Futurist Breaks Down Robots & Future Tech in Movies | GQ

hey gq i'm dr jordan newen i'm a biomedical engineer inventor and futurist and this is the breakdown [Music] [Applause] in this episode we'll be breaking down robots in future tech iron man you're going to start off nice and easy you're going to see 10 thrust capacity chief lift and three two one i love that seed just the way that tony stark goes about designing the uh the thrusters to his his uh suit to allow him to to fly he just goes straight in and tests it what i loved about seeing these movies was i was going he designs things the way that i do he tests them out he crashes them he hurts himself in some cases in university when i was doing my phd i was designing a wheelchair that could be controlled by the power of the mind the wheelchair itself was a robot so it needed to be able to see and think for itself the first time i got my wheelchair to operate i didn't think anything was working i didn't think i had the program controlling the motors yet so i started eating my lunch i sat back in my seat and i ran the program to see what would happen it took off and not only did it take off i had the voltages completely wrong it also took off at a fast speed through my screen off the table unplugged itself when it uh it took off towards the wall but not in time it actually went through the wall of the uh the office that i was in uh and then when uh iron man came out a few years later i started realizing he was designing things the way that i did and this is all part of it you design you test you usually try not to hurt yourself like that but then you iterate three two one we'll pause it right there i love the detail they've gone into in this scene so exoskeleton technology is something that's always advancing exoskeletons being able to wear some sort of suit that can help you with strength or can even help people who might have a spinal cord injury or not be able to to say move move the legs be able to stand and potentially walk i've seen all kinds of of exoskeletons getting smaller cheaper lighter faster they operate a lot better than they used to and they'll eventually get to the point of being able to just wear uh wear suits as well where some sort of outfit that looks like a a lot more like a material in this case he's got this metal exoskeleton he's trying to take on that next level of iteration in his flight he's trying to control it a lot better the level of detail that they've got in this scene is just awesome because we've got even those little side thrusters that help stabilize his legs as he's taking flight i think that was just an amazing level of detail that they've they've paid attention to we should take another look into arc reactor technology the arc reactor that's a publicity stunt tony come on we built that thing to shut the hippies up we'll pause it there so this arc reactor it looks very much like a hydrogen fusion tokamak and even uh jeff bridge's character there over dyer he's saying it's a publicity stunt it's almost a take on where hydrogen fusion is at and what's happened in the past it was always touted as being the energy of the future and always will be or the energy that will be 30 years away and always will be so there is a big international collaboration called ita iter and this is where many countries have come together to try and realize this potential future energy of hydrogen fusion different to nuclear fission reactors where you're breaking apart isotopes of something like uranium or plutonium in a hydrogen fusion reactor this kind of works the way that the sun almost creates energy itself you've got a donut shape and that donut is a vacuum and so they push a hydrogen gas into that vacuum and it's surrounded by electromagnets so magnets with huge amounts of energy going into it to try and contain and hold that uh that charged uh gas in place so that it doesn't touch the sides because they heat it right up and they can heat it to a plasma that gets to about 150 million degrees celsius we're talking 10 times the surface temperature of the sun here and to get to that level of heat and pressure what happens is hydrogen atoms start actually fusing together they convert into helium there's a drop in mass and a massive release of energy and you can see here in the arc reactor in this scene it has big donut shape so it's got that tokamak style shape to it it's even got little rings which look like uh they're the electromagnets but in a tokamak the way it tends to look is they just tend to look like a giant dome and it really is a holy grail of energy generation so this is why it's been in the movie and the arc reactor resembles that ex machina [Music] caleb you're wrong so this is chilling scene it's an amazing movie it's a modern take on the touring test so this was designed by alan turing in 1950 the whole idea was that a person would interact with an artificial intelligence in the future at some point where an ai could sufficiently dupe a human into thinking they were interacting with another human if they could be sufficiently duped then the turing test would be passed by this uh this advanced level of artificial intelligence now this has come up over different points in time like uh ridley scott's 1982 blade runner the androids in that movie were tested with something they called the voitcamp test and this test was to try and bring out levels of empathy they would look at the eye they would look for pupillary dilation so the response that the android would have to being given emotionally evocative questions whereas ex machina has taken this to a whole new level and this is what i absolutely love about this movie caleb here is speaking to what is clearly an android they're not hiding that so what is happening here is it seems that ava knows that she's sentient that she's cognitive that she's actually uniquely experiencing her environment and that she's conscious she's trying to convince him of that fact at this particular point in time where ai becomes somewhat sentient when it can exhibit that level of human characteristic where it's able to perceive its environment um interact with that learn independently but also show that level of sentience of of self-awareness well even though it's not biological this will start to bring up a level of robots and ai rights because who are we to say that a robot or an artificial intelligence can't love can't experience these levels of emotions because once it's able to properly trick us into believing that it is sentient this raises a massive set of ethical questions that we have to be able to answer to uh ai systems whether they're in robot form or not uh will they need rights do you think i might be switched off because i don't function as well as i'm supposed to ava i don't know the answer to your question a robot or an android like ava is so advanced it would be built in a way that utilizes a fusion of many different types of sensors and at the same time trying to replicate those of humans and the artificial intelligence many types of artificial intelligence interoperating so ava is able to see out her eyes it seems it seems like she's utilizing cameras and uh the same sort of image processing technology but at the same time when it comes to artificial intelligence operating through camera technology uh it could actually be used to perceive a lot more than say the human eye there could be infrared in there as well it could have infrared sensors so she might be able to even see in the dark who knows then there would probably be haptic feedback so she'd be able to feel things like uh if say a person was touching her hand she would be able to feel that so to try and emulate the types of sensory systems that our body has it's very very difficult because our our body is just full of so many different uh sensory systems sensory input and then be able to output through movement through voice through gestures through human characteristics and mannerisms very complex technology massive fusion of many different types of technologies from hardware to software and artificial intelligence but these where the advancements are all headed the technology is pretty much all there it just needs to be designed in a way that's uh streamlined so it all works together seamlessly and can all fit including the power systems can all fit into an android body but the technology is well on its way wally i love this movie [Music] we'll stop it there what this animation does so well is depicts a robot that has so much personality now this is called anthropomorphism it's where we project human personalities and characteristics onto things that aren't human and we do this all the time it's why you might say name your plants or see a face in the front of a car this is what we tend to do we project human personalities and characteristics onto things that aren't human this whole idea of how much we like an entity or a robot or an animation it doesn't matter what type of entity it is but how much we like it depends on how human-like its characteristics are and this is called the uncanny valley as an entity as a character becomes more and more human-like our affinity for it goes up we start to like it more and more up until a certain point and then there's a point in time where an animated character or a robot becomes too human-like and what happens is we plummet down the valley and this is called the uncanny valley we actually become scared of it we can become a bit freaked out and that's what happens if you see an android that's been designed a robot that looks very human-like but isn't quite right because our brain is able to pick up on those tiny things the micro facial features all the different changes the things that we're suddenly missing out on we can see it's an impostor and our threat detectors go off in our brain the only way to come out of the uncanny valley is to make something so human-like it's indistinguishable from the real thing this is a principle that's used a lot in animations and movies that i think the likes of pixar and dreamworks just get so right in how they do these things wally doesn't look at all humans so it's not along the curve of the uncanny valley we're not going to get freaked out by it but it shows lots and lots of human characteristics in his personality he's curious he's interested he's creating his own little space where he's got all the different gadgets and toys and things that he's picked up in his travels that he enjoys we're seeing him have a bit of a love for life and that's giving us joy through being able to see it because so much of that personality comes across in those small things those small details like the look of the eyes the way that they move the imperfections like wally has there's perfection in imperfection because we actually like things that aren't perfect it happens a lot when we're watching these things we don't want to see everything that's completely symmetrical completely perfect our brain likes those levels of imperfection and this comes across in the personality of something like a robot which is why my robots also get distracted and have that level of curiosity ai artificial intelligence his name is teddy teddy this is david [Music] hello teddy hello david david teddy is a super toy and i know you'll take good care of each other i am not a toy i love that i am not a toy the movement in his eyes the facial expressions it's what i'm saying you're able to bring across personality this whole movie is a modern take on pinocchio david is a young android boy who's been designed to replicate uh the son of of this this family they've lost their son so they have an android replacement and so he's basically like pinocchio he wants to become a real boy he wants to become a real human at the same time teddy is basically jiminy cricket teddy is the voice of reason for david and goes on these adventures with him always sort of working through what he should be doing what he shouldn't be doing helping him on that journey and being his his guiding light robots all form some form of function that can in many ways help humans so you've got the boy david who's been designed to help in that grieving process so that the family can have a replacement whether that completely works or not it depends on how people obviously deal with grief i think that we are going to see various levels of robots augmenting the human experience it's never meant to replace human to human interaction that's not what it should be for we get a lot of a lot of amazing benefits in having face-to-face interaction our brain loves and thrives on face-to-face real-life interactions our brains physiologically change each other in each other's presence particularly when we make eye contact i robot i know the three laws your perfect circle of protection a robot cannot harm a human being the first law of robotics yeah i know i've seen your commercials but doesn't the second law state that a robot has to obey any order given by a human being what if it was given in order to kill impossible it would conflict with the first law right but the third law states that a robot can defend itself yes but only when that action does not conflict with the first or second laws well you know what they say laws are made to be broken so these three laws of robotics have uh come up in this movie it actually was originally created by isaac asimov and that's why they're called asimov's three laws of robotics now these actually were built into his his short story called run around which he uh wrote in 1942 published in 1942 and this had and featured the three laws which he also built into his fictional robots in many of his other stories as well and this is a governing set of laws that are built into robots so that they will help humans they will improve humanity and not become our enemy so they're kind of like safeguards that have been built into all of these fictional robots but also basically brought up this whole concept that we need to think about when it comes to artificial intelligence and robotics that we need to build in these safeguards we might need to build in things like the three laws the problem with it though is that these laws tend to be very subjective they can be open to interpretation and you don't want robots or ai being able to interpret rules or laws because it could potentially find ways to work around it while still satisfying it so laws will probably need to be made a lot more specific in this particular case my father tried to teach me human emotions they are difficult this brings up a much broader conversation about artificial intelligence this is an area i've gone into in my book uh it has been widely philosophized this this area in the future this point in time the technological singularity where artificial intelligence becomes on par with human brain in every way possible where currently uh you know widely acknowledged we're currently placed in the artificial narrow intelligence banned out of three major areas of ai the next is artificial general intelligence and we are a general intelligence because our brain is incredibly complex it can do so many different things we are able to uh to learn various different tasks we're able to adapt to our environment and when an artificial intelligence becomes on par with us in every way possible it becomes an a an agi an artificial general intelligence and it will very quickly by that point in time be able to take itself to the next level it will be able to evolve itself to become an artificial super intelligence where it goes beyond human capacity and we suddenly end up with the new alpha species so at this point in time things get really really bad for us or it could get really really good and this is going to be based on how we approach this particular philosophical point in time so really what isaac asimov did was he put into our minds that we need to be able to build values build laws build things into an ai so that once it gets to that point it will actually want to create benefit for humans for life on earth and maybe even help us do things like explore the stars so there could be mutual benefit in it but we need to be able to plan for this before we get to that point back to the future uh does it run like on regular unleaded gasoline unfortunately no it requires something with a little more kick plutonium uh plutonium wait a minute are you are you telling me that this sucker is nuclear hey hey hey keep rolling keep rolling there no no no this sucker's electrical but i need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity i need doc you don't just walk into a store and by plutonium stop that that's right you don't just walk into a store and buy plutonium plutonium isotopes are often used uh in nuclear reactors plutonium and uranium are the main isotopes used for nuclear fission which is where the isotopes are actually broken apart by neutrons being fired at the atom to split it up which releases energy and releases more neutrons to continue on the reaction as far as a nuclear reactor is concerned it's more or less almost controlling a nuclear bomb it's almost controlling that explosion but pulling out the energy in this case what they're doing is putting a nuclear reactor that runs on plutonium on the back of the delorean to power the flux capacitor which is what makes time travel possible in these movies and allows the delorean to time travel the delorean beautiful machine and what actually happened here was the late ron cobb he was a mate of mine uh he was a political cartoonist and also a sci-fi cartoonist he was given the task of trying to turn a delorean into a time machine he said once they figured out where the flux capacitor went everything else fell into place the original design only had one exhaust in this there's two exhausts the second one to balance it out and also make them a lot larger which gives it a lot more balance and the car looks incredible for it what did i tell you 88 miles per hour i own a delorean as part of my production house it is the coolest thing it's a lifelong dream first thing i noticed when i got in the door was it actually doesn't go up to 88 miles on the dial they had to fix that up into the this particular delorean for the movie back to the future too what the hell was that taxi cab what do you mean a taxi cab without we were flying precisely all right doc what's going on huh where are we when are we we're descending toward hill valley california at 4 29 p.m on wednesday october 21st 2015. stop it right there 2015 unfortunately we didn't get flying cars by this point in time they have come up in some form but they don't look the way that they did in the movies i would much prefer a flying delorean to what has actually turned up i've gotten in one of them which was a passenger carrying electric autonomous mega drone it had one seat had a thing that was like an ipad in front of you you selected where you want to go and this would take up through the cloud straight to the location and straight down i didn't go very far in it but i got to experience it and this was in a quadcopter configuration so this was a lot like uh the quadcopters that you might you know fly with uh cameras on them but bigger as we just saw in this particular clip it's a very challenging thing to to fly a car i mean what sort of height is it flying at he's going into oncoming traffic a big challenge for any uh design to flying vehicles so the mega drone that i got inside to allow these to viably fly from one place to another autonomously they set up different heights so instead of it being like different lanes on the road these will actually fly at different heights so they can avoid collisions that way but there has been an iteration and any engineer any inventor will not only design a particular solution they'll start to iterate on it as well and so i love seeing that in these movies where doc brown comes out back at the end of the first movie and it flows into the second he's got this new design on the delorean it no longer runs on plutonium because it wasn't a viable solution he's got some futuristic version of nuclear fusion instead so he's got a misdiffusion on the back they don't show how it works they just show mr fusion on the back of the delorean doc brown throws some soda and some scraps into it so biological waste and somehow converts that into energy now fusion is more of a futuristic technology it's one that is being developed has been developed for for many years um in particular hydrogen fusion is the one that's being looked into and it could be a future source of clean energy wild wild west the colors around the neck see me contain powerful magnets as long as we can outrun the blade we'll be fine good how long does it take a magnet to lose its power about 400 years damn both of these characters have these magnetic discs around their neck and they're being chased by these blades so the blades would be temporary types of magnets they're probably made of something like iron which can become magnetic when exposed to a magnetic field so in this the magnetic field is being created by these rings around their necks but not viable to create that level of magnetism that would require a power source which they clearly don't have on their neck here so it can't really be a an electromagnet and it would also require a lot of power this movie is very much a steampunk style approach to things no battery source no power source that would power something that would require a astronomical amount of energy to create a magnetic field that strong that could pull these blades towards them another potential approach would be super magnets using superconductors superconductors need to be brought down really really cold to cryogenic temperatures to allow the resistance in the conductors to basically disappear and then it can create huge amounts of magnetism in this case again it wouldn't be strong enough it's not viable for it to work this way but it is a funny scene as we've seen through a lot of these different clips in these movies science fiction has given us these amazing ideas of where the future could go and often they are dystopic they tend to show us these darker depictions of where the future could potentially go so we can treat these things as warnings you know we've got to treat them as warnings for where the future could go so we can think about them create a better vision for a better tomorrow and move towards those when it comes to automation robotics artificial intelligence incredibly powerful technologies that are central to our day-to-day lives but also will be massively defining towards our future we need to as individuals as groups as collectives as organizations and companies be able to shape that change so that's why these conversations are incredibly important to be able to have these conversations to work through what we want what we don't want the ethical approach to designing these powerful technologies and how they might be able to augment the human experience help humanity and move towards improving all life on earth thanks so much for watching these clips with me stay tuned for part two

2022-05-29 00:48

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