Rise Of The Living Robots | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by expressvpn [Music] hey have you ever been sitting on the toilet and you're evacuating your bowels and thought to yourself is this all there is is life just an endless series of putting food in one hole and shooting it out the other hole i mean is this all there is hello darkness my old friend you ever had to so bad i gave you an existential crisis no just me i mean it's kind of weird right i mean we all got to get energy from somewhere plants get it from the sun your computer gets it from the wall but we take organic matter crunch it up with our face bones and then shove it down a tube we're basically a worm that grew a human around itself a human whose job it is to keep that worm from getting shoved down something else's tube hashtag protect the tube so yeah weird when you think about it but this this works i mean we've made so much progress in terms of robotics and artificial intelligence it's kind of crazy how far we've come in such a short amount of time in fact mkbhd actually did a video recently with the boston dynamics spot robot dog and they talked about how they showed off that it could work for 90 minutes on a charge it can easily walk upstairs and even has this two-legged hop capability i mean this is super impressive yeah humans can do this and we can go for days without refueling we can refuel while moving we don't have to be plugged into a wall somewhere so it may be the case that robots of the future will look a lot less like this and a lot more like this [Music] robot's been part of our culture for decades and they take all kinds of forms mechanical arms for manufacturing giant hockey pucks that can clean our floors and sci-fi characters that can sell toys and inhumanity now all these robots are made out of metal and plastic that's kind of what you think of when you think of robots you know metal bodies computer brains but that is not how the first robots were conceived the first use of the term robot comes from a play in 1920 from the czech writer karel chapek and it was called r-u-r rossum's universal robots in the play he described robots as being made out of biological parts at a factory they were like made out of skin and in internal organs more like a mass-produced frankenstein's monster i imagine something like a slaughterhouse mixed with an assembly line which yikes the word robot comes from the czech word for surf which itself comes from a word for slave and that's basically what these robots were the play was an allegory of what was happening to the worker class during the industrial age and in the play the robots rise up and destroy humanity so that trope got locked in early seven years later humanoid robots dominated fritz lang's metropolis which if you haven't seen metropolis you definitely need to find a way to see it it is not only a great groundbreaking movie that set the tone of sci-fi for years to come but it's also just an art deco masterpiece in this movie the robots were metal but they looked human and they strove to take full human form so that they could eventually um rise up and destroy humanity just leaning on that button but the humanoid robot thing has always been more of a sci-fi convention than a practical reality um automatons go back for hundreds of years but they were always more of a an entertainment value thing one of the earliest ones was from no other than leonardo da vinci and it was called the mechanical night it dates back to 1495. it worked on a series of gears and pulleys and was able to stand up and sit down raise its visor do a handful of other human-like things which by the way how did he avoid getting burned at the stake in actual practice today robots take all kinds of forms they build our cars and help doctors to perform surgery they're actually a much bigger part of our lives than we really imagine robots are being used to disinfect hospitals in the midst of a pandemic they're scanning shells and supermarkets and sorting recyclables so human workers can maintain social distancing industrial robots are extremely common with over two and a half million working in factories around the world most of them making automobiles and other things like that construction robots are even less human-like they range from giant 3d printers to intelligent cranes for stacking masonry blocks it's actually a race in the construction industry to create a robot that can build a home entirely by itself meanwhile mall security robots seem to be pushing us ever closer to a sci-fi dystopia i don't know who thought that these dalek wannabes would make people want to spend money although some of them seem to actually get that they're part of the problem and are doing something about it and then there's the nightmare robot i mean atlas from boston dynamics i mentioned spot earlier spot was someone's best friend that would be atlas the somewhat human-like bipedal robot that in no way will eventually enact his vengeance on the people who kept trying to knock him over there are videos online that show atlas like shooting guns and kicking people those are cgi it's not real it's actually built for search and rescue missions there are however actually robotic war machines that are designed to destroy our tubes but they don't look like humans not yet anyway they look like flying drones and miniature tanks one of which the russians claim to have perfected but whether it's building cars or scanning groceries or you know killing people robots are highly specialized they're designed to do one thing and one thing really well although there are some generalized robots that can handle a multitude of tasks that are coming along but the whole point of these robots is to do things that we can't do you know repetitive actions heavy lifting going into dangerous places these require sturdiness and toughness but there is a line of thought that says that maybe going the other direction is a smart way to go rigid and inflexible robots break down over time they can't self-repair they can't adapt to different environments this is where our tube-based machines have the upper hand humans as i pointed out before can do amazing things take the ammo for instance these are female pearl divers from japan they died to the floor of the ocean up to 150 times a day hold their breath for up to two minutes and swim vigorously while on the hunt for pearls although to be fair robots have shown the ability to dive as well if you look into the animal world especially the microbial world you'll find an endless number of adaptations that allow these living machines to survive in every environment imaginable like the lazarus microbe that can actually repair its own dna after receiving radiation that would kill a human three thousand times over there's a reason why they're called extremophiles like dr malcolm says life finds a way so it should be no surprise that roboticists are looking at life as inspiration for an entirely new kind of robots ones that don't rely on servos and motors but actually mimic the mechanics of life itself enter the soft robots one of the most basic examples are the soft robot tentacles that are being developed in labs all around the world inspired by octopus arms these use flexible materials that can be curled or shortened to grasp objects this gives it the ability to grasp any shape so long as the tentacle can wrap around the perimeter harvard built one arm with vacuum-based biometric suckers that pull air to help the tentacle grip octopuses are a popular inspiration in soft robotics and japanese porn the world's first completely soft robot according to its makers anyway is the octobot it was designed at harvard and it doesn't really do much but the way it does it is pretty cool octobots are small octopus-shaped robots molded from silicon into which two kinds of ink are added by a 3d printer one ink is a placeholder as the octobot turns from gel to solid the ink evaporates leaving hollow tubules the other rink is made of platinum to get the robot to move the operators pump in hydrogen peroxide which turns to gas when it hits the platinum the gas expands inside the tentacles causing them to move and that movement is directed by a soft printed circuit this way the circuit times out the movement of the arms and the robot does its weird robot octopus thing currently octobota is just a proof of concept it just kind of shows the potential and the techniques involved in soft robotics and one of the most common techniques is using pressure to control a soft component octabots use a type of pneumatic pressure so a pressure from air or gas to do its work and real life applications sort of mimic this one of them that's the best example of it is called the vine bot this was developed by stanford university and it's basically a smart version of that tube man that you see at the car dealerships by pumping in air or a combination of air and fluid users can extend a soft tube that snakes through tight spaces tubes this proved especially useful for an archaeologist named john rick who is studying pre-incan religious site shaving de in peru not to be confused with john wick who studies double taps anyway the archaeologist john rick was researching this site but tight spaces and unstable soil made it too dangerous to dig plus the artifacts he was trying to dig up were very old and fragile so how to get it something that's dangerous for humans to get to without destroying these artifacts soft robots to the rescue they used a vine bud equipped with a camera to explore ancient tunnels under the site revealing scenes that no human eye had witnessed for something like 3000 years no word if any crystal skulls were found but still pretty cool but of course one of the best use cases for soft robots comes in the fields of surgery because what better to maintain our tubes than tubes surgical robots been around for a long time and they usually contain a combination of soft and rigid components surgeons usually have to strike a balance rigid components can't really maneuver around organs inside the body flexible components can but they can be harder to track and usually the flexible bits are usually just at the end of the scope now an ideal scope would allow control throughout its entire length giving the surgeons the ability to control it however they want so roboticists are experimenting with several different types of actuators to make this happen there's cable actuators that are in development also pneumatic actuators that work on pressure that are being developed as well then there are shape memory actuators that deform the material with heat so you apply heat to one side it causes it to bend that way you cool it it causes it to bend back now there's a few different materials that make this possible there's a nickel titanium alloy that reacts with the heat and that way there's also a glassy polymer that can react to electrical current and bend and flex in the way that you want it to this kind of technology can also be helpful in space applications researchers langley have been looking at using soft robots on the moon and on mars missions so one major advantage of soft robots for nasa include durability because they can be shaped and flattened and squeeze in even punctured and not lose functionality and soft robots are smaller and lighter and easier to transport some of the applications include habitat assembly several different soft robots could work together to build temporary shelters and as langley's jim neland points out soft robots are a lot safer to be around than hard components i mean if you're out there on the surface of the moon the last thing you want is for a hard crane to come around and smash you in the visor and last but not least future spacesuits could include soft robotics for longer evas so now we've gone from soft robots emulating muscle tissue to muscle tissue being supported by soft robots experimental roboticists have found ways of emulating living tissue by using silicon ink and even metal compounds but of course nothing simulates life better than life itself recently scientists at the university of vermont have created an actual robot out of living cells they did it by harvesting stem cells from a species of frog let them incubate and then assemble them together in certain configurations the result is a xenobot named after the species of frog that was taken from xenopus lapis also known as the african clawed frog which seems really shocked that its cells are being used in this way xenopus actually means strange foot in greek and that makes sense because when i see this frog the first thing that stands out is its foot it's it's foot that's weird about this frog anyway following that same naming convention xenobots would mean strange but which makes sense because yeah now the magic of stem cells is that they can be differentiated into all kinds of other cells so if you have a columbus stem cells you can turn some of them into skin cells heart cells muscle cells whatever you want and that's what they did they turn some of the cells into skin cells turn some of them into heart cells and as those heart cells contract as heart cells do you can arrange them in certain configurations to make them do work they then ran some evolutionary computer algorithms around this come up with dozens of different uh configurations for these cells then they ran that through some physics simulations and out of that they came up with a handful and they brought those to life literally now the authors of this paper went to great lengths to show that the work that was being done by these bots were being done on purpose it wasn't just you know randomness that was occurring and in fact they found that you could combine them in different ways and actually program them to do specific jobs that you want them to do for example when placed in a shared environment some of these will lock together and spin in circles until eventually they'll break apart and do their own things but you can imagine the possibilities with that where you could get these little almost living drills into people's blood streams and they can clear out blockages that way another thing they can be programmed to do is to sort of corral debris into heaps so you could imagine putting some of that on an infected wound to clean that out or to clear micro plastics out of water there are donut shaped xenobots that can be loaded up with a drug and delivered directly to the cells that they need to be applied to scientists are just starting to imagine the possibilities now one more cool thing about xenobots is they spontaneously self-repair when they've been damaged and they live for a really long time this species of frog for example it lives 15 years and when they do die xenobots decompose they're just heart and skin cells after all so they just become food for microbes like the rest of us just food for microbes now by the way some scientists are going even smaller using actual dna to build nanobots for drug delivery and cell maintenance my buddy emmett short actually did a video specifically on that that's sort of correlating with this video you should go check that out what's up answer peeps is that what he calls yet i already screwed this up okay did you know your dna can be turned into nano machines and reprogrammed to repair your dna scientists are working on that right now i got a video on it on my channel and joe has a nice little cameo in there as well so when you're done here come check that out give him a subscription while you're at it he's he's big into the whole comedy science thing just like i am but ultimately living robots need to be able to power themselves by consuming fuel and there are some steps in that direction the cleverly named robot eater which stands for energetically autonomous tactical robot it's it's not a soft robot but it does consume soft things it's basically an electric backhoe that collects and burns biomass for fuel which has led to a lot of jokes about how its favorite food is going to be corpses because as every sci-fi film has told you they will rise up against us now the company that made eater promised that humans wouldn't be on the menu the name of the company by the way is robotic technologies so i guess they used up all their clever naming skills on eater a team at the bristol research laboratory in england have come up with a few biomass eating robots one of them is called the slug bot which was designed to remove pests from your garden that same team later built the ecobot one in the ecobot 2. ecobot 1 just kind of ran on sugar water ecobot 2 ran on quote a flora of microorganisms originating from sludge and fed with dead flies or rotten fruit the idea being that ultimately robots are going to need to be able to fuel themselves with their environment now none of these are soft robots but that could be down the line and that's when things really get crazy actual living robots made out of actual living cells that fuel themselves by consuming biomass around them and i'll bet you anything they do with tubes now the ultimate form a soft robot could take would be something that looks very much like us now the replicants in blade runner and the the robots and kurelja pecks play they were a labor force meant to kind of do the work for us but ultimately these machines might become so human-like that we have to start thinking about their rights and protections as living creatures now obviously it's a long way from synthetic tentacles in a lab and xenobots to replicants walking the streets but that day will come and with it will come an array of ethics issues and philosophical debates that will make us question everything we think about ourselves as karel chapek wrote in rossum's universal robots nothing is stranger to man than his own image i wonder if living robots would have access to wi-fi if they did they'd probably be concerned about people hacking their brains that's why there's expressvpn did i pull it off yeah sweet look we all know what vpns do they keep your computer safe from outside baddies who want to get access to your information and make your life miserable and now that we're doing pretty much everything through the internet these days it's not a bad idea to take the bare minimum precautions to protect yourself if only there was some corollary to current events in that statement expressvpn hides your computer from the outside world by making you look like you're somewhere else by connecting you to a virtual private network that's the vpn part of the name the express part of the name is because it was fast super easy to install i'm a dummy with computers and i got it set up in minutes and it just works it's totally in the background you just turn it on and keep doing your thing like normal actually it's better than normal because expressvpn kind of gives you super powers you know different 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super easy to set up it just works if i can do it anybody can do it and you know there's enough to stress about these days this is just one less thing to worry about so yeah expressvpn.com joe scott three months free links down the description go check it out big thanks to expressvpn for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon that are just doing everything to make this channel happen i appreciate the community that's forming out there we got some new people let me uh murder the names real quick we've got steve seuss jess thomas steven steele colton j mass guy manuel emmanuel jim fields m.i tiny riley uh josiah williams jeffrey snyder thomas flanagan nancy fazidine adam m eric castro uh jeff spurlock and douglas young thank you guys so much if you'd like to join them get early access to videos get patreon exclusive content and just join an awesome community of like-minded people you can go to patreon.com please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here google thinks you might like this one so maybe give that one a try or any of the others on the side have a face on it and if you do like them and you want to see more i invite you to subscribe i come back with videos every monday all right that's it for now thank you guys for watching go on out there now have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 380,654

Rating: 4.9456758 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, robots, soft robots, living robots, xenobots, frog stem cells, october, tentacles, octopus, protect the tubes

Id: DeR43H-lAf8

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020

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