Boris Sofman: Waymo, Cozmo, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of Robotics | Lex Fridman Podcast #241

The following is a conversation with Boris Sofman, who is the senior director of engineering and head of trucking at Waymo, the autonomous vehicle company, formerly the Google self-driving car project. Before that, Boris was the co-founder and CEO of Anki, a robotics company that created Cozmo, which, in my opinion, is one of the most incredible social robots ever built. It's a toy robot, but one with an emotional intelligence that creates a fun and engaging human-robot interaction. It was truly sad for me to see Anki shut down when it did. I had high hopes for those little robots. We talk about this story and the future of autonomous trucks, vehicles, and robotics in general. I spoke with Steve Viscelli recently on episode 237 about the human side of trucking. This episode looks more at the robotic side. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now here's my conversation with Boris Sofman. Who is your favorite robot in science fiction, books or movies?

WALL-E and R2-D2, where they were able to convey such an incredible degree of intent, emotion, and kinda character attachment without having any language whatsoever, um, and just purely through the emo- richness of em- emotional interaction, so those are fantastic. And then, uh, the Terminator series is just, like, really (laughs) in front of my eye-

(laughs) Okay.

... pretty wide-

Jumped from WALL- (laughs)

... wide range, right? Uh, but, uh, I kinda love this, uh, dynamic where you have this, like, incredible Terminator itself that, that Arnold played, but, uh, and then he was kind of like the inferior, like, previous generation version that was, like, totally outmatched, uh, you know, in terms of kinda specs by the new one, but, you know, still kind of, like, held his own. And so it was kind of interesting where you, you realize how many, how many levels there are on the spectrum from human to kind of potentials in AI and robotics to, uh, futures. And so, yeah, that movie really, uh, as much as it was, like, kind of a dark world in a way, was actually quite fascinating, gets the imagination going.

Well, from an engineering perspective, both the movies you mentioned, uh, WALL-E and, um, Terminator, uh, the first one is probably achievable, you know, humanoid robot, maybe not with, like, the realism in terms of skin and so on, but that humanoid form, we have that humanoid form. It seems like a compelling form. Maybe the challenge is it's super expensive to engine- to, to build, but you can imagine maybe not a machine of war-

Yeah.

... but you can imagine Terminator-type robots walking around.

Yeah.

Uh, and then the same obviously w- with WALL-E. You've basically... So for people who don't know, you, uh, created the company Anki that created, uh, a small robot with a big personality called Cozmo that just... It does exactly what WALL-E does, which is somehow with very few basic visual tools is able to communicate a depth of emotion, and that's fascinating. Uh, but then again, the humanoid form is, uh, super compelling. So, like, C- uh, Cozmo is very distant from a humanoid form-