Rosalind Picard: Affective Computing, Emotion, Privacy, and Health | Lex Fridman Podcast #24

the following is a conversation with Rosalind Picard she's a professor at MIT director of the effective computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab and co-founder of two companies Affectiva

and in Pataca over two decades ago she launched the field of affective computing with her book of the same name this book described the importance of emotion in artificial and natural

intelligence the vital role of emotional communication has to the relationship between people in general and human robot interaction I really enjoy talking

with Roz over so many topics including emotion ethics privacy wearable computing and her recent research in epilepsy and even love and meaning this

conversation is part of the artificial intelligence podcast if you enjoy subscribe on youtube itunes or simply connect with me on twitter at Lex

Friedman spelled Fri D and now here's my conversation with Rosalind Picard more than 20 years ago you've coined the

term effective computing and let a lot of research in this area since then as I understand the goal is to make the machine detect and interpret the emotional state of a human being and

adapt the behavior of the machine based on the emotional state so how is your understanding of the problem space defined by effective computing changed

in the past 24 years so it's the scope the application is the challenge is what's involved how is that evolved over the years yeah actually originally when

I defined the term effective computing it was a bit broader than just recognizing and responding intelligently to human emotion although those are probably the two pieces that we've

worked on the hardest the original concept also encompassed machines that would have mechanisms that functioned like human emotion does inside them it

would be any computing that relates to arises from or deliberately influences human emotion so the human-computer interaction part

is the part that people tend to see like if I'm you know really ticked off at my computer and I'm scowling at it and I'm cursing at it and it just keeps acting smiling and happy like that little

paperclip used to do yeah dancing winking that kind of thing just makes you even more frustrated right and I thought that stupid thing needs to see

my effect and if it's gonna be intelligent which Microsoft researchers had worked really hard on it actually had some of the most sophisticated AI in and at the time that thing's gonna

actually be smart it needs to respond to me and you and we can send it very different signals so by the way just a

quick interruption the Clippy maybe is in Word 95 a 98 I remember when it was born but many people do you find yourself with that reference that people

recognize what you're talking about still to this point I don't expect the newest students to these days but I've mentioned it through a lot of audiences like how many of you know this clip

ething and still the majority people seem to know it so Clippy kind of looks at maybe natural language processing what you were typing and tries to help you complete I think I don't even

remember what Clippy was was except annoying yeah it's right some people actually liked it I miss I would hear those stories you miss it

why missed the the annoyance they felt like there's a element was there somebody was there and we're in it together and they were annoying it's like it's like a puppy that just doesn't get it

they Crippin up the college crime and in fact they could have done it smarter like a puppy if they had done like if when you yell yell did it or cursed at it if it had put its little ears back

and its tail down and jerked off probably people would have wanted it back right but instead when you yelled it it what did it do its smiled it winged it danced right if somebody comes

to my office and I yell at them they started smiling winking and dancing I'm like I never want to see you again so Bill Gates got a standing ovation when he said it was going away because people

were so ticked it was so emotionally unintelligent right it was intelligent about whether you're writing a letter what kind of help you needed for that context it was completely unintelligent

about hey if you're annoying your customer don't smile in their face when you do it so that kind of mismatch was something the developers just didn't

think about and intelligence at the time was really all about math and language and chess and you know games problems

that could be pretty well defined social emotional interaction is much more complex than chess or go or any of the games I that people are trying to solve

and in order to understand that required skills that most people in computer science actually we're lacking personally well let's talk about computer science if things gotten better since since the work since the message

since you've really launched the field with a lot of research work in the space I still find as a person like yourself who's deeply passionate about human

beings and and yet Emin computer science there still seems to be a lack of sorry to say empathy now again as computer scientists yeah well where

hasn't gotten bad let's just say there's a lot more variety among computer scientists these days it's computer scientists are much more diverse group today than they were 25 years ago and

that's good we need all kinds of people to become computer scientists so that computer science reflects more what society needs and you know there's brilliance among every personality type

so it need not be limited to people who prefer computers to other people how hard do you think it is how your view of how difficult it is to recognize emotion

or to create a deeply emotionally intelligent interaction has it gotten easier or harder as you've explored it further and how far away away from

cracking this the if you think of the Turing test solving the intelligence looking at the Turing test for emotional

intelligence I think it is as difficult as I thought it was going to be I think my prediction of its difficulty is spot-on

I think the time estimates are always hard because they're always a function of society's love and hate of a particular topic if society gets excited

and you get you know hundreds of it you get thousands of researchers working on it for a certain application that application gets solved really quickly

the general intelligence the lack of the the computers complete lack of ability to have awareness of what it's doing the

fact that it's not conscious the fact that there's no signs of it becoming conscious the fact that it doesn't read between the lines those kinds of things that we have to teach it explicitly what

other people pick up implicitly we don't see that changing yet there aren't breakthroughs yet that lead us to believe that that's going to go any

faster which means that it's still going to be kind of stuck with a lot of limitations where it's probably only going to do the right thing and very limited narrow

pre-specified context where we can pre script prescribe pretty much what's what's gonna happen there so I don't see the I it's hard to predict the date

because when people don't work on it it's infinite when everybody works on it you get a nice piece of it you know well solved in a short amount of time I

actually think there's a more important issue right now then the difficulty of it and that's causing some of us to put the brakes on a little bit usually we're all just like step on the gas

let's go faster this is causing us to pull back and put the brakes on and that's the way that some of this technology is being used in places like

China right now and that worries me so deeply that it's causing me to pull back myself on a lot of the things that we could be doing and try to get the

community to think a little bit more about ok if we're gonna go forward with that how can we do it in a way that puts in place safeguards that protects people

the technology were referring to is just when a computer senses the human being like the human face yeah right yeah so what there's a lot of exciting things there like forming a deep connection of

the human being book so what are your worries how that could go wrong is it in terms of privacy is it in terms of other

kinds of privacy so here in the US if I'm watching a video of say a political leader and and in the u.s. we're quite

free as we all know to even criticize the you know the president the United States right here that's not a shocking thing it happens you know about every

five seconds sorry but in China what happens if you criticize the leader of the government right and so people are

very careful not to do that however what happens if you're simply watching a video and you make a facial expression that's shows a little bit of skepticism

right well and you know here we're completely for you to do that in fact for free to fly off the handle and say anything we want usually I mean there

are some restrictions you know when when the athlete does this as part of the national broadcast maybe the teams get a little unhappy about picking that forum

to do it right but that's more question of judgment we we have these freedoms and in places that don't have those

freedoms what if our technology can read your underlying affective state what if our technology can read it even non-contact what if our technology can

read it without your prior consent and here in the US and my first company we started a Factiva we have worked super hard to turn away money and

opportunities that try to read people's effect without their prior informed consent and even the software that is licensable you have to sign things

saying you will only use it in certain ways which essentially is get people's buy-in right don't don't do this without people agreeing to it there are other

countries where they're not interested in people's buy-in they're just gonna use it they're gonna inflict it on you and if you don't like it you better not scowl in the direction of any censors so

one let me just comment on a small tangent do you know with the idea of adversarial examples and deep fakes and so on yeah what you bring up is actually

the the in that one sense deep fake provide a comforting protection that they you can no longer really trust that

the video of your face was legitimate and therefore you always have an escape clause if a government is trying if a

stable balanced ethical government is trying to accuse the or something at least you have protection you could say was fake news as it's a popular term now

thinking of it we we know how to go into the video and see for example your heart rate and respiration and whether or not they've been tampered with

and we also can put like fake heart rate and respiration in your video now too we decided we needed to do that after we after we developed a way to extract it

we decided we also needed a way to jam it Hey and so the fact that we took time to do that other step to write that was time that I wasn't spending making the

machine more effectively intelligent and there's a choice and how we spend our time which is now being swayed a little bit less by this goal and a little bit more like by concern about what's

happening in society and what kind of future do we want to build and as we step back and say okay we don't just build AI to build AI to make Elon Musk

more money or to make Amazon Jeff Bezos more money you could gosh you know that's that's the wrong ethic why are we building it what what is the point of

building AI it used to be it was driven by researchers in academia to get papers published and to make a career for themselves and to do something cool

right like cuz maybe it could be done now we realize that this is enabling rich people to get vastly richer the

poor are the divide is even larger and is that the kind of future that we want maybe we want to think about maybe we want to rethink AI maybe we want to

rethink the problems in society that are causing the greatest inequity and rethink how to build AI that's not about a general intelligence but that's about

extending the intelligence and capability that have-nots so that we closed these gaps in society do you hope that kind of stepping on the brake happens organically because I think

still majority of the force behind AI is the desire to publish papers is to make money without thinking about the why do you hope it happens organically is there

room for regulation is yeah great questions I prefer the you know they talk about the carrot versus the stick I definitely prefer the carrot to the

stick and you know in in our free world we there's only so much stick right your find a way around it I generally think

less regulation is better that said even though my position is classically carrot no stick no regulation I think we do need some regulations in this space I do

think we need regulations around P protecting people with their data that you own your data not Amazon not Google I would like to see people own their own data I would also like to see the

regulations that we have right now around lie detection being extended to emotion recognition in general that right now you can't use the lie detector on an employee when you're on a

candidate when you're interviewing them for a job I think similarly we need to put in place protection around reading people's emotions without their consent and in certain cases like characterizing

them for a job and other opportunities so I've also I also think that when we're reading a motion that's predictive around mental health that that should even though it's not medical data that

that should get the kinds of protections that our medical data gets what most people don't know yet is right now with your smartphone use and if you're wearing a sensor and you want to learn

about your stress and your sleep and your physical activity and how much you're using your phone and your social interaction all of that non-medical data when we put it together with machine

learning now call to AI even though the founders of a I wouldn't have called it that that capability cannot only tell that you're calm right now or that

you're getting a little stressed but it can also predict how you're likely to be tomorrow if you're likely to be sick or healthy happy or sad stressed or calm especially when you're tracking data

over time especially when we're tracking a week of your data or more you have an optimism towards you know a lot of people on our phones are worried about this camera that's looking at us for the

most part unbalanced do you are you optimistic about the benefits that can be brought from that camera that's looking at billions of us or should we be more worried

I think we should be a little bit more worried about who's looking at us and listening to us the device sitting on

your countertop in your kitchen whether it's you know Alexa Google home or Apple

Siri these devices want to listen while they say ostensibly to help us and I think there are great people in these companies who do want to help people I

let me not brand them all bad I'm a user of products from all all of these companies I'm naming all the a company's

alphabet Apple Amazon they are awfully big companies right they have incredible

power and you know what if what if China were to buy them right and suddenly all of that data were not part of free America but all of that

data were part of somebody who just wants to take over the world and you submit to them and guess what happens if you so much as smirk the wrong way when they say something that you don't like

well they have reeducation camps right that's a nice word for them by the way they have a surplus of organs for people who have surgery these days they don't have an organ donation problem because

they take your blood and they know you're a match and the doctors are on record of taking organs from people who are perfectly healthy and not prisoners

they're just simply not the favored ones of the government and you know that's a pretty freaky evil Society and we can use the word evil there I was born in

the Soviet Union I can certainly connect to the to the worry that you're expressing at the same time probably

both you and I and you very much so you know there's an exciting possibility

that you can have a deep connection with a machine yeah yeah right so students

who say that they you know when you list like who do you most wish you could have lunch with or dinner with right and though right like I don't like people I just like

computers and one of them said to me once when I had this party at my house I want you to know this is my only social

event of the year my ones okay now this is a brilliant machine learning person right and we need that kind of brilliance and machine learning and I love that computer science welcomes

people who love people and people who are very awkward around people I love that this is a field that anybody could join we need all kinds of people and you

don't need to be a social person I'm not trying to force people who don't like people to suddenly become social at the same time if most of the people building

the AI is the future are the kind of people who don't like people we've got a little bit of a problem hold on a second so let me let me push back on it so don't you think a large

percentage of the world can you know there's loneliness there is a huge problem with loneliness that's growing and so there's a longing for connection

do you if you're lonely you're part of a big and growing group yes so what weren't we're in it together I guess if you're lonely you drive good you're not

alone that's a good line but do you think there's uh you talked about some worry but do you think there's an exciting possibility that's something

like Alexa when these kinds of tools can alleviate that loneliness in a way that other humans can't yeah yeah definitely I mean a great book can kind of

alleviate loneliness very because you just get sucked into this amazing story and you can't wait to go spend time with that character right and they're not a human character there is a human behind

it but yeah it can be an incredibly delightful way to pass the hours and it can meet needs even you know I I don't read those trashy romance books but

somebody does right and what are they getting from this well probably some of that feeling of being there right being there in that social moment that romantic moment or

connecting with somebody I've had a similar experience reading some science fiction books connecting with the character Orson Scott Card and you know just amazing writing and Ender's Game

and and speaker for the dead terrible title but those kind of books that pull you into a character and you feel like you're can if you feel very social it's very connected even though it's not

responding to you and a computer of course can respond to you so it can deepen it right you can have a very deep connection much more than the movie her

right you know plays up right what much more I mean movie her is already a pretty pretty deep connection right well but it but it's just a movie right it's

scripted it's just you know but I mean like there can be a real interaction where the character can learn and you can learn you could imagine it not just

being you and and one character you can imagine a group of characters you can imagine a group of people and characters human Nai connecting where maybe a few

people can't can't sort of be friends with everybody but a few people and there a ice can be friend more people there can be an extended human

intelligence in there where each human can connect with more people that way but it's it's still very limited but there are just what I mean is there many

more possibilities than what's in that movie so there's a tension here the one you expressed a really serious concern about privacy about how governments can misuse the information and there's a

possibility of this connection so let's let's look at Alexa yeah so a personal assistance for the most part as far as I'm aware they ignore your emotion they

ignore even the context or the existence of you the intricate beautiful complex aspects of who you are except maybe aspects of your voice that

how but recognize this before speech recognition do you think they should move towards trying to understand your emotion all of these companies are very

interested in understanding human emotion they they want more people are telling ciri every day they want to kill themselves they Apple wants to know the

difference between if a person is really suicidal versus if a person is just kind of fooling around with Siri right the words may be the same the tone of voice

and what surrounds those words is is pivotal to understand if they should respond in a very serious way bring help

to that person or if they should kind of jokingly tease back you know ah you just wanna you know sell me for something else right like like how do you respond

when somebody says that well you know you do want to err on the side of being careful and taking it seriously people

want to know if the person is happy or stressed in Part B so let me give you an altruistic reason and a business profit

motivated reason and there are people and companies that operate on both principles the altruistic people really care about their customers and really

care about helping you feel a little better at the end of the day and it would just make those people happy if they knew that they made your life better if you came home stressed and after talking with their product you

felt better there are other people who maybe have studied the way effect affects decision-making and prices people pay and they know if I should

tell you like the work of Jen Lerner on heartstrings and purse strings you know if we manipulate you into a slightly sadder mood you'll pay more Yeah right

you'll pay more to change your situation you'll pay more for something you don't even need to make yourself feel better so you know if they sound a little sad maybe I don't want to cheer them up

maybe first I want to help them get something a little shopping therapy right that helps them which is really difficult for a company that's primarily funded on advertisement so they're

encouraged to yet to get if you get you can offer you products or primarily funded value buying things from their store so I think we should be you know maybe we need regulation in the

future to put a little bit of a wall between these agents that have access to our emotion and agents that want to sell us stuff maybe there needs to be a

little bit more of a firewall in between those so maybe digging in a little bit on the interaction with Alexa you mentioned of course a really serious

concern about like recognizing emotion if somebody is speaking of suicide or depression asan but what about the actual interaction itself do you think

so if I if I you know you mentioned Clippy in being annoying what is the objective function we're trying to optimize is it minimize annoyingness or

minimize or maximize happiness or both we look at human human relations I think that push and pull the tension the dance you know the annoying the flaws that's

what makes it fun so is there is there a room for like what what you wanna you want to have a little push and pull think kids sparring

right you know I see my sons and they one of them wants to provoke the other to be upset and that's fun and it's actually healthy to learn where your limits are to learn how to self-regulate

you can imagine a game where it's trying to make you mad and you're trying to show self-control and so if we're doing a AI human interaction that's helping build resilience and self-control

whether it's to learn how to not be a bully or how to turn the other cheek or how to deal with an abusive person in your life then you might need an AI that

pushes your buttons right but in general do you want an AI that pushes your buttons mmm probably depends on your personality I don't

I want one that's respectful that is there to serve me and that is there to extend my ability to do things I'm not

looking for a rival I'm looking for a helper and that's the kind of a I put my money on your census for the majority of people in the world in order to have a rich experience that's what they're

looking for as well so they're not looking if you look at the movie her spoiler alert I believe the the program

the the woman in the movie her leaves the yeah portion for somebody else right because they don't want to be dating anymore

right like well do use your senses if Alexis said you know what I'm actually had enough of you for a while so I'm gonna shut myself off you don't see that

as like I'd say you're trash cuz I paid for you right okay yeah we we've got to remember and this is where this blending

human AI as if we're equals is really deceptive because AI is something at the end of the day that my

students and I are making in the lab and we're choosing what it's allowed to say when it's allowed to speak what it's allowed to listen to what it's allowed

to act on given the inputs that we choose to expose it to what outputs it's allowed to have it's all something made by a human and if we want to make

something that makes our lives miserable fine I'd I wouldn't invest in it as a business you know unless it's just there for self-regulation training but I think we you know we need to think about what

kind of future we want and actually your question I really like the what is the objective function is it to calm people down sometimes is it to always make

people happy and calm them down well there was a book about that right the brave new world you know make everybody happy take your soma if you're unhappy take your happy pill and if you refuse to

take your happy pill well well threaten you by sending you to Iceland to live there I lived in Iceland three years it's a great place don't think you're so

much a little TV commercial there I was a child there for a few years this wonderful place so that part of the book never scared me but but really like do we want AI to

manipulate us into submission into making us happy well if you are a you know like a power obsessed sick dictator individual who only wants to control

other people to get your jollies in life then yeah you want to use AI to extend your power in your scale just to force people into submission if you believe

that the human race is better off being given freedom and the opportunity to do things that might surprise you then you want to use AI to extend people's

ability to build you want to build AI that extends human intelligence that empowers the weak and helps balance the power between the weak and the strong

not that gives more power to the strong so in in this process of empowering people in sensing people and what is

your sense on emotion in terms of recognizing emotion the difference between emotion that is shown and emotion that is felt so yeah yeah

emotion that is expressed on the surface through your face your body and not various other things and what's actually going on deep inside on the biological

level on the neuroscience level or some kind of cognitive level yeah whoa no easy questions here boy yeah I'm sure there's no there's no definitive answer

but what's your sense how far can we get by just looking at the face we're very limited when we just look at the face but we can get further than most people

think we can get people think hey I have a great poker face therefore all you're ever gonna get from me is neutral well that's naive we can read with the

ordinary camera on your laptop or on your phone we can read from a neutral face if your heart is racing we can read from a neutral face if your breathing is

becoming irregular and showing signs of stress we can read under some conditions that maybe I won't give you details on how your heart rate variable

the power is changing that could be a sign of stress even when your heart rate is not necessarily accelerating so I'm sorry from physio sensitive from the

face from the color changes that you cannot even see but the camera can see that's amazing so so you can get a lot of signal but so we get things people

can't see using a regular camera and from that we can tell things about your stress so if you are just sitting there with a blank face thinking nobody can

read my emotion while you're wrong right so that's really interesting but that's from sort of visual information from the face that's almost like cheating your

way just the physiological state of the body by being very clever with when you can do as a tional processing signal processing so that's a really impressive but if you just look at the stuff we

humans can see the bulk of the smile smirks the subtle all the face so then you can hide that on your face for a limited amount of time now if you if you're just going in for a brief

interview and you're hiding it that's pretty easy for most people if you are however surveilled constantly everywhere you go then it's gonna say gee you know

Lex used to smile a lot and now I'm not seeing so many smiles and Roz used to you know laugh a lot and smile a lot very spontaneously and now I'm only

seeing these not so spontaneous looking smiles and only when she's asked these questions you know that's some sleep we

could look at that too so now I have to be a little careful - when I say we you think we can't read your emotion and we can it's not that binary what we're reading is more some physiological

changes that relate to the your activation now that doesn't mean that we know everything about how you feel in fact we still know very little about how you feel your thoughts are still private

you're nuanced feelings are still completely private we can't read any of that so there's some relief that we can't read that even brain

ding can't read that wearables can't read that however as we read your body state changes and we know what's going on in your environment and we look at

patterns of those over time we can start to make some inferences about what you might be feeling and that is where it's

not just the momentary feeling but it's more your stance towards things and that could actually be a little bit more scary with certain kinds of governmental

control freak people who want to know more about are you on their team or are you not and getting that information through overtime so you're saying there's a lot of things by looking at

the change over time yeah so you've done a lot of exciting work both in computer vision and physiological sense like wearables what do you think is the best

modality for what's the the the best window into the emotional soul like is it the face is that the voice it's a body you want to know without you know

everything is informative everything we do is informative so for health and well-being and things like that define the wearable physio techno some

measuring physiological signals is the best for health based stuff so here I'm gonna answer empirically with data and

studies we've been doing we've been doing studies now these are currently running with lots of different kinds of people but where we've published data and I can speak publicly to it the data

are limited right now to New England college students so that's a small group among New England college students when

they are wearing a wearable like like the impact embrace here that's measuring skin conductance movement temperature

and when they are using a smartphone that is collecting their time of day of when they're texting who they're texting

their movement around it their GPS the weather information based upon their location and when it's using machine learning and putting all of that together and looking not

just it right now but looking at your rhythm of behaviors over about a week when we look at that we are very accurate of forecasting tomorrow's

stress mood and happy sad mood and health and when we look at which pieces of that are most useful first of all if

you have all the pieces you get the best results if you have only the wearable you get the next best results and that's

still better than 80% accurate at forecasting tomorrow's levels it's not exciting because the wearable stuff with physiological information it feels like

it violates privacy less than the non-contact face based methods yeah it's it's interesting I think what people sometimes don't you know it's fine the

early days people would say oh wearing something or giving blood is invasive right whereas a camera is less invasive because it's not touching you I think on the contrary the things that are not

touching you or maybe the scariest because you don't know when they're on or off and you don't know when people and you don't know who's behind it right

a wearable depending upon what's happening to the data on it if it's just stored locally or if it's streaming and

what it is being attached to in in a sense you have the most control over it because it's also very easy to just take it off take it off right now it's not

sensing me so if I'm uncomfortable with what it's sensing now I'm free yeah right if I'm comfortable with what it's sensing then and I happen to know

everything about this one what it's doing with it so I'm quite comfortable with it then I'm you know I have control I'm comfortable control is one of the

biggest factors for an individual in reducing their stress if I have control over it if I know all there is to know about it then my stress is a lot lower

and I'm making an informed choice about whether to wear it or not or winter wear it or not I wanna wear it sometimes maybe not others right this is that control that I'm with you that control

even if you had the ability to turn it off yeah is a really important and we need to maybe you know if there's regulations maybe that's number one to

protect is people's ability to it's easy to opt out as to opt in right so you've studied a bit of neuroscience as well

how if looking at our own minds of the biological stuff or the neurobiological the neuroscience to get the signals in

our brain helped you understand the problem in the approach of effective computing so originally I was the computer architect that I was building hardware and computer designs and I

wanted to build ones that work like the brain so I've been studying the brain as long as I've been studying how to build computers have you figured out anything

yet it's so amazing you know they used to think like oh if you remove this chunk of the brain and you find this function goes away well that's the part of the brain that did it and then later they realize if you remove this other

chunk of the brain that function comes back and oh no we really don't understand it brains are so interesting and changing all the time and able to

change in ways that will probably continue to surprise us when we were measuring stress you may know the story where we found an unusual big skin

conductance pattern on one wrist in one of our kids with autism and in trying to figure out how on earth you could be stressed on one wrist and not the you know that like how can you get sweaty on one wrist right when you when you get

stressed but that sympathetic fight-or-flight response like you he kind of should like sweat more in some places than others but not more on one wrist than the other that didn't make any sense we learned that what had

actually happened was a part of his brain had unusual electrical activity and that caused an unusually large sweat response on one wrist and not the other

and since then we've learned that seizures caused this unusual electrical activity and depending where the seizure is if it's in one place and it's staying there you can have a big electrical

response we can pick up with a wearable at one part of the body you can also have a seizure that spreads over the whole brain generalized grand mal seizure and that response spreads and we

can pick it up pretty much anywhere as we learned this and then later built embrace that's now FDA cleared for seizure detection we have also built

relationships with some of the most amazing doctors in the world who not only help people with unusual brain activity or epilepsy but some of them are also surgeons and they're going in

and they're implanting electrodes not just to momentarily read the strange patterns of brain activity that we'd like to see return to normal but also to read out continuously what's happening

in some of these deep regions of the brain during most of life when these patients are not seizing most of the time they're not seizing most of the time they're fine and so we are now

working on mapping those deep brain regions that you can't even usually get with EEG scalp electrodes because the changes deep inside don't reach the

surface but interesting when some of those regions are activated we see a big skin conductance response who would have thunk it right like nothing here but something here in fact right after

seizures that we think are the most dangerous ones that precede what's called pseudo sudden unexpected death in epilepsy there's a period where the brain waves go flat and it looks like

the person's brain has stopped but it hasn't the activity has has gone deep into a region that can make the cortical activity look flat like a quick shutdown

signal here it can unfortunately cause breathing to stop if it progresses long enough before that happens we see a big skin conductance response in the data

that we have the longer this flattening the bigger our response here so we have been trying to learn you know initially like why why are we getting a big response here when there's nothing here

well it turns out there's something much deeper so we can now go inside the brains of some of these individuals fabulous people who usually aren't seizing and

get this data and start to map it so that's active research that we're doing right now with with top medical partners so this this wearable sensor this looking skin conductance can capture

sort of the ripples of the complexity of what's going on in our brain so you this this little device you have a hope that you can start to get the signal from the

from the interesting things happening in the brain yeah we've already published the strong correlations between the size of this response and the flattening that happens after words and unfortunately

also in a real suit up case where the patient died because the well we don't know why we don't know if somebody was there it would have definitely prevented it but we know that most students happen

when the person's alone and in this suit up is an acronym su DEP and it stands for the number two cause of years of life lost actually among all

neurological disorders stroke is number one suit up as number two but most people haven't heard of it actually I'll plug my TED talk it's on the front page of Ted right now that

talks about this and we hope to change that I hope everybody who's heard of SIDS and stroke will now hear of suit up because we think in most cases it's

preventable if people take their meds and aren't alone when they have a seizure not guaranteed to be preventable there are some exceptions but we think most cases probably are so you have this

embrace now in the version two wristband right for epilepsy management that's the one that's FDA approved yes and which is

kind of weird weird yes that's okay it essentially means it's approved for marketing got it just a side note how difficult is that to do it's essentially getting FDA it's organized computer

science technology it's so agonizing it's much harder than publishing multiple papers and top medical journals yeah we published peer-reviewed top

medical journal Neurology best results and that's not good enough for the FDA is that system so if we look at the peer review of medical journals there's flaws the

strengths is the FDA approval process how does it compare to the peer review process is it have a strengthened I think we peer review over FDA any day but is that a good thing is that a good

thing for FDA are you saying does it stop some amazing technology from getting through yeah it does the FDA performs a very important good role in

keeping people safe they keep things they put you through tons of safety testing and that's wonderful and that's great I'm all in favor of the safety

testing sometimes they put you through additional testing that they don't have to explain why they put you through it and you don't understand why you're going through it and it doesn't make

sense and that's very frustrating and maybe they have really good reasons and they just would it would do people a

service to articulate those reasons be more transparent so as part of them Pataca you have sensors so what kind of

problems can we crack what kind of things from seizures to autism - I think I've heard you mentioned depression and

what kind of things can we alleviate can we detect what's your hope of what how we can make an world a better place with this wearable tech I would really like

to see my you know fellow brilliant researchers step back and say you know what are what are the really hard problems that we don't know how to solve

that come from people maybe we don't even see in our normal life because they're living in the poorer places they're stuck on the bus there they can't even afford the uber or the lifts

or the data plan or all these other wonderful things we have that we keep improving on meanwhile there's all these folks left behind in the world and they're struggling with horrible

diseases with depression with epilepsy with diabetes with just awful stuff that maybe a little more time and attention

hanging out with them and learning what are their challenges in life what are their needs how do we help them have job skills how do we help them have a hope and a future and a chance to have the

great life that so many of us building technology have and then how would that reshape the kinds of AI that we build how would that reshape the new you know

apps that we build or the maybe we need to focus on how to make things more low-cost and green instead of thousand-dollar phones I mean come on

you know why can't we be thinking more about things that do more with less for these books quality of life is not related to the cost of your phone you know it's not something that you know

it's been shown that what about seventy-five thousand dollars of income and Happiness is the same okay however I can tell you you get a lot of happiness from helping other people and get a lot

more than seventy-five thousand dollars buys so how do we connect up the people who have real needs with the people who have the ability to build the future and

build the kind of future that truly improves the lives of all the people that are currently being left behind so

let me return just briefly and a point maybe in movie her so do you think if we look farther into the future he says so

much of the benefit from making our technology more empathetic to us human beings would make them better tools empower us make make our lives better

well if we look farther into the future do you think we'll ever create an AI system that we can fall in love with and loves us back on the level that is

similar to human to human interaction like in the movie her or beyond I think we can simulate it and ways that could

you know sustain engagement for a while would it be as good as another person I don't think so for if you're used to like good people

now if you've just grown up with nothing but abuse and you can't stand human beings can we do something that helps you there that gives something through a machine yeah but

that's pretty low bar right if you've only encountered pretty awful people if you've encountered wonderful amazing people we're nowhere near building anything like that

and I'm I would not bet on building it I would bet instead on building the kinds of AI that helps all helps kind of raise

all boats that helps all people be better people helps all people figure out if they're getting sick tomorrow and it helps give them what they need to stay well tomorrow that's the kind of AI

want to build that improves human lives not the kind of AI that just walks on The Tonight Show and people go wow look how smart that is you know really like

and then it goes back in a box you know so on that point if we continue looking a little bit into the future do you

think an AI that's empathetic and does improve our lives need to have a physical presence of body and even let

me cautiously say the C word consciousness and even fear of mortality so some of those human characteristics do you think he needs to have those

aspects or can it remain simply a machine learning tool that learns from data of behavior that that learns to

make us based on previous patterns feel better or doesn't need those elements of consciousness and it depends on your goals if you're making a movie it needs a body it needs a gorgeous body it needs

to act like it has consciousness it needs to act like it has emotion right because that's what sells that's what's gonna get me to show up and enjoy the movie okay in real life

does it need all that well if you've read Orson Scott Card Ender's Game speaker for the dead you know it could just be like a little voice in your earring right and you could have an intimate relationship and it could get

to know you and it doesn't need to be a robot but that doesn't make this compelling of a movie right I mean we already think it's kind of weird when a guy's looks like he's talking to himself

on the train you know even though it's earbuds so we have embodied is more powerful embodied when

you compare interactions with an embodied robot versus a video of a robot versus no robot the robot is more engaging the robot gets our attention

more the robot when you walk in your house is more likely to get you to remember to do the things that you asked it to do because it's kind of got a physical presence you can avoid it if you don't like it it could see here

avoiding it there's a lot of power to being embodied there will be embodied AIS they have great power and opportunity and potential there will

also be a eyes that aren't embodied that just our little software assistants that help us with different things that may get to know things about us will they be

conscious there will be attempts to program them to make them appear to be conscious we can already write programs that make it look like what do you mean of course I'm aware that you're there right I mean it's trivial to say stuff

like that it's it's easy to fool people but does it actually have conscious experience like we do nobody has a clue how to do that yet that seems to be

something that is beyond what any of us knows how to build now will it have to have that I think you can get pretty far

with a lot of stuff without it will we accord it rights well that's more a political game that it is a question of real consciousness

yeah can you go to jail for turning off Alexa is what that's the question for an election maybe a few decades well Sophia robots already been given rights as a

citizen in Saudi Arabia right even before women have full rights then the robot was still put back in the box to

be shipped to the next place where it would get a paid appearance right yeah dark and almost

comedic if not absurd so I've heard you speak about your journey and finding faith sir uh and how you discovered some

wisdoms about life and beyond from reading the Bible ma say that you said scientists who often assume that nothing exists beyond what can be currently

measured materialism materialist and scientism yes in some sense this assumption enables the near term

scientific method assuming that we can uncover the mysteries of this world by the mechanisms of measurement that we

currently have but we easily forget that we've made this assumption so what do you think we missed out on by making

that assumption that hmm it's fine to limit the scientific method to things we can measure and reason about and

reproduce that's fine I think we have to recognize that sometimes we scientists also believe in things that happen historically you know like I believe the

Holocaust happened I can't prove events from past history scientifically you prove them with historical evidence right it was the impact they had on

people with eyewitness testimony and and things like that so a good thinker recognizes that science is one of many

ways to get knowledge it's not the only way and there there's been some really bad philosophy and bad thinking recently you can call it scientism where people

say science is the only way to get to truth and it's not it just isn't there are other ways that work also like knowledge of love with someone you don't

you don't prove your love through science right so history philosophy love

a lot of other things in life show us that there's more ways to gain knowledge and truth if you're willing to believe there is such a thing and I believe

there is than science I do I am a scientist however and in my science I do limit my science to the things that the

scientific method can can do but I recognize that it's myopic to say that that's all there is right there's just like you listed there's all the why questions and really we know for being

honest with ourselves the percent of what we really know is is basically zero relative to the full mystery of this measure theory a set of measure zero if

I have a finite amount of knowledge which I do so you said that you believe in truth so let me ask that old question what do you think this thing is all

about life on Earth life the universe and everything I did everything was Douglas Adams yeah 42 my favorite number my

street address my husband right yes - the exact same number for our house we got to pick it there's a reason we picked 42 yeah so is it just 40 tours

there's do you have other words that you can put around it well I think there's a grand adventure and I think this life is a part of it I think there's a lot more to it than meets the eye and the heart

and the mind and the soul here I think we we see but through a glass dimly in this life we see only a part of all there is to know if if people haven't

read the the Bible they should if they consider themselves educated and you could read proverbs and find from end s wisdom in there that cannot be

scientifically proven but when you read it there's something in you like like a musician knows when the instruments played right and it's beautiful there's something in you that comes alive and

knows that there's a truth there that like your strings are being plucked by the master instead of by me right playing when I pluck it but probably

when you play it sound spectacular right and when you when you encounter those truths there's something in you that

sings and knows that there is more than what I can prove mathematically or program a computer to do don't get me wrong the math is gorgeous the

computer programming can be brilliant it's inspiring right we want to do more none of the squashes my desire to do science or to get knowledge through

science I'm not I'm not dissing the science at all I grow even more in awe of what the science can do because I'm more in awe of all there is we don't

know and really at the heart of science you have to have a belief that there's truth that there's something greater to be discovered and some scientists may

not want to use the face word but it's faith that drives us to do science it's faith that there is truth that there's something to know that we don't know

that it's worth knowing that it's worth working hard and that there is meaning that there is such a thing as meaning which by the way science can't prove either we have to kind of start with

some assumptions that there's things like truth and meaning and these are really questions philosophers own right this is their space of philosophers and

theologians at some level so these are things science you know if we when people claim that science will tell you all truth that's there's a name for that

it's it's its own kind of face it's scientism and it's very myopic yeah there's a much bigger world out there to be explored in in ways that science may

not at least for now allow us to explore yeah and there's meaning and purpose and hope and joy and love and all these awesome things that make it all worthwhile too

I don't think there's a better way to end it right thank you so much for talking today pleasure great questions you