go, then it's gonna say, "Gee, you know, Lex used to smile a lot, and now I'm not seeing so many smiles." And, "Roz used to, um, you know, laugh a lot and smile a lot very spontaneously, and now I'm only seeing these not so spontaneous looking smiles."
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- RPRosalind Picard
"And only when she's asked these questions." You know, that's... something's changed here.
- LFLex Fridman
Probably not getting enough sleep is part of it. (laughs)
- RPRosalind Picard
Um, we could look at that too. So, now, I have to be a little careful too. When I say we, we... you think we can't read your emotion and we can, it's not that binary. What we're reading is more some physiological changes that relate to the, your activation.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- RPRosalind Picard
Now, that doesn't mean that we know everything about how you feel. In fact, we still know very little about how you feel. Your thoughts are still private. Your, uh, nuanced feelings are still completely private. We can't read any of that. So, there's some relief that we can't read that, even brain imaging can't read that, um, wearables can't read that. However, as we read your body state changes, and we know what's going on in your environment, and we look at patterns of those over time, we can start to, uh, make some inferences about what you might be feeling. And that is where it's not just the momentary feeling, but it's more your stance toward things, and that could actually be a little bit more scary with certain kinds of, uh, governmental, uh, control freak people who want to know more about, are you on their team or are you not?
- LFLex Fridman
And getting that information through over time, so you're saying there's a lot of signal-
- 39:05 – 50:20
Measuring signals from the brain and the body
- LFLex Fridman
looking at our own minds, sort of the, sort of the biological stuff or the, uh, the neurobiological, the neuroscience look at the signals in our brain, uh, helped you understand the problem in the approach of effective computing? So ...
- RPRosalind Picard
Hmm. Originally, I was a computer architect, and I was building, uh, hardware and computer designs. And I wanted to build ones that worked like the brain. So I've been studying the brain as long as I've been studying how to build computers.
- LFLex Fridman
Have you figured out anything yet? (laughs)
- RPRosalind Picard
(laughs) Very little. Uh, it's, it's so amazing. You know, they used to think, like, "Oh, if you remove this chunk of the brain-"
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- RPRosalind Picard
"... and you find this function goes away, well, that's the part of the brain that did it." And then later they realized, "If you remove this other chunk of the brain, that function comes back," and-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- RPRosalind Picard
... "Oh no, we really don't understand it."
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- RPRosalind Picard
Uh, brains are so interesting and changing all the time, and able to change in ways that s- will probably continue to surprise us. When we were measuring stress, you may know the story where we found an unusual big skin conductance pattern on one wrist in one of our kids with autism. And in trying to figure out how on earth you could be stressed on one wrist and not the other, like how can you get sweaty on one wrist, right? When you, when you get stressed with that sympathetic fight or flight response. Like you, you kind of should, like, sweat more in some places than others, but not more on one wrist than the other. That didn't make any sense. We learned that what had actually happened was a part of his brain had unusual electrical activity-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- RPRosalind Picard
... and that caused an unusually large sweat response on one wrist and not the other. And since then, we've learned that seizures cause this unusual electrical activity, and depending where the seizure is, if it's in one place and it's staying there, you can have a big electrical response we can pick up with a wearable at one part of the body. You can also have a seizure that spreads over the whole brain, generalized grand mal seizure, and that response spreads and we can pick it up pretty much anywhere. As we learned this and then later built, um, Embrace that's now FDA cleared for seizure detection, uh, we have also built relationships with some of the most amazing doctors in the world who not only help people with unusual brain activity or epilepsy, but some of them are also surgeons and they're going in and they're implanting electrodes, not just to momentarily read the strange patterns of brain activity that we'd like to see return to normal, um, but also to read out continuously what's happening in some of these deep regions of the brain during most of life when these patients are not seizing. Most of the time, they're not seizing. Most of the time, they're fine. And so we are now working on mapping those deep brain regions that you can't even usually get with, uh, EEG scalp electrodes, uh, 'cause the changes deep inside don't reach the surface. Uh, but interesting, when some of those regions are activated, we see a big skin conductance response. Who would've thunk it, right? Like, nothing here, but something here. In fact, right after seizures that we think are the most dangerous ones, um, that precede what's called SUDEP, sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, uh, there's a period where the brainwaves go flat and it looks like the person's brain has stopped, but it hasn't. Uh, the activity has, has gone deep into a region that can make the cortical activity look flat, like a quick shutdown signal here.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- RPRosalind Picard
Um, it can unfortunately cause breathing to stop if it progresses long enough. Before that happens, we see a big skin conductance response in the data that we have. The longer this flattening, the bigger our response here.So we have been trying to learn, you know, initially like, why, w- why are we getting a big response here when there's nothing here? Well, it turns out there's something much deeper. So we can now go inside the brains of some of these individuals, fabulous people who usually aren't seizing, and get this data and start to map it. So that's active research that we're doing right now with, with top medical partners.
- LFLex Fridman
So this, this wearable sensor that's looking at skin conductance can capture sort of the ripples of the complexity of what's going on in our brain? So you c- this, this little device is, you have a hope that you can start to get the signal from the...
- RPRosalind Picard
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... from the interesting things happening in the brain?
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah. We've, uh, we've already published the strong correlations between the size of this response and the flattening that happens afterwards, and, uh, unfortunately also in a real SUDEP case where the patient died because the, uh... Well, we don't know why. We don't know if somebody was there, it would have definitely pr- prevented it. But we know that most SUDEPs happen when the person's alone. And, uh, in this case-
- LFLex Fridman
What's a SUDEP? I'm sorry.
- RPRosalind Picard
A, a SUDEP is an acronym, S-U-D-E-P.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay.
- RPRosalind Picard
And it stands for, uh, the number two cause of years of life lost actually among all neurological disorders. Um, stroke is number one. SUDEP is number two, but most people haven't heard of it. Actually, I'll plug my TED Talk, it's on the front page of TED right now, uh, that talks about this. And, uh, we hope to change that. I hope everybody who's heard of SIDS and stroke will now hear of SUDEP, 'cause we think in most cases it's preventable if people take their meds and aren't alone when they have a seizure. Uh, not guaranteed to be preventable, there are some exceptions, uh, but we think most cases probably are.
- LFLex Fridman
So you have this embrace now in the version two wristband, right? Uh, for epilepsy management. That's the, the one that's FDA approved?
- RPRosalind Picard
Yes.
- LFLex Fridman
And which is kind of a cred-
- RPRosalind Picard
FDA cleared they say.
- LFLex Fridman
Cleared.
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Sorry if-
- RPRosalind Picard
No, it's okay. It's-
- 50:20 – 53:50
Future AI systems
- LFLex Fridman
if we continue looking a little bit into the future, uh, do you think an AI that's empathetic and, uh, does, uh, improve our lives need to have a physical presence, a body? And even, let me, uh, cautiously say the C-word, consciousness, and, uh, even fear of mortality? So some of those human characteristics. Do you think it needs to have those aspects or can it remain simply a machine learning tool that learns from data of behavior that, uh, that learns to make us, based on previous patterns, uh, feel better? Or does it need those elements of consciousness and-
- RPRosalind Picard
It, it depends on your goals. If you're making a movie, it needs a body. It needs a gorgeous body. It needs to act like it has consciousness. It needs to act like it has emotion, right? Because that's what sells, that's what's gonna get me to show up and enjoy the movie, okay? Um, in real life, does it need all that? Well, if you've read Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, you know, it could just be like a little voice in your earing, right? And you could have an intimate relationship, and it could get to know you, and it doesn't need, uh, to be a robot. Uh, but that doesn't make as compelling of a movie, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- RPRosalind Picard
I mean, we already think it's kinda weird when a guy looks like he's talking to himself on the train-
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- RPRosalind Picard
... you know, even though it's earbuds. So we have these... Embodied is more powerful. Embodied, when you compare interactions with an embodied robot versus a video of a robot versus no robot, uh, the robot is more engaging. The robot gets our attention more. The robot, when you walk in your house, is more likely to get you to remember to do the things that you asked it to do-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- RPRosalind Picard
... because it's kinda got a physical presence.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- RPRosalind Picard
You can avoid it if you don't like it. (laughs) It could see you're avoiding it. There's a lot of power to being embodied. There will be embodied AIs. They have great power, and opportunity, and potential. There will also be AIs that aren't embodied, that just are little software assistants that help us with different things, that may get to know things about us. Will they be conscious? There will be attempts to program them to make them appear to be conscious. We can already write programs that make it look like, "Uh, what do you mean? Of course I'm aware that you're there," right? I mean, it's trivial to say stuff like that. It's, it's easy to fool people. Uh, but does it actually have conscious experience like we do? Nobody has a clue how to do that yet. That seems to be something that is beyond what any of us knows how to build now. Will it have to have that? Uh, I think you can get pretty far with a lot of stuff without it. Um, will we accord it rights? Well, that's more a political game than it is, uh, a question of real consciousness.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. Can you go to jail for turning off Alexa is what, uh, is the que- is the question for, uh, an, an election maybe a few, uh, decades from now.
- RPRosalind Picard
Well, Sophia robot's already been given rights as a citizen in Saudi Arabia, right? Even before women have, uh, full rights.
- LFLex Fridman
That's-
- RPRosalind Picard
Then the robot was still put back in the box to be shipped to the next, uh, place where it would get a paid appearance, right?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. It's, uh, dark and almost comedic, if not absurd.
- 53:50 – 56:35
Faith and science
- LFLex Fridman
So I've heard you speak about your journey in finding faith.
- RPRosalind Picard
Sure. Uh-huh.
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, and how you discovered some wisdoms about life and beyond from reading the Bible.
- RPRosalind Picard
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
And, and I've also heard you say that, you said scientists too often assume that nothing exists beyond what can be, uh, currently measured.
- RPRosalind Picard
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, so it's-
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah, materialism.
- LFLex Fridman
Materialism, right?
- RPRosalind Picard
And scientism, yeah. Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
So in some sense, this assumption enables the near-term scientific method, uh, uh, assuming that we can, um, uncover the mysteries of this world by the mechanisms of measurement that we currently have. Uh, but we easily forget that we've made this assumption, right?
- RPRosalind Picard
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
So, so what do you think we miss out on by making that assumption that-
- RPRosalind Picard
Hmm. It's fine to limit the scientific method to things we can measure and reason about and reproduce. Uh, that's fine. Uh, I think we have to recognize that sometimes we scientists also believe in things that happened historically.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- RPRosalind Picard
You know, like I, I believe the Holocaust happened. I can't prove events from past history scientifically. You prove them with historical evidence, right? With the impact they had on people, with eyewitness testimony, and, and things like that. So a, a good thinker recognizes that science is one of many ways to get knowledge.It's not the only way. And there, there's been some really bad philosophy and bad thinking recently, you can call it scientism, where people say science is the only way to get to truth, and it's not.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- RPRosalind Picard
It, it just isn't. There are other ways (laughs) that work also, like knowledge of love with someone. You don't, you don't prove your love through science, right? Uh, so history, philosophy, love, (laughs) a lot of other things in life, uh, show us that there's more ways to gain knowledge and truth, if you're willing to believe there is such a thing, and I, I believe there is, uh, than science. I do, I am a scientist, however, and in my science, I do limit my science to the things that the scientific method can, can do. But I recognize that it's myopic to say that that's all there is.
- LFLex Fridman
Right. There's, just like you listed, there's all the why questions, and really-
- RPRosalind Picard
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... we, we know, if we're being honest with ourselves, the percent of what we really know is, is, uh, basically zero relative to the full mystery of the-
- RPRosalind Picard
(laughs) Measure theory, the set of measure zero, if I have a finite amount of knowledge, which I do.
- LFLex Fridman
Um, so
- 56:35 – 59:55
Meaning of life
- LFLex Fridman
you said that you believe in truth, uh, so let me (laughs) ask that old question. Uh, what, what do you think this thing is all about, this life on Earth?
- RPRosalind Picard
Life, the universe, and everything? I, I can't-
- LFLex Fridman
And everything. What's the meaning-
- RPRosalind Picard
I can't quote Douglas Adams-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- RPRosalind Picard
... 42?
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- RPRosalind Picard
My favorite number.
- LFLex Fridman
So is 40-
- RPRosalind Picard
By the way, that's my street address. My husband and I-
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, wow.
- RPRosalind Picard
... guessed to the exact same number for our house. We, we, we got to pick it. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
Okay, good. (laughs)
- RPRosalind Picard
And there's a reason we picked 42. Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
So is it just 42, or is there, do you have other words that you can put around it?
- RPRosalind Picard
Well, I think there's a grand adventure, and I think this life is a part of it. I think there's a lot more to it than meets the eye and the heart and the mind and the soul here. I think we, we see but through a glass dimly in this life. We see only a part of all there is to know. If, if people haven't read the, the Bible, they should, if they consider themselves educated. And you could read Proverbs and find tremendous wisdom in there that cannot be scientifically proven, but when you read it, there's something in you, like, like a musician knows when the instrument's played right, and it's beautiful. There's something in you that comes alive and knows that there's a truth there, that it's like your strings are being plucked by the master instead of by me, (laughs) right? Playing when I pluck it, but probably when you play, it sounds spectacular, right? And when you, when you encounter those truths, there's something in you that sings and knows that there is more than what I can prove mathematically or program a computer to do. Don't get me wrong, the math is gorgeous. The computer programming can be brilliant. It's inspiring, right? We wanna do more. Uh, none of this squashes my desire to do science or to get knowledge through science. I, I'm not, I'm not dissing the science at all. I grow even more in awe of what the science can do because I'm more in awe of all there is we don't know. And really at the heart of science, you have to have a belief that there's truth, that there's something greater to be discovered. And some scientists may not wanna use the faith word, but it's faith that drives us to do science. It's faith that there is truth, that there's something to know that we don't know, that it's worth knowing, that it's worth working hard, and that there is meaning, that there is such a thing as meaning, which by the way, science can't prove either. Uh, we have to kinda start with some assumptions that there's things like truth and meaning. And these are really questions philosophers, uh, own, right? This is their space, uh, philosophers and theologians at some level. So these are things science, uh, you know, if we, when, when people claim that science will tell you all truth, that's, there's a name for that. It's, it's its own kind of faith. It's scientism, and it's very myopic.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, there's a much bigger world out there to be explored in, in ways that science may not, at least for now, allow us to explore.
- RPRosalind Picard
Yeah, and there's meaning and purpose and hope and joy and love and all these awesome things that make it all worthwhile too.
- LFLex Fridman
I don't think there's a better way to end it, Roz. Thank you so much for talking today. (laughs)
- RPRosalind Picard
(laughs) Thanks, Lex. What a pleasure. Great questions.
Episode duration: 1:00:11
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