Robert Playter: CEO of Boston Dynamics, the legendary robotics company behind Atlas and Spot. He has been with the company since its start, earned his PhD at MIT's Leg Lab, and programmed the first 3D robotic somersault.
What this episode covers
Playter traces Boston Dynamics from its MIT Leg Lab roots and the gas-powered BigDog through the humanoid Atlas, the quadruped Spot, and the warehouse robot Stretch. He explains the engineering behind natural-looking walking, model predictive control for backflips, and the difficulty of manipulating heavy objects while staying balanced. The conversation covers the company's pivot from an R&D shop to a commercial business that must sell thousands of robots to survive, plus its work with industrial customers in chip fabs, breweries, and power utilities. Playter and Fridman also discuss large language models, why embodiment makes AI more verifiable and less scary, the fear of robots taking jobs, and Boston Dynamics' pledge not to weaponize its robots. They close on social robots, loneliness, and whether machines can ever offer real companionship.
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Ex Machina
Alex Garland
“you have a movie like ex machina I'm not sure if you've seen it but the main actress in that who plays the AI robot I think is a ballerina”— Lex Fridman
WALL-E
Pixar
“a cartoon was it Wally where they had this big ship and all the people were just overweight lying on their best chairs kind of sliding around”— Robert Playter
R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)
Karel Capek
“the word robot was developed by a playwright named Carol chapek in 1921 to check a playwright for Awesome's Universal robots and in that first depiction”— Robert Playter
Sony AIBO
Sony
“do you remember IBO the Sony IBO yeah they sold over a hundred thousand of those maybe 150 000”— Robert Playter
Big reveals from this episode
- Natural human-like walking on Atlas took 10 to 15 years, from the 2008 Petman prototype until Playter first saw it look right around 2022.
- New software tools now let the team create robot behaviors in days, whereas it used to take six months to do anything new.
- The next generation of Atlas will have actuators strong enough that a human can't match some of its movements, like its box jump.
- Boston Dynamics killed the elegant two-wheeled Handle robot purely as a hard-nosed business call, it was too slow to pick boxes for logistics.
- Playter says Elon Musk and Tesla entering humanoid robots brought a bright light onto Boston Dynamics' decade of work and energized the team.
- Playter spearheaded a letter, co-signed by leading robotics firms, pledging not to put weapons on their robots.
- Playter is openly dubious that large language models' statistical word-completion has anything to do with consciousness.
Worth remembering
- Playter wrote his PhD thesis on robot gymnastics and programmed the world's first 3D robotic somersault.
- Boston Dynamics was founded in 1992 but spent about a decade as a simulation company before building BigDog under a 2003 DARPA contract.
- Early BigDog robots used off-the-shelf two-stroke go-kart engines with no mufflers to save weight, making them horribly loud.
- At any time you can see about a dozen Boston Dynamics robots autonomously walking the hallways as reliability tests.
- The robot fleet accrues roughly 1,500 to 2,000 kilometers of walking and over 1,000 hours of operation every week.
- Around 1,100 Spot robots are deployed; the company needs to sell about 1,000 to 1,500 a year to be profitable in that segment.
- An estimated one trillion cardboard boxes are shipped worldwide each year, most still moved by hand, the market Stretch targets.
- The first Stretch deliveries went to DHL and Maersk in January, with Gap and several other customers already committed.
- Ontario Power Generation uses Spot's arm to operate a dangerous high-power breaker switch where arc flashes can kill workers.
- Fridman closes with Alan Turing's 1950 definition: a computer deserves to be called intelligent if it can deceive a human into believing it is human.