Robotics Expert Breaks Down Robot Scenes From Film & TV

I don't want to be human!

What am I?

Hi there.

I'm Chris Atkeson.

[Narrator] Chris is a professor

at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Today I'll be breaking down clips from movie and TV

about artificial intelligence and robotics.

Out of control robots, I, Robot.

Detective what are you doing?

Well, you said they've all been programmed

with the three laws.

Isaac Asimov was one

of the earliest science fiction writers

who focused on robots.

And he came up with the scheme of the three laws.

Yeah I know, the three laws,

your perfect circle of protection.

Robots don't hurt humans.

But doesn't the second law state

that a robot has to obey any order given

by a human being?

Except if it causes a violation of the first law.

Right, but the third law states

that a robot can defend itself.

Unless it causes a violation of the second law

and the first law.

We have one thousand robots that will not try

to protect themselves if it violates a direct order

from a human.

I'm betting one who will.

[gun whirs]

Got you.

Get the hell out of here!

[dramatic music]

[screams]

[robot thuds]

What am I?

You saw a robot that somehow its three laws were disabled

and that left it with an existential crisis.

What am I?

Which is sort of similar to, What am I supposed

to do next if I don't have any guiding purpose.

And if it was a case that robots ran

on what we call expert systems, or sets of laws,

that might actually be a reasonable way

to program robots.

You know what they say, laws are made to be broken.

But nowadays, we're actually programing robots

in a very different way by giving them lots

of training examples.

And having them essentially learn parameters

and formulas so that they do the right thing.

So we have this mitch match between logical rules

and numbers in a formula--

[robot thuds]

[metal crunches]

There he is!

Stay right where you are! Stand where you are!

So in robot movie after robot movie, they're obsessed

with the robots actively turning against the humans

and started killing humans.

And I get that.

The god damn robots, John!

Far more likely...

is the robot will screw up.

It'll make a mistake.

And that mistake will have bad consequences.

Brother, it's a robot.

It doesn't need a motive, it just has to be broken.

Deactivating an android, Blade Runner.

[screaming]

[gun fires]

Should I really shoot the crazy robot

that's coming to attack me?

[thuds]

Yeah, shooting a robot is a potentially a pretty good way

to stop a robot.

[robot yelling]

Now, there might be parts of its chassis

that you shoot a bullet through, it doesn't do anything.

Doesn't cut any wires,

doesn't open up a hydraulic fluid hose.

So you might have to shoot it a bunch of times.

[robot screaming]

[gun firing]

There are other ways to disable a robot

that might not damage it in the same way.

For example, there's something called

an electromagnetic pulse, which will fry all its circuits

but leave the mechanics intact.

Blade Runner's a fantastic movie.

Thanks.

It has this incredible vision of the future,

which by the way, we've already caught up with.

Learning from imitation, Terminator.

[knocking on door]

Hey buddy, got a dead cat in there or what?

[electronic whirring]

[beeping]

[beep] you [beep] hole.

We're gonna program robots to have conversations

and dialogue.

And in many, many situations, you can anticipate

what happens next.

But sooner or later, the robot's gonna face a situation

that's new, it doesn't know what to say.

Got a dead cat in there?

You know, the robot's gonna have to wing it.

In this clip, [beep] you [beep] hole was the way to go.

[beep] you [beep] hole.

A screen came up, and English words were there.

And it sort of moved a cursor down and picked one.

That's only there for the audience of the movie.

The robots aren't gonna do that, you know?

It's all electronics,

little transistors going blup blup blup.

And it's gonna make the decision.

It decided our fate in a microsecond.

Programming, the new Westworld.

Did you see it?

No.

Give it a second, she'll do it again.

Her finger!

That's not standard.

Occasionally, in Westworld,

you see a black box, looks like a fancy keyboard,

in which they're sort of programming various sub behaviors,

let's call 'em, or primitives.

There's been this controversy of do you build up behaviors

from a twitch here and a twitch there,

or do you have a few fundamental behaviors,

and then you combine them?

Ford, he must have slipped it

in there without telling anyone.

It turns out, you can learn a lot faster

if you combine these fundamental behaviors,

rather than adding up a lot of twitches.

He calls them reveries.

The old gestures were just generic movements.

These are tied to specific memories.

This is a spoiler.

Things in Westworld go bad

because they couldn't completely wipe the memory of a robot.

The memories are purged at the end

of every narrative loop.

But they're still in there,

waiting to be overwritten.

He found a way to access then.

It turns out, in complex machines,

you got lots of different kinds of memory

in lots of different kinds of places.

For example, the CPU is gonna have a little bit

of memory in it.

It'll also have something called cache memory.

We have what's called a memory hierarchy.

There's fast memory, and then there's slower memory--

Like a subconscious.

A hooker with hidden depths.

If you totally fried the machine,

all you'd end up with is a broken robot.

So you can't totally wipe the machine.

It's the tiny things that make them seem real.

Robotics lab, Making Mr. Right.

[door squeaks and clicks shut]

[electronic trilling]

You look at that scene, you say, Why is chemistry happening

in a robotics lab?

The future of robotics is

where we make materials using chemistry

to make soft materials.

So that's actually looks very similar to what goes on

in some of my colleagues' labs, you know,

at Carnegie Mellon.

[Man 1] I thought showing you these tapes might help

to make you more familiar with the droid.

We video record all our experiments.

And in fact, often, you know, when we press an on button

to say do something,

that simultaneously turns the cameras on.

Programming the android takes them just so far.

The rest must be learned.

Watching video feedback is very helpful

to debug behavior.

We had some difficulty with his gross motor functions

before we modified his cerebral muscular coordination.

Okay, so, you just saw some mumbo jumbo.

He's mixing things we'd say about a human

who had a disease--

We modified his cerebral muscular coordination.

And a robot that doesn't know how to walk.

Gross motor functions.

[crashing]

My robots actually fell down much more

than their robot did.

Robot malfunction, Austin Powers.

[robot moaning]

[spring fires]

[fire explodes]

Can you design an input to a robot

that will cause it to malfunction and crash?

[robot explodes]

Only Austin Powers can do that.

Yeah baby!

Multi agent robotics, Minority Report.

[robots thudding and whirring]

[dramatic music]

One area of research in robotics is

what we call multi agent robotics,

which is get a bunch of robots to work together.

[dramatic music]

[robots chirping]

We model that on humans working together.

Like a sports team or when we're searching

for somebody lost in the woods.

Small robots in this clip would seem very smart

and complicated.

The dream in robotics is can we make a lot of stupid,

cheap robots that by working together get the job done.

Mommy!

Now it's gonna scan you.

Keep your eyes open, just stay still.

What we saw in this clip is they were using some kind

of imaging radar to figure out

where people are likely to be.

Tom Cruise hid in the bathtub.

That water shields him from radar, as you saw.

But it also tries to hide his thermal signature,

so he's hotter than everything else around him.

Any kind of infrared imaging would have found him.

That's why he dumped ice in the water as well.

But, you know, if the robots have any kind of camera,

they could have just looked down and--

[water bubbles]

Ah, there's Tom Cruise!

So, I think we're gonna have to do a little better

than that if we're gonna hide from the robots.

Thermal vision, Westworld.

[dramatic music]

[heels clicking]

[high pitched whining]

The Westworld clip is using what we call thermal imaging,

far infrared imaging where you essentially can see an image

of the temperature of things that are out there.

[heels clicking]

[fire crackling]

When the human got next to something

that was much hotter, the movie tried to suggest

that that would hide the human.

[fire crackling]

That's actually probably not the case

because the human isn't any less hot.

And as long as the image doesn't do what we call bloom,

and the whole thing saturate,

that robot should have been able

to see the human just as well.

[exhales]

[dramatic music]

[crashing]

Human limitations, Battlestar Galactica.

The five of us designed you to be as human possible.

I don't want to be human!

I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear x-rays,

and I want to, I want to smell dark matter!

It's highly unlikely robots are gonna complain

about their bodies.

What they might complain

about is our crappy computational hardware.

And I can't even express these things properly.

A lot of it gets back to how do we build computers?

And right now, for largely historical reasons,

we separate out the thinking part,

we'll call that the processor, and the memory part.

And in order to really think about things,

we've gotta move everything in the memory part

into the processor so it can process it.

And it turns out, that's really slow.

And if you wanna save stuff, you gotta move it back.

And that's really slow.

If I'm so broken, then who's fault is that?

It's my maker's fault.

Google has something called a TPU,

which they're optimizing

to run something called neural networks.

And they're building bucket loads of these things.

And they're very, very different from standard computers.

But I know want to reach out with something other

than these prehensile paws!

I do believe that the way we build computers now

is gonna change completely in many ways--

I'm a machine.

And I could know much more.

And if the robots want to help us do a better job

at that, more power to 'em.

Robotics lab, Rising Sun.

Why do we have guys in gold suits?

I don't know why you'd wear gold suits.

You certainly in a clean room where some kind of suit,

so your dandruff doesn't ruin the chips.

They look ridiculous.

[robotic whirring]

Jim, how are ya?

Captain Connor.

The people making the movie said,

We gotta get us some cool looking robots.

What I've been told by reliable sources,

that only you have the next generation of technology

to do this kind of work.

So they actually reached out to, what was then,

the Leg Lab, which was at that time at MIT.

You're looking at early robots

that eventually became Boston Dynamics.

I'm getting out to a lot more Dodger games lately.

The robot on the boom, I believe, was a Uniroo,

which it was a kangaroo like robot.

So the 3D biped is quite famous.

It was one of the first robots that didn't have a sort

of protective system to keep it form falling down.

[robot whirs]

Well, your reliable sources are wrong.

And it did a lot of amazing things, walk, run,

it even did flips.

In contrast, the robot you saw earlier inside that building

was on a boom, and it runs in a circle.

What'll they think of next?

Design, Bicentennial Man.

Have you given any thought whatsoever

as to what age you'd like to be?

Officially, I am 62 years old.

Let's take off 25 years, what do you say?

15. 20.

Perfect. Good.

[goo splats]

They use soft materials to make the face of the robot.

Soft materials typically do what we call creep

over long periods of time.

The animatronic figures such as the Disney presidents

and whatnot all begin to sag--

Just keeping you on your toes.

I don't have any toes.

A big problem is robot skin is after a while,

it gets worn, it gets cuts, it sags.

It's actually a big problem because if you load it

up with sensors and wires, it's a million dollar piece

of skin and fixing it is a big problem.

[splats]

But otherwise, that's pretty much how you make a robot face.

You have some mechanism and you cover it

with some soft gooey stuff.

Origami, Transformers.

[truck idling]

[electronic whirring]

[dramatic music]

There are a lot of roboticist out there who want

to build origami robots.

Robots that can reconfigure themselves by folding.

[robots whirring and clicking]

That turns out to be a great way to build robots.

Who knew?

Another area of robotics is more like traditional origami,

where you have a flat sheet and you have a folding pattern

and that makes a three dimensional robot.

Why is it a good idea to start things from a flat sheet?

You could use any printing technology you want

to lay down things like surfaces or materials.

[robot whirring and clicking]

But most of these folding robots are on a smaller scale

for structural reasons.

So they're on the meter or centimeter scale

rather than the hundred or tens of meter scale.

Big guys, big guys with big guns.

Robotic insects, Black Mirror.

Colony Collapse Disorder,

we still don't know what's behind it.

Bees themselves were virtually extinct

so what our ADIs do is effectively stand in for them.

This clip is very close to the truth

in that people are trying to build robot insects right now.

They can build things that are almost as small as a bee

and that can fly--

We simply set the behavior and leave them to it.

They need rudimentary pattern recognition

in order to locate compatible flora and navigate.

They even construct these hives themselves.

They reproduce--

Reproduce?

Yeah, each hive is a replication point.

I was entertained by the hives

which had these sort of squarish honeycombs.

It's like a 3D printer basically.

They also had a little bit of confusion

about reproduction.

They create duplicates of themselves,

then create more hives and spread out exponentially.

They seem to suggest that there's this big 3D printer

that's churning them out.

Which I wouldn't really call reproduction,

I'd call that production.

It's just a shame it's necessary.

The alternative would have been environmental catastrophe.

Bees were dying out.

Are we gonna have to make robots in big factories

in the future, or are we gonna have, find a similar way

to just grow new robots?

It's a big issue for robots.

I didn't expect to find myself living in the future,

but here I [beep] well am.

Radiation, Chernobyl.

[helicopter whirring]

[machine thuds]

All right, let's take this easy.

Forward one way and reverse one way.

There's one.

[keyboard clicking]

Did you lose the signal?

It's not the signal, it's the vehicle.

It's dead.

The problem with high energy radiation is you have chips,

circuits, which rely on every part working.

And a high energy particle comes in and damages it,

knocks out a trace or two,

and the whole thing stops working.

[keyboard clicking]

And they should have known that that was gonna happen.

I'm a little surprised at that.

That robot was never going to work.

An implication of this is

why does military electronics cost so much?

They anticipate high levels of radiation

if you're fighting in the midst of a nuclear war--

That amount of gamma radiation penetrates everything.

The particles literally shred the circuits

and microchips apart.

All their equipment needs to be rad hard as well.

It means the circuit is much more likely

to keep working in the presence of high energy radiation.

And that makes it fantastically expensive.

[bell dings]

I'm surprised at how good the old stuff was

at predicting what's gonna happen.

A lot of roboticist hate Hollywood, I love Hollywood.

Give me more robot movies!

It's very inspirational.

Let's go out there and watch more movies.

[applause]