[MUSIC PLAYING]
LAURENCE MORONEY: James,
it's a real pleasure
to have you on the show.
Thanks for coming.
JAMES MCLURKIN: It's
wonderful to be here.
LAURENCE MORONEY:
Now a lot of us
know you as the maker guy,
right, with the AIY Project.
But can you just tell
us about yourself?
What is it that you
do here at Google?
JAMES MCLURKIN:
So my primary job
is hardware engineer on AIY.
But that's not my
top secret mission.
So my top secret
mission really is
to build things that
build engineers.
I'm trying to get the coolest
of Google technology, which
is artificial
intelligence-- get that out
so that makers and
students and everybody can
use that in their own projects.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And
one of your first things
you've done with it
is this thing, right?
JAMES MCLURKIN: Yes.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And
this is the before,
and this is the after.
JAMES MCLURKIN: Right.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So can
you show us how it works?
JAMES MCLURKIN: Sure.
How tall is the Space Needle?
Oh, that's so trite.
AI: The Space Needle
is 605 feet tall.
JAMES MCLURKIN: Let's
try some other ones.
What is Union Pacific 844?
AI: According to Wikipedia,
Union Pacific 844
is a 484 Northern
type steam locomotive
built by the American Locomotive
Company in December, 1944,
for the Union Pacific Railroad.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice.
So I know you like
trains, right?
JAMES MCLURKIN: I do.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Wasn't
there a little thing
as you were designing this that
you designed it for trains?
JAMES MCLURKIN: So we
got our prototypes back,
and as we were getting
to our production,
we never had quite enough time
to get enough prototypes to
built. So we were having a
demo, and I cleared the week,
and I was like,
I've got to build
some stuff with this thing.
We can't have
people dogfooding it
without me testing it myself.
So I went throughout
my house trying
to figure out what to control,
and I saw my trains there.
Well, let's go drive the trains.
And I went to go connect
the trains to it,
and I had to cut the
circuit board up in order
to drive the trains.
And I thought,
this will never do.
This will never do.
So I stopped literally
at that instant,
went back and
changed the design,
changed the circuit
board design so it would
be easier to control trains.
LAURENCE MORONEY:
Right, so a ship
stopper on the
original design was it
didn't work with your
train set, so you got
it to work with your train set.
I think we have a video of that.
Should we take a look?
JAMES MCLURKIN: Train, fast.
Motors, or lights, or
servos, or anything
else that you can control
with no electrical signal.
It literally is
just that simple.
If you can plug wires
into a circuit board,
then you can connect a
motor to the voice kit.
Train, stop.
LAURENCE MORONEY:
Now that looks cool.
Do you have a lot of trains?
JAMES MCLURKIN: I do.
So the one you saw in the
video, the gray diesel engine,
that's an old SP model, ST9.
And then my pride and joy,
which is that UP844 model which
showed up at the end.
And there's a bunch of others.
I live in Seattle, and
there's a famous train
that goes from Seattle to
Chicago, the Empire Builder.
And the scale that I
model in is N scale.
So that's one to 160.
And that train, I
have it on my wall.
It is 6 and 1/2 feet long.
So I had to go build a
special wall display unit
just to put this
train on the wall.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice.
And then you get to control
the trains [INAUDIBLE]
this project, which
is pretty cool.
Now I know we released
a bunch of these,
and they kind of sold out
really quickly, right?
JAMES MCLURKIN: They did.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And you
had a magazine in the UK,
I think that was.
JAMES MCLURKIN: So
our launch partner
was Raspberry Pi Foundation.
And they have a
magazine called MagPi,
which is all about their
Raspberry Pi single board
computer.
So the Raspberry Pi, it's
a computer about this big.
And the real breakthrough
isn't the size.
We're used to small
computers now.
It's the cost.
It's a $35 computer.
You plug in your
keyboard and your monitor
and you're ready to go.
So it has really
revolutionized the low end
and the educational
market for computing.
So it was an obvious
partner for us.
It had enough compute to
do what we wanted to do.
It is the most popular
single board computer.
Easy, easy thing.
LAURENCE MORONEY:
They're super cool.
JAMES MCLURKIN: Yeah, they are.
And we got along famously.
The cultures of Raspberry
Pi, what they're
trying to do with
education outreach,
what we're trying to do
with machine intelligence,
basically to democratize
it, to commodify it,
to make it as simple as putting
a Lego brick, or a servo,
or a motor, you just take your
machine intelligence block
and you put it
onto your project,
and you're ready to go.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now when
you first told me about this,
I said, I want to put this to
the test as an education thing.
So I knew some high school
kids, and some of these
were part of a robotics club.
So we gave them
a bunch of these,
and we gave them
some Raspberry Pis.
And we gave them five days to
see what they would do with it.
Should we take a look?
JAMES MCLURKIN:
Let's take a look.
Cool.
SPEAKER 2: We can
[INAUDIBLE] to turn left.
Turn left.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice.
SPEAKER 2: Stop.
SPEAKER 3: Pawn to D5.
AI: [INAUDIBLE] takes D5.
Your move.
SPEAKER 3: Yeah,
and it just takes.
And then you go on.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Shop for
a New York Mets jersey.
SPEAKER 4: Candies.
SPEAKER 1: Giving
you two candies.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So
we get plural as well.
Nice.
And red is my favorite, so I'm
glad I got a couple of reds.
Pretty cool stuff, right?
JAMES MCLURKIN:
That was awesome.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Did any
of them jump out at you?
JAMES MCLURKIN: Well, so the
three favorites, [INAUDIBLE],,
are the walking robot.
LAURENCE MORONEY:
[INAUDIBLE] cool.
JAMES MCLURKIN: I used to
be a robotics professor,
so anything that
gets up and moves
around is near and
dear to my heart.
I also really liked
the shopping example,
because that was a
pure software make.
And I don't want people
to think that makes
have to be blocks and screws
and soldering and stuff.
Making with software
is just as important.
And connecting things
together with software
is critical, because that's
how the whole world works.
But obviously, if you put
Lego and candy together,
what could be better than that?
LAURENCE MORONEY:
Exactly, life is good.
JAMES MCLURKIN: And
the other thing there
is that there is sophistication
and subtlety there.
But it has the look that,
well, anyone can do this.
The robot's got all these
wires and crazy stuff.
The software, all
the magic is hidden,
and you can't see all
the delicacy there.
But the Lego stuff, yeah.
Maybe I could do that.
Now of course it's
never that simple,
and that's what you'll
learn when you go to build.
But then when you get
working, the feeling
of accomplishment
and joy-- look,
I built a little Lego thing.
And you take it.
Put it on yourself.
Any time you want some
candy, give me candy.
LAURENCE MORONEY:
When she first told me
she was going to build
a candy dispenser,
I thought she was buying an
off-the-shelf candy dispenser
and just pinning it and
then controlling that.
And I thought, OK.
It's kind of cool.
It's kind of good.
High school kids do that.
And then she shows up with
the one that she made herself.
It was like jaw on the
floor kind of thing.
JAMES MCLURKIN: So much better.
LAURENCE MORONEY:
And it's just amazing
what a bunch of kids, when
we gave them five days,
were able to do.
And it was like when we first
gave them this, it was like--
you were there.
We probably have
some footage of it.
They were so quiet.
They were a little intimidated.
And then they just
went away and they just
started building
these amazing things.
JAMES MCLURKIN: That's
the magic right there,
to have this machine
intelligence.
In these projects,
it was kind of
like a connector
between some input
that they've got in the
physical world and some output
that they've got in
the physical world.
And to put that
machine intelligence
right in the middle is
exactly what we want to do,
because right now,
machine intelligence,
it really is everywhere, but
it's a very enterprise-y,
big server, back end thing.
And that's just not
how it needs to be.
And I don't even think
that's how it should be.
I think that the
world would be better
when more people are building
more things that are smarter.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Absolutely.
And it was something
that you said right
at the beginning of
when we were talking.
It was like, you
build engineers.
JAMES MCLURKIN: Well,
so I used to actually
be directly in the
engineer creation business.
I used to be a professor.
And I didn't get to play
with any of the cool toys
as a professor.
So my job was to live
in a lab with cool toys,
and have my students build
stuff, do science, write
papers.
But the engineering
supported the science.
But what I always
kept coming back to
was that what I really
am enjoying doing
is building engineers.
And I got distracted by
outreach programs, and things
in museums, and other
stuff that wasn't along
the straight and narrow
path of academia.
And eventually I decided that
if I'm going to want to do this,
I need better toys, basically.
I need a bigger toy box.
LAURENCE MORONEY: We
all need better toys.
JAMES MCLURKIN: So
the path to Google
and then the serendipitous
path of this project
was just fantastic.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I
think with the experience
that we're just talking
about, just getting this box
and open it up, and we see
it's a bunch of cardboard
components, and circuit
boards, and a button.
Everybody loves
the button, right?
JAMES MCLURKIN: Yeah,
the button's great.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I like to just
take it out and play with it.
JAMES MCLURKIN: We had to
fight so hard for that button.
So we couldn't find it.
The vendor wasn't there.
It was late.
We couldn't figure
out how to pay them.
It was just so much
problem to get that button.
But it's such a wonderful--
I'm shamelessly biased
about the button.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah, I think
everybody likes the button.
As soon as you put it on the
desk, the first thing is people
reach over and press the button.
JAMES MCLURKIN: So we have a
partnership with ITP at NYU.
And that's a design studio.
Their slogan is, I do believe,
the art of the newly possible.
So what's at the cutting
edge of technology
that they can get
their hands on,
and then what does that mean
from a design point of view,
and a user experience
point of view,
and a human interaction
point of view.
So we showed up to talk to
them about, here's our kits.
Do you want to use them
in your summer class?
Yes, we love it.
And the first thing they said
was, look at this button.
And they started
pushing on the button.
Well this button has meaning.
And they used a bunch of--
I'm an engineer.
So they're using a bunch of
very serious, UI, artsy words
that describe that
immediacy of it,
the human interaction, and
things I didn't understand.
But there is theory
about you see this
and you want to push it.
So that desire to
do it, now you can
use that to get the
thing to do something.
And it pulls the
thing into the world.
Basically, they like
the buttons, too.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah.
I just love it.
I push it and say
candy, and I got candy.
JAMES MCLURKIN: You see?
LAURENCE MORONEY: It
was really, really cool.
So back on the theme
of building engineers.
So our experience was that
it worked really, really
well with that experiment.
But what if people want
to do this for themselves?
Where would they get started?
How can they get going
in building one of these
by themselves?
JAMES MCLURKIN: So
we're working on making
it just as easy as possible.
We are working to move these
things into retail chains.
So the first batch, we
freely admit we totally
underestimated the popularity.
LAURENCE MORONEY: They even
ended up on EBay right?
JAMES MCLURKIN: They
ended up on EBay.
The kit in the States, I
want to say it was $14.95.
It's an imported magazine.
In the UK, I think
it was seven pounds.
On eBay, $120 for this thing.
So Adam Smith has spoken, and
the solution there is just
to crank up the factories.
And we're during a second run.
So soon, hopefully by
the time you see this,
there will be enough
to have everyone.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So we
have a website where people
can go to find it,
and open source code,
and all that kind of goodness.
JAMES MCLURKIN: The website, the
documentation, the maker guide,
that sign-up sheet
for the waiting list,
it's all available
on the website.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So it's
AIY Projects with Google.com?
JAMES MCLURKIN: There you go.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Thank
you so much, James.
That was awesome.
JAMES MCLURKIN: It's
been great being here.
LAURENCE MORONEY:
And if you want
to learn more about
the AIY Project, please
take a look at the website.
We've linked it in
the description below.
If you've any questions
for me or if you've
any questions for James,
just please also leave them
in the comments below.
Thank you so much, James.
JAMES MCLURKIN: Oh, it's
been a great time being here.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And go
build something great, right?
JAMES MCLURKIN: Build
something awesome.
