This is the Convergent Science Network podcast. Leading researchers in the domain
of neuroscience, brain theory and technology are interviewed by Paul Vershoor and Tony Prescott.
So this is Paul Vershoor at the Barcelona Cognition Brain Technology Summer
School speaking with Joseph Bar-Cohen, active in the field of biomimetics for a long time.
And in your presentation this morning, you started out with sketching a bit
the philosophy of biomimetics, right? Why would you do biomimetics?
Also, as an engineer solving practical problems, where does biomimetics come in? How does it help?
Biomimetic is hard to define it as a field because what is it?
It's everything. Everything we do has some roots in biomimetics.
The clothes we wear, if you think about the spider,
and the way it nets things, I imagine that the primitives have seen this net
and saw the idea of making fibers and netting them in the way they so eventually
it led to the clothing um so.
As an idea to copy nature, definitely we can look for what else we can learn.
At least in my lab, we're looking at a drill that can go drill deep.
We call it go-fill, so that it does basically what the go-fill does.
And also another aspect is we're doing what we call health monitoring,
In terms that is drawn from our health monitoring and basically we're looking
at tubing and making sure that they are healthy.
So those are specific areas that right now I'm focusing on that are drawn from
the field of biomimetics.
Right. But now what makes an approach biomimetic in your approach?
The approach that is biobimedic is the concept of, at least a specific one of,
the gophil, is basically the ability to remove, not as a drill that just keep
going and remove materials as it drills continuously.
This one, what we call a wire line, it goes in, Then grab material,
gets out, throw this material, and keep going through the ground.
That's a biomimetic concept. Right. If someone didn't know that that's what
it is, of course, we would not have named it gopher. Right.
But now, for what are you building this robot? What's Gov going to do in the end?
This is not a robot. But in terms of robots, I am working on,
at least at this point, it's a proposal.
We worked on a rover like that, that has legs.
This legged robot is biomimetic robot. And we are using a drill that does not
require high action load,
so that it can anchor itself as it climb steep walls The mountains, if you want, and cliffs.
So that is a direction that we're also taking.
And hopefully we'll land on different planets with it. Right, and explore them.
So climbing cliffs, to what extent... So you showed us that there you look at
mountain goats as a source of inspiration.
But how does the mountain goat help you to build a climbing robot?
Number one, it is possible to climb with a rover that has legs.
If, you know, same thing about flying.
People looked at insects and birds, and they know it's possible to fly.
We just need to do the homework.
If we look at the mountain goat, maybe I'm not sure. We haven't made it to climb walls yet.
We just did preliminary experiments of making the foundations to allow us to do that.
What we may have to do, just like the other people who are doing a lobster and looking at lobster,
how it solves its problems, we may have to go to the zoo and check with the
goat to see what does it do when there is specific conditions and how it analyzes
the situation and climbs.
Right. And of course, it doesn't anchor. We are going to anchor.
There's some advantage.
So I'm wondering how they do that. Mm-hmm. So that means that in some sense
you're also saying, look, the current state of the art, if we just talk about
our more standard engineering approach to our robotics,
if I look at how you pursue solving problems like now climbing cliffs,
that also implies you're saying, well, in some sense we're missing something
in our standard approaches to solving these kinds of real-world problems with robots.
So what to you is this missing ingredient right now?
We will have the difficulty of navigating and what we call negotiating the terrain.
A goat does it much faster than we probably will do.
The degrees of freedom that we probably will
have equivalent to the goat
um but how all
this eye hand coordination that the goat or leg coordination right the goat
does it's for us it's going to be not going to be so easy and hopefully we will
take it as a reference for what is possible right but there's something else speed and performance.
Another animal that you highlighted was the octopus. So why do you find the
octopus so interesting?
It's quite fascinating. You know, here I can mention ideas that sound like science fiction.
You know, there's the Terminator 2, the movie.
And, well, the octopus can go through tubes and hide itself, camouflage itself.
If you can think of a robot, that can go under doors, hide like a carpet,
and just look for bad guys.
A police job or a military job. Sounds like science fiction,
but that's what the octopus does, part of its living.
You know? So this is something that is fascinating, possible.
We don't have the tools to do that. There are some works that have been done
on the camouflage, but having an ability to squeeze a body of a robot that can
go through a narrow tube, we don't have that.
No. If anything, it could be an EAP. If we have electroactive polymers that
can help in the shaping, this could become possible, but we're not there yet.
Right. We're far from that point.
Yeah, so also the octopus was a little bit the stepping stone into really thinking
more systematically about materials, right?
Like what are the possibilities today of building these highly compliant and
robust materials that we see used in nature? so what's the state of the art
and where did we come from?
Well, put it this way we do have some material that could help us we cannot
copy nature exactly there's no way even airplanes it's not exactly flying by
flapping wings it flies with jet engines as the best and that's why we beat
nature in every way possible.
We may not going to do the same thing or same tricks that the octopus does But
we have materials that allow us to have controlled rigidity, for example.
An example is electro-rheological liquids.
They allow you to have controlled rigidity. You can make a structure that is
rigid because this liquid is becoming rigidized in different areas if you need.
And if you need to make it just fluid, you make it fluid.
So this combination of controlled rigidity may allow us to do things like that.
But to what extent is it biomimetic? The fact that it is inspired by the octopus
to crawl through tubes or through narrow spaces, that is not referring to the
ability to create camouflage.
The camouflage capability, there are people who are working on a display that
is plastic, basically totally polymer and making display.
So with that, if you have a surface that is basically a display,
you can make it to do everything.
The cameras are tiny nowadays. You can make it copy the neighborhood and basically
come up like yourself, just like the octopus.
Right. But it means for you, the biomimetics is in copying or realizing the
functional properties of the system.
So for instance, for you, it's not necessary that the way the material controls
its rigidity is done at a mechanistic level at the way that approximates the octopus a solution.
It can be a different kind of solution like with these special materials you
talked about that can change their rigidity in a controllable fashion.
Right. I mean, copying nature many times is impossible.
Possible so we have to see what we can do and copying functionality is a way
even electroactive polymers they are not they are called artificial muscles
but they are performance and functionality,
similar not mechanic mechanism similar uh we don't have this capability of uh
of a structure to be consistent of those tiny cells that rejuvenate themselves.
So when a structure fails, it just fails. I mean, if you have crack,
that is self-repair people have been working on.
It's not exactly, but it's inspired by nature.
The idea is that you can create repair mechanisms that the structure will repair itself.
You know, just like we are. Well, when we are injured, our body takes care of the fixing. Right.
So now, when you describe these kinds of biomimetic materials,
you made a distinction between, let's say, two course categories of approaches.
One more anchored in physics and the other one more anchored in chemistry.
And I thought it was a really nice separation or also a classification of a
whole bunch of different methods.
So what's the problem you actually tried to solve with that kind of categorization?
Well, the idea was to try to help engineers, scientists who are not chemists,
who want to step into the field of electroactive polymers and do some work there.
It makes it easier if they know,
okay, if it's ionic, this is the kind of properties I should expect. If.
Electronic, or we call it field activated, these are other properties I can expect.
Then you don't have to worry about knowing that, you know, polymer so-and-so is whatever it is.
You don't have to remember there's a lot of polymers and derivatives of them.
If you're a chemist, you know what you're doing. This is your field,
and you feel comfortable.
But our problem is, this is a relatively small field. And if we want to draw
into it more people to work in it, we don't want to make their entry a hard one.
We want to make it as easy as possible, and they can be comfortable with whatever
they can bring. This is a multidisciplinary field.
So if they can bring physics, if they can bring electronics,
what I want them to do is focus on that capability and just quickly be able
to work with the field, with what is available. level.
I didn't mention at the presentation that I have a website where if you want to know how to make it,
there is a recipe that I managed to get from the people who invented those materials,
who came up with this material, who were generous enough to give us a recipe.
So if you want to make it, there is this recipe.
If you don't want to make it, I also have another website where you You can find where to get it.
It's still most of those places are custom made. Actually, all of them are.
We don't have commercial products yet.
So when you buy, it's a little bit more expensive because it's still one of a kind.
So when you order, they have to make it for you rather than they already made
millions and the cost is divided, unfortunately.
Sure. But now what are the key features of this, let's say, physics-based approach?
To artificial muscle. It is not just necessarily a physics base. It's a type of material.
Okay. There are, as I mentioned, some of those materials that are driven by just electric field.
By the electric field make them respond.
These have become, these are, geological liquid is one of them,
where you get rigidity. or they contract or change shape or whatever happened
to them as a mechanical result of this electrical field stimulation.
It takes a lot of voltage. It could be in the thousands of volts.
As opposed to the chemistry type that are required at a relatively low voltage,
and they aren't chemistry in action.
When you subject them to electric field, it's not the electric field that drives
them, it's the current that goes through them.
And therefore, it doesn't matter how thick.
The same two volts will do the same effect if it is a big tank or a small tank,
as opposed to what we call the physics base, like the highly stimulated.
But now, let's say I want to actuate my robot arm with an artificial muscle system.
Why would I choose one approach over the other?
Electronic type or field-activated type, the advantage they have,
if you walk it trial, you don't have to worry about suddenly the material dries
on you and dies, if we use a quote-unquote.
It is able to sustain position.
So you don't need to have power if it doesn't move. Just having it maintain the position,
you need to supplement the drift, the creeping charges that go full,
But otherwise, it is basically freebie.
You can put it in that position. For robotics, it's important.
Only when you move that one, you need power. As opposed to everything else,
I mean, when you talk about the other group, everything is the opposite.
They dry when you put them in, you know, different polymers.
The conductive type or what is called conducting polymers can sustain position,
but you have to do, oh, and some of them can be done at dry condition,
but it is not the whole goal.
Most of them are suffering from those weaknesses.
Right. So now if I have these active polymers, I can build my muscle and what
kind of force can we generate today?
What's the state of the art there? Well, to simplify it,
there were demonstrations at the conference that I chaired in San Diego where
the highest anyone was hanging mass on and able to raise and drop was in the level of 10 kilogram.
So that gives you an idea what kind of forces you can generate with a practical
size. But then how much of this material do I need to lift 10 kilograms or to
pull 10 kilograms on the string?
The Gruppenemper created those actuators in 2005, and they needed ropes that
are about a centimeter diameter by about...
They're 20 centimeters long, and they used a group of those.
If I'm not wrong, something like 20 of them just thought that they could hang
bottled water of 20 kilograms.
Oh, I'm sorry, 20 liters, if I'm not wrong. Those are the numbers.
But just to give you a rough idea.
Right. But are we in a range that you also have a power density of this material
that starts to become comparable to what we see in nature?
Yes, we do have the power density, but on the low, on the small scale,
and it is not, if you, in order to make it intuitive, the comparison,
I have this arm wrestling challenge,
because it gives you a gauge where we are.
And when we compare a system where you have a control and the driver and electronics
and everything combined to a system,
rather than someone sat down in the lab and just measured somehow how the actuator does it,
then we are at the point of one order of magnitude weaker performance of the
actuators, the speed of the actuator, the force of the actuator,
the speed of the actuator.
So we have some way to go, quite a bit of way to go. Okay.
But now the next step up, it might be nice to have these muscle type solutions
for actuation, but it raises a whole bunch of new questions about control.
Because in some sense, it goes far beyond or takes a completely different form
of control than what we would be used to in robotics.
So how do you see that pan out?
Well, we will have to learn how to control these materials.
People have been working on a control and there's a lot of sessions in the conference
on EAP in San Diego that are dedicated to the topic of control.
Just for simplicity of intuitive feeling about it, you walk in the street and
your hands are not rigid attached to your body.
They just swing without doing anything about it. Just like a pendulum.
And you don't even think about it. And then when you want to make a watch,
same hands suddenly become precision tools.
So we have this ability to control this flexible hands because we have bones
in them, make it helpful.
We do need to understand how those materials work and somehow be able to do the needed control.
We have to remember that if a muscle like that activated an object,
the damping is not as rigid as if it was a piezoelectric material moving something.
So we have to take those into account. Right.
I'm sure with time, we'll be able to deal with it much better. Right.
So now, as sort of the current state of the art in this field of humanoid robotics,
we could take Robonaut, which NASA is now just testing in space.
So what can Robonaut really do today? What are sort of the capabilities of these systems?
Robonaut is not driven by EEP. It has motors in it. And, of course,
the mass is significant because those motors are not lightweight like EAP.
The capabilities you probably could see in the internet. There's quite a big
description of the Robonaut and what it can do.
And, of course, hopefully we'll see it soon in performance in space. Right.
So it is not related directly to my work. There's so much I want to talk about it.
But as I said it would be nice if we could drive it with the ERP.
So the question is how far in the future do you see that link up happen that
we can look at let's say robots we can really use effectively in different tasks
that are now driven by these more biomimetic materials?
Predicting the future is very difficult. At least one thing I can say.
I see the time to this is happening is getting shorter now because more large
industries are now backing producers of EAP.
There's a group in Denmark, there's a group in Switzerland, and there's a group in Germany.
U.S. and San Francisco, called Artificial Muscle.
And the specific one, I will mention the one in Artificial Muscle,
where Bear, the drug maker, is behind him.
He purchased this company, so they have good backing, and they're starting to
make commercial products.
Once we see commercial products coming, that is a major step because we will
start seeing funding resulting from the profit of selling EAP,
making companies more receptive to invest in this area because they see return on investment.
Hopefully they will see return on investment because if it's not,
of course they will be reluctant to put money into something that will take another 20 years.
And of course with time things will happen.
Even laser, When it was invented, the lasers were huge, applications were very
limited, and look at that.
Now they are pointers and readers of CD and DVD.
You just name it, where it went and how inexpensive they were,
they became, as opposed to where they used to be years back.
Right. So hopefully we'll see similar success to this field.
Right. So you're saying, so you're coming out with a book very soon about robots, right?
About biomedics. It includes chapters about robotics, include about marine,
include about EEP, the latest applications, including braille displays,
active braille, or we call them refreshable braille displays. place.
What has been done with the electronic departments towards making them?
But previously, fairly recently actually, and you're a fast writer,
you also had a book that was called The Coming Robot Revolution, right?
Right. The Coming. Yes, The Coming Robot Revolution.
So what's the shape of that revolution you have in mind?
The biomimetics is about the whole field in general, not necessarily.
It's more about innovation and invention that resulted from biomimetics.
The book about robotics was specifically about human-like robots.
And just to tell the audience the inside story, just the publisher didn't want
to have a name human-like robots.
They wanted it to be revolution, to have buzzwords like that.
They even wanted to have a picture of a robot with a knife or a gun or something. And I said, no way.
I wanted, I was willing to go with this picture the way, if you look at the
internet, you'll see the picture. That was okay with me.
And basically what the message there is, we are now slowly learning to live
with robots as our way of life.
We're just making them human-like and just shaping the capability.
We already have ability to see with the machines, and actually they use them to recognize people.
We're using them to recognize speech, and now you call the bank,
and you can make transactions just by talking to your phone, through your phone.
We are at the level that this robot can recognize up to 1,000 words or even
more, some claim even more.
That is not bad. And so there are stores, at least in the U.S.,
that grocery store and hardware store where you just shop yourself.
I mean, you take your product, scan them, and the machine tell you what to do.
It asks you to give your credit cards.
And everything is done electronically with a machine. You don't talk to anyone.
And people mostly prefer that because I can do it faster than I have someone
at the cashier scanning my product and then ask me for a pocketed card and then get my signature.
Everything is done electronically. So we're slowly liking that kind of approach.
Soon, when maybe you go to a restaurant and the person who comes to take your
order will be just a robot.
You know, and then you will feel more comfortable because there will be all
the time around you when you need them rather than vanish and who knows when
they show up to ask you what do you want if you need anything.
There's some advantages.
And so two things are happening. Evolution of improvements.
We're getting used to them, recognize their need. However, we are not where we want it to be.
If you look at science fiction books, by now they were expecting to have robots
everywhere. We're not there.
And to some extent, I think we need to do it slowly because of this revolution of robots.
And that's basically the revolution I'm talking about. and there is a chapter
totally about this issue of ethics and things to worry about this robot.
Because while they can be very helpful, and there are already quite a bit of
development, they can be dangerous.
You know, if someone clones you, and you can be watching TV,
watching the news, suddenly breaking news, and you see yourself robbing a bank,
and you're sitting at home.
Someone copied you, and this robot will leave on purpose your fingerprint.
It will have your DNA scattered everywhere because they copied you and cloned you very quickly.
And what would you do? And they can even make it worse.
Mass produce you 100 times, and you can rob all the banks of the city.
What would you do about that?
You know, talking about stealing your identity with credit cards,
This is just a minor problem compared to have robots that have you completely.
No one will believe you when you show up at the police to know that you are you, not a robot.
I mean, things that you see on video movies are starting slowly to become reality.
And of course, you always have concern. We naturally are afraid of reality.
You know, something looking like human. My daughter, when she was young,
we bought her a doll that walking and singing.
And we thought she would be happy and hug her maybe. She was scared out of her mind.
And not only her, our grandson. My wife went with him when he was a three-year-old to Disney.
He was scared out of their mind when he saw those robots.
And he wanted to get out before we know what happened. And so there is something
natural, fundamental to us about this fear.
And, you know, it's, how do you explain that? But, you know,
it's basically just looking like us and that's become bad.
Because they don't have a problem when you give them a doll without motion or
dog toys or all those toys like cows.
But they're afraid when it looks like human. Right. But now there are two things
about this. On the one hand, this is not necessarily going to happen tomorrow, right?
Because to go from ubiquitous computing, the examples you mentioned,
to really integrated, actuated systems that are also psychologically and morphologically
plausible, we still have a few steps, right, to go there.
But I agree with you. We can imagine that this can be realized.
So now you're sketching this problem. Like here I have 10 million clones of
you, but they're all robots, okay?
So that's the problem. How are you going to solve that problem? It's a problem.
I want a solution. The solution is the fact that all this thing is happening slowly.
We'll make sure we'll come up with a reasonable solution that will improve as
the technology develops.
Because it is a problem, no matter what. But that's a belief,
right? Because it might as well be the frog in the boiling water problem, right?
That sort of, as long as things change slowly, you think there's no problem until it's too late.
Well, I mean, look in this way. The spamming that we get from email,
we have the problem, big problem, we dealt with it.
We have viruses, we dealt with it.
It's the kind of thing that we somehow recognize it's a problem.
This is the same, could be the same issue. Here someone make you,
sell you a robot, not necessarily copied you, but while it is in your home,
Someone take over the control and basically send all these pictures from the home.
I'm sure in flow, I mean, a robot
like that in a house of an actor in California, you know, famous actor.
I'm sure lots of people would like to see on YouTube images right from the house
when the actor is feeling comfortable.
You know, things like that. You know, how do you protect it against it?
This could be an issue. You're talking about all this, they call them,
that they chase actors to take photos.
Here, this robot sits in their own home, you know, and sending pictures.
Right, but then one solution could be that we have to just generate a new set of laws.
For instance, that we will not build robots, or that it would be outlawed to
build robots that are exactly replicas of systems that we would recognize as animals or as humans.
It could be a possibility. It could be the one-off solution.
On the other hand, we are trying to build robots that will look like animals
and perform like animals.
So one other angle of fear I have of this is that we build all these birds that
will fly, and if we use them in a war, we'll make the enemy kill all the birds
because they don't know which one is real, which one is not.
So they will kill anything that flies like a bird or quacks like a bird.
You know, and that's a danger that is a side effect of developing technology like that.
What would we do? Not develop this kind of technology?
Well, that's the question, right? So if we say, look, we're not going to build
replicants because otherwise we have the same problem as in the Android dream
of electric sheep of Philip K.
Dick or Blade Runner, that in the end we had this massive difficulty to actually
recognize or distinguish the replicants from the robots, from the humans,
and that is this Kropf-Forg test for that to look at the emotional responses.
So, okay, so this could be a possible future danger of, let's say,
biomimetics at this morphological level. Okay.
Is there a reason not to do it, Dan, if you take that angle?
I'll put it this way. It's important to know what can go wrong.
I mentioned that in my lecture.
Knowing that something can go wrong is important. Hide it under the carpet. That's bad.
But if electricity has its negative too, stick your finger with a nail into
one of the poles, you will die.
It doesn't mean that we're going to stop using electricity. Cars kill people.
We have, in the US, we have 50,000 people die every year in accidents. We still drive.
We have laws. We improve safety. We're doing a lot of things to improve.
But this has become, we cannot live without them.
Robots, maybe at the beginning, we probably won't be able to live without them.
But soon, once they become part of our life, it will be the same problem.
We'll have them causing trouble, making mistakes, our software go wire,
but we'll have to somehow deal with what could go on while we're enjoying the benefit.
The wrong expected a lot of benefits from them. And I can imagine a lot of them.
You know, we are, Japanese recognize it even more than any other society because
their society is declining. mining. There is more elderly than youngs.
And they're looking for people to help the elderly in nursery homes, for example.
And they're making robots to help them. Remind them of medication,
making sure they're okay.
Just be around them, make sure that everything is under control.
So they are using them. So they're slowly getting into their life.
But the acceptance of these robots is not necessarily very high.
I mean, there are cases where these robots were introduced in,
let's say, nursing homes, but the humans were not very pleased with them.
They actually didn't like it.
Put it this way. If you go to a friend and they introduce you to the new robot
they just got, and the robot made incredible meal,
cleaned the dishes, took the garbage, did it all efficiently without breaking
anything, guess what you're going to do?
You're going to go home, look at the internet where they sell those, and order one.
It's just a matter of time. Right. Of course, when it comes to your home,
it will start breaking dishes and everything else. And bad cooking.
But I'm sure with time we'll improve on that. Because everything you will remember
of technology at the beginning, there were flows of childhood diseases.
Problems, yes. Problems, and look where it is today.
So now, what do you mean with the notion of human-like robots? Why is that important?
Well, the human-like aspect is, I mean, you could have machines that look like
human, but we feel more comfortable with human. I mentioned that too.
It has to be our size to begin with. You know, if you want it to be useful for
us, if it's like, look, can you get me this bottle? And the bottle is on the table.
If the robot is too short, you know, by the time get me the bottle,
I'll be thirsty like hell, you know.
Or if it's too big, you know, it will be so clumsy and it won't even be able to get through the door.
So you want it to go through your door, open, you know, open the door comfortably.
I want it to do all the things we can do.
So if it can do it, it probably would be nice if it has the same capability we have.
Five fingers in each hand, two hands, I don't know, maybe useful to have more,
but probably Probably evolution already found that it's better management of
the space around us to have two legs and two hands, rather than have multiple,
even though the solution on a smaller level, lower level life was that there
is more of them. You know, a spider has eight of them.
And, of course, if we find useful, we'll do it. You know, it's just an evolution,
I mean, development evolution.
So the other aspect is we are very comfortable with communication with human
language, body language.
If I smile, people appreciate that, you know, I'm happy. And,
of course, if I'm angry, this is all expected with the face.
So if you want to talk to your robot and the robot does something stupid,
instead of programming so that you can say, I'm angry, you just show angry face.
That's it. it, you know, especially if the general public is starting to use
robots rather than those who don't care about sitting and programming,
which is what we do anyway, you know, so it would be nice.
And look what suddenly social media is doing with computers.
No one would have imagined that suddenly every kid will have to have a computer
so that they can communicate with Facebook and what all these capabilities that we have today,
you Even though computers were made initially for computational.
It was a computational machine.
But you're saying, look, we evolved to exist in a certain niche.
We have also shaped our world to have certain affordances so we can deal with
cups and tables and chairs.
We have structured all these things to fit also our own morphology and our own behavior.
So our affordances match the world we have created.
It um so you're saying to
insert robots in that they must match that similar set
of affordances and that's that's why they should be human-like but
this could possibly also create an exactly a conflict
with your earlier problem that i can clone you because you're
saying look because of these functional requirements i have to build something
that is very human-like it even has to look human because otherwise it cannot
communicate but then automatically as an artifact you create now all these problems
you sketched earlier which is like well now i can I can clone Joseph Barcone
and I can have a rubber bank, right?
I mean, there are solutions to that. You can have the forehead with a license plate.
Okay. As an example, there are possibilities of solution.
But okay, you could run around without license plate.
So, of course. The license plate, I think, is not effective.
I mean, it could be a device just like, you know, fake money.
There are scanners that you can use that can scan which one is real,
which one is fake. You can have, definitely we can identify a machine versus human with detectors.
But in some sense you make an assumption, right? Because maybe we want these
machines that help us, that assist us in everyday life to be recognizable as
machines and not necessarily do everything.
Maybe we want to have a recognizable, more like a tool. This is my assistive tool.
It is a more human compatible robot as opposed to a human-like robot. Would you buy that?
It's probably this is what will happen at the beginning. But I'm sure with time,
we'll desire more and we'll ask for more.
And of course, if I, my vision is, I don't know if it will be 100 years from
now, 200 years from now, robots will do way better than humans.
In what? Will be the robots of the future will do way better than humans.
My concern is. But in what? In what will it do way better? In everything.
Everything. Force, intelligence, computation, recognizing, you know,
they can recognize faces right away with the resume and everything with it.
Go to the internet, search, think we can do.
I mean, you will have to pull your iPhone or something or your smart phone to
find all this information.
This guy has it in his brain as part of the machine.
And, you know, maybe he can communicate it to you down the road because we don't
know how the communication will be then, not necessarily verbal,
because if you have this companion robot with you and you just want it to help
you without others knowing,
maybe there will be a chip in our brain or our skull connected to this robot and it will help us.
It will tell us things we need to know while it doesn't share this with everyone,
just with us. And who knows what else could it be?
The probability are enormous. If you think of all the smartphones and what they can do. Sure.
Look at all these old movies and books. None of them predicted that.
And this is something simple we have in our pockets.
But now, are you, in some sense, aligning yourself with this whole singularity movement?
And people like Kurzweil who would say, look, there is sort of this disastrous
future in front of us when the machines will take over.
It's a bit like a Terminator scenario, right? Like you build Skynet and it becomes
conscious and it takes over the world and we're lost.
Well, I'm not saying a singularity. I mean, we're in trouble. That's it.
I don't see that because I think we are humans still around and we're going
to bring a sense of human into whatever we develop.
So at least we still have hope.
So I'm looking at it more in the positive sense. There will be corrections throughout the path.
Well, thing go wrong and we fix. Thing go wrong and fix. And basically,
this is what we're doing. We're finding something wrong.
Look, traffic light. Why we invented traffic light? We had cars driving all
over. There were not that many. They ran into people.
And we decided, and it became so much that we needed to come with solutions.
So we came with traffic light, brake light, front light, and all those tools
that allow us to find, you know, manage with this chaos.
And initially, it probably was chaos, one driving one way, the other one the other way.
Now, we put order into this chaos, and now we can make, we still have traffic
jams, but people constantly coming with new solutions.
It's the same thing will be with this robot. But with time, I'm sure,
constantly we'll come up with, and probably the speed of problems that are rising
will be even faster than the speed of coming with solutions to them.
But look what happens when we find problems like that. We just shut down the
factory or whatever until we have a solution, even like the space shuttle.
When there was a problem, there was an explosion, we turn it off,
no flight, until we find a solution.
Right. You know, it could be some situation like that here, that,
you know, you send the movie iRobot, I don't know if you've seen it.
They marketed on defective robots, you know.
So somehow they're all out there and going haywire. Right, exactly.
But there are two things about this. And that's traffic lights,
I think, is a good example, right?
Because the sobering observations that traffic lights are actually still hopelessly
primitive. I mean, the way we regulate traffic in cities is actually terribly
inefficient, and there is a long way to go.
And the second thing is that...
If we think about these robots and this robot future, it's often in these very
utilitarian terms, like they will be smarter than us, faster than us,
stronger than us, but maybe they should be as lazy as we want to be.
Humans have many features that are not utilitarian, right?
It also has a lot to do with, let's say, quality of life, experience,
enrichment of experience, and so on, in which you cannot outdo each other,
because it has to do with your enjoyment of life. I mean, you might want to do sports.
It's just a very personal experience. So, in that sense, isn't there this whole
other aspect of human experience and human activity where we have to think about
how these machines can assist us?
Well, as I said, this is what we call the technology evolution.
We're going to pull them to the direction where we feel comfortable with them.
I will give you an example of when those sluggages that you carry with you to the airplane came out.
Initially, they were vertical, so that it will be narrow to go between the chairs of the airplane,
but they kept falling because they were poorly balanced, and I didn't buy one
because I saw it as a problem, and look where it is today.
They're all flat. They sit more stable on the ground, and look how they're evolving,
and there's no comparison between those and what we used to have,
I don't know, 10, 20 years back.
We evolve, if you compare evolution of animals to evolution of our technology
or commercial product, there's some similarity in many senses.
Whatever we don't like, it become extinct, no one buys it anymore.
And then they come with the latest version that we like, and that's what we buy.
So it would be the same thing. One thing, of course, I wouldn't be concerned about.
Talking about quality of life. So while things have improved our life,
like the cell phone, we're constantly busy.
I used to go to a conference. No one here for me. I don't hear from anyone. I just enjoy, relax.
Now I have a laptop with me. I have an iPhone with me. And I constantly,
while I'm listening to the talks, I make sure my, what I call business,
is running smoothly because I'm taking care of things.
Things that I would have waited, probably it would be disastrous consequences by the time I arrived.
But this is what it used to be. So now everyone has this capability.
So everyone wants to be in real time with what's going on.
So I know, and you heard the bing from my phone. This is the constant bing.
And all the time I have to check what happened and I have to tell them what
to do and take care of whatever is happening.
So while I have control, it's my life constantly being 24 hours a day,
seven days a week, I am working.
So bring the efficiency of having a robot on top of it. By the end of the day,
you're exhausted. You use yourself up too. Exactly.
Now this is interesting, right? Well, we think we introduce a technology to
make life easier. We just complexify it tremendously.
Tremendously. You have no time to breathe because you are very efficient.
How much efficient can you be? Oh my gosh. You cannot turn your head because
something's going to happen and you have to watch it.
But then, to what extent do you see biomimetics playing a leading role in giving
rise to this robot revolution that you envision?
It gives us more tools to make our life more efficient.
I mean, efficiency could be good and bad because relaxing is not about efficiency.
When you drink beer and having a good time watching the ocean,
there's no efficiency. You're not looking for efficiency.
And that's, At least if you have that time or if you had time to do that,
you wouldn't have that probably because you're so busy.
You have a robot to take care of everything now. So on one hand,
you think that with all the technology we created,
We're now supposed to have more free time. I don't have free time.
I used to go fishing. I don't go fishing anymore because I don't have free time.
Right. Because I am so efficient now. But on the other hand,
I publish so many books. I publish so many things. I made so many reports.
I have so many patents because I'm efficient.
But I probably would be more efficient. But I don't have time for anything.
So there's also many, many other people have an exponential increase of emails
in their mailboxes. Because you're so efficient.
Exactly. And in response, they're more efficient.
And it's a problem. And you are left out if you are not in that category of those who can do it.
So I took a class, How to Read Fast. And I type quick.
And I'm constantly writing emails, responding to things.
And someone else is reading that so they can respond. And this is crazy.
It is in 2011. I don't know.
I don't want to think what will happen in five years from now.
How miserable it will be in terms of having to respond to emails so quickly.
It's our efficiency arms race. I guess. It is. It is. And everyone is losing.
This is interesting, right? So technology has not helped us to improve the quality of life so far.
But then my question is… No, it did. It just makes us… Efficient.
It makes us super efficient and we don't have time extra. But not necessarily
happy. You're not fishing anymore, right?
But then the other thing is what I want to know from the perspective of research.
So this is the robot revolution.
They'll make us very efficient. So we'll be typing even more emails in the future
and fixing the robot in the same time.
But to what extent is biomimetics going to lead the development?
Is that your view on it? Or is it one of many approaches that will contribute?
Biomimetics, this is what is important about it.
We do not want to reinvent the wheel.
Nature has done a good job over billions of years with enormous pool of inventions.
We just tapped some of them that we were able to copy or learn from.
Some of them we don't even know.
There's so much. I told the new zoo in San Diego, apparently they have a program now on biomimetics.
And I told them, your role, just doing that, taking animal, animal, and start cataloging.
Cataloging what this animal as an engineering device forget that this is a living
creature biological with cells and stuff look at it as a machine it has specs
that it is between this size and this size when it is adult is it can live this
long but beside that what does it do,
Look at it as an engineering. And we, the engineers, will try to see what we can learn from that.
And there is a lot of things, and not just a simple engineering aspect.
You know, the hair, how does it grow? What makes it look that?
What does this hair, the way it grows, does?
Because the way the angle and whatever, white is here and not there,
all the things can give us clues to our new ideas.
Because it's already been invented. And if it was no good, it would have been
extinct. The fact that it survived this millions of years, this is incredible.
And you look at things like that, what are bringing us to octopus.
Look what it can do. We cannot do that. If I give you rope and whatever,
try to do on scale of human what spider does on scale of spider.
This is incredible. Incredible. Flat surface with all these strings.
How does it tie? I always am fascinated. I never seen them, how they do,
how they start. I always see them after they already made the progress.
But somehow they link from one end to another. No knots.
It's all one flat surface. And it's amazing. They're fairly repeating themselves.
And it's just a spider, a tiny spider. And it's able in its mind to put all
these coordinates on whatever surface,
which is fascinating. We cannot do that. Not yet. Not yet, right.
So to go to the finish, so you're in this domain of biometrics for a long time.
You've written several books about it. You have a very strong opinion of what
biometrics means. So if we would have to identify the one law of Joseph Barcon
with respect to how we're going to move into that future, what's this one law
that you would like to put out today?
It's hard to answer that because it's so multidisciplinary field.
What is biomimetics? As I said, it's everything.
What I'm hoping, there will be some kind of a handbook one day where we have
everything we know about animals.
Even things we know, because maybe we know, but someone else doesn't.
So that new engineers will have
this catalog of, and it's going to be complicated, how multidimensional.
How do you catalog that? By animal type, by insects, animal,
birds, whatever, by materials, by whatever, because everything is biomedic to some extent.
And if we somehow one day we are able to make an airplane with cells that rejuvenate
and self-repair and make sure that it maintains all the things that it needs to maintain,
then that could be a good biomedics lesson.
And listen, the fact we make cars the same, and if they are somewhat,
you know, not exactly, then these cars that are not exactly offload,
they won't perform as good. Look at us.
You could be this short, and you could be this tall, and all of us will do the
same. They will be able to climb stairs.
They will be able to climb trees. They will be able to write,
read, do all the things we know how to do without being exactly.
And, you know, once we die, our body becomes bones. And when you look at it, it's not connected.
Nothing physically rigidly connects everything. It's all scattered.
We make our structures bolted down, glued permanently.
We need to learn something how to make structures that are not exact.
Actually, we don't want to look exactly one like the other.
Twins have a lot of problems sometimes if people recognize who is who.
We have identity. We like that.
So something like that, structures that are different, it's nice.
There are people already designing robots with identity and appearance difference.
So the law would then be imposition is power, something like this.
Then the second question would then be, okay, we talked about,
let's say, predictions that go pretty far into the future, up to 200 years was
the last number we discussed there.
But if you would have to make a prediction that we can validate with you five
years from now, so we get you back here next interview, look,
five years back, you gave me this prediction, and now you're going to tell me
whether you succeeded or you failed.
What's that prediction? That's a hard thing to do.
I'm sure I'd be wrong most likely you know just to make it simple to understand
if you had a time machine and you just move two years from now,
lots of things are different you don't even know what they're doing,
you know two years I mean even look at all the cell phones now they change every
half a year right through a year I don't want to go back a year or two because
Because I don't have the good tools that I have already.
Sure. Why would I go back? Which is the same problem of prediction. Of course. If I knew.
No, we agree. Predicting is hard. That's why I want you to do it.
So what's the prediction? One prediction only.
It's my hope. I would say hope instead of prediction.
My hope is that to see improvement at the electroactive polymers that will bring
practical commercial materials or applications rather than just toys.
Right now, it's mostly toys. We have fish that are sitting in aquarium that
the Japanese are selling.
We have this iPhone attachment that is haptic interface. I hope it will be maybe
a braille display or, you know, a vegetable pipe or something practical that
makes different to people.
Okay. So five years time, electroactive polymers as really a solid and mature
product in our society. That's what I'm hoping to see.
Great. We'll be back to check. Not prediction, hope. Okay. Joseph Barkowin,
thank you very much for this conversation. Thank you. Okay.
The CSN podcast was produced by the Convergent Science Network of Biometrics
and Biohybrid Systems, a project funded by the European 7th Research Framework Program.
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Music.