How taking a second look can change your everything

0:00This message comes from AT &T. Staying connected matters. That's why AT &T has connectivity you can count on, or they'll proactively make it right. That's the AT &T &T guarantee. Terms and conditions apply. Visit AT &T.com. Guaranteed. for details. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?

0:43And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, double takes. Ideas that dare us to take a second look. The other day, I went for a walk in my neighborhood with a new friend and her dog. Her name is Basha. You can call her Basha. Hi, Basha. So sometimes little kids at first are going to have a moment of hesitation, but then curiosity wins and they're always going to see it. This is artist Agnieszka Pilat. And as we strolled with her dog, Basha, we turned a lot of heads.

1:31What the hell is that? Oh, my God. This is Basha. She's hanging out with us. Because Basha is not just any dog. She's a robot dog who came from the company Boston Dynamics and cost around$200 ,000. Yeah, you can touch her. Just don't put your fingers in the joints. Oh, yeah, no. Do people ever get scared? Small kids sometimes are a little uneasy for a second. People will ask questions, how fast can it run? OK. What's the answer? I don't know, because it's like, It's not a running dog for me. OK, right. The factory name for these four-legged robots is Spot. They can run up to 11 miles per hour and were built to enter dangerous places like collapsed buildings and to help patrol areas.

2:23Maybe you've seen the video of one monitoring President Trump's Mar-a-Lago residents or the reports of them assisting New York City police with a raid. Critics say they are simply tools of a burgeoning surveillance state. But as an artist, Agnieszka says people's response to Basia shows it's more complicated than that. It's a Rorschach test. You saw this a little bit, right? How different people arrive differently. It tells you a lot about the person, how they react towards Basia, which I think is kind of cool. This is literally the route that I take my dog on every single day, and she doesn't listen to me like Basia.

3:02Like Basia? Yeah. There you go. Another advantage of a robot dog. Oh, stop. What is this? Basha can be trained to move autonomously. But today, engineer Glenn Gartner and his son Devin were operating Basha with a remote control. During our walk, she confused many humans and real dogs, too. She doesn't have a smell, so dogs really are very confused about the no smell because it kind of looks like a dog, works like a dog, but doesn't smell like a dog, which is a big problem. I'm a tech reporter, and I've been reporting on digital privacy for over a decade. And yet I found Basha strangely cute, despite knowing what she could be capable of.

3:49Yeah. Okay. Good girl. You wait. Why am I talking like this to her? I sound ridiculous. Agnieszka was trained as a classical portrait artist. But in 2013, she moved to San Francisco and began painting portraits of technology, which eventually led her to Basha. I wanted to paint a portrait of a celebrity of today. And so 2018, I met Basha. And I thought, OK, if Andy Warhol were alive, his Marilyn Monroe would be robot Basha. So that's how I first encountered the robot. After seeing her portraits of Basha, the engineers at Boston Dynamics came up with another idea. They're like, well, you can't just paint a portrait.

4:33You have to play with the robot. You have to teach the robot how to paint. So it was actually initiated by engineers at Boston Dynamics. Today, Basha helps Agnieszka explore that tension between humans and technology. The two do exhibits together, even paint together. But she's a tool to you. She is not a sentient being and not a substitute for a real mammal in your house. She's something completely different. She is. She's a different species on her own. But she's not a vacuum cleaner. So she's more than that. But, yes, but, I mean, I understand technology. She's not self-aware. She doesn't have self-awareness.

5:15And, yeah, she doesn't have some weird emerging behaviors. And yet you feel like you're nurturing her in some way, too. Yes. Yes. But in a sense, it's like if you had a doll, you know, we get attached to. And you were talking to Basha. I mean, everyone speaks to her. I couldn't help it. But I think part of it is the way that she moves is so fluid and smooth and animalistic that you want to be respectful to her in some ways or to show compassion. So this is interesting. So it goes to the core of robotics. we start assigning to them abilities and maybe even feelings. Actually, a lot of it is just really engineering.

5:59It's going to be interesting to see if actually AI will enable robotics to come out of its cage, so to speak. By taking Basha out in public, Agnieszka hopes the spectacle of this robot dog sparks people's curiosity not just their fear. As an artist, we are obligated to ask questions and to highlight the big changes that's coming. What can we learn from those who manage to provoke us to look and then look again? Why should we reconsider something we think we already understand? Today on the show, double takes. Ideas from speakers who want us to go beyond a cursory glance, how they're pushing people to look at technology, history, and even recycling with fresh eyes.

6:55As an artist, Agnieszka Pilat knows that some might assume she fears AI and its potential threat to her livelihood. So she loves surprising them with the story behind her techno-optimism. Growing up in communist Poland, I was subjected to Soviet propaganda most of my life. Here she is on the TED stage. So this might be kind of strange to say, but today I am a propaganda artist and I work for the machine. How did this happen? Well, let me take you back to my childhood in communist Poland where crumbling factories were my playground. I didn't have access to modern technology. We didn't have a car, a telephone.

7:42We had the radio that played the music of Chopin. Day and night. But some stations my parents didn't like me to hear. I remember one evening, my brother and I could hear a strange broadcast from behind a closed door. But an iron curtain cannot stop the transmission of radio waves which pass overhead. It was only many years later when I realized that was an illegal station, Radio Free Europe. But back then, as a little girl, I could see my parents come out of that room, changed, with a sentiment in their eyes that was unknown to me till then. It was hope. That old crackly radio was my first encounter with the miracle of technology.

8:37And while this story might seem sad, to me it's really beautiful. Portraiture always tells stories of the privileged class. In Middle Ages, the subjects were kings and queens. With the birth of capitalism, Dutch merchants commissioned portraits to indicate their growing influence. Warhol's celebrity portraits were a brilliant commentary on the growing power of pop icons in 20th century America. So, likewise, as a portrait painter, I decided to paint the power brokers of our time, intelligent machine. So when I first came to Silicon Valley from Poland, my grand idea was I want to work for the machine.

9:23I want to be the court painter for the machine, for technology. And I started painting portraits of old machines, kind of thinking of them as their royal portraits, because this is the royalty of America. The first thing I consider when painting as a portrait painter is the age of my subject. So when looking at Basha, I asked myself, in robot years, how old is she? Basha was different from all my previous machine subjects like vintage airplane parts or lunar space models painted in my studio on a World War II aircraft carrier. They had history, they had personality. Basha's personality wasn't formed yet.

10:09Now, she was like a child, teenager maybe at most, still growing up, receiving frequent firmware upgrades. You see, every time I take Basia for a walk, we meet people in person who are curious. They stop us, they take videos, they ask questions. There is a genuine sense of excitement. But as soon as these videos are posted online, mean comments appear, accusing us of surveillance, robots taking over, people actually threaten to smash Basia into pieces, throw her into a river. In person, if someone doesn't like us, they just cross the street. But on the internet, these fears grow into threats and insults spreading across social media and the search engines.

11:03I think the main beauty of robotics is that it forces people to interact with technology in real life. And we're much better in real life as human beings. As soon as someone will post a video online, mean comments are going to pour in. Part of me is proud of people for saying, watch out for surveillance. Like, there was a point where I think people were very naive about technology and didn't think about these things. So part of me thinks, good, I'm glad that they're asking questions. Do you think there's something dangerous about it? I think technology has been unfairly targeted. I think it's even more urgent to engage with technology because there's not going to be a moratorium, no robots, no AI.

11:52We have to engage actively. That's the only thing we can do. Like, with children. So I think about my work as kindergarten. We are parenting these new technologies. We are parenting AI. It's a kindergarten. And we have to be almost helicopter parenting and teaching and passing on these positive values. Because otherwise we are in big trouble. In current form, AI is like a young child watching, mimicking the world for the first time in its own unique way. Basia has a physical body to put her in place and in time but many AI models they live in the cloud that's embodied at universal they don't have just one teacher or one parent such an AI is a global child with the whole of human civilization parenting it we have to nurture this young prodigy artificial intelligence that's what technology is to me it's hope for a better future.

12:56That's why I am a propaganda artist and I work for the machine. Thank you. That was artist Agnieszka Pilat. You can see her full talk at TED.com and check out the video of My Day with Basha at npr.org. On the show today, double takes. I'm Manoush Zomorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

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14:54Because with all you've done to find your rich, they'll do all they can to help you keep enjoying it. Edward Jones, member SIPC. This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash podcast. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, double takes. Inspiring ideas that come from taking a second look at something. Sometimes something very small. For Francisca Troutman, it was a glass of wine. We were actually sharing a bottle of wine, admittedly.

15:43Fair. It was a two-buck chuck from Trader Joe's. Those were college days. Back in 2020, Francisca and her boyfriend were students at Tulane University in New Orleans. And after we finished that bottle, you know, we often had nights like this where we were, you know, having a little drink, talking about life and what we wanted to do. and we were like, hold on, this bottle is going to end up in a landfill because Louisiana had virtually no glass recycling. Oh, really? Even in the places where they do recycle? Right, yeah. So like, for example, New Orleans has curbside recycling, but you cannot put glass in your curbside bin.

16:23Louisiana also does not have a bottled deposit program, so no getting nickels or dimes back for returns. In theory, glass is infinitely recyclable. But many recyclers there consider glass a nuisance. Glass is super heavy. It breaks. And so in those cases, it's hard to separate from other recyclables. And we thought that was a shame. We thought that there had to be a better way, something to do about the glass recycling issue in Louisiana. And so we kind of started Googling. Like where to recycle glass or how, like, what did you want to know? Yeah, all of the above. We really wanted to know anything and everything about recycling, about glass.

17:11I think the first thing we found online was that it wouldn't be viable for us to collect the glass and send it to someone else to process or recycle. Texas was the closest option, which was like five to six hours away, depending on where in Texas it is. And so we did some back of the napkin math on that. and realized that that would never work economically. So yeah, then we knew the next step was like, okay, we have to do something. We have to process the glass into something that can be used locally. As a kid growing up in southern Louisiana, recycling wasn't much on Francisca's mind. But the joys of nature were.

17:54Yeah, I actually grew up on a bayou, you know. When it rains, you run outside to play in the mud. When it's hot in the summer, you jump in said bayou and have no care in the world about gators. In Louisiana, though, there is always a sense that nature is in jeopardy. You're always, unfortunately, familiar with the coastal erosion crisis. It feels like one day we'll just be washed away or flooded and, you know, never see our homes again. Like, it's that kind of scary and big. Louisiana loses up to 35 square miles of land every year, an area larger than Manhattan. And so when she got to college and had that moment looking at the bottle, she wondered, instead of the landfill, could this glass go to the shore?

18:46Could it help restore the land? Now, you might be thinking to yourself, how in the world would two college kids ever be able to make a dent in these problems? Francisca Troutman picks up the story from the TED stage. And that would be valid. Plenty of people told us the exact same thing. But we didn't listen because we knew that no matter how small of an impact we made, it would be worth it. It felt like we could alleviate two problems with one solution. Convert the otherwise landfill glass back into sand and use it in restoration projects across the state. Easy, right? But we didn't listen to the haters, which is actually why we named our company Glass Half Full.

19:31But that glass half empty mindset might actually be one of the biggest threats we face today. Dread, doom and gloom tend to get us nowhere. Whereas hope combined with action can be one of the most powerful tools to enact change. So instead of being like, okay, we're going to find a way to recycle glass to be more glass, you were like, let's find a way to use glass that is productive in a very different way. Remind us of the relationship, if you would, between glass and sand. Yeah. So glass comes from sand. And we found this machine that could turn glass back into sand. And sand is something we use, you know, every day in various materials.

20:21And it has to be mined to be used in glass bottle manufacturing, but also in concrete and buildings and also our phones and things like toothpaste. waste. And so when we realized we could turn glass back into sand, then we knew that we could use the sand for something locally, even if it wasn't coastal restoration, because I knew that it would take some research to figure that out. We could use it in construction. We could use it in landscaping. You know, things that sand are used for, it felt like, why don't we do that? So still college students, Francisca and her friends, jumped into action.

20:58They set up shop in a fraternity house and raised money to buy their first glass-crushing machine. It was like the size of a tween, like a 12-year-old. And it has this long, skinny neck on it. So you put the bottle in the top, it falls down that chute, and then it meets the hammer mill, and then at the bottom there's a bucket, and that's where the sand comes out. Then they set up collection bins all around town and found out that people were hugely excited to recycle their glass. So we would swap out the full ones for empty ones and then bring all the glass to the back of the frat house. That was where it all got turned back into sand.

21:38It's just like 10 people in this backyard. We have some music bumping and like some people are sorting through the glass. Some people are taking caps off. There's one person crushing and the rest of us are like hand sifting the material. It's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. We're like trying to make it fun. And, you know, we're begging our friends to come help us crush glass. And basically we did that until nighttime and even past that. And then went home, went to bed and did it again. And again and again. And when they weren't crushing glass, they were scheming about what to do with the sand they were left with.

22:15The goal was to figure out if we could use it for coastal restoration. But we also knew that we couldn't just go dump it on beaches and be like, done. You know, there had to be some research involved. So I brought that to a lot of my professors and we ended up applying for a National Science Foundation grant to do that research. What they found is they could use biodegradable sandbags and plant native grasses to build back the marshes to restore the land. That convinced many Louisianans to pay a bit to join their recycling program. Now, Francisca has a business and does it full time. We outgrew the smaller spaces pretty quickly So by August of 2020 We had moved into a 40 ,000 square foot facility Just the hopper itself is like two stories tall Wow Last year we did about 4 million pounds of glass And we are aiming to triple that this year at least I mean, how many beer bottles are we talking?

23:14So a beer bottle is half a pound So 4 million pounds would be 8 million beer bottles Wow.

23:26The loud part is definitely the bottles, like the bottles being dumped from a dump truck. That's really loud. And then scooping the bottles from like the ground into the hopper. And we create three main products. One is the sand for coastal restoration. But we also now create flint and amber cullet. So color is the raw material to make new bottles. And what's been the reaction? Like, to me, I'm like, this is amazing. This makes total sense. But I know that's never as simple as it sounds. Who are the people who take issue with you? Like, what are some of your challenges? I will say overall, people are extremely supportive and really do love our idea and love what we're trying to do.

24:18some of the main complaints I get at least in Louisiana are people who think I'm trying to solve all of coastal erosion in Louisiana I get comments like we don't have nearly enough glass bottles to solve our coastal erosion issue and I'm like duh I'm not trying to solve our entire coastal erosion issue I don't think that's possible for you know one solution or one person And I think it's going to take so many different solutions and so many different people getting involved to solve this huge issue. And let's say someone's like, all right, but I don't know. How do I get into that mindset that you were in where you looked at something and thought, you know what, we can do something with this instead of just throwing it away?

25:08How do you sort of coach people to have that creative approach? I think I'm still learning how to truly get people to think that way. But the best method that I think I've found shown people is like show by doing. We were always sharing our struggles, what we needed help with and what was going wrong. And I think people saw that and felt more compelled to help. The key was that we simply started and we kept going. Somewhere, the belief that we as individuals could enact change trumped our doubts. And for us, finding a way to help with a problem much, much bigger than us meant taking that first step.

25:59And in our case, it was a step in the sand in an eroding but once magnificent swamp. Thank you all. That's Francisca Troutman. She is the CEO and co-founder of Glass Half Full. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, double takes. People compelling us to take a look at something we think we understand. Ralph Ellison, who wrote The Invisible Man, sums it up quite nicely. I think he says, Sometimes invisibility is a refusal to see. It's not that the information is not there. It's more about training ourselves to be conscious of the things that we're not necessarily paying attention to.

26:43This is artist Tavares Strawn, and he was first introduced to this idea when he was a child growing up in the Bahamas. We have a big family. There's over 60-plus grandkids. 60-plus? Yep. My grandmother and grandfather had 13 kids. So when we were all together, it was a big group of people. When he was around 10 years old, his grandfather came home with a set of encyclopedias. And it was a big deal, as you would imagine, because all of a sudden, all these little kids had access to all this knowledge. So imagine the pomp and circumstance of having these encyclopedias arrive at the house. And I remember first looking at them, thinking, How absurd is this process of collecting this much information and trying to share it with the general population?

27:35That's what went through your mind as a kid? I thought it was very odd. I thought there was a certain level of hubris in the process. And I realized that immediately there weren't the kind of stories that reflected the environment that we were in. So I know more about Napoleon and Christopher Columbus than I do about, for example, you know, the River Nile or Marcus Garvey or any kind of African origin. And at the time, I think the population of the Bahamas was probably 90 % black. And so all we were being fed was material that was being scripted for a primarily European audience. And so I think the question always was, where are we?

28:17Who are the people who are in this community? Are we located anywhere else and represented anywhere else? I mean, that's incredibly astute for a young kid. I think I probably would have thought like, whoa, I can hold the world's knowledge between my two hands. But that is not what you thought. You know, I feel like that level of skepticism, healthy skepticism, that is, was what pushed me towards the arts in the first place. As an adult, Tavares took that skepticism to art school in the U.S. He also started traveling the globe searching for lost stories. And trying to understand what a society does with all the information that is not recorded and not a part of the zeitgeist, if you will.

29:06And as a grad student, he came across a name he'd never heard before, Matthew Henson. Matthew Henson was one of, or if not the first to make it to the North Pole, and he traveled in 1909 with Robert Perry. I had never heard of Matthew Henson, and I'm guessing that most people listening also have not heard of Matthew Henson. Can you tell us about him? Yeah, Matthew Henson, he worked as a deckhand with Admiral Perry for many, many years. as a teenager, traveled throughout Central and South America. Admiral Robert Perry was an explorer himself in his own right. And they just spent so many years together.

29:45And then the race to the poles began. And for context, this race was like going to space, making it to the North Pole back in 1909. So this was a big deal, if you know what I mean. And I think one of the things that really turned the tide was Henson became one of the more trusted explorers on the team, if you will. His mushing skills, his navigational skills, his ability to withstand the freezing temperatures, all those things mixed together. And also his kind of social prowess, his ability to navigate the indigenous folks that he was interacting with. And in 1909, they made a trek to the pole and successfully arrived at the pole.