The following is a conversation with Rosalind Picard.
She's a professor at MIT,
director of the Effective Computing Research Group
at the MIT Media Lab and co-founder of two companies,
Effectiva and Empatica.
Over two decades ago,
she launched a field of effective computing
with her book of the same name.
This book described the importance of emotion
in artificial and natural intelligence.
The vital role of emotional communication
has to the relationship between people in general
and human robot interaction.
I really enjoy talking with Roz over so many topics,
including emotion, ethics, privacy, wearable computing
and her recent research in epilepsy
and even love and meaning.
This conversation is part
of the artificial intelligence podcast.
If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes
or simply connect with me on Twitter
at Lex Friedman spelled F-R-I-D.
And now here's my conversation with Rosalind Picard.
More than 20 years ago,
you've coined the term effective computing
and led a lot of research in this area.
Since then, as I understand the goal
is to make the machine detect
and interpret the emotional state of a human being
and adapt the behavior of the machine
based on the emotional state.
So how is your understanding of the problem space
defined by effective computing changed in the past?
24 years.
So it's the scope, the applications, the challenges,
what's involved.
How has that evolved over the years?
Yeah, actually originally
when I defined the term effective computing,
it was a bit broader than just recognizing
and responding intelligently to human emotion.
Although those are probably the two pieces
that we've worked on the hardest.
The original concept also encompassed machines
that would have mechanisms that functioned like human emotion
does inside them.
It would be any computing that relates to arises from
or deliberately influences human emotion.
So the human computer interaction part
is the part that people tend to see.
Like if I'm really ticked off at my computer
and I'm scowling at it and I'm cursing at it
and it just keeps acting, smiling and happy
like that little paperclip used to do,
dancing, winking, that kind of thing
just makes you even more frustrated, right?
And I thought that stupid thing needs to see my affect.
And if it's gonna be intelligent,
which Microsoft researchers had worked really hard on,
actually had some of the most sophisticated AI in it
at the time, that thing's gonna actually be smart.
It needs to respond to me and you
and we can send it very different signals.
So by the way, just a quick interruption,
the Clippy, maybe it's in Word 95 and 98,
I don't remember when it was born,
but many people, do you find yourself with that reference
that people recognize what you're talking about still
to this point?
I don't expect the newest students to these days,
but I've mentioned it to a lot of audiences
like how many of you know this Clippy thing
and still the majority of people seem to know it.
So Clippy kind of looks at maybe natural language processing
what you were typing and tries to help you complete,
I think.
I don't even remember what Clippy was, except annoying.
Yeah, some people actually liked it.
Well, I missed it.
I would hear those stories.
You miss it?
Well, I missed the annoyance.
They felt like there's an element.
Someone was there.
Somebody was there and we were in it together
and they were annoying.
It's like a puppy that just doesn't get it.
They keep stripping up the couch kind of thing.
And in fact, they could have done it smarter like a puppy
if they had done, like if when you yelled at it
or cursed at it, if it had put its little ears back
in its tail down and shirked off,
probably people would have wanted it back, right?
But instead when you yelled at it, what did it do?
It smiled, it winked, it danced, right?
If somebody comes to my office and I yell at them
and they started smiling, winking and dancing,
I'm like, I never wanna see you again.
So Bill Gates got a standing ovation
when he said it was going away
because people were so ticked.
It was so emotionally unintelligent, right?
It was intelligent about whether you were writing a letter,
what kind of help you needed for that context.
It was completely unintelligent about,
hey, if you're annoying your customer,
don't smile in their face when you do it.
So that kind of mismatch was something
the developers just didn't think about.
And intelligence at the time was really all about
math and language and chess and games,
problems that could be pretty well-defined.
Social-emotional interaction is much more complex
than chess or Go or any of the games
that people are trying to solve.
And in order to understand that required skills
that most people in computer science
actually were lacking personally.
Well, let's talk about computer science.
Have things gotten better since the work,
since the message, since you've really launched the field
with a lot of research work in this space,
I still find as a person like yourself
who's deeply passionate about human beings
and yet am in computer science,
there still seems to be a lack of,
sorry to say empathy in a computer scientist.
Yeah, well.
Or hasn't gotten better.
Let's just say there's a lot more variety
among computer scientists these days.
Computer scientists are a much more diverse group today
than they were 25 years ago, and that's good.
We need all kinds of people to become computer scientists
so that computer science reflects more
what society needs.
And there's brilliance among every personality type,
so it need not be limited to people
who prefer computers to other people.
How hard do you think it is?
Your view of how difficult it is to recognize emotion
or to create a deeply emotionally intelligent interaction,
has it gotten easier or harder
as you've explored it further?
And how far away are we from cracking this,
if you think of the Turing test solving the intelligence,
looking at the Turing test for emotional intelligence?
I think it is as difficult as I thought it was gonna be.
I think my prediction of its difficulty is spot on.
I think the time estimates are always hard
because they're always a function
of society's love and hate of a particular topic.
If society gets excited and you get thousands of researchers
working on it for a certain application,
that application gets solved really quickly.
The general intelligence,
the computer's complete lack of ability
to have awareness of what it's doing,
the fact that it's not conscious,
the fact that there's no signs of it becoming conscious,
the fact that it doesn't read between the lines,
those kinds of things that we have to teach it explicitly
what other people pick up implicitly.
We don't see that changing yet.
There aren't breakthroughs yet that lead us to believe
that that's gonna go any faster,
which means that it's still gonna be stuck
with a lot of limitations
where it's probably only gonna do the right thing
in very limited, narrow, pre-specified contexts
where we can prescribe pretty much
what's gonna happen there.
So I don't see the...
It's hard to predict a date
because when people don't work on it, it's infinite.
When everybody works on it,
you get a nice piece of it well solved
in a short amount of time.
I actually think there's a more important issue right now
than the difficulty of it.
And that's causing some of us
to put the brakes on a little bit.
Usually we're all just like, step on the gas,
let's go faster.
This is causing us to pull back and put the brakes on.
And that's the way that some of this technology
is being used in places like China right now.
And that worries me so deeply
that it's causing me to pull back myself
on a lot of the things that we could be doing
and try to get the community
to think a little bit more about,
okay, if we're gonna go forward with that,
how can we do it in a way that puts in place safeguards
that protects people?
So the technology we're referring to
is just when a computer senses the human being,
like the human face.
Yeah, yeah.
So there's a lot of exciting things there,
like forming a deep connection with a human being.
So what are your worries, how that could go wrong?
Is it in terms of privacy?
Is it in terms of other kinds of more subtle things?
Let's dig into privacy.
So here in the US, if I'm watching a video
of say a political leader
and in the US we're quite free, as we all know,
to even criticize the president of the United States.
Here, that's not a shocking thing.
It happens about every five seconds, right?
But in China, what happens if you criticize
the leader of the government, right?
And so people are very careful not to do that.
However, what happens if you're simply watching a video
and you make a facial expression
that shows a little bit of skepticism, right?
Well, and here we're completely free to do that.
In fact, we're free to fly off the handle
and say anything we want, usually.
I mean, there's some restrictions.
When the athlete does this as part of the national broadcast,
maybe the teams get a little unhappy
about picking that forum to do it, right?
But that's more a question of judgment.
We have these freedoms,
and in places that don't have those freedoms,
what if our technology can read
your underlying affective state?
What if our technology can read it even non-contact?
What if our technology can read it
without your prior consent?
And here in the US, in my first company,
we started Affectiva.
We have worked super hard to turn away money
and opportunities that try to read people's affect
without their prior informed consent.
And even the software that is licenseable,
you have to sign things saying you will only use it
in certain ways, which essentially is get people's buy-in,
right?
Don't do this without people agreeing to it.
There are other countries
where they're not interested in people's buy-in.
They're just gonna use it.
They're gonna inflict it on you.
And if you don't like it,
you better not scowl in the direction of any censors.
So one, let me just comment on a small tangent.
Do you know with the idea of adversarial examples
and deepfakes and so on,
what you bring up is actually in that one sense,
deepfakes provide a comforting protection
that you can no longer really trust
that the video of your face was legitimate.
And therefore you always have an escape clause
if a government is trying.
If a stable, balanced, ethical government
is trying to accuse you of something,
at least you have protection.
You can say it was fake news, as is a popular term now.
Yeah, that's the general thinking of it.
We know how to go into the video and see, for example,
your heart rate and respiration
and whether or not they've been tampered with.
And we also can put like fake heart rate and respiration
in your video now too.
We decided we needed to do that.
After we developed a way to extract it,
we decided we also needed a way to jam it.
And so the fact that we took time
to do that other step too, right?
That was time that I wasn't spending
making the machine more affectively intelligent.
And there's a choice in how we spend our time,
which is now being swayed a little bit less by this goal
and a little bit more like by concern
about what's happening in society
and what kind of future do we wanna build.
And as we step back and say, okay,
we don't just build AI to build AI
to make Elon Musk more money
or to make Amazon Jeff Bezos more money.
You could, gosh, that's the wrong ethic.
Why are we building it?
What is the point of building AI?
It used to be it was driven by researchers in academia
to get papers published and to make a career for themselves
and to do something cool, right?
Because maybe it could be done.
Now we realize that this is enabling rich people
to get vastly richer.
The poor are, the divide is even larger.
And is that the kind of future that we want?
Maybe we wanna think about, maybe we wanna rethink AI.
Maybe we wanna rethink the problems in society
that are causing the greatest inequity
and rethink how to build AI.
That's not about a general intelligence,
but that's about extending the intelligence
and capability of the have nots
so that we close these gaps in society.
Do you hope that kind of stepping on the brake
happens organically?
Because I think still majority of the force behind AI
is the desire to publish papers,
is to make money without thinking about the why.
Do you hope it happens organically?
Is there room for regulation?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, great questions.
I prefer the, they talk about the carrot versus the stick.
I definitely prefer the carrot to the stick.
And in our free world, there's only so much stick, right?
You're gonna find a way around it.
I generally think less regulation is better.
That said, even though my position is classically carrot,
no stick, no regulation,
I think we do need some regulations in this space.
I do think we need regulations around protecting people
with their data, that you own your data,
not Amazon, not Google.
I would like to see people own their own data.
I would also like to see the regulations
that we have right now around lie detection
being extended to emotion recognition in general,
that right now you can't use a lie detector
on an employee when you're,
on a candidate when you're interviewing them for a job.
I think similarly we need to put in place protection
around reading people's emotions without their consent
and in certain cases like characterizing them for a job
and other opportunities.
So I also think that when we're reading emotion
that's predictive around mental health,
that that should, even though it's not medical data,
that that should get the kinds of protections
that our medical data gets.
What most people don't know yet is right now
with your smartphone use,
and if you're wearing a sensor
and you wanna learn about your stress and your sleep
and your physical activity
and how much you're using your phone
and your social interaction,
all of that non-medical data,
when we put it together with machine learning,
now called AI, even though the founders of AI
wouldn't have called it that,
that capability can not only tell
that you're calm right now
or that you're getting a little stressed,
but it can also predict how you're likely to be tomorrow
if you're likely to be sick or healthy,
happy or sad, stressed or calm.
Especially when you're tracking data over time.
Especially when we're tracking
a week of your data or more.
Do you have an optimism towards,
a lot of people on our phones are worried
about this camera that's looking at us.
For the most part, on balance,
are you optimistic about the benefits
that can be brought from that camera
that's looking at billions of us,
or should we be more worried?
I think we should be a little bit more worried
about who's looking at us and listening to us.
The device sitting on your countertop in your kitchen,
whether it's Alexa or Google Home or Apple, Siri,
these devices want to listen
while they say ostensibly to help us.
And I think there are great people
in these companies who do want to help people.
Let me not brand them all bad.
I'm a user of products from all of these companies.
I'm naming all the A companies, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon.
They are awfully big companies.
They have incredible power.
And what if China were to buy them?
And suddenly all of that data
were not part of free America,
but all of that data were part of somebody
who just wants to take over the world
and you submit to them.
And guess what happens if you so much as smirk
the wrong way when they say something that you don't like?
Well, they have re-education camps, right?
That's a nice word for them.
By the way, they have a surplus of organs
for people who have surgery these days.
They don't have an organ donation problem
because they take your blood and they know you're a match.
And the doctors are on record of taking organs
from people who were perfectly healthy and not prisoners.
They're just simply not the favored ones of the government.
And that's a pretty freaky evil society.
And we can use the word evil there.
I was born in the Soviet Union.
I can certainly connect to the worry
that you're expressing.
At the same time, probably both you and I
and you very much so, you know,
there's an exciting possibility
that you can have a deep connection with a machine.
Yeah, yeah.
Right, so.
Those of us, I've admitted students who say that they,
you know, when you list like who do you most wish
you could have lunch with or dinner with, right?
And they'll write like, I don't like people.
I just like computers.
And one of them said to me once
when I had this party at my house,
I want you to know, this is my only social event of the year.
My one social event of the year.
Like, okay, now this is a brilliant
machine learning person, right?
And we need that kind of brilliance in machine learning.
And I love that computer science welcomes people
who love people and people who are very awkward
around people.
I love that this is a field that anybody could join.
We need all kinds of people
and you don't need to be a social person.
I'm not trying to force people who don't like people
to suddenly become social.
At the same time, if most of the people building the AIs
of the future are the kind of people who don't like people,
we've got a little bit of a problem.
Hold on a second.
So let me push back on that.
So don't you think a large percentage of the world can,
you know, there's loneliness.
There's a huge problem with loneliness, that's growing.
And so there's a longing for connection.
Do you?
If you're lonely, you're part of a big and growing group.
Yes.
So we're in it together, I guess.
If you're lonely, join the group.
You're not alone.
You're not alone.
That's a good line.
But do you think there's, you talked about some worry,
but do you think there's an exciting possibility
that something like Alexa, when these kinds of tools
can alleviate that loneliness in a way
that other humans can't?
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
I mean, a great book can kind of alleviate loneliness,
because you just get sucked into this amazing story
and you can't wait to go spend time with that character.
And they're not a human character.
There is a human behind it.
But yeah, it can be an incredibly delightful way
to pass the hours.
And it can meet needs.
Even, I don't read those trashy romance books,
but somebody does, right?
And what are they getting from this?
Well, probably some of that feeling of being there, right?
Being there in that social moment,
that romantic moment, or connecting with somebody.
I've had a similar experience reading
some science fiction books, right?
And connecting with the character.
Orson Scott Card, just amazing writing,
and Ender's Game, and Speaker for the Dead, terrible title.
But those kind of books that pull you into a character,
and you feel very social, it's very connected,
even though it's not responding to you.
And a computer, of course, can respond to you.
So it can deepen it, right?
You can have a very deep connection,
much more than the movie Her plays up, right?
Well, much more.
I mean, movie Her is already a pretty deep connection, right?
Well, but it's just a movie, right?
It's scripted.
But I mean, there can be a real interaction
where the character can learn, and you can learn.
You could imagine it not just being you and one character.
You can imagine a group of characters.
You can imagine a group of people and characters,
human and AI, connecting.
Where maybe a few people can't sort of be friends
with everybody, but the few people and their AIs
can befriend more people.
There can be an extended human intelligence in there,
where each human can connect with more people that way.
But it's still very limited, but there are just,
what I mean is there are many more possibilities
than what's in that movie.
So there's a tension here.
So one, you expressed a really serious concern
about privacy, about how governments
can misuse the information,
and there's the possibility of this connection.
So let's look at Alexa.
So personal assistants, for the most part,
as far as I'm aware, they ignore your emotion.
They ignore even the context or the existence of you,
the intricate, beautiful, complex aspects of who you are,
except maybe aspects of your voice
that help it recognize for speech recognition.
Do you think they should move towards
trying to understand your emotion?
All of these companies are very interested
in understanding human emotion.
They want, more people are telling Siri,
every day they want to kill themselves.
Apple wants to know the difference between
if a person is really suicidal,
versus if a person is just kind of fooling around with Siri.
The words may be the same,
the tone of voice and what surrounds those words
is pivotal to understand if they should respond
in a very serious way, bring help to that person,
or if they should kind of jokingly tease back,
ah, you just want to sell me for something else, right?
Like, how do you respond when somebody says that?
Well, you do want to err on the side
of being careful and taking it seriously.
People want to know if the person is happy or stressed.
In part, well, so let me give you an altruistic reason
and a business profit motivated reason.
And there are people in companies
that operate on both principles.
The altruistic people really care about their customers
and really care about helping you feel a little better
at the end of the day.
And it would just make those people happy
if they knew that they made your life better.
If you came home stressed and after talking
with their product, you felt better.
There are other people who maybe have studied
the way affect affects decision-making and prices people pay
and they know, I don't know if I should tell you,
like the work of Jen Lerner
on heartstrings and purse strings.
If we manipulate you into a slightly sadder mood,
you'll pay more, right?
You'll pay more to change your situation.
You'll pay more for something you don't even need
to make yourself feel better.
So, you know, if they sound a little sad,
maybe I don't want to cheer them up.
Maybe first I want to help them get something,
a little shopping therapy, right, that helps them.
Which is really difficult for a company
that's primarily funded on advertisement.
So they're encouraged to get you to-
To offer you products or Amazon
that's primarily funded on you buying things
from their store.
So I think we should be, you know,
maybe we need regulation in the future
to put a little bit of a wall between these agents
that have access to our emotion
and agents that want to sell us stuff.
Maybe there needs to be a little bit more
of a firewall in between those.
So maybe digging in a little bit
on the interaction with Alexa.
You mentioned, of course, a really serious concern
about like recognizing emotion if somebody
is speaking of suicide or depression and so on.
But what about the actual interaction itself?
Do you think, so if I, you know,
you mentioned clippy in being annoying.
What is the objective function we're trying to optimize?
Is it minimize annoyingness or minimize
or maximize happiness?
Or if we look at human-to-human relations,
I think that push and pull, the tension,
the dance, you know, the annoying, the flaws,
that's what makes it fun.
So is there, is there a room for,
like what is the objective function?
I mean, there are times when you want to have
a little push and pull, think of kids sparring, right?
You know, I see my sons and they,
one of them wants to provoke the other to be upset
and that's fun.
And it's actually healthy to learn where your limits are,
to learn how to self-regulate.
You can imagine a game where it's trying to make you mad
and you're trying to show self-control.
And so if we're doing a AI-human interaction
that's helping build resilience and self-control,
whether it's to learn how to not be a bully
or how to turn the other cheek
or how to deal with an abusive person in your life,
then you might need an AI that pushes your buttons, right?
But in general, do you want an AI that pushes your buttons?
Probably depends on your personality.
I don't.
I want one that's respectful, that is there to serve me
and that is there to extend my ability to do things.
I'm not looking for a rival.
I'm looking for a helper.
And that's the kind of AI I'd put my money on.
Your sense is for the majority of people in the world,
in order to have a rich experience,
that's what they're looking for as well.
So they're not looking, if you look at the movie, Her,
spoiler alert,
I believe the program, the woman in the movie, Her,
leaves the person for somebody else.
Right, right.
Says they don't want to be dating anymore, right?
Like do you, your sense is if Alexa said,
you know what, I'm actually had enough of you for a while,
so I'm going to shut myself off.
You don't see that as all.
I'd say you're trash because I'm paid for you, right?
Okay.
We've got to remember,
and this is where this blending human AI,
as if we're equals, is really deceptive,
because AI is something at the end of the day
that my students and I are making in the lab,
and we're choosing what it's allowed to say,
when it's allowed to speak, what it's allowed to listen to,
what it's allowed to act on given the inputs
that we choose to expose it to,
what outputs it's allowed to have.
It's all something made by a human,
and if we want to make something
that makes our lives miserable, fine.
I wouldn't invest in it as a business,
you know, unless it's just there for self-regulation training.
But I think we, you know,
we need to think about what kind of future we want,
and actually your question, I really like the,
what is the objective function?
Is it to calm people down sometimes?
Is it to always make people happy and calm them down?
Well, there was a book about that, right?
The Brave New World, you know,
make everybody happy, take your soma if you're unhappy,
take your happy pill,
and if you refuse to take your happy pill,
well, we'll threaten you by sending you to Iceland
to live there.
I lived in Iceland three years, it's a great place.
Don't take your soma, then go to Iceland.
A little TV commercial there.
I was a child there for a few years, it was a wonderful place.
So that part of the book never scared me.
But really, like, do we want AI to manipulate us
into submission, into making us happy?
Well, if you are a, you know,
like a power-obsessed, sick, dictator, individual
who only wants to control other people
to get your jollies in life,
then yeah, you want to use AI to extend your power
and your scale to force people into submission.
If you believe that the human race
is better off being given freedom
and the opportunity to do things that might surprise you,
then you want to use AI to extend people's ability,
to build, you want to build AI that extends human
intelligence, that empowers the weak,
and helps balance the power between the weak and the strong,
not that gives more power to the strong.
So, in this process of empowering people
and sensing people, what is your sense on emotion
in terms of recognizing emotion,
the difference between emotion that is shown
and emotion that is felt?
So, yeah, emotion that is expressed on the surface
through your face, your body, and various other things,
and what's actually going on deep inside
in the biological level, on the neuroscience level,
or some kind of cognitive level.
Yeah, yeah.
Whoa, no easy questions here.
Was I, yeah, I'm sure there's no definitive answer,
but what's your sense?
How far can we get by just looking at the face?
We're very limited when we just look at the face,
but we can get further than most people think we can get.
People think, hey, I have a great poker face,
therefore all you're ever gonna get from me is neutral.
Well, that's naive.
We can read with the ordinary camera on your laptop
or on your phone.
We can read from a neutral face if your heart is racing.
We can read from a neutral face if your breathing
is becoming irregular and showing signs of stress.
We can read under some conditions
that maybe I won't give you details on,
how your heart rate variability power is changing
that could be a sign of stress,
even when your heart rate is not necessarily accelerating.
So-
Sorry, from physio sensors or from the face?
From the color changes that you cannot even see,
but the camera can see.
That's amazing.
So you can get a lot of signal, but-
So we get things people can't see using a regular camera.
And from that, we can tell things about your stress.
So if you were just sitting there with a blank face
thinking nobody can read my emotion, well, you're wrong.
Right, so that's really interesting,
but that's from sort of visual information from the face.
That's almost like cheating your way
to the physiological state of the body
by being very clever with what you can do with-
With signal processing.
With signal processing.
So that's a really impressive,
but if you just look at the stuff we humans can see,
the smoke, the smiles, the smirks,
the subtle, all the facial action.
So then you can hide that on your face
for a limited amount of time.
Now, if you're just going in for a brief interview
and you're hiding it, that's pretty easy for most people.
If you are however surveilled constantly everywhere you go,
then it's gonna say, gee, you know,
Lex used to smile a lot
and now I'm not seeing so many smiles.
And Roz used to laugh a lot
and smile a lot very spontaneously.
And now I'm only seeing these not so spontaneous
looking smiles.
And only when she's asked these questions, you know,
that's something's changed here.
Probably not getting enough sleep as well.
We could look at that too.
So now I have to be a little careful too.
When I say we, you think we can't read your emotion
and we can't, it's not that binary.
What we're reading is more some physiological changes
that relate to your activation.
Now, that doesn't mean that we know everything
about how you feel.
In fact, we still know very little about how you feel.
Your thoughts are still private.
Your nuanced feelings are still completely private.
We can't read any of that.
So there's some relief that we can't read that.
Even brain imaging can't read that.
Wearables can't read that.
However, as we read your body state changes
and we know what's going on in your environment
and we look at patterns of those over time,
we can start to make some inferences
about what you might be feeling.
And that is where it's not just the momentary feeling,
but it's more your stance toward things.
And that could actually be a little bit more scary
with certain kinds of governmental control free people
who want to know more about are you on their team
or are you not?
And getting that information through over time.
So you're saying there's a lot of things
by looking at the change over time.
Yeah.
So you've done a lot of exciting work,
both in computer vision and physiological sounds
like wearables.
What do you think is the best modality
for what's the best window into the emotional soul?
Like, is it the face?
Is it the voice?
To finish what you want to know.
It depends what you want to know.
Everything is informative.
Everything we do is informative.
So for health and wellbeing and things like that,
do you find the wearable physiological signals
is the best for health-based stuff?
So here I'm going to answer empirically
with data and studies we've been doing.
We've been doing studies now.
These are currently running
with lots of different kinds of people,
but where we've published data,
and I can speak publicly to it,
the data are limited right now
to New England college students.
So that's a small group.
Among New England college students,
when they are wearing a wearable,
like the Empatic Embrace here
that's measuring skin conductance, movement, temperature,
and when they are using a smartphone
that is collecting their time of day
of when they're texting, who they're texting,
their movement around it, their GPS,
the weather information based upon their location.
And when it's using machine learning
and putting all of that together
and looking not just at right now,
but looking at your rhythm of behaviors over about a week.
When we look at that,
we are very accurate at forecasting tomorrow's stress,
mood, and happy, sad mood and health.
And when we look at which pieces of that are most useful,
first of all, if you have all the pieces,
you get the best results.
If you have only the wearable,
you get the next best results.
And that's still better than 80% accurate
at forecasting tomorrow's levels.
Isn't that exciting?
Because the wearable stuff with physiological information,
it feels like it violates privacy less
than the non-contact, face-based methods.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I think what people sometimes don't,
it's fine, in the early days,
people would say, oh, wearing something
or giving blood is invasive, right?
Whereas a camera is less invasive
because it's not touching you.
I think on the contrary,
the things that are not touching you are maybe the scariest
because you don't know when they're on or off.
And you don't know when people, and you don't know who's
behind it, right?
A wearable, depending upon what's happening
to the data on it, if it's just stored locally
or if it's streaming and what it is being attached to,
in a sense, you have the most control over it
because it's also very easy to just take it off, right?
Now it's not sensing me.
So if I'm uncomfortable with what it's sensing,
now I'm free, right?
If I'm comfortable with what it's sensing,
then, and I happen to know everything about this one
and what it's doing with it,
so I'm quite comfortable with it,
then I have control, I'm comfortable.
Control is one of the biggest factors for an individual
in reducing their stress.
If I have control over it,
if I know all there is to know about it,
then my stress is a lot lower
and I'm making an informed choice
about whether to wear it or not,
or when to wear it or not.
I wanna wear it sometimes, maybe not others.
Right, so that control, yeah, I'm with you.
That control, even if, yeah,
the ability to turn it off is a really important thing.
It's huge, and we need to, maybe, you know,
if there's regulations, maybe that's number one to protect
is people's ability to, as easy to opt out as to opt in.
Right, so you've studied a bit of neuroscience as well.
How have looking at our own minds
of the biological stuff or the neurobiological,
the neuroscience to get the signals in our brain
helped you understand the problem
and the approach of effective computing, so.
Originally, I was a computer architect
and I was building hardware and computer designs
and I wanted to build ones that work like the brain.
So I've been studying the brain
as long as I've been studying how to build computers.
Have you figured out anything yet?
Very little, it's so amazing.
You know, they used to think like,
oh, if you remove this chunk of the brain
and you find this function goes away,
well, that's the part of the brain that did it.
And then later they realized
if you remove this other chunk of the brain,
that function comes back and, oh no,
we really don't understand it.
Brains are so interesting and changing all the time
and able to change in ways
that will probably continue to surprise us.
When we were measuring stress,
you may know the story where we found
an unusual big skin conductance pattern on one wrist
in one of our kids with autism.
And in trying to figure out how on earth
you could be stressed on one wrist and not the other,
like how can you get sweaty on one wrist, right?
When you get stressed
with that sympathetic fight or flight response,
like you kind of should like sweat more
in some places than others,
but not more on one wrist than the other,
that didn't make any sense.
We learned that what had actually happened
was a part of his brain had unusual electrical activity
and that caused an unusually large sweat response
on one wrist and not the other.
And since then we've learned
that seizures cause this unusual electrical activity.
And depending where the seizure is,
if it's in one place and it's staying there,
you can have a big electrical response
we can pick up with a wearable at one part of the body.
You can also have a seizure
that spreads over the whole brain,
generalized grand mal seizure,
and that response spreads
and we can pick it up pretty much anywhere.
As we learned this and then later built,
embrace that's now FDA cleared for seizure detection,
we have also built relationships
with some of the most amazing doctors in the world
who not only help people with unusual brain activity
or epilepsy, but some of them are also surgeons
and they're going in and they're implanting electrodes,
not just to momentarily read the strange patterns
of brain activity that we'd like to see return to normal,
but also to read out continuously what's happening
in some of these deep regions of the brain
during most of life when these patients are not seizing.
Most of the time they're not seizing,
most of the time they're fine.
And so we are now working on mapping those deep brain regions
that you can't even usually get with EEG scalp electrodes
because the changes deep inside don't reach the surface.
But interesting, when some of those regions are activated,
we see a big skin conductance response.
Who would have thunk it, right?
Like nothing here, but something here.
In fact, right after seizures
that we think are the most dangerous ones
that precede what's called SUDEP, sudden unexpected death
and epilepsy, there's a period where the brain waves
go flat and it looks like the person's brain has stopped,
but it hasn't.
The activity has gone deep into a region
that can make the cortical activity look flat,
like a quick shutdown signal here.
It can unfortunately cause breathing to stop
if it progresses long enough.
Before that happens, we see a big skin conductance response
in the data that we have.
The longer this flattening, the bigger our response here.
So we have been trying to learn initially,
like why are we getting a big response here
when there's nothing here?
Well, it turns out there's something much deeper.
So we can now go inside the brains
of some of these individuals, fabulous people
who usually aren't seizing
and get this data and start to map it.
So that's the active research that we're doing right now
with top medical partners.
So this wearable sensor that's looking at skin conductance
can capture sort of the ripples of the complexity
of what's going on in our brain.
So this little device, you have a hope
that you can start to get the signal
from the interesting things happening in the brain.
Yeah, we've already published the strong correlations
between the size of this response
and the flattening that happens afterwards.
And unfortunately also in a real SUDEP case
where the patient died because the,
well, we don't know why.
We don't know if somebody was there
would have definitely prevented it,
but we know that most SUDEPs happen when the person's alone.
And in this case, a SUDEP is an acronym S-U-D-E-P
and it stands for the number two cause of years of life lost
actually among all neurological disorders.
Stroke is number one, SUDEP is number two,
but most people haven't heard of it.
Actually, I'll plug my TED talk.
It's on the front page of TED right now
that talks about this.
And we hope to change that.
I hope everybody who's heard of SIDS and stroke
will now hear of SUDEP
because we think in most cases it's preventable
if people take their meds and aren't alone
when they have a seizure.
Not guaranteed to be preventable.
There are some exceptions,
but we think most cases probably are.
So you have this embrace now in the version two wristband,
right, for epilepsy management.
That's the one that's FDA approved?
Yes.
Which is kind of a- FDA cleared, they say.
Cleared.
Sorry.
No, that's okay.
It essentially means it's approved for marketing.
Got it.
Just a side note, how difficult is that to do?
It's essentially getting FDA approved
for computer science technology.
It's so agonizing.
It's much harder than publishing multiple papers
in top medical journals.
Yeah, we published peer reviewed
top medical journal neurology, best results,
and that's not good enough for the FDA.
Is that system,
so if we look at the peer review of medical journals,
there's flaws, there's strengths,
is the FDA approval process,
how does it compare to the peer review process?
Does it have its strength in-
I've taken peer review over FDA any day.
But is that a good thing?
Is that a good thing for FDA?
You're saying, does it stop some amazing technology
from getting through?
Yeah, it does.
The FDA performs a very important good role
in keeping people safe.
They keep things,
they put you through tons of safety testing
and that's wonderful and that's great.
I'm all in favor of the safety testing.
Sometimes they put you through additional testing
that they don't have to explain why they put you through it
and you don't understand why you're going through it
and it doesn't make sense.
And that's very frustrating.
And maybe they have really good reasons and they just would,
it would do people a service to articulate those reasons.
Be more transparent.
Be more transparent.
So as part of Empatica, you have sensors.
So what kind of problems can we crack?
What kind of things from seizures to autism,
to, I think I've heard you mentioned depression.
What kind of things can we alleviate?
Can we detect?
What's your hope of what,
how we can make the world a better place
with this wearable tech?
I would really like to see my fellow brilliant researchers
step back and say,
what are the really hard problems
that we don't know how to solve
that come from people maybe we don't even see
in our normal life
because they're living in the poorer places.
They're stuck on the bus.
They can't even afford the Uber or the Lyft
or the data plan
or all these other wonderful things we have
that we keep improving on.
Meanwhile, there's all these folks left behind in the world
and they're struggling with horrible diseases,
with depression, with epilepsy, with diabetes,
with just awful stuff that maybe a little more time
and attention hanging out with them
and learning what are their challenges in life.
What are their needs?
How do we help them have job skills?
How do we help them have a hope and a future
and a chance to have the great life
that so many of us building technology have?
And then how would that reshape
the kinds of AI that we build?
How would that reshape the new apps that we build
or the maybe we need to focus
on how to make things more low cost and green
instead of thousand dollar phones.
I mean, come on,
why can't we be thinking more
about things that do more with less for these books?
Quality of life is not related to the cost of your phone.
It's not something that,
it's been shown that what about $75,000 of income
and happiness is the same, okay?
However, I can tell you,
you get a lot of happiness from helping other people.
You get a lot more than $75,000 buys.
So how do we connect up the people who have real needs
with the people who have the ability to build the future
and build the kind of future
that truly improves the lives of all the people
that are currently being left behind?
So let me return just briefly and a point maybe in movie her.
So do you think if we look farther into the future,
you said so much of the benefit
from making our technology more empathetic to us human beings
would make them better tools, empower us,
make our lives better.
If we look farther into the future,
do you think we'll ever create an AI system
that we can fall in love with and loves us back
on a level that is similar to human-to-human interaction
like in the movie her or beyond?
I think we can simulate it in ways
that could sustain engagement for a while.
Would it be as good as another person?
I don't think so for if you're used to like good people.
Now, if you've just grown up with nothing but abuse
and you can't stand human beings,
can we do something that helps you there
that gives you something through a machine?
Yeah, but that's pretty low bar, right?
If you've only encountered pretty awful people.
If you've encountered wonderful, amazing people,
we're nowhere near building anything like that.
And I would not bet on building it.
I would bet instead on building the kinds of AI
that helps kind of raise all boats,
that helps all people be better people,
helps all people figure out if they're getting sick tomorrow
and helps give them what they need to stay well tomorrow.
That's the kind of AI I want to build
that improves human lives.
Not the kind of AI that just walks on the Tonight Show
and people go, wow, look how smart that is, you know,
really like, and then it goes back in a box, you know?
So on that point,
if we continue looking a little bit into the future,
do you think an AI that's empathetic
and does improve our lives
need to have a physical presence, a body?
And even, let me cautiously say the C word consciousness
and even fear of mortality.
So some of those human characteristics,
do you think it needs to have those aspects
or can it remain simply a machine learning tool
that learns from data of behavior
that learns to make us based on previous patterns
feel better?
Or does it need those elements of consciousness?
It depends on your goals.
If you're making a movie, it needs a body.
It needs a gorgeous body.
It needs to act like it has consciousness.
It needs to act like it has emotion, right?
Because that's what sells.
That's what's going to get me to show up and enjoy the movie.
Okay.
In real life, does it need all that?
Well, if you've read Orson Scott Card,
Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead,
you know, it could just be like a little voice
in your earring, right?
And you could have an intimate relationship
and it could get to know you.
And it doesn't need to be a robot,
but that doesn't make us compelling of a movie, right?
I mean, we already think it's kind of weird
when a guy looks like he's talking to himself on the train,
you know, even though it's earbuds.
So we have these, embodied is more powerful.
Embodied, when you compare interactions
with an embodied robot versus a video of a robot
versus no robot, the robot is more engaging.
The robot gets our attention more.
The robot, when you walk in your house,
is more likely to get you to remember
to do the things that you asked it to do,
because it's kind of got a physical presence.
You can avoid it if you don't like it, it could see
you're avoiding it.
There's a lot of power to being embodied.
There will be embodied AIs.
They have great power and opportunity and potential.
There will also be AIs that aren't embodied,
that just are little software assistants
that help us with different things
that may get to know things about us.
Will they be conscious?
There will be attempts to program them
to make them appear to be conscious.
We can already write programs that make it look like,
oh, what do you mean?
Of course I'm aware that you're there, right?
I mean, it's trivial to say stuff like that.
It's easy to fool people,
but does it actually have conscious experience like we do?
Nobody has a clue how to do that yet.
That seems to be something that is beyond
what any of us knows how to build now.
Will it have to have that?
I think you can get pretty far with a lot of stuff
without it.
Will we accord it rights?
Well, that's more a political game,
that it is a question of real consciousness.
Yeah, can you go to jail for turning off Alexa,
is what, it's a question for an election
maybe a few decades from now.
Well, Sophia Robot's already been given rights
as a citizen in Saudi Arabia, right?
Even before women have full rights,
then the robot was still put back in the box
to be shipped to the next place
where it would get a paid appearance, right?
Yeah, it's dark and almost comedic, if not absurd.
So, I've heard you speak about your journey
in finding faith.
Sure, uh-huh.
And how you discovered some wisdoms about life
and beyond from reading the Bible.
And I've also heard you say that,
you said scientists too often assume
that nothing exists beyond what can be currently measured.
Yeah, materialism and scientism, yeah.
So, in some sense, this assumption enables
the near-term scientific method,
assuming that we can uncover the mysteries of this world
by the mechanisms of measurement that we currently have.
But we easily forget that we've made this assumption, right?
So, what do you think we miss out on
by making that assumption that?
It's fine to limit the scientific method
to things we can measure and reason about and reproduce.
That's fine.
I think we have to recognize that sometimes
we scientists also believe in things
that happen historically, you know?
Like, I believe the Holocaust happened.
I can't prove events from past history scientifically.
You prove them with historical evidence, right?
With the impact they had on people,
with eyewitness testimony and things like that.
So, a good thinker recognizes that science
is one of many ways to get knowledge.
It's not the only way.
And there's been some really bad philosophy
and bad thinking recently, you can call it scientism,
where people say science is the only way to get to truth.
And it's not, it just isn't.
There are other ways that work also,
like knowledge of love with someone.
You don't prove your love through science, right?
So, history, philosophy, love,
a lot of other things in life,
show us that there's more ways to gain knowledge and truth
if you're willing to believe there is such a thing,
and I believe there is, than science.
I do, I am a scientist, however, and in my science,
I do limit my science to the things
that the scientific method can do.
But I recognize that it's myopic
to say that that's all there is.
Right, there's, just like you listed,
there's all the why questions.
And really, we know if we're being honest with ourselves,
the percent of what we really know is basically zero
relative to the full mystery of this.
Measure theory, the set of measure zero,
if I have a finite amount of knowledge, which I do.
So, you said that you believe in truth.
So, let me ask that old question.
What do you think this thing is all about?
It's the life on earth.
Life, the universe, and everything.
I can't quote Douglas Adams in 42.
My favorite number.
By the way, that's my street address.
My husband and I guessed the exact same number
for our house.
We got to pick it.
And there's a reason we picked 42, yeah.
So, is it just 42, or is there,
do you have other words that you can put around it?
Well, I think there's a grand adventure,
and I think this life is a part of it.
I think there's a lot more to it than meets the eye
and the heart and the mind and the soul here.
I think we see, but through a glass dimly in this life,
we see only a part of all there is to know.
If people haven't read the Bible, they should,
if they consider themselves educated.
And you could read Proverbs
and find tremendous wisdom in there
that cannot be scientifically proven, but when you read it,
there's something in you, like a musician knows
when the instrument's played right and it's beautiful.
There's something in you that comes alive
and knows that there's a truth there,
that it's like your strings are being plucked
by the master instead of by me, right, playing
when I pluck it, but probably when you play,
it sounds spectacular, right?
And when you encounter those truths,
there's something in you that sings
and knows that there is more
than what I can prove mathematically
or program a computer to do.
Don't get me wrong, the math is gorgeous.
The computer programming can be brilliant.
It's inspiring, right?
We wanna do more.
None of this squashes my desire to do science
or to get knowledge through science.
I'm not dissing the science at all.
I grow even more in awe of what the science can do
because I'm more in awe of all there is we don't know.
And really at the heart of science,
you have to have a belief that there's truth,
that there's something greater to be discovered.
And some scientists may not wanna use the faith word,
but it's faith that drives us to do science.
It's faith that there is truth,
that there's something to know that we don't know,
that it's worth knowing, that it's worth working hard,
and that there is meaning,
that there is such a thing as meaning,
which by the way, science can't prove either.
We have to kind of start with some assumptions
that there's things like truth and meaning.
And these are really questions philosophers own, right?
This is their space of philosophers
and theologians at some level.
So these are things science,
when people claim that science will tell you all truth,
there's a name for that, it's its own kind of faith.
It's scientism, and it's very myopic.
Yeah, there's a much bigger world out there to be explored
in ways that science may not,
at least for now, allow us to explore.
Yeah, and there's meaning and purpose and hope and joy
and love and all these awesome things
that make it all worthwhile too.
I don't think there's a better way to end it, Raz.
Thank you so much for talking today.
Thanks, Lex, what a pleasure, great questions.