You're listening to Imaginary Worlds.

I show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief.

I'm Eric Mollinsky.

And this is Joanna Bryson.

In America, I'm Professor Joanna Bryson.

In the UK, I'm called Dr. Joanna Bryson because you only get called Professor when you're

a full professor.

So I'm a reader, which is a very cool title because nobody knows what it means.

But she does the same work on both sides of the pond, teaching and designing artificial

intelligence.

In the 1990s, she was working with top scientists at MIT who believe that robots should have

human characteristics like big eyes because that will encourage people interact with them.

But the robot they were working on was no C3PO.

It was just a torso.

I actually didn't even have arms, but it had a head and it had two cameras, in fact,

four cameras where the eyes should be.

So we were trying to get the brain parts to talk to each other and I was writing some

of the really pretty low-level software on this and I would be sitting up there and

people coming by would just say, I would be on a thick, I don't plug that.

And I was like, well, it's not plugged in.

And they'd say, well, if you plugged it in, it would be on a thick, I don't plug it.

And then I'd say, well, it doesn't work.

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