Robotics pioneer Marc Raibert joined InnoLead on stage to kick off our Impact conference last October. After three decades building Boston Dynamics, he now oversees The AI Institute, a Cambridge R&D lab set up to explore the intersection of AI and robotics. It’s funded by Hyundai, the owner of Boston Dynamics.
“The way I look at it, we’ve made a huge amount of progress in establishing the physicality of robots — that is building them, [and] doing the low level and real-time controls of them,” Raibert said. “But their cognitive function — they’re basically as dumb as…doorknobs [or] toasters. They don’t really understand the world around them in a human-like way. Certainly, they’re hard to interact with. They take a lot of very smart, skilled people to program them to do things.”
Five other quotes from the session:
- “I never want an employee to leave [the AI Institute.] It’s supposed to be a lifetime job, for selfish reasons. When you have someone working at your place, you’re investing in them. They become more and more skilled and knowledgeable. You’d be crazy for them to leave, if you could keep them.”
- “We want to really figure out what are the big problems that are that are holding robots back. And believe me, robots are held back. They’re not the success that other technologies are yet. But people like me just are committed to the dream of fixing that.”
- “As long as I’m running [the AI Institute], we’re never going to have revenues. We’re going to treat product opportunities as something we want to get out as quickly as we can… Because I know from experience that working on products really requires resources and a kind of focus and a kind of work that is almost the antithesis of figuring out what the next big thing is.”
- “Imagine a day when the robot analyzes itself… and then fixes it. That should be our goal. Not the goal for next year…but a goal that’s five or eight or 10 years away. The Institute is all about trying to take on those kinds of goals.”
- “I don’t think [robots are] going to be in the home anytime soon because of cost, safety, and functionality. I think the place they’ll go first are places like warehouses and factories that are very organized, places where there can be rules, where all the people who might get close to the robots can be trained to be careful…”
To watch highlights from the session, click “play” above. This conversation was recorded at Impact 2024 on October 24, 2024.
