Ayanna Howard: Human-Robot Interaction and Ethics of Safety-Critical Systems

Ayanna Howard is a roboticist and professor at Georgia Tech, director of Human-Automation Systems lab, with research interests in human-robot interaction, assistive robots in the home, therapy gaming apps, and remote robotic exploration of extreme environments.

This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon.

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Here's the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

00:00 - Introduction 02:09 - Favorite robot 05:05 - Autonomous vehicles 08:43 - Tesla Autopilot 20:03 - Ethical responsibility of safety-critical algorithms 28:11 - Bias in robotics 38:20 - AI in politics and law 40:35 - Solutions to bias in algorithms 47:44 - HAL 9000 49:57 - Memories from working at NASA 51:53 - SpotMini and Bionic Woman 54:27 - Future of robots in space 57:11 - Human-robot interaction 1:02:38 - Trust 1:09:26 - AI in education 1:15:06 - Andrew Yang, automation, and job loss 1:17:17 - Love, AI, and the movie Her 1:25:01 - Why do so many robotics companies fail? 1:32:22 - Fear of robots 1:34:17 - Existential threats of AI 1:35:57 - Matrix 1:37:37 - Hang out for a day with a robot