David Mindell on Our Robots, Ourselves

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2015

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

Are we on the verge of driverless cars and other forms of autonomous robots and artificial intelligence? David Mindell of MIT and the author of Our Robots, Ourselves talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the robotic revolution. Mindell argues that much of the optimism for autonomous robots ignores decades of experience with semi-autonomous robots in deep-sea operation, space, air, and the military. In all of these areas, the role of human supervision remains at a high level with little full autonomy. Mindell traces some of the history of the human interaction with robots and artificial intelligence and speculates on what the future might hold.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:09.2	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.7	Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this podcast, and find
0:18.7	links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.7	You'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done
0:25.8	going back to 2006.
0:28.2	Our email address is mailadycontalk.org.
0:30.7	We'd love to hear from you.
0:35.9	Today is November 16, 2015, and my guest is David Mendel, the Francis and David Dibner
0:42.0	professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing and Professor Aeronautics and
0:46.4	Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
0:50.4	He is the author of our robots, ourselves, robotics, and the myth of autonomy.
0:55.6	David, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:57.8	Thanks for happy to be here.
0:59.6	Now you open with the tragic story of Air France Flight 447, and you use the crash and
1:04.9	the recovery of the wreckage as symbolic of our interaction with autonomous technology
1:10.5	and robots.
1:12.0	Why that story and what does it teach us?
1:15.0	Well, the Air France story is a story about a failed handoff where the automation on board
1:21.9	and airplane found a relatively minor fault and handed the plane, control of the plane
1:29.5	back to the human pilots too suddenly, kind of ungracefully, surprised them, and then
1:35.8	they had lost some of their skills flying too much with automated systems and were lost
	...

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