- How Stuff Works now is in Austin, Texas
for South by Southwest 2016,
and there are a ton of
things going on here.
There are films, there's
music, and there's interactive.
That's all the technology
stuff which is why I'm here.
(upbeat music)
One of the biggest
topics going on right now
is all about robots and AI.
They've got ranches full of robots.
They have kinetic sculptures of robots.
And I got to go see a panel called
One Robot Doesn't Fit All.
This panel had really
interesting conversation
about how robots can be
really good at specific tasks.
The problem comes in
when you try and design
a general-purpose robot
to do lots of stuff.
The more things you add,
the less well it can do those things.
More interesting than that was the idea
of human-robot interaction.
How can we design robots
to interact with people,
and how can we make
sure those interactions
are meaningful and don't
get in the way of things?
One really good example of
robot-human interactions
that can go wrong was
given by Leila Takayama.
Leila was talking about how
she used to work in an office
where robots would try
and learn how to maneuver
in indoor envirionments.
And sometimes they could get stuck.
They might stare at a doorway and
try to figure out how the door works.
While we humans can quickly
grasp how doors work
based on one experience,
robots aren't really good at doing that.
She said the real problem
was, she never knew
that's what the robots were doing.
They were just cluttering up the hallway.
What if you designed robots
that actually indicated
what they were doing, so
you didn't interrupt them?
For example, you teach this robot that
whenever it's about to open a door,
or it's trying to figure something out,
it scratches its head?
These are social cues that
we humans know automatically
but robots don't.
So you have to program that in so that
we humans know what the robots are up to.
In fact, Wendy Ju said this
is incredibly important.
If you do not have the robot
indicate what it's doing,
it might be doing something sneaky.
That means we humans may not trust robots.
Now guys, this is just
one example of the sort of
think-tank stuff going on here at
South by Southwest Interactive.
I'm going to check out a lot more of it,
so make sure you keep coming back to
now.howstuffworks.com to learn about
all the coolest stuff coming
into the future, right now.
