Irrational Fear of Robots; Mozart’s Epilepsy-Reducing Sonata
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 963 Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2021
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Robotics researcher Ruth Aylett explains why some people fear robots. Plus: how a sonata can reduce epilepsy seizures.
More from Ruth Aylett, professor of computer science at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh:
- Pick up "Living with Robots: What Every Anxious Human Needs to Know": https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/living-robots
- Follow @ruthaylett on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ruthaylett
- University website: http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~ruth/
- Edinburgh Centre for Robotics: https://www.edinburgh-robotics.org/academics/ruth-aylett
Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major may be able to treat refractory focal epilepsy by reducing seizures... somehow by Grant Currin
- Berezow, A. (2021, October 4). How Mozart’s music treats epilepsy. Big Think; Big Think. https://bigthink.com/health/mozart-k448-effect-music-treats-epilepsy/
- Quon, R. J., Casey, M. A., Camp, E. J., Meisenhelter, S., Steimel, S. A., Song, Y., Testorf, M. E., Leslie, G. A., Bujarski, K. A., Ettinger, A. B., & Jobst, B. C. (2021). Musical components important for the Mozart K448 effect in epilepsy. Scientific Reports, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-95922-7
- AFP. (2021). One Mozart Song Calms The Brains of People With Epilepsy, And We May Finally Know Why. ScienceAlert. https://www.sciencealert.com/listening-to-mozart-somehow-helped-people-with-epilepsy?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencealert-latestnews+%28ScienceAlert-Latest%29
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes, with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. |
| 0:05.6 | I'm Cody Gough. |
| 0:06.8 | And I'm Ashley Hammer. |
| 0:08.0 | Today you learn about why some people are afraid of robots, |
| 0:11.0 | with robotics researcher Ruth Alet, and one specific piece of music |
| 0:15.2 | that can reduce epilepsy seizures, although researchers have no idea why. |
| 0:19.2 | Let's satisfy some curiosity. |
| 0:23.0 | From 2001's HAL 9000 to Terminator's SkyNet, |
| 0:28.0 | Western pop culture is full of terrifying robots. |
| 0:32.0 | So it's no wonder that the people who consume that |
| 0:34.3 | media kind of fear them too. But according to today's guest, it doesn't have to be |
| 0:39.0 | this way. And it's not in every culture. |
| 0:47.4 | Ruth Alet is a professor of computer science at Harriet Watt University in Edinburgh. |
| 0:55.4 | She's been a robotics researcher for 30 years and co-authored a recent book that touches on why people are so afraid of robots. So he asked her, why are people so afraid of robots? |
| 0:59.2 | Let me say this is very much a Western thing. |
| 1:01.6 | You don't find this so much in Japan. People have different attitudes. |
| 1:05.2 | And it's really part of our attitude towards technology, not just robots. So if you go back to |
| 1:11.9 | Frankenstein's monster, for instance, if you go back to Frankenstein's monster for instance, if you come a little way forward and you look at Disney and the sorceress apprentice and all those autonomous brooms getting out of hand. I don't know if you've ever seen it. It's a very nice piece of animation. |
| 1:25.0 | So this feeling that our technology will escape from our control. It's very deeply embedded in our own culture, although not in Japanese culture, as far as we can tell. I think it's part of a cultural |
| 1:35.7 | matrix that goes all the way back to the ancient Greek. So there's this idea of hubris trying |
| 1:41.6 | to make yourself as good as the gods which will undoubtedly at some point give |
| 1:45.6 | you nemesis where everything will go really badly wrong and this comes into the Judeo-Christian |
... |
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