Catie Cuan's dad was in the hospital, surrounded by machines that were supposed to help him. Instead they made him feel alienated and afraid. Catie, a dancer-turned-roboticist, realized it's not enough for a machine to do its job — it has to be relatable, too. Today she's the founder and CEO of ART Lab, focused on what she calls the "interaction gap" between what a robot can do and how it makes us feel.
Catie danced at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and ran her own dance company before getting her PhD at Stanford and becoming an artist-in-residence at Google X, where she worked on the Everyday Robots moonshot — including teaching office robots that it's rude to cut between two people having a conversation. Now ART Lab is building a home robot that won't look anything like a robot, plus a new kind of AI model that conditions success on how the human in the room responds, not just whether the task got done.
Listen for the case against humanoids, why the future of AI shouldn't live inside your phone, and a sneak peek at what our life with robots might look like.
Chapters:
- (02:11) - “There will be billions of robots” – from dishwashers to elder care
- (04:45) - Why robots can be capable and still feel unsettling
- (08:00) - How robots could read your reactions and respond in real time
- (11:45) - What shape should robots take?
- (15:30) - The case against humanoids
- (19:00) - A nine foot robot hand and the wild future robot design could take
- (23:15) - What it's like to dance with robots
- (28:30) - “The robot just died” – when a live failure changed the whole performance
- (32:45) - Friendship loneliness and home robots (and why builders need to be clear about the future they are creating)
- (37:11) - Why the home may become robotics’ biggest use case (and what ART Lab is building)
- (40:06) - Robot tutors, homework help, and why teachers still matter most
- (43:51) - “We have a tremendous amount of agency” – choosing the future we build now
- (46:16) - Why inequality and access worry Catie most (and who gets left behind)
- (48:56) - Why builders need to get outside their own bubble
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