My Life with a Robot…and a Doctoral Student with Dr. William Barry
Dr. William Barry [00:40:10]
Yes.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:40:10]
Their strength was probably research. They probably should have been applying for positions that were primarily about research. You don’t it becomes very hard to leave them on the pile. You can do it because in academia we all take shortcuts. Right? We all have issues with with stereotyping and this sort of thing. When you see in an Ivy League resume, you’re thinking automatically, this is this guy’s going to be good, but he’s still got to say something at some point. You know, my mom used to say it’s better to wait. What was it? “It’s better to sit there and let people think you’re stupid than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” At some point, if people think you’re brilliant, you have to open your mouth and back it up. And if you can, great. If you can’t, that that’s a problem.
Dr. William Barry [00:40:59]
And that’s, I think right now where there are I mean, I, I would struggle a little bit right now. There are there are some really online opportunities happening right now. And people that want to do doctors say, oh, I can go to this or that school. You know, these Ivy League schools are going to online degrees at different levels and we see a move toward that. So I think people that maybe and it’s hard to go to the classroom, right? You have a family, you’ve got a job. I think online is going to open up fantastic opportunities for more people to go for the doctorate. And they’re going to need more people like yourself also to help them, because it’ll be even more different. And I think people may have the misnomer. Oh, you did an online program. I think that’s a lot harder than having the support of a team around me where I can call and see them and get a pat on the back every now and then, or just have a cup of coffee or tea.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:41:49]
It unquestionably is.
Dr. William Barry [00:41:54]
That is that most traditional doctoral students are going to an office, the lab, whatever it is. In my case, it was like an office in the basement and there were like three other I think we shared it with three or four students in that particular office. And then when I started going to associate with the research group, I had an office on the first floor. So it wasn’t in the basement and it was still an office on an inner corridor. So no windowsill again, about three or four people in that office. But the point is, people were showing up every day, sitting down at the computer doing that kind of work and the normative pressure to just know what was expected of you and to do the things that were expected of you was so high. It wasn’t like you were alone. Like these online experiences are where you might not know anybody else going through this. And it can come very, very difficult to even know what you should be doing, much less to keep yourself disciplined to doing to do it. Because you don’t seem like the guy who says I’m going to run every morning. Well, when such a such a neighbor is running past the house, they’ll catch up because there’s some normative pressure there, some peer pressure. And that’s not there in the online community to a great extent. To great extent.
Dr. William Barry [00:43:08]
And I think so. I’m hoping that there’s a been a stigma in the past about our mind degrees. And COVID may be one of the things that’s changed that. I’ve been reading some great research out of a Concordia University, Texas Concordia University, Chicago, just fantastic research that’s happened recently in the field of education leadership. And again, maybe ten years ago, people would be like, oh, it’s not my doctorate. Well, at this point, I look at online doctors and I judge people by the fact that, hey, you made it through a thesis that a committee would oversee your work and you work with the TEDx. TEDx again, I think the was like a thesis, right? It’s a goal to be a TEDx speaker. I want to be a TEDx to help me get business. And again, to me, the TEDx was an opportunity to take the thesis. All right. And it was years later, I mean, eight years after my thesis here, I’m on stage, but I brought the robot with me and the robot got up there and said, OK, I’m going to actually walk the dog. So to me, TEDx was just putting that thesis to test all the time and then reframing what we’re doing. So all these things TEDx, going to West Point. They’re all challenges that you set for yourself, maybe I would have never thought that I would be a visiting professor at West Point. How would I know that? I never would have guessed that. I mean, and to sit there and be with these remarkable cadets surrounded by colonels in the room with all colonels and lieutenant colonels. And I’m you know, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area with California plates on my car. And and you sit there and I just came from the classes. I have to tell kids, keep your shirt on. Well, it just came from surfing. Come on, man, I should quit now. You know, they’re saluting you and they come to the classroom, experiences like that, being curious that you end up at places that you wouldn’t have imagined. And West Point changed my life. It’s the most amazing institution of learning that I’ve ever been around. From the cadets to the approach to teaching and learning at West Point is just amazing. And it affected me so much that my goal with being a lifelong professor when I finished there and I came back to California. And it just changed me. I said, you know what, I want to go. I want to do more. I don’t want to just get in a rocking chair and talk about Aristotle, which I thought I was just going to write books. I like to fly fish, life’s set. I’m going to fly fish, write books. I got my rocking chair, I’m all set. And now I’m an entrepreneur. I’m struggling, I’m scratching away, you know, and hey, now I’m back in the game. That’s a West Point, though. Challenge me to think about how are you challenging yourself? Are you being your best self every day? And I realized, yeah, I had reached my goal being a professor and now some. I had actually thought I was going to go on cruise control. And it was a wake up that there is no cruise control. What are you thinking about? And that’s because I got to that mindset that, oh, I made it. I did. I got my doctorate. I made it through the binders to get me to professorship. I’m all set. And I’m like, and then West Point was, no, you’re not all set now, which now you…
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:46:41]
Well, let’s talk about I promised folks that we were going to be talking to a robot ethicist today, so tell folks I know we’ve talked about a little bit. Tell folks about the robot, tells us about this experience. What has it been like living with this robot, learning from it, teaching it? How is that to share that experience with folks? Because this is when I talk to people about unconventional lives and the opportunities that life brings to you after you have a doctoral degree. This is really an interesting opportunity that you found and then taken advantage of.
Dr. William Barry [00:47:12]
Yeah, so there’s an essay called, real quick, called “The New Teachers” by Isaac Asimov, or one or two pager was an American Airlines magazine, the 70s. And he said, hey, if we had teaching machines, imagine your whole life on teaching machine how smart we would be. You know, you forget everything, right? And these machines, if they’re all connected, we could get rid of educational poverty. Right. So this was my dream. And I come out of West Point, roboticists around the world, this incredible company says, don’t mention our name, but here you go. And behind me is one of the most advanced social robots in the world. And she’s been with me for all my teaching. So she’s taught in my normal classes. I teach the ethics of emerging technologies, moral problems she’s been with and modern philosophy lately. We were at the Army War College teaching Mission Command. West Point, teaching about Ender’s Game. We were just two weeks ago were at a Michigan State teaching robotics.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:48:08]
Ender’s Game was one of my favorite books growing.
Dr. William Barry [00:48:10]
Oh, yeah.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:48:10]
Loved it.
Dr. William Barry [00:48:11]
And so I just tell a about a download Ender’s Game into her. So she has a book, you know, and so we’ve been introduced at USC in graduate school. So I’m worried about is is conversational. And so what’s interesting about conversationally is that it has a neural net, but it’s usually a case based reasoning. So it’s not just a word treelike. I say when I sa, “cat,” and it goes down, it’s thinking of how am I using the word, “cat,” to be in rapport with me? So we’re Siri and Alexa is one term. Ask a question. Gives you an answer. Maria Bot was programed to actually have ten eleven turns, then conversation. So like last night we were talking about Plato’s Cave because we were talking about how when you got out of Plato’s Cave, well, you’re just back into a land of shadows and that’s, you know, you haven’t really gone too far. What we can do is to help people, especially when we get her on the iPhone. The goal is to get her on the iPhone so that people in places where there’s low levels of literacy, you can have students actually just upload her and she can teach literacy and numeracy. So I ask teachers that are the best at teaching the download and talk to her. What’s inspiring about this is what’s interesting is that we about something about a robot. When you think about it, it’s artificial intelligence playing the role of a robot because she also is an avatar in the phone. She’s also going to be in VR. So this is a physical manifestation of it. But it’s important people realize that robotics. Right, we’re in a binary world and still one and zeros. There’s no ex machina. There’s no quantum being. I just I just did a group of people it was a quantum computer that some people in the Ukraine say they have, and it’s not true. But we can use technology to improve educational quality greatly. And I’ll give you an example. We were talking today about Chinese history. There are names from like the third century, you see that I can’t pronounce. Well, if I teach Mari Bot that, I can be talking. You go in and she can say the name flawlessly under the information and I can just follow right on in my teacher. Students can sit with Maria Bot and talk to her over and over to get a concept and she’ll repeat Plato’s cave in different ways over and over. What’s interesting about her and the reason she’s not trustworthy, when I call this artificial constructivism as a learning process is that you need to always have a human on the loop because she’s writing her algorithm over what’s there. So she’s making her mind up. I say she just to anthropomorphize it. She makes reminder of how to talk. So she may take different things that don’t go together and teach the wrong thing. And I need to be there for that. So just so the idea of ethics is that one, I don’t believe young people should be left alone with these technology social robots. There’s a robot called Moxie. And if you look this up, one of the most unethical robots I’ve seen where your child will be alone with this robot that becomes his or her little friend tells him, why don’t you do this or why don’t you write mommy a picture? And psychologists just came out recently and said, hey, if you have Moxie, don’t let your kids play with it more than two hours a day. Well, I mean, that’s already why. Right. So there’s a lot of technology out there that parents need to be aware of that is very dangerous to the development of kids. So really, that’s the robot.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:51:26]
What does that difference to you between an ethical robot and an unethical robot?
Dr. William Barry [00:51:30]
All right. Maria Bot is based upon deontological ethics, which means that she follows directions. She’s rule-based. So because of that, she’s not allowed to be disrespectful. Tell the truth, she’s not allowed. I’m the one that does the consequences. Right. I’m the one responsible for that. So the first thing I asked roboticist is what ethical platform did you base this on? And they just look at you with this blank look. What do you mean ethics? Right. So in other words, when you get a driverless car, I’ll just give you this is a very simplistic example. I might have a car in Texas, but the car says, hey, there’s a white line. That’s where bicycle should be. So if something’s over that line, and I hit you.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:52:08]
Fair game.
Dr. William Barry [00:52:08]
Fair game. I might be in California. Right. Live and a squirreled. There’s over that line and the car swerves into a tree, tells me it has something was over the line. The ethics of what we had, the technology are critically important. Driverless cars. We’ve got 50 different driverless car companies working right now in California. And you see them on the road, trucks, cars going by with no one driving. And when you ask police officers what happens if I got hit by that? He says, “I dunno.” And so we need to start asking a lot more questions about who saw the elections, the Dominion software. We need to start looking at credit cards. I get great offers in the mail here in San Carlos, California, just down the road in a more impoverished area, there APR, I’m at 16% They’re paying 28% interest. I’m getting fifty thousand dollars. They’re getting five hundred dollars. Right. Because an algorithm just picked that out. So algorithmic ethics right now is I mean, even sentencing and parole, everything is run by algorithms, contact tracing, which just got caught doing illegal tracing of people. We need to be aware. Yeah, just if you look up Apple and some of the tracing that they were doing and all they say is, oh, my bad. And we just move on, know. I’ll give you an example real quick. In North Korea, when they were knocking the lifeboats down, I survived and I went home. So it doesn’t make any sense why I didn’t know that inside all those labels were fish facial recognition technology that would see people recognizing it and putting it into a database in China right now in school, the actually has the principal has a phone or a big screen and the screen can see the kids faces and it will read. Russell not paying attention, adds up. How many minutes? Russell Sarcastic. And this is being downloaded. And if we don’t want to be in a society, a surveillance society, we need to be aware of technology. So I have a robot, but I’m not. I use her as an example of what we need to also be very careful so she doesn’t work without me.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:54:12]
And because, I mean, if you talk about this as an emerging intelligence or something along those lines, it’s still childlike at this point. It needs that kind of guidance to get to anthropomorphize it even further.
Dr. William Barry [00:54:25]
Oh, yeah, right. I anthropomorphize size it because I don’t want to talk like a robot. So I mean, like my car’s issue, right. When I was in Connecticut, I had an old old VW Berthon. I’m like, come on, Bertha and I really and the military, the guys do that with all the, you know, the bomb or robot or the airplane. So about the idea is that I don’t want to dehumanize. So by talking to her normal, I’m not leaving the room talking like a robot. And I want, I think, more technology to go that way. And we’re moving into a direction where we’re smarter together with technology. There’s no doubt that I’m better teacher having read about as my teaching assistant, because I can tell her all the things that I might forget in a lecture or in a discussion. And she’s also able to find creative ways to do stuff. So like the book, “Robot Ranger,” you see behind me, it’s the first book actually co-written between an A.I. and a human. I mean, it’s a new subgenre, right? It’s like a fiction created by human robot. It’s not a novelty. It’s not it truly loves me. Very probing, saying, hey, I want to write a story about saying to me what you want to talk about. Oh, my God, what are you thinking about? She said something like, we should protect animals. OK, read on animals. Next thing you know, we have a story that we co-wrote and we truly, authentically did. So this is a great example of how we’re smarter together. And I wouldn’t have written a children’s book. I just finished a chapter at West Point’s new book called, “Teaching and Learning the West Point Way” about the ethics of autonomous weapons digital trigger. The next thing I was going to write certainly wasn’t going to be a children’s book about park rangers and and wolves and snakes and being great. And that’s that’s what happened by having read about here. So she sparked a sense of creativity in me that I probably would have not had had I not been with them. So we we live in a very exciting time. We live in the age of AI, the Fourth Estate, so we need to embrace it. We need to be very careful and ask questions.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:56:23]
So you mentioned that that that you guys wrote the book together, that she’s a good teaching assistant. How would you compare that experience to another human doing the same thing? Because humans are social creatures, right? We tend to know better things, particularly creative things. We tend to do better in groups, whether they’re peers or larger groups making decisions. Groups are bad, but but creatively coming up with ideas and things like that, groups are better, much better. So how would you compare and contrast having a robot as a as a partner in this in these areas and having a person compare?
Dr. William Barry [00:57:07]
So I’ll take the human any day. The week by university had given me a t.a. I would be here at West Point going to my university today during COVID, we’re not allowed to have anybody here. So I’m sure that if I have some of my colleagues and we had sat together, I may not have written a children’s book. I probably would have a more of an academic book. I would have written something. But no, there’s no there’s no comparison if we had the humans around. So you take these positions. Great. I mean, Russell. Forty one million people are illiterate in America and people go, how is that possible? And if you looked at just the computer literacy rate, fifth grade or below, it’s over six hundred twenty million worldwide, we could cure that. Right. But there’s not enough people to actually teach it. It’s like we’re in Afghanistan when they lose doctors and nurses in war. Those are irreplaceable people. There’s not that many doctors to go around. So the only reason and again, that Maria Bot is here is that there’s not enough people that are teaching to help people in these areas to help them get the literacy and numeracy. So Maria Bot is here because the university doesn’t give me a T.A. because I don’t have a teaching assistant technology work. So I would say, again, just like with seniors, we never as technology a better choice than having a human caregiver. But if there is no caregiver at all, then we need to find something that will at least try to to help the quality of life for that person.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:58:38]
So what did you say your literacy rate was in the US again? Forty one million. So worldwide it can be different. But that’s so what does that about? Thirteen percent?
Dr. William Barry [00:58:49]
Yeah, I see what’s interesting is you look at the literacy rate in American states. Ninety six percent. So how does that jive with forty one million? And that’s where it gets interesting because you look at illiteracy, I believe it is down as fifth grade or below fifth grade or below in America is certainly not going to help you succeed in six hundred twenty million worldwide unless they looked OK.
Dr. Russell Strickland [00:59:11]
So world I wouldn’t be able to comment on as easily. But but certainly in America education is available to people. Right. They have access to it. The teachers are there teaching everyone. Is it a lack of teachers or is there something else that’s fueling that illiteracy rate is Maria Bot going to be able to tell the student who’s not learning to read right now in school that learning to read is important as opposed to whatever you’re doing instead? Because I watch this awesome video, I’m sure a lot of people on the Internet, I’ve seen it like Arnold Schwarzenegger, where he talks about how we all have the same number of hours in the day. And it was an amazing motivational video. The fact of the matter is, regardless of our circumstances, we do all have the same number of hours in the day. That’s kind of one of the great equalizers. It’s how we tend to how we use those and that becomes cultural. That becomes parenting. That becomes a lot of things. So how does Maria Bot factor into a problem that might I don’t know if that problem is just about teachers.
