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 Cosmo, 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. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| We talk about this story and the future of autonomous trucks, vehicles, and robotics in general. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| So those are fantastic. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Maybe not with like the realism in terms of skin and so on, but that humanoid form, we have that humanoid form. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And that's fascinating. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| That's true. And it's interesting because it is very intentional to go really far away from human form when you think about a character like Cosmo or like WALLY where you can completely rethink the constraints you put on that character, what tools you leverage and then how you actually create a personality and a level of intelligence interactivity that actually matches the constraints that you're under, whether it's mechanical or sensors or AI of the day. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And that's not the way AI works is there's places where you're way stronger and there's places where you're weaker. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Like you see this with cartoons, like stick figures, you can communicate quite a lot with just very minimal, like two dots for eyes and a line for a smile. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And then if you do that, then you can focus on the actual magic of human and dot line interaction versus all the engineering mess. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| But you sometimes end up getting a far more beautiful output because you're pushing at the extremes of this emotional space in a way that you just wouldn't because you get lost in the surface area if you have like something that is just infinitely articulable. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And so we were studying robotics, AI, machine learning, different areas. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And there's a lot of incredible breakthroughs that happened there. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And at that time, there was actually relatively few applications of robotics that were outside of peer research or industrial applications, military applications and so forth. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And we saw kind of a pretty wide range of applications that varied in the complexity of what it would take to actually solve those. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And so we thought that we could really reinvent that experience. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And so we really got excited about that and how we push all the complexity from the physical world into software by using really inexpensive components, but putting huge amounts of complexity into the AI side. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And the motivation very much was Pixar. We had an incredible respect and appreciation for what they were able to build in this really beautiful fashion and film. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| So basically you take a toy, you add intelligence into it in the same way you would add intelligence into AI systems within a video game, but you're not bringing it into the physical space. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| We literally use that exact same phrase because in the case of Drive, this was a parallel of the racing genre. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And a lot of those elements were almost like a proving ground for what would human robot interaction feel like in a domain that's much more forgiving, where you can make mistakes in a game. It's okay if a car goes off the track or if Cosmo makes a mistake.

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