Robots! (3/5): Next up for AI? Dancing robots | Catie Cuan

0:00Catie Cuan: Hi, it's Sherelle, host of TED Tech. This week, I want to share a playlist of some of my favorite TED Tech episodes.

0:11Catie Cuan: Soul singer and songwriter Erykah Badu travels around with her robot P-Funk. It trails behind her carrying snacks, veggies from her garden, clothes, pins for the laundry, whatever she needs, and serving as her companion for errands and interesting social media fodder. We are living in an age where robots are embedded in our daily lives. This is taking shape in our most intimate of spaces. Autonomous servers make your pizza or serve your coffee. They become 24-hour law enforcement in public spaces. They even help you cross the street. We're only becoming more and more dependent on this technology.

0:49Catie Cuan: So as we look to the future, how can we build more empathetic robots that seamlessly integrate into our lives? This is TED Tech, a podcast from the TED Audio Collective. I'm your host, Sherelle Dorsey. Today on the TED stage, we hear from choreographer and roboticist Katie Kuan. She teaches robots how to dance. Her ultimate goal is to build humanity into our robotic technology by training it to move, just like people do. But before we dive into the talk, a quick break to hear from our sponsors.

1:51Catie Cuan: Global team with Deal.

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3:31TED Tech Host: I have an unusual job. I teach robots how to dance. In 2017, I transitioned from dancing on stages with humans to dancing with robots. Big robots, small robots, single arms, and roving robots. Robots that fly, vacuuming robots, a lot of robots that look like humans, and a whole bunch that don't. I'm pretty sure I've choreographed and danced with more different types of robots than anyone on earth. Why do I do this? Because robots move, and choreographers understand how movement affects us. If a robot slides politely out of a doorway to let you pass, it might make you feel seen and acknowledged.

4:18TED Tech Host: If a robot marches quickly towards you and avoids you at the last second, it might cause revulsion and fear. Robots are beginning to show up in our everyday environments, from sidewalks to offices, backyards to hospitals, and they will be threatening and confusing to us if we do not carefully examine how they move. I'm also a roboticist and an engineer. I study this connection between robot motion and emotion. I combine my expertise in robotics and dance in the emerging field of choreorobotics, the intersection of dance and robotics. Right now, we're giving AI a robot body with physical intelligence.

5:03TED Tech Host: AI technologies like GPT and Gemini are becoming the robot's brains, which means that robots are getting smarter. Much smarter. Think of what AI has already done to text and video generation. We are just scratching the surface on seeing what AI can do in the physical world. We are going to be interacting with these new intelligent robots more and more, interacting with them through movement. Roboticists already spend a lot of time thinking about movement, but they think about it in terms of efficiency, optimizing for speed or success. That's not enough. We need to teach robots how to dance. If a robot can dance, make every movement with intention, agility, balance, emotional expression, and grace, I believe they will also become better caregivers, teachers, and companions.

6:01TED Tech Host: It will help us build better, general-purpose robots that we actually want to live amongst us. If we teach robots to dance, we expand the future of intelligent machines. machines. Choreographers and engineers have made Dances with Robots since the 1990s, and these highly scripted performances have captured the public's imagination. They've made us feel wonder, made us laugh, made us want to dance along, and sometimes made us never want to meet a robot in real life. Dancing with Robots is no longer just about art or entertainment. It is about transferring the lessons that one, all movement changes emotions, and two, contextual movement is critically important in applying those lessons to robots in our everyday lives.

6:57TED Tech Host: Robotics engineers are beginning to consider emotion and context when designing intelligent machines that interact with us. The choices we make now are going to dictate how we live our lives with robots. If we get this right, robots will be more welcomed, safe, and delightful. Humans will be more empowered and comfortable. Before AI, programmers needed hours to script a simple dance sequence for a robot to perform, just like they needed hours to script the robot to open a single door. With AI, you can teach the robot to open just a few specific doors, and it will learn to open all of them, even ones it hasn't seen before.

7:45TED Tech Host: It's also true for dance. You can teach the robot to dance with a specific person, and it will learn how to dance and move with many others in many different environments and circumstances. This is what I did at Everyday Robots, then a robot AI moonshot at Google. But rather than teach one robot, I used AI to teach 15 robots how to move together as a flock. We imagined a world where you could walk down a hallway filled with robots, and they would part to make space for you, like a flock of doves or a crowd of people on a city street, where a robot could navigate seamlessly and even beautifully through a busy, chaotic Times Square.

8:33TED Tech Host: The world we live in is complicated for robots to understand, so it was impossible to script or choreograph interactions like these step by step. We needed to use the magic of AI to teach the robots how to improvise and react. This was a massive challenge that had never been done before, and the result is an interactive performance and installation work called Project Starling. This took us two years of hardcore engineering to complete. We trained an AI agent on the preferences of a choreographer, me. I chose the most engaging patterns and sequences. We also taught the robots how to recognize and respond to human gestures.

9:18TED Tech Host: While we were at it, we turned the robots into musical instruments. Each joint on the robot was mapped to a different sound. When the robot's torso moved, triggered a bass sound. Its hand opening and closing triggered a bell sound. The robot's actions created its own unique symphony. I wanted it to feel like stepping out of your normal reality and into a waking dream, one that was so far from where we stand today, yet all the same felt like a world where your kids could grow up and feel calm, where you could be surrounded by machines, and it felt natural and safe. People were drawn to just wander amongst these robots.

10:09TED Tech Host: Some were a bit tentative at first, but then they began to engage and explore with curiosity and playfulness. People kept coming back. What we learned about gesture, navigation, human interaction, and expression can be applied to robots more generally. Think of the following future scenario. A robot in a senior living facility waiting in a crowded cafe. You sit at your table, you wave over to it, make a sipping gesture, and the robot understands that you would like a glass of water. And when it drives over to you with its glass of water, it nods at the other people it passes and pauses graciously to let them go by.

10:56TED Tech Host: And when it arrives at your table, it places the glass gracefully down. And when you thank it, it nods in acknowledgement. Maybe it even performs a small, celebratory dance in place. We can choose to build and program robots that we welcome. Robots that make us feel understood. Robots that we want to spend time with. The promise of robots that will live and work amongst us has existed for a very long time. from Carol Kopeck's 1920 play Rossum's Universal Robots to the Jetsons' Rosie the Robot to C-3PO of Star Wars and even Terminator. These stories have been deeply impactful in what we imagine and build.

11:48TED Tech Host: Yes, we can have robots that do our chores. But we can also have robots be our dance partners. Humans do a range of things, ceramics to diplomacy, singing in choirs to vertical farming. Imagine a world where robots can do a myriad of things that are functional or creative, and everything in between. General-purpose robots are coming, and they will help us to address big demographic challenges like aging populations and massive labor shortages. and how they move will unlock whether we let them into our homes and welcome them in our workplaces. Because we want to feel like we're still marvelously human in this increasingly AI world.

12:43TED Tech Host: And we can, because we have the power to choreograph the future we want. Thank you. Thank you.

12:55Catie Cuan: That was Katie Kuhn at TED 2024.

13:02Catie Cuan: TED Tech is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by Nina Lawrence, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Maria Latias, Farrah DeGrange, Corey Hajim, Daniela Balareso, and Michelle Quint. I'm Sherelle Dorsey. Thanks for listening, and talk to you again next week.

13:55Catie Cuan: The leading AI finance platform manages and pays over 1 ,185 employees across 16 countries. Build your global team with Deal. Visit deal.com slash TED and start expanding your business today. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value.

14:35Catie Cuan: Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, email, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle slash workspace with Gemini.

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