INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Epstein is the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard and MIT, and the author of the New York Times bestselling book Good Without God
More posts by this contributorIn June, TechCrunch Ethicist in Residence Greg M
Epstein attended EmTech Next, a conference organized by the MIT Technology Review
it means to work in technology ethically, within a capitalist system and market economy.Accompanying the story for Extra Crunch are a series
of in-depth interviews Greg conducted around the conference, with scholars, journalists, founders and attendees.Below, Greg speaks to two
founders of innovative startups whose work provoked much discussion at the EmTech Next conference
Moxi, the robot assistant created by Andrea Thomasz of Diligent Robotics and her team, was a constant presence in the Media Lab reception
hall immediately outside the auditorium in which all the main talks took place
intense discussion throughout the conference and beyond.Andrea Thomaz is the Co-Founder and CEO of Diligent Robotics
Image via MIT Technology ReviewCould you give a sketch of your background?Andrea Thomaz: I was always doing math and science, and did
electrical engineering as an Undergrad at UT Austin
Then I came to MIT to do my PhD
I went to grad school interested in doing AI and was starting to get interested in this new machine learning that people were starting to
that people want to be around and are also useful.Say more about your journey at the Media Lab?My statement of purpose for the Media Lab, in
1999, was that I thought that computers that were smarter would be easier to use
I thought AI was the solution to HCI [Human-computer Interaction]
Cynthia finished her PhD with Rod Brooks and started at the Media Lab
Patty Maes has kind of reinvented her group since those days and is doing fluid interfaces; I always really appreciate the kind of things
I had twelve years in academia in between those
I finished my PhD, went and I was a professor at Georgia Tech in computing, teaching AI and robotics and I had a robotics lab there.Then I
got recruited away to UT Austin in electrical and computer engineering
Again, teaching AI and having a robotics lab
Then at the end of 2017, I had a PhD student who was graduating and also interested in commercialization, my Co-Founder and CTO Vivian
necessarily going to be replaced by a robot like Moxi
But then the nurse finishes making an assessment [and] has to run and fetch things
the clinical workflow with some automation and increase the amount of time that nurses or physicians are spending with patients.So your
robots, as you said before, do need human supervision
Will they always?We are working on autonomy
We do want the robots to be doing things autonomously in the environment
or supervision from a teammate.That seems different than what you could call Ghost Work.Right
In most service robots being deployed today, there is this remote supervisor that is either logged in and checking in on the robots, or at
People are monitoring and keeping track of robots in the middle of the night
Certainly that may be part of how we deploy our robots as well
face-to-face interaction that the robot has with some of its coworkers.Since you could potentially envision a scenario in which your robots
are monitored from off-site, in a kind of Ghost Work setting, what concerns do you have about the ways in which that work can be kind of
anonymized and undercompensated?Currently we are really interested in our own engineering staff having high-touch customer interaction that
If we had a robot in the field and it was phoning home about some problem that was happening, at our early stage of the company, that is
customer interactions and all of the information we can get from robots in the field are such valuable pieces of information.But how are you
everywhere? Your CTO is not going to take all those calls
How could you do this in a way that could make your company very successful, but also handle these responsibilities ethically?
