NOT a swarm! (Friends)

29:03And we're not that far from the opportunity. And it's not the 800 pound gorillas that are going to bring that. It's going to be the billions of startups out there. They're each doing a little piece of it and they're, and they're swarm components and stuff we're able to communicate. That's the future that we're going to build. Well, I'll tell you one thing. You've definitely put a lot more pressure on the idea of home lab. That's for sure. Because that's all home lab. Those are a ton of DNS queries out there, probably a ton of telemetry being tracked. A lot of things you may or may not be concerned.

29:37Those are things I think about when I think about adding more and more devices to my home. Gosh, man. So separate, I have a slight side story, but it contributes to that. So about a year ago now, almost exactly a year ago, we bought and moved into the house that I'm in now. and the guy that we bought it from he and his wife he was a fanatical home automation person and so like um we moved in um not because of the automation that was incidental but like it's had it's helped me move from just like thinking like more of a professional kind of thing like you know we're talking ai and a professional kind of to thinking about stuff around the house um with all the sensors and the cameras and stuff.

30:23And we have all the, you know, the various types of home automation stuff that you see out there combined, CASAs here. Like we have many, many, many dozens of CASAs devices all over the place. And CASA is the brand from Lutron. Is that right? Am I picking that up? It's from TP-Link actually. TP-Link. But that's just one. There's a whole bunch of them and, you know, Apple Home and Google Home. I was thinking Casita. Casita's from Lutron. Those are the light switches. Yeah. The Lutron does the light, it does light switches, but like they all, there's some common protocols that they all work on. And I'm starting to see like, I move, like, because I didn't have to go start it from scratch and because I inherited what this guy had already kind of put together and then had to figure it out and make it work.

31:06And suddenly I'm like, well, gosh, it would be really easy to add this. Like, and we're, we're talking about this robotic future, even in our homes, not just a commercial or industrial or whatever thing, but in our homes, like it's so easy for me to see that now because like, I realized I already have a good bit of infrastructure here and it's not expensive and it's not, it just takes a little bit of effort. And if they can make that easier for people to get into, it's a done deal. Like, you know, we already have, we, we, we already have wifi and all the other things. And then you start, start adding things to plug in.

31:39It's, it's like Legos. It's like home automation Legos in your home.

31:53Well, friends, I don't know about you, but something bothers me about GitHub Actions. I love the fact that it's there. I love the fact that it's so ubiquitous. I love the fact that agents that do my coding for me believe that my CI, CD workflow begins with drafting Toml files for GitHub Actions. That's great. It's all great. until yes until your builds start moving like molasses get up actions is slow it's just the way it is that's how it works i'm sorry but i'm not sorry because our friends at namespace they fix that yes we use namespace.so to do all of our builds so much faster namespace is like get up actions but faster i'm like way faster it caches everything smartly it caches your dependencies, your Docker layers, your build artifacts.

32:43So your CI can run super fast. You get shorter feedback loops, happier developers because we love our time and you get fewer. I'll be back after this coffee and my build finishes. So that's, that's not cool. The best part is it's drop in. It works right alongside your existing GitHub actions with almost zero config. It's a one line change. So you can speed up your builds, you can delight your team and you can finally stop pretending that build time is focus time it's not learn more go to namespace.so that's namespace.so just like it sounds like it said go there check them out we use them we love them and you should too namespace.so speaking of legos and home automation ikea just announced a whole new set of like 27 smart home things coming from ikea i saw that talk about bringing it to the masses like that's the kind of thing that ikea brings to the masses now is they make it very simple and straightforward and lego-esque in order to and it all runs on matter which is i think the open standard for communication between these things and so like matter's in an interesting place and that like i only buy things that that are mad that have matter integrated in and for For listeners and viewers, the Matter is a protocol that allows different makes and models of automation to work together over a common protocol.

34:08And it's local based instead of cloud based. And so like, but not everything does it yet. So it's still kind of working. It's been very slow. It took a long time to kind of come into play. But it seems to be having a second wind right now because of all this new capability that's coming about. And so like every new thing I buy, whether I'm using matter yet on that or not, I have to have matter so that as I go forward, I can integrate into that. But like, yeah, you know, everything is it's local, it's matter. And I'm finding with today's craziness out there that I'm moving more local and a little bit more out of the cloud.

34:45And so matter is becoming increasingly important from my standpoint. Well, from the startup perspective and the swarming, perhaps, at least the droning perspective, you'll be happy to hear, Chris, that we do have a startup coming on soon, Zipline, who are now moving delivery drones into production. They actually have a delivery drone system that is started off delivering medical needs in Africa, vaccines and stuff like that. And now they're moving into the States and they're doing food delivery, small item delivery, small package. So you think your Chipotle burrito, that kind of thing. Yeah. You're, you know, eight pounds or less.

35:21Yeah. Eight pounds or less. It's super cool stuff. And they've got it to where they're actually rolling out into, into commercialization now. So startups are making moves in this direction. And now there's our, I'm assuming in each city, they have a fleet of these delivery drones. Obviously each drone is, is operated on its own. I assume eventually autonomously. It actually seems like a simpler problem than autonomous cars because the airspace is just pretty open, right? Like you got problems like wind and snow and stuff like that, birds. But it's got to be easier than cars. Yeah, generally. And so it's a different problem.

35:59So it's easier. There's easier. It's a little bit of both. It kind of depends on how you're looking at it. With cars, and like we were just talking to Waymo again a few weeks ago on Practical AI about this. So this is very top of mind for me with cars. Yeah, there are a lot of challenges and you have the notion of the child running out or the ball bouncing out. There's a lot of stuff that's right there. But also, you know, what you're how you're navigating is very well defined in terms of the streets and stuff like that. Air becomes more three dimensional. And so the challenges are different. But so long as it's not highly congested, I would agree with you that it is generally easier that you can kind of move from here to there.

36:41And so long as you have good collision avoidance and some other capabilities for navigation there, then you're probably doing OK. Though that changes with swarming because swarming brings in close collaboration. Yeah. So define swarming then, because I think of killer bees when I hear swarming. And I assume with drones, you're talking about a bunch of drones nearby each other then. You are. And it's not just a physical distance thing, because what is physical distance is a relative thing, depending on what it is you're trying to do. But it also, it's really more about behavior. And so we can dive into that.

37:18But before you say that, I think that's a line of thought we should go down is that, as you guys know, I'm really into animals. We were making jokes earlier about a bazillion dogs and stuff like that. I'm a licensed wildlife rehabber and I study animals. And in the context of swarming, mother nature has perfected not just swarming, but there are many different types of swarming from different species. And so I, I have a set of species that I tend to look to for swarming purposes and say, if I want to swarm with this type of technology or this type of platform, like how do we get started on that?

37:56You know, how do we get inspiration or look for some insights on the technology, but you can look to certain species that are, that are similar to the technology platforms you're interested in terms of how they move around and do stuff and say, well, how, how has nature solved it there? And I definitely do that a lot. I, I, it's not uncommon for me to go into tech meetings and start off with lots of pictures of animals and stuff and people like, what's, what's going on with this? Are you thinking like fungus, bees and bees bat like i do a lot of bees bats birds uh starlings you know those huge what are called murmurations of starlings ants are awesome ants are awesome when when uh when i'm thinking about robotics on the ground uh meaning uh what we would call a ugv which is an unmanned or uncrewed ground vehicle.

38:49Ants are amazing in what they can do. And so they're an awesome thing to look at. But I'll start with the definition that I use. Given the fact that I work in the military intelligence space, my definition sounds kind of, it uses that jargon, but it really don't get caught up in that. It can be applied to residential. It can be applied to commercial. It can be applied to industrial. So don't get caught up in this specific wording. So I'm going to read it in front of me. It's one really long run on sentence that's very specific in what it's trying to imply. It is swarming occurs when numerous independent, fully autonomous, multi-agentic platforms exhibit highly coordinated locomotive and emergent behaviors with agency and self-governance in any domain, which could be air, ground, sea, undersea, or space, functioning as a single, independent, logical, distributed, decentralized decisioning entity for purposes of C3, which is command, control, and communications, with human operators on the loop to implement actions that achieve strategic, tactical, or operational effects in the furtherance of a mission.

40:06So long, long, long sentence, but it hits a bunch of very precise concepts and integrates them in together. I can tell each word was selected there. Yeah. A mission might be, instead of thinking military, a mission might be getting a package to your house. That might be the mission. And that does have command control and communications involved. So like you can put the, you can, it doesn't have to be the, the military-esque jargon that we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. It applies to any of these to any of these you know commercial industrial residential military whatever so so that's a lot it's a lot it's a lot and if you want i can kind of break down high level what some of those mean yeah i think my broad takeaway we can talk about the individual words because i know they're very specifically chosen like independent logical distributed decentralized decisioning entity like stuff like that i can tell each word was selected for a reason yeah i think my grand takeaway of a swarm is kind of the e pluribus unum like it's like okay all these things are individual and autonomous but they're all acting as one they're acting with one purpose that's a fantastic insight that you have and that that is the key to it is like swarm is such a buzz you know we we always have buzzwords in in this ai and software spaces there's always the buzzwords of the year and swarm is certainly a huge buzzword right now.

41:34And, and almost without exception, I will turn around until I can go back to my definition, assuming that you want to accept that as the definition of swarming. And I can defend that fiercely. I cannot attack it. Can you attack it, Adam?

41:51But I would say like all you people who are talking swarming, no, you're not, It's not swarming. What you're describing is all sorts of things that lead to swarming. There's a whole bunch of incremental capabilities that that would eventually, as you add all those capabilities together, they culminate in swarming. Right. But but the chances of somebody saying that what they're doing out there is is consistent with Chris Benson's definition of swarming. Right. It's pretty low. So what you said was right on. And that is that just as you see in nature with those ants, every little ant has its neural capability, shall we call it, and what it's doing.

42:36But at the end of the day, they're functioning to get a mission done, a job done, something productive for the colony. And they are all lending themselves to that greater good, even if some of them may not survive, that kind of thing. They are functioning as a single entity, and it is the entity that's trying to get the thing done, not the individual ants. The individual ant may be like we have a crack in the ground, and we have to get from this side to that side, and they build an ant bridge. You know, we've seen pictures of that. And, like, you know, that one job, one little ant may have the job of I'm holding on to the ant on this side, and the ant below me is holding on there.

43:20And then they have that going on as well. And we're all creating this ant bridge over a chasm that none of us individually could span. But by working together for that swarm approach, which is make that accessible, they are doing something well beyond what any of the individuals can do. They are super ants in that way. And that's what I'm getting at is that that ability to to give up your individual identity as a member of a swarm for the purpose of the overall swarm's intent. And that swarm itself has an intent that is a swarm level thing, kind of to your point, Jared. It's like, you know, it's not that's not the thing on any one brain.

44:04But when you put all those brains together or technology that represents that, there is a there is a thing that the overall thing is is trying to do as a single entity. It's powers in number. It's like I saw my kids love ants, animals, you know, all the things essentially venomous plants that kill things. You know, that stuff entertains them dramatically. Venus fly traps, things like that. And we watched this show. It's kind of a documentary, but it's also kind of dramatic. And John Cusack was the narrator. And it's a movie called The Besieged Fortress from 2006. and there's an ant type that I want to mention to you.

44:48It was actually, I'll ruin the plot a little bit, but it was ants versus termites essentially. And it was very, very well done. If you've seen it, Chris, obviously say so. I have not, but I'm going to check it out now. It's 100 % worth it. It is phenomenal. It's probably going to visualize for our entire audience the things you're talking about because the particular ant, I guess you would call it, the name of the ant, I suppose, is how you'd describe it, were driver ants. And these driver ants are, are so swarm-like, you know, they don't think little, they, they, they create rafts for themselves.

45:23The entire colony can, can float. I mean, you can put them underwater and they won't die. They will like create this bubble. They are just basically resilient to the nth degree. And if you're in their path, you're dead. Like no matter what you are, a snake, a rat, a bug. They're going to overwhelm you. Oh yeah. They, they drive in numbers they're called driver ants and they are truly truly incredible and this whole entire dramatic documentary narrated by john cusack is phenomenal the besieged fortress i would highly recommend it 2006 amazing but these driver ants probably elicited a lot of the a lot of the qualities and and characteristics that you're mentioning because they act like if you're in their path it's not as if they're one it's they're many and they act together and it's wild yeah i mean it brings a whole capability, like whether you're talking to Ant or whether we're humans with our technology doing this, you're basically inventing a whole new category of what's possible by introducing this.

46:27And like, you know, well, because I, because the conflict of interest and I stay away from my employer, Lockheed Martin, and generally I'm delicate on defense and intelligence stuff anyway when we're talking in public. But the notion of if you were to look on the military side for just a second, at a high level, there's the notion of mass. And if you go back and work on it, people would say, okay, let's build up mass to win against an enemy. And then as things progress forward, we learn that maneuver could kind of out, you could go around mass and you could hit it from different ways. And so maneuver as a capability started trumping what was possible with mass.

47:10But swarming becomes like a whole new thing is that you're you're kind of getting the best of mass at individual small scale. But you're getting mass and you're getting hyper maneuverability. And so it's able to trump that. You know, so in that domain and that kind of military world, it brings about a whole new capability that it never existed before. And similarly, when you move into commercial and industrial, and we talked about this super automated house a few minutes ago, you're bringing about things that just were not possible before. You could have little pieces of it that were possible discreetly from a source.

47:52But the notion of this integrated solution that would just kind of go attack a real world problem and overcome it, you know, kind of going back to your driver ants is a new capability that the world will enjoy going forward across all different types of domains. And so I think that's I mean, that's the magic of swarming right there is it's not it's different from a fleet. I think a lot of the times where people throw up a whole bunch of things like drones, that's the thing everyone knows, will throw up a whole bunch of drones in the air, but it's not really a swarm. It's a fleet of drones is what it is.

48:27And each one requires individual programming to go do this or do that. There may be some communication between them potentially, depending on what they're doing, but they're not thinking almost like a brain, like an abstract brain themselves. They're not looking and dynamically handling what's happening in the real world in real time and saying, this is changing right here, right now as a swarm. I'm going to go do that. They can't do that. They're fleets. They can respond, but it's going to take inputs. It's going to take some collaboration between them. But it's going to take a lot of guidance from afar to make that happen.

49:03And that that's the difference in mass numbers in a fleet versus what a true swarm would be, is that that that capability and that intent and and that emergent behavior is is really key to identifying a swarm. And you do see that in Mother Nature. So let's take a recent phenomenon, which is the drone light shows, you know, where they go out and let's say they're making a dragon. This is not a swarm. But yes. Well, I was going to ask. It depends on how it's implemented, right? See how I did that? Just see how I did that? Not a swarm. Well, I was going to ask. It depends on how it's implemented, isn't it?

49:40Couldn't you swarm to accomplish a dragon? Absolutely could, but nobody has. So these days what they're doing is you may see these light shows where they have thousands of drones in the air, but each one of those is following a pre-programmed path. There might be some limited communication when they're very close in case of their wins and things like that in terms of anti-collision. But what I would say is like if you were to do the big dragon that you talked about as a swarm, the swarm would figure out how to do it in real time. Um, it's actually using that, that, that decisioning entity that we talked about in the definition and saying, my mission is to produce a dragon over this area for people to watch.

50:27And it would go do that. Like it would go figure out where all the pieces need to be for that dragon to come about. That's true swarm bait. Like, because you, if you think about, um, animals that are getting out and doing something, they're not producing dragons, but they're going out and doing something in a swarm. Right. They're not there's no external thing saying, you know, swarm of bees. I'm telling you to go do this and you need to make an adjustment there and all. They figure it out in real time in the swarm and make whatever it is that those species are trying to achieve. It happens. It's emergent behavior that's real and in real time that supersedes the individuals.

51:06And that's what I'm saying. The light shows fleets of drones that are being that are being provided instructions. often you know essentially a three-dimensional uh vectoring trajectory on what me as an individual drone would do regardless of what all these others are doing okay so even inside of emergent behavior let's say in an ant colony you have roles you have leadership there's some sort of like there's some sort of mission that comes from somewhere there is and i assume now we're getting we're getting to the part where it's like, okay, how do you make these things? Because as a guy who's makes fancy websites his entire life for a living, like this sounds really hard.

51:48I just feel like if I had a new day, Jared, your new job is like build a swarming technology of autonomous, whatever is, I'd be like, no, not going to even try that. Cause, uh, that just sounds very, very, very difficult. Where do you start? Like, how do you, how do you, how do you do it? That's a great question. And not only that, but you've identified the thing that you just said, in your vulnerable moment there in terms of like, I don't even know where to go. That's what almost everybody, that is why it is a problem yet to be solved. And there are many, there are many groups, companies, individuals out there working on it, including me.

52:28And, and, and, you know, that this is my passion. And all of us at some point start, some of us might have had the benefit of coming from robotics, but just like many other skills that also carries some baggage with it that you have to unlearn to do it. And that's, that's one of the pros. So when I talk to people like I've been doing drones for 20 years, I know everything. And I'm like, well, I'm like, that's good in some ways, but not a swarm. Yeah. Not a swarm. And not only that, but sometimes it's the, it's the t-shirt says not a swarm. Ask me anything, not a swarm. That fresh, that fresh learner's mind though, often does it.

53:06And so it's a complex problem and you have to break it down into its constituent parts. And there's a whole bunch of layers because there's things that have to happen at the member. Like if you talk about the individual ant, at the member level, there's a whole bunch of things. It's got to navigate. And that's kind of like where we are on drones today in the sense of like, if you go buy one, we're going to go out, you go out to the toy store and you buy a drone today or order one online these days because toy stores are not so common anymore. So we ordered the drone online. And like that has basic navigation and there's a whole bunch of tasks associated with that.

53:43And that's where most of the robotics world has been, obviously, over the years. But as you move into communication between them and what kind of tasks happen, you kind of move up to a level. There's a local there's a local drone level in a larger swarm. And then there is the how do all those locals operate together? So you kind of steadily move up in abstraction until you have that notion of this emergent thing, which is really quite a challenge. Because there's not a master member. There's not the boss. You may have a queen bee. Wouldn't it be easier if there was a boss, though? It would. So it depends on what you're trying to do.

54:27I would say that's like the step below. If you're doing almost everything a swarm can do, but you still have some centralized control, there's a couple of levels below that. And while I can't share it today, I'm going to try. I invented, I created a document that helps people at my company evaluate these technologies at different levels. It's called a maturity model towards swarming. And they can look at anyone else. somebody has put something out there and we can evaluate it based on that criteria about what exactly it does. And I need to see if they'll let me release it publicly because I think it would be useful.

55:06Let me see if I can maybe break down an idea. And I don't have your depth, but if I were thinking about this problem, and obviously when we compare ants, so in the case of the driver ants, just because that's my example that I have some clarity on at least, they do have a queen. And the job is to protect the queen. It's like if the queen disappears, they will elect or attempt to elect a new queen, but there's always somebody in charge, essentially. But if that's not a swarm, then the way I might try to create a boss would be through consensus. Because if you're a controlling entity that's connected, and so you know all your parties in this connected mesh network or whatever you want to call this swarm.

55:52then, you know, player B versus Z over here has new information. The swarm needs to know to consensus Lee, that's even a word to have consensus on the next decision. And so we may as a swarm elect a new, not so much boss, but a primary information source that changes the way the swarm acts as an entity. And so it's sort of self evolutionary. You're hired because you're on the right track. That's it. So aren't they just making their own boss then, basically? So that's the thing. So the queen, like in the case of the queen, yes, there's a queen who is the general, the one in charge. But at the same time, she's actually not making all the decisions.

56:37A lot of it is instinct that is being played out. It's preservation at that case, right? The queen is not the boss in terms of leadership and knowledge because the drones have the knowledge, right? The drone ants out there doing the work. That's right. She is the the preservation system for the entity. It's a necessary component of many. So she's not a master, like a master direction giver. You know, that's not her. Her role is, as you said, perpetuation of the colony versus she's not driving the specific actions of the of the drones. Those are built in. You know, Mother Nature has imbued the members with that and they understand how to do that.

57:15But to your point, Adam, that notion of kind of consensus, you know, there are different approaches to it. We can use some different words because there are different algorithmic approaches of consensus, election, things like that in terms of saying, well, we have a distributed compute grid that is our swarm, that is imbued in our swarm. and how do we arrive at single overarching directives that perpetuate themselves downward through the swarm and which change as they go down because this is the overall, this is what we need to do. There's a mission. There is a high-level sense of abstraction about, well, to accomplish the mission, you must do A, B, and C.

58:03But A has 10 steps to it, you know, and some of the swarm members are going to be, are going to take the assignment of doing those and others are going to say, well, I'm going to go off and do these other things that are part of that, that might have been part of the B category. And so they have to self-organize in the way to do that in real time, because this is a physical technology. So it's one of those, and there are sensors coming in, things are changing, you know, constantly without, without, and so you're, you're a knowledge, you are with your sensors, whether you're a biological being or whether you're technology, you're having to take all that new information in.

58:42You're having to do distributed computing and decisioning through algorithmic approaches and select members to accomplish all the things as part of that overall mission that you're doing. And it's quite complicated. I mean, it's a very complicated thing as we sit here in 2025. I think we'll nail it gradually. I think we'll nail it in iterations. And I think it won't, I think somebody a century from now will be like, yeah, well, of course we did that. But today it's a tough problem to solve. So at what level do the humans interact? So let's imagine that you've created a swarm of vehicles and it's a legit swarm.

59:25It's not a not a swarm swarm. A legit swarm. Yeah. I was thinking about that as you said that. You remember the old Jeff Fox where you're saying you like, you might be a redneck. We could do a whole line of like, you might not be a swarm. Like if you've got a boss, you might not be a swarm. You know, if you've got a path that gave you to fly, you might not be a swarm. But let's say you have one and this is like, you know, Chris approves. And it's a bunch of drones. Let's just do that. At what level does the drones receive their mission from the humans? Like, is it very generic or is it very specific?

59:56It can be either. It depends on what you're what you're building toward. And swarms have different purposes. So remember, a swarm is not a generic thing. They're a purpose built, you know, for certain capabilities. OK. And so you and you do have that C3, which is command, control and communications that's inherent to that. And one of the other phrases I use, which people outside of the military context may not be as familiar with, is human on the loop. Not in the loop, but on the loop. Not in the loop, but on the loop. Those are two different things. So an in the loop is where you're a human is controlling a technology directly or and they are they're making it.

1:00:35So like a human in the loop may say, make a choice for a task. So they may say, yes, I'm going to now have you drop that package on that person's front door. And, you know, yeah, it's clear we've looked at it. It's safe. There's nobody in the way. And we're going to have you put the package on the front door because it's safe. And we did not want the drone to do that until me as a human verified that that was OK for us to do so that we didn't hit people or hit things on the loop. You are essentially tasking that it's kind of a the human has a supervisory role and maybe a mission giving role. Like your mission swarm is to deliver the package to that, or maybe more, it might be, here's a bunch of packages and to the swarm.

1:01:25And I want you to go to this neighborhood and deliver all these packages to the right houses. And that is the mission. And then the swarm understands that geographic layout. It understands the real world environment it's in. And it figures out which member they each pick up a package and it figures out how are they going to do that? Some of the packages are more than the eight pounds that Adam talked about. Some of them are 60 pounds and it takes multiple swarm members to get that package airborne and to collaborate. And so as they go, as they go into that environment and they're looking, I got to get this package to that address.

1:01:59And Oh, by the way, that address might've been reachable by a four pound package on one swarm member acting alone, but we, it's now 60 pounds. We have multiple swarm members and even with all the swarm members, it's outside of our range. So how do we address getting it outside the range, given the fact that we have other concerns that may be limiting that the swarm would work that out through its distributed computing and collaboration that we just talked about that, you know, where it kind of comes to that consensus on how it's going to collectively solve the problem. Does that make sense? Yes, I think that it does.

1:02:36I'm wondering if maybe I'm sniffing danger eventually, because oh go for it well because at a certain point You give a directive, and maybe that directive is completely benign. Like you have a swarm of cleaning bots, you know, in your house and you say, okay, bots, you know, clean the bathroom. And that's as far as you get into it. You're on the loop, but you're not in the loop. And so they go about doing that. And we've accomplished Chris Benson level swarming. So I now have numerous independent, fully autonomous, multi-agentic platforms in my bathroom, exhibiting highly coordinated locomotive and emergent behaviors with agency and self-governance.

1:03:23Right. So at a certain point, couldn't they just say, this toilet's really dirty. What if we just removed it? Wouldn't that be the bathroom would be even cleaner? And then they all decide that, yes, that's a great idea. I come back. I don't have a toilet. That is, Adam had a great moment a moment ago and you just had a great moment there, Jared. Oh, thank you. Most of my great moments involve toilets. One for sure is what we get. Just one for sure. You're cleaning up your act, man. But yeah, so like that, that's a great thing. And that comes down to, you're not giving, what you're really telling about in swarms is when you get down to the task level, then you're talking maybe not about the whole swarm making a decision.

1:04:06It might be a few of them that are addressing a task and figuring out at a more logistical level, like how am I going to, you know, operational level, how am I going to do this? And that is one of the things is that when you're doing, you know, we're back to AI safety and AI training on this. Is that maybe removing the toilet in most cases is not an acceptable thing. So we need some technology-based guardrails there. But that's also where, depending on the circumstance that you're looking at, that human on the loop needs to be able to go, no. There's kind of a kill button, if you will, figuratively speaking, meaning killing of the swarm, not killing a person, just to be very clear so that nobody misunderstands me.

1:04:51Super clear. No killing here. No, we're not talking about killing people here. That's why I use a bathroom and a toilet as my example. In this context, it might be don't kill the toilet. Right. You know, kind of thing. And that's where the human on the loop as as an oversight where we still have these amazing, capable human brains that have they can't do everything that digital technology can do. But, you know, digital still hasn't yet arrived. It will, but it hasn't yet arrived at what our capabilities are. And we can look at it and go. Taking the toilet out is not acceptable to the homeowner.

1:05:25We're not doing that. Maybe if you're Jeff Bezos, maybe instead of cleaning the toilet, you just remove it every time. Maybe Jeff Bezos will have the toilet removal every day. The drone swarm goes into Jeff Bezos' bathroom and it just takes the toilet out and it puts the new one in. The back is just a sea of toilets back there. It's like a pile of them. There you go. Well, it cleans it all up because you know what? When you can throw$8 billion at something you haven't really identified yet, you can probably afford to have your toilet. 6.2. Oh, 6.2. That made such a big difference in my job. Yeah, sorry about that.

1:06:038 billion is close. Let's just round up to 8 billion. Let's just round down to 6. Okay, we're there. But yes, so other than Jeff, I don't want the drone swarm taking my toilet away. That would get rather. I'm with you. Yeah, it's a little bit too much.

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1:10:48could we get into this scenario where it's like aladdin and the genie and he's like hey you know I want make me a prince. Right. I think it was the first. No, the first one was to, he tricked the genie to get him out of the cave. We'll, we'll skip that one. And then the second one, technically the second wish was make me a prince. And he didn't really make him a prince. Great memory. Gosh, like I've seen the movie, but like, you're really bringing it back to me. Well, I got a good brain, you know, over here. My brain is solid. That's a second great moment, right? That's right. Two moments here with me.

1:11:23So, okay. Keep going. He doesn't really make him a prince. He just clothes him as a prince. He mimics a prince. He doesn't really give him royalty. He doesn't really give him lineage. And I guess I'm sort of sidetracking to some degree just to be accurate about my Aladdin reference. But the point is, is there's times when he adds it. Or I guess in all of the lore around the Aladdin figure and a genie figure where you ask the genie for something. But you have to be careful. That's where this term comes from. Be careful what you wish for. because you wish for something without the full awareness of the agency behind the genie, behind the swarm.

1:11:57And so you might get your toilet removed. Is that a concern? Like how are you guarding against that? How do you guard against that without the human on a loop or the kill switch? Is there an OS? Like, I don't know. How do you guard against this genie issue? I know. I think there's a lot. And I think it's at many different levels. And it's a real thing that we talk about in real life today. without having achieved full Chris Benson level drone swarming. And that, you know, we talk about that in terms of AI safety all the time now. You know, that's a huge part of the AI world is what is AI safety?

1:12:32How do you keep unintended consequences from coming to pass? I think anyone who's reasonable recognize that some of those will still come to pass out there. You can put guardrails around things, but and you can even ask AI to put guardrails around other AIs as we're doing, because we're using the tool to build the tool. But we will have bad outcomes across the board, just as we always have with software and always will. So I don't have the magic bullet on that, but there is training the distributed swarm brain, this abstraction of computing, of grid computing, where they're all doing this and using their algorithms.

1:13:16And that will where it goes wrong may happen different places. You know, we often talk about today's LLMs coming out with with inferences that are that are suboptimal, sometimes quite funny, sometimes quite tragic, actually. But that will continue to happen. We have software issues. We're also moving into the physical world where, you know, if you have these physical agents that are imbued with a whole bunch of AI agents that are doing stuff and they're acting as a member of a larger swarm, there's a lot of places where things can go wrong. So it's going to be it's there's going to be a learning curve on that.

1:13:54And we're going to have we're going to have problems along the way. So I don't want to I certainly wouldn't want. I know for a lot of listeners and viewers, they probably think of a little, you know, a little bit pie in the sky. Not everyone's going to believe that this is probably sooner than they would otherwise expect. But we'll get through it and stuff and we'll try it. We'll do the best we can. And the responsible people will put a lot of safety around it in the best they can. But we'll make mistakes. Where do we stand? Where are we in this initiative to create this thing or these things?

1:14:29So I think like many things, you'll see it coming from specialists. You know, there's a whole area of expertise, you know, that you develop around trying to solve these problems. And some companies are specializing that. And just like other things, you'll see that. But I think over time, especially given the fact that it's not one industry, it's many industries. There'll be many players. I think one of the things to make this happen isn't just can we get there? Because if you think about it, once you can get there, almost everybody kind of does a close copies of that. Once we had our first chat GPT, it wasn't long before that we had competitors and other models that were nipping at its heels.

1:15:12And I think you'll see that here as well. But I think it really comes down to getting organizations and motivated individuals into it so that they are producing some level of whatever is productive in what they're doing. In their industry, in their world, what's productive and costs will drive down. And I think as those costs drive down, that's where you see it really pushing out into lots of different places in life. So a lot of it isn't just a technology question. It's an economics question. But I think the pervasiveness of it will drive that. Let's get, since we, you know, helped create a show called Practical AI, let's get practical.

1:15:51Yes. You'd mentioned this is obviously burgeoning. You're coining this. I kind of feel like swarming is the protocol. Maybe there's a specification there somewhere and the implementation is more of a product potentially. But take us into the practical nature of, let's just say, over the next three years. Will we see swarming of any sorts in a consumer level, home lab, put it my home level? And if we do, like, be realistic, practical, if you can. Like, what will it be? At the level of the definition that I provided, which is a very high bar, I think you'll see lots of things that are calling themselves swarming things developing within that two to three year horizon.

1:16:30I don't think many of them will rise to that level. There'll be there'll be kind of quasi swarming capabilities that you're starting to see in consumer and commercial products and stuff. I do think, however, there are so many really smart minds around the world working on on swarming because the by opening up an entire new category of capabilities that don't exist today, that people already have productive use cases in mind for. There's a lot of money to be made there. So you have not only commercial entities and motivated makers, but you have nation states that are highly motivated to do that.

1:17:13And it's a big scientific topic of research. I think you'll see it probably first in areas where people can throw lots of money at it. And so, you know, if we do talk about in the commercial space, our 800-pound gorillas, you're more likely to see it in a narrower case of use cases there. I think in the military space, an intelligence space, you're likely to see it there because you have the economies of nation states that don't want to be left behind. If we're not able to produce a swarm first or are very closely following whoever is first, then we have a national security issue here in terms of what's possible.

1:17:54And so I think you'll see nation states prioritizing that probably in very close collaboration with commercial entities, which is really common today. I mean, if you look at certainly how both the U.S. government and most of our allies, as well as, you know, the Chinese government, you know, there's a lot of overlap between nation state resources and commercial entities that have special knowledge and skills working together to produce that stuff. So I think that's I think those types of collaborations are likely to be the first ones, largely because they can throw resources at the problem until you get there.

1:18:32I think the key is thinking about the problem the right way. And I think that's where people struggle is breaking down that complexity that we were talking about earlier, you know, that Jared pointed out and saying, how can we discreetly address those points of complexity in a way that you can then pull those many solutions together to achieve the grandiosity of the definition that I provided? Let me see if I can not predict, but this is where I would. Because I'm not going to predict anything. We know. Well, I think the two of you, I think, will agree with what I'm going to say here. I think the area where I like to see this type of swarming is in energy conservation.

1:19:16And so I think there's multiple devices in my house that consumes energy from a HVAC system above me that both heats and cools my home to the lights that power my house to, let's say, a kettle that is electrified. all the things. I want to give my home the task of being energy conservative, right? This swarm, I want to have a swarm of devices that help me be that. And it can, hey, Adam and the family are not here. It makes sense as an agency to be conservative with our energy use because there's no one here to do it. And that's where the, you can do like individual device level smart home automation, which is here today.

1:20:01Yeah. Matter supports that. It's not a swarm though, right? It's not a swarm. That's right. So I would like energy conservation to be my first swarm tactic. The next would be, I live in Dripping Springs, Texas, just outside of Austin, Texas, and we always have water challenges. Right now, we're always in some version of a drought. There's actually a big bet on Wall Street against Texas running out of water. Like there's a bet, essentially shorting Texas running out of water at some point. I just heard this headline. That's a headline only. I don't even know what the truth is behind that, but I heard it.

1:20:35So it must be true. Okay. So the next thing is water conservation. Help me as a household, maybe even help me as a neighborhood, a sworn neighborhood, be conservative when it comes to water conservation. So my child goes to flush the toilet or, I don't know, some sort of action tries to take place, But the swarm is like, hang on a second. We're in a conservative nature. We're going to use the one or the 0.5 gallon version flush versus the 1.2 because it's a, you know, it's number two. You know, some reason, right? But for whatever reason, like we now have new tech in my house. So that gives me things that really matter.

1:21:12Energy, water. And I think the last one for me is food. There is so much food waste in America. Tremendous amount. I know I for sure buy some chicken once, twice a month, and I'm killing chickens constantly because I'm wasting my chicken not making it. So I don't know if that's a problem that's me, but at some point my tech, my swarm tech, can help me solve those three key things, energy, water, and food. And I think you start there because that's what matters. My laundry, kind of a me problem. Maybe my washer can say, hey, you put a white in with a darks. Probably not smart. Eject it or alert me.

1:21:46You know what I'm saying? But like, I don't need help with laundry. I don't need, I mean, I like my iRobot and vacuuming. That's cool. But I think that the thing I would want to conserve on is those three things. That'd be helpful. And I think, I think you'll see that. I don't think it'll just be the swarm doing that though, because like even today, you know, if you start with where we're at right now and talk about the fact that energy monitoring is really common within a lot of these existing devices. Not a swarm though. Not a swarm. Not a swarm yet, but we're getting there. We're getting there.

1:22:15Yeah, bear with me for a second. So we have the we have what we can already do at the individual device level. And then as we really start imbuing our homes with AI agents, which is going to happen even before the swarms are hitting so soon. Yeah, that's next. You're going to have AI agents doing lots of different things, including the monitoring. And and they will be in those AI agents will be monitoring your matter driven devices and thinking, oh, we need to make some adjustments. They'll be communicating with the devices that are being governed by that. And so they're able to get you a great deal of the way down that use case that you just talked about.

1:22:52But there are also going to be things in your home that, you know, where things like for energy, the energy conservation thing, you mentioned things like, you know, airflow and temperature where it's not an explicit device that's matter enabled and has the, you know, energy monitoring built in. but it may be like that corner of the room is cold. And in that case, that swarm, it's monitoring the house and maybe it has other functions that aren't just monitoring. Maybe it's doing a cleanup, you know, it's doing the cleaning job, but it also notes that, hey, this corner is not getting good airflow.

1:23:27The temperature is changing. To your vision, Adam, that you just talked about, that's where the swarming capabilities of having different devices work together will do it. Now, an individual robot could also detect that device. It doesn't have to be a swarm. So you're really good for a swarm to be effective there. You're really going to be looking for how does a cluster of members working dynamically together get me something I don't already have? And I think that's the question to answer in that use case if you're actually wanting to introduce the swarm to it. Well, we humans have our own form of swarming.

1:24:04It's called open source software. And I'm curious if there's a place where people who are as passionate or maybe even just potentially interested in this initiative, this movement, this, I don't know, this next big thing of swarming tech, is there a place they can gather? Is there like a, is there a framework? Is there a conversation? Is there anything in the world of open that people could gather around? There are. And I probably should have brought a list maybe in the show notes. We can add some stuff in. Some of the things that I often tell people to start off on is, you know, robotics has been a big part of this kind of robotics role, you know, being a part of developing to the swarm is ROS2 exists.

1:24:46ROS stands for ROS2. ROS is the robotic operating system, which is open source. And it is the most widely used robotic software technology out there. It's not the only one. There are many and some of them are closed and some of them are open, but there's tons of books now on Ross. And so I often when people are interested in this and they're like, but how do you do like aside from the swarm? I can't even make a single robot or like, what do I do? Well, there's tons of information about that. Start off maybe not solving the overall swarming problem that we that we were describing as being as remaining a hard challenge.

1:25:25But start with something more accessible. You can get on to, we mentioned Bezos so much, Amazon and others, and there are a lot of maker kits that you can get that are open maker kits. You have ROS. They're very similar in terms of, but if you want to not do robots and you want to do drones, there's a whole bunch of open source drone stuff. And then the thing that I love doing, I do this all the time, is diving in on GitHub at different software communities that support, you know, open specs and stuff. There's tons of repositories on GitHub that are designed to do this that just interested people said, I want to go scratch an itch.

1:26:06I want to solve a problem. And I go there and I'll then also go to Hugging Face and look for small models that may if I need AI in the mix that can contribute. because really, you know, small models are where the future is. You know, it's not. We talked at the very beginning of the conversation about the giant versus the small. Go for small stuff. There's very likely that you have a GPU at home and maybe in your laptop or something that you can buy for a couple hundred bucks that can do all sorts of cool inferencing with an existing model that you can then go do some of this stuff with. So with open source, that's the place to go.

1:26:43But that's where I think that's where I think the majority of innovation is really driving from. And it's a good place to start and figure out what is interesting to you. And and even that area, I'm really into I'm going to I'm going to also pitch a language that I'm into, which is Rust. I mentioned Go beginning of the show. Love Go. And I use that in a lot of environments. But I've been using Rust as a replacement for C++ because – and it's great for embedded. You can use it with no operating system at all. And it's fast as can be. And so I've been – that's been – like when I go play on my own, aside from like work stuff in this area, I'm always – I mean, every day I'm looking at all the innovation in the Rust community to do small little projects that I can do for fun.

1:27:35that drives my own passion forward. So it doesn't have to be a giant 800-pound gorilla or defense industry or whatever kind of thing. It can be something that the kid in you or maybe the kid in your house can go do on their own. Give some shout-outs to, I guess, some crates or some projects out there in the rest of the world. I think probably Tokyo or Tokyo probably is one of them. Saturday is probably one of them. What else are you playing with? Tokyo is really good because it allows you to, you know, kind of that multi-threaded things, many things happening at once, which is really important in robotics.

1:28:12And so that's really taken off. There is, I'm trying to remember, Embassy is the name of it. I was trying to remember for Embedded. It is a runtime in Rust that allows you to do a whole bunch of embedded capabilities without writing everything from scratch. It kind of gives you this framework. And so you can go get a Raspberry Pi, even one of the small ones, I think, of the Nano and stuff that isn't there supporting the OS and use embassy to create an executable that runs on something that's too small for an OS. And so I like exploring all these different possibilities in terms of how you're going to.

1:28:51And when I said Tokyo being multithreaded, it wasn't multithreaded. It was a big concurrency. I said the wrong thing. So I just want to correct that before we got too far. But being able to do highly performant, concurrent things on very small pieces of hardware out on the edge is a real thing. Like five years ago, it just wasn't possible to do anything like what we're doing now. But, you know, in the beginning of the show, we talked about the revolution of all these different areas coming together. Well, now anybody can go use several different languages, but in my case, Rust, and find small bits that cost me$10, you know, out there and put some unique software and do something that scratches my itch that no one in the world has done.

1:29:37And it's no longer out in the cloud or out on some computer. It can be something that I'm carrying around on my body or is literally a robot. This is all reachable now. And so that's really what I would encourage people to do is the future. I get asked all the time about the future of AI. And I really think the next big revolution in AI is going to be physical AI. Is AI imbued in all these things in our life that we've been talking about? that we refer to as on the edge in the software world. But that's going to be the new normal. And now you can do that without any real budget on your own, anytime from any place in the world.

1:30:19So this, if you want to go create the future, and I said this is the coolest time we've ever lived in, well, you can go create that right now no matter where you're living and no matter what your budget is. So that's what I say. Go do it. If you're tinkering with Russ right now, so let's say you're done with this podcast, you're off for the day. let's just say magically you have nothing to do. You're going to go pick up your next or your current Rust project. Maybe you've got a new model you want to play with. Where are the places you're going? You mentioned hanging face. What are some of the stack that you're tapping into?

1:30:52So there's the swarming stuff that we've talked about and trying to figure out robotics and all that. And we've talked about home automation. And I think that feels, for answering this question, that's an accessible thing that I like to do now. So as I've picked up this kind of home automation stuff, I'm trying to figure out like, what can I do? I go get some Raspberry Pis or I can use a slightly larger, you know, like a mini PC to do something in the house. None of this costs much. And I'm now on my day to day when I'm just at home and I'm not thinking about the day job, if you will. I'm looking at all the things that I do with my family and thinking, wow, I can go pick something to handle that.

1:31:33So almost all the lights in our house are automated. A lot of the appliances are automated. We have voice command from anywhere in the house where we can tell a particular assistant, go do this, and it happens. I've been starting to integrate AI agents into that workflow. now that that is becoming super accessible with all the, there's so much open source that have made agents very easy to do. And you can get small models off hugging face and run it off compute that you have in your house already. And so that's, that's the kind of thing that I like to do. And I think it's amazing because it's gotten people in my family who are like, Oh my God, Chris is doing technology again.

1:32:17You know, like you have the family members that are like, yeah, yeah. I don't want to hear it because you're talking about that with everyone else all the time but now they're like they're using that and they're getting interested in like yeah they're like tell me more chris yeah they'll start like not a swarm though tell me more not a swarm but my wife will say you know how could we make this this you know how could we automate this to make it better and like i couldn't get her to to care yeah she didn't want to care like that was my thing and just stop talking about it chris so um yeah and and and my daughter uh is starting to get really, she's 13 and she's really starting to think about what can we do?

1:32:53And like, it's just sparks the imagination because it's real and it's tangible. And so that's like, that's why I get to like, go do something. Just decide today you're a maker, go get some cheap stuff, have a vision, recognize that every part of it is either free or only a few bucks and just go do something in your imagination. If you can't think of anything, there's tons of websites with maker projects out there and find something that you go, Oh God, that's cool. And just go do it. And like, even if it, it doesn't have to be the greatest thing in the world, just go do it. And then you're helping push all this stuff forward.

1:33:27You are diving into the future and making this stuff happen. And that's why this is the greatest moment in the history of the world. It really is. I mean, we went from photography or from painting photos to photography and a blink of an eye. And now we're thinking, gosh, I just wouldn't like paint the picture that way ever again. and I would just take the photo because that's the way. Yeah. It's a cool moment in life. I'm super curious about one particular area that you mentioned. You mentioned voice. Are you leveraging Alexa or leveraging the behemoths, or are you home assisting in it and you're doing something with home assistance?

1:34:01So I am moving. We have been for a while Alexa'd all over the place. And given the fact that I am increasingly concerned about privacy just in terms of like surveillance is so built into everything now that I am generally moving from cloud-based systems into more private systems that are completely under my control and local and stuff. And I realize that may not be for everybody. I think part of that is because I work in a world that is obviously touching on intelligence and I'm more aware of what's possible from a surveillance standpoint than probably most people are and how pervasive it is. And that makes me obviously wanting to kind of protect our own privacy a little bit.

1:34:53So I'm keenly interested in automation that's not specifically commercial cloud dependent. We should circle back in the new year for a deeper conversation. I'm sure you'll have some time away, maybe new progress, new projects and new insights, because these are things I'm about to go into. In my curiosity is I haven't automated anything in my house. They're like, Adam, you're such a nerd. You care about home lab. I'm like, yeah, I don't care about that part of the home lab. It's a different area of the home lab that I'm trying to conquer. I didn't either. It really took me. For me, the kick in the butt was moving into a house, buying a house that already came with a lot of automation in it.

1:35:32Yeah. And it's not just catching up on that and learning. There was a certain like ramp, like I had to level up. But then there was also the, it starts getting your imagination going. Like you didn't, like you knew in the back of your mind you could do this, but now you're like, you're living it. And then you're thinking about the next five things after that. And I think that's it. Once you do a little bit, it wets your appetite and you start seeing all the possibilities. And that's what it took for me, you know, professional technologist, but I wasn't really doing it until a year ago. And now this last year is just take off.

1:36:03Being able to host models locally, have that privacy. The fact that Home Assistant is so pervasive and so massive as an open source project that they have. But you can tap into via the API, you know, whatever local, you know, models you have running for inference. They have voice capabilities. There's just so much happening there. Why give that data to, you know, to Amazon? It's not that they're bad. It's just that I have preferences and the preferences don't involve me telling you what I want. And then now I get hit with ads for X, Y, and Z as I scroll the Internet. People often complain about how creepy it is that you're almost just thinking about something and then it shows up in your Amazon cart kind of thing, you know, or Google or whatever.

1:36:46And like, but you're doing that. You're giving them that power over you. And so to some degree, and it's not happened all at once, but I'm taking responsibility for the fact that that's been my choice because it was the easy way to go. Because they were providing this ecosystem. I didn't have to do much. It just happened. All I had to do was let them was say yes every time they send the updated terms and conditions. And they would take my data and do whatever they wanted. And there they are. And I've kind of gotten to that point where I'm done with that. And to some degree and turning around. Just give me an idea, Chris.

1:37:24You know, somebody should. I don't know if this is actually a good thing or not, but like AI is great at scanning an entire document, like in terms of conditions. There was a documentary, I think, on Netflix about this, that if you tried to read all the terms and conditions you would agree to in modern society, you would spend more than your entire life just reading terms and conditions. So to keep up with the updates and or literally scrolling them to say, yes, I accept is not it's not possible. It's not realistic of a request from the people. So we're agreeing to a lot of things just out of the nature that we don't have the time to do it.

1:38:02And you're not going to, if you're trying to get something done and now you have to do through terms and conditions to get something done. They do it at that moment because they have you, they know you have to get something done. And what are you going to do? Go, well, I had to do the thing. It was really important, but now I can't do it because I'm not going to do terms and conditions. Bricked. You're bricked now. Yeah. So I'm, I'm starting to invent my own world. Or as the kids say, cooked, you're cooked. Yeah. I'm starting to invent my own world where I, I, I'm not bound in that little prison, if you will.

1:38:32Well, that was cool. Thanks for deep diving on the swarm, not a swarm, Rust, all the things. Make sure, if you don't mind, some of the things that you can link us to in the show notes. I'm sure you got lots of links. Just spam us with all your links. We'll put them in the show notes for everybody. Fantastic. Thanks for having me in, guys. It's been great catching up with you and a fun conversation. Tons of fun. Go listen to Practical AI. PracticalAI.fm. If you want more, Chris, that's where you find it. Thank you, Jared. I'm so glad you did that because we would love for people to join the conversation.

1:39:05And we all it's one big happy family, as people can see here. And that I love ChangeLog. And I hope some of the ChangeLog people who haven't given us a shot will give us a shot and join our conversation. There you go. PracticalAI.fm. That's it. Go there and be square, as they would say in the 80s or 90s, which is cool now. It is cool now. Yeah, the 80s and 90s are cool again. Good stuff, Chris. Bye, friends. Bye, Chris. Bye, friends. Thanks, guys. We absolutely love chatting with Chris. He's so on point, he's so positive, and he's so particular about what is, and more importantly, what is not a swarm.

1:39:44I still love the idea of a list of things that makes you not a swarm, red in the style of Jeff Foxworthy's You Might Be a Redneck routine. Let me try a few for you. If you exhibit highly uncoordinated emergent behavior, you're not a swarm. If your human operators slip and fall into the loop, you're not a swarm. And if your C3 stands for cookies, crayons, and cartoons, you are not a swarm. Okay, I'm sure I could think of more, but I should stop while I'm behind. Thanks once again to our partners at Fly.io and to our sponsors of this episode, TigerData.com, Namespace.so, AugmentCode.com, and NordLayer.com slash TheChangelog.

1:40:24Thanks also to Breakmaster cylinder for these dope beats next week on the pod news on monday bill buehler gives us insider info all about wikipedia on wednesday and our old friend losh vickman couldn't make it for the pound to find champs game but he can make it for changelogging friends on friday have yourself a great weekend a good word makes the heart glad and let's talk again real soon

1:41:07Game on!