Why worry about tokenmaxxing when you can just let robots do the work for you in the future? Meanwhile, keep selling your first-person data of you folding laundry to Tesla, they’ll sure appreciate your labor (figuratively, not via compensation).

Bonus: There are three special guests (Kiwi, Phoebe, & Peanut) at the end of this video.

Today’s episode is all about robots. Starting off with robots in factories trained to take your job through egocentric data collection (get ready for the headache of having your phone strapped to your head); moving through to new humanoid robots in China that are being introduced as your emotionally intelligent, lifelike, kind of creepy new companions; Autonomous Urban Delivery Vehicles (watch out for your kneecaps); then finishing strong with some classic Rose and Angy debates on what our futures with humanoids might look like (and what we should worry about).

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2:00 Egocentric data collection

03:15 Meet the Kled AI founder, Avi Patel, who is collecting your data for Elon’s robots

06:42 How much can you make from selling your egocentric data at Kled, Luel, or Waffle-something? Wired gives us the scoop

08:50 Factory workers are pressured to be monitored and sell their egocentric data (for free!) to big tech (especially in India, especially for Tesla)

11:50 Data privacy, agency and consent, and future compensation: the inequality wheel keeps turning

14:22 Meta’s workers: “Tell him he’s a piece of sh*t” (high-profile engineers funneled into the Applied AI team to train keystroke by keystroke AI to take their job)

17:37 UBTECH’s humanoid robots. They dance, look into your eyes, and read your emotions. Yay! That’ll be $17k.

20:34 A peek into “Robot Valley” and Ex-humanoid: buy a humanoid robot, rent a robot, or get paid to do physical things with a robot. The choice is yours, so long as you consent to having your data collected.

23:27 Why is the goal to make these robots look so humanlike? We debate the draw of humanlike but not human

26:53 The Robotics Market (some numbers for you) (and questions about where we’re going to put all of them)

28:38 Recent research on romantic relationships with AI companions: what predicts how intense their relationship is, and what does this mean for social robots?

36:01 Robots on the street (Autonomous Urban Delivery Vehicles)

39:30 What does the future with social robots hold? We debate.

44:58 Special guest appearances from our cats

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This is Our Lives With Bots, the show where we ask important, timely questions about what it means to live with our bot counterparts. From time to time, we also dive deep into what an AI future might look like for us. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we spiral, but we always go deep.

Rose and Angy are psychologists with degrees in psychology, artificial intelligence, and ethics. They have conducted research in human-AI interaction and created this podcast to make information about AI accessible to you. You can learn more about us at ⁠ourliveswithbots.com⁠.

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Links:

Egocentric data collection: Wired, The Guardian, Avi Patel’s non-personal, personal site

China’s Humanoid Robot Industry: CNN, The Register, YouTube

Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RMET) Test

Autonomous urban delivery vehicles: BBC

Understanding romantic relationships between humans and chatbots research