Engineering Community With Social Roboticist Heather Knight
How one high-profile robot maker thinks about using bots to bring people together.
We’re all pretty familiar with the benefits of a robot when it comes to, say, vacuuming our floors. But what if a robot companion could transform our social lives? If you brought a robot to a party, it could remember the names of everyone you meet, serve as the catalyst to striking up conversations, and even smooth any conversational lulls with a perfectly programmed sense of comedic timing.
This type of robot-human collaboration is just one example of the interesting questions Dr. Heather Knight asks and answers as a social roboticist. Put plainly: She works on building robots that excel at human interaction and are social and charismatic. She’s currently the Robotic Artist in Residence, Adecco, at Google X, doing, well, things she’s not at liberty to disclose. This fall she’ll head to Oregon State University to direct the new research lab CHARISMA (an acronym of Collaborative Humans and Robots: Interaction, Sociability, Machine Learning, and Art).
Since appearing in a 2010 TED talk with a robotic standup comedian, Knight’s become a familiar presence on the innovation circuit. Later this month, she’ll appear on the Cannes Lions Innovation festival stage with her sidekick Ginger the Robot to discuss whether data can help make people laugh and what that means for brands and agencies. She’s also programming her sixth annual Robot Film Festival this December in Los Angeles. Previously, while getting her PhD at Carnegie Mellon, she created Marilyn Monrobot, a theater company where she performs live comedy with, you guessed it, robots. Oh, and during her days at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she helped create the can’t-look-away Rube Goldberg machine in OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” music video (56 million views and counting).
Knight operates on two tracks. “The endpoint of my research is research,” she says, “and the endpoint of Marilyn Monrobot is entertainment.” Acting doesn’t come naturally to her, so she prefers her robot co-stars do the bulk of the acting — “the Superman to my Clark Kent,” she says.
Yet for all of Knight’s interplay with entertainment, the prevalence of robots in pop culture may actually make the realities of her job a bit harder to explain. People often default to thinking robots are a lot more capable than they actually are, she says. But I saw a robot do it in a movie! Yeah, she says, but to make them do that in real life? That’s hard. Really hard. And yet that’s what she’s working toward: technology that’s more embedded in how we interact with each other, technology that brings people together and improves communication. We chatted with Knight about how she tackles her biggest questions, the future of social robots, and why “sustained boring work” is actually the only real way to get ahead.
Collaboration Is Key
I’m one of those people who always has 20 more ideas than is humanly possible to do. So when you have a lot of ideas, you can find things that people are excited about and meet them in the middle. When you task people with projects, they spin it out and add their own ideas, and it’s very inspiring. One of the reasons I like research is because we aren’t just trying to figure out how to make a product work, we’re figuring out the future of this technology.
Robots Will Add, Not Replace, Skills
One of the hot topics is how we can make more collaborative robots. Autonomous cars fall into this idea, where you need a person and a machine to work together. I think the potential there is huge. This paradigm of thinking isn’t necessarily about how to make robots do what people can already do — that’s sort of old-fashioned — but how to build a collaborative robot.
The Magical Power of Robot Seals
If we could make technology more social, we could use it to actually connect people. One example is the robot seal used for almost a decade in nursing homes in Japan. When it first came out there were studies about how people felt while using it. The conclusion was that the robot gave people an excuse to start talking to each other, because it reminded them of their child, or an old pet. It became this keystone for people to connect with each other.
Stealing From Theater
I started out with interactive art and making things, and one of my first projects was a robot flower garden. I got hooked on seeing people who knew nothing about robots discover them. Installations are really short experiences, but theater looks at relationships over time, and that’s more similar to what it would be like if you had a robot in an assisted living facility or if they were delivering something to an office.
Writing + Programming = ❤
You do both by yourself most of the time. It’s a very intimate thing, you and your head and your ideas. When I was in high school I really wanted to go to Princeton because the school was equally good at humanities and engineering, and I wanted to study literature and engineering but couldn’t decide which one. Of course I ended up studying engineering at MIT, but what they didn’t tell you when you get into academia is that writing is the way you communicate, period.
The Sustained Boring Work
One thing I learned in my PhD program is that progress is not about any one day. It’s really important to think in a weeklong or a monthlong scale when you’re doing creative endeavors. It’s like nutrition. Even if you have two ice creams in one day, that doesn’t mean you’re going to have high cholesterol. It’s about trying to be kind to yourself and finding time. It’s great to try and do your work every day, but ultimately, as long as at the end of the week or the end of the month the work is happening, then you’re going to have progress. Little commitments matter. Everyone can pull an all-nighter as an undergrad, but if you want to succeed in life, you have to figure out how to not just do all-nighters, but to do the sustained boring work every day or every week. That’s how the turtle beats the hare.
Choose Your Ends
I used to tell myself this story that you had to be really nervous or have a negative experience to truly achieve. I was in school for 11 years after high school and it’s really exciting because you’re working towards your next badge, but something that’s different about general research or general writing is you have to choose what your ends are. No outside entity is going to do that for you. You have to choose those goals and celebrate those successes and not obsess over failures in a single day.
Lessons from Stephen King
In his book On Writing, Stephen King talks about putting up this huge nail next to his bed when he was in middle school. He submitted his first story and when he got his first rejection slip — it was still on paper back then — he was so proud that he put in on the nail. By the time he finished high school, the nail was full. For him, that was success. He was aiming for collecting the rejections. As long as you’re also making an effort along the way, and developing that kind of discipline and practice, then it’s not about celebrating your failures, it’s about celebrating the audacity to try.
On Facing Rejection
A PhD itself is a real marathon experience. You have this 200-page thesis, this big hunk of paper that seems like it will never end. Even the night before my defense of it last August, I said to myself, “Has anyone ever quit their PhD the night before their thesis defense?” Up until the last day, I didn’t believe I could do it. There was one professor at Princeton who published a resume of all his failures. Everyone who’s ever done anything exciting has a list like that.
Closing the Door
I don’t think the creative who is doing work that is coming from themselves can survive without having a room of their own. There needs to be a way of having your own space. A big part of my job is mentorship and I definitely need to be available to people. But to have 90 minutes or two hours where I can close my door, that lets that flame burn and ensures I’m doing that hard work. It’s good to have that one to two hours of consistency every day. I think that’s all you need.
