Deep Future Pablos

I've gotten to spend a little bit of time with Rob Shepherd over the years. He's working on soft robotics and all the different kinds of materials advancements that could really help us make robots that are more naturally integrated into the world.



Things like polymer colloidal suspensions as inks for 3d printers so they can fabricate microfluidic devices, synthesizing single micron to millimeter scale parts in glass and silicon and all kinds of other stuff, like tiny gears. Imagine if you were trying to make a micro machinery like Swiss watches, but smaller. That's the kind of stuff that he worked on in the past and researched, developing pneumatic actuators, different kinds of elastomers and things that could maybe give us a real kind of muscles for robots.









Also developing the kinds of walking and undulating movements that you would want robots to do once they got beyond just being these kind of rigid jerky things that we have now. This also gets really interesting when you're trying to make fingers for robots, which I'm personally obsessed with. I think it is a kingpin that's going to enable robots to start going to all the places they haven't been able to. We've seen some real progress on that lately.





Rob is a great guy, super humble, willing to share everything he knows, which is a lot. Rob is an associate professor at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell university.





We recorded this in Ojai, California in a In-n-out Burger, on a Friday night, when it was full of teenagers... So this is it also an exercise in using AI for noise canceling, post-facto.



I know it won't be the cleanest recording you've ever heard, but I think it will be interesting to know that we ran the audio through a tool called AUDO, and AUDO is one of many. I don't have anything to do with them. I've talked to the founders few times. I think it's cool. There's probably other ones, I don't know what the best ones are, but I've been using AUDO, and it's able to do this remarkable job cutting out, like a hundred noisy teenagers, while Rob and I are just sitting there eating burgers, talking about robots.



So hopefully you'll learn something from that as well...



Important Links:




Cornell University Organic Robotic Labs



Llume



Cornell Engineering



Robotics and Autonomy



Advanced Manufacturing and Materials




About Rob Shepherd





Rob Shepherd received his B.S. (2002) and Ph.D. (2010) in Material Science at the University of Illinois where his research focused on developing polymeric and colloidal suspensions as 'inks' for 3D printers.



He also fabricated microfluidic devices to synthesize single micron to millimeter scale parts. Concurrently to performing this research, he received his M.B.A. (2009) at U of I and started a company, worked with several other startups, and gained significant experience with the details of market research, financials, accounting issues, and legal aspects of entrepreneurship.



In 2010, he continued his education as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University in George Whitesides's research group in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. In this group, he developed pneumatic actuators in soft elastomers that took the form of a machine capable of moving in multiple gaits: walking and undulating. These actuators have also been used for low-cost manipulators, and in concert with a microfluidic system for biomimetic camouflage & display.

Two nerds bullshitting about augmented reality tattoos.









Pablos: I don't know if this exists, but AR tattoos should totally be a thing. and this is just I think there's a couple different embodiments for this, but basically there should just be an app where you aim it at anybody and they can set their own tattoos on, right?



So like if I hold up my phone and I aim it at you, I can see the tattoos that you put on your bod, right? On my phone or goggles or whatever you got. But it would just be a thing where like the, it's kind of like, augmented reality, being able to put stuff in spatial positioning.



But instead of the real estate being like, Pokemon go, the real estate is people. And so all people would become a surface area for this. And then I could, you could have two versions, of this could be like, one is like I put tattoos on and whoever's using the app would see my tattoos.



And so you could imagine this going off at like Coachella or whatever. And the other version is, I put tattoos on you. And if you want to see what other tattoos people put on you, you get the app and start looking at your head, arms. I don't know. I think there's something there. it can't be that hard to build.



Ash: It's like, what is it? 19 crimes What was that? That,



Pablos: 19 crimes. Oh yeah, the wine with the AR. Yeah, and you could have



Ash: It was all really



Pablos: cool animated ones like that. Yeah.



Ash: Yeah, you just, it knows it's in there and then that's it. Boom.



Pablos: Yeah, it doesn't have to be QR codes. Nobody needs to get a QR code tattooed on themselves. Like you can,



Ash: No, actually, you don't have to do anything. You can make all the tattoos virtual. You could just have the face recognition kick in and it knows



Pablos: all virtual,



Ash: you come with tattoos.



Pablos: But it only works on skin, so you still have to like, lift up your shirt or peel down your pants in order to show off your tattoos, even though they're virtual.



Ash: So it only works on like, instead of it says, "I love mom", now you can but this is a better version of a temporary tattoo. What you do is you buy real estate.



Pablos: Yeah,



Ash: Like, what would you like to buy on your thing? The



Pablos: Exactly.



Ash: funny thing is,



Pablos: exactly



Ash: it'd be even better if you could do settings, right?



Pablos: You're selling people real estate on their own body, exactly.



Ash: Like that's beyond the metaverse, right? So now



Pablos: This is



Ash: from selling you completely fake land to "I'm gonna allow you to sell your own body parts"



Pablos: You have to buy your own body parts.



Ash: You have to buy your own body part.



Pablos: Oh yeah. You could, we could also put pepsi logos on you and charge and you make money.



Ash: Hundred. That's the thing, some logos could be free, but you could earn.



Pablos: But then what you would do is like at Coachella, you'd have a big screen that was just running 24/7 and anybody who walks by, it would show their virtual tattoos on that screen. So people would hang out in front of the screen to show tattoos.



Ash: I



definitely want some, I definitely want some ACL, some access control lists on this, where, the access control list does the following: what I'd love to do is like, "Friends", and it sends a smiley face and it just flips the bird, it's like "Enemy", they scan you and it's just, a



Pablos: Oh yeah. Right. Oh, they're interactive. Or what you could do is you could build this whole thing where it's, all the real estate on all the bodies is up for sale at the beginning. Anybody can buy it where you auction it off, right? Like you auction off space, but the, but you don't necessarily own your own body, right?



You don't like, I might be able to just put tattoos on you, whether you like it or not. Cause I bought that space. And if you want in,



Ash: Well, I mean,



Pablos: you have to bid against me.

 Lee Cronin is a true mad scientist. He's a professor of chemistry in Glasgow, where he also founded Chemify. This is a company that has invented a new type of approach to accomplish chemistry, very analogous to using the tool chain that we use in computers and then adapting that to chemistry.









I think this analogy holds very tightly. He's built this machine called a Chemputer, which is basically a 3D printer for chemistry. To make that work, he had to make a programming language for chemistry, a GitHub for chemistry. He basically had to rebuild the whole stack that we use in software, but for chemistry.



That's very important because chemists are still acting in this kind of a dark ages, voodoo modality, where it's very difficult for somebody in one chemistry lab to replicate what you did in another one.



This is going to really change the way that chemists work, because they'll have very systematic and replicable approach to what they do.





Lee is a legitimate professor. He's the Regis Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow. He's graduating Ph.D's in chemistry and they're doing all kinds of amazing stuff, and I think in part because they're stuck in remote Scotland, there's just no adult supervision and these people are able to think freely and go do amazing stuff. On top of this, if you don't know about Lee or some of the other things we don't get into, I highly recommend you listen to his conversation with Lex Friedman on that podcast, which is also wonderful and goes deep.



Important Links:




Chemify



University of Glasgow



Lex Fridman podcast




About Lee Cronin





Leroy "Lee" Cronin is the Regius Chair of Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and appointed to the Regius Chair of Chemistry in 2013. He was previously the Gardiner Chair, appointed April 2009.



Cronin was awarded BSc (1994) and PhD (1997) from the University of York. From 1997 to 1999, he was a Leverhulme fellow at the University of Edinburgh working with Neil Robertson. From 1999-2000 he worked as an Alexander Von Humboldt research fellow in the laboratory of Achim Mueller at the University of Bielefeld (1999–2000). In 2000, he joined the University of Birmingham as a Lecturer in Chemistry, and in 2002 he moved to a similar position at the University of Glasgow.



In 2005, he was promoted to Reader at the University of Glasgow, EPSRC Advanced Fellow followed by promotion to Professor of Chemistry in 2006, and in 2009 became the Gardiner Professor. In 2013, he became the Regius Professor of Chemistry (Glasgow).



Cronin gave the opening lecture at TEDGlobal conference in 2011 in Edinburgh. He outlined the initial steps his team at University of Glasgow is taking to create inorganic biology, life composed of non-carbon-based material.

Two nerds bullshitting about an augmented reality baseball cap.









Pablos: With AR, I think we got it wrong.



Everybody's been trying to put dragons in the room or have a whale in the room or whatever. And they're going for this super realistic, photorealistic, immersive experience. And I think the only thing that really matters is dashboards. And even if you get an Apple Vision Pro and it's an extraordinary image quality, what you mainly find yourself using it for is dashboards.



You just put stuff around. It's like here's my messages, let me know if I got some, here's a clock. Here's a browser window, all this is 2D stuff, but it's just giving me dashboard, dials and meters and alerts and info and stuff in my life.



Ash: You're basically talking about the Terminator view, right?



Pablos: Yeah. You want terminator view.



Ash: You need terminated view.



Pablos: You want to be able to see. So all these goggles are overbuilt. I just want my glasses to put your name on your forehead.



Ash: Yeah.



Pablos: That's all I really need.



Ash: Credit score.



Pablos: When I look at people and just put their name on their forehead, so I know who the hell they are. And then you would want dashboards for things like, tell me when to turn left, tell me where the nearest Starbucks is, stuff like that.



And my idea for this years ago was to create this shoe horn version of AR called the Killer Cap and the Killer Cap is literally baseball cap with 140 character display and all it would do initially is show you tweets from whatever sports ball team had their logo on the cap.



And so this is like a $99 product you could sell to Middle Americans. Nobody would think it was weird because it just looks like a normal baseball cap. And in the bill you have plenty of room. You could bury a battery in a cell data modem and then you could have a 140 character monochromatic display.



And then in version two, the Killer Cap has one button on the bill where that sticker usually is, for "Buy now". So it's like during the day you would see alerts or little tweets from the team. Like, "Hey, want to buy the, Seahawks edition of Coors Light?" Boom. Buy now.



And it would just show up on your doorstep. You know, want season tickets? Boom. Buy now.



Ash: Just on the hat.



Pablos: Yeah. It's all in the hat.



Ash: You see what, you just see it underneath,



Pablos: Yeah, you just look up.



Ash: Just look wear it up, and underneath,



Pablos: Mm hmm. You can pretend to be listening to your wife and you can look up at the sports ball game score.



Ash: It's actually pretty interesting, the funny thing is today you could just put a thin film like flex film little OLED.



Pablos: Yeah, so easy to build. It's so easy to build this thing. You could make money selling them for 99 bucks. And people pay 99 bucks for a baseball cap now anyway. It's crazy.



Ash: Yeah, I mean, could literally put it right in there. And by the way, you don't have to do anything, it's just Bluetooth the damn thing, right? It doesn't need...



Pablos: I wanted to do it using the old SPOT watch network because that was like a networking system, a low bandwidth networking built into AM radio. It's got nationwide coverage, no one uses it for anything before I buy it for a dollar and then use that to broadcast the tweets to the hats.



But now cell data modems are in everything, that's cheap enough, you could just do it that way. Anyway, somebody should build the Killer Cap. And then the , other point I would make about it is like everybody's trying to make glasses and it's very difficult to integrate imagers into glasses and have it be low power enough and light enough and small enough and all that.



And it's all very high tech, whereas the Killer Cap you could do with like probably if you spent a weekend in Shenzhen, you could design and build this thing.



Ash: By the way, you know what I'm only partially laughing about this, I'm starting

Two nerds bullshitting about being able to annotate everything.

 If you ever get the chance to hang out with David Eagleman, first of all do it. The first thing you're going to notice is that he's extremely nice, fun, outgoing and very friendly. He's lit up in the brain and he's prolific, he's doing a zillion different things and he's still somehow nice enough to hang out and listen and chat.









Davis is a neuroscientist teaching at Stanford. He's got an amazing TED talk you have to watch. He's an author of – I don't know how many books – fiction and nonfiction. The newest one's called "Incognito: the secret lives of the brain," which you should read, if you want to learn about the brain.



He's also written novels, like the award-winning titled "Sum: forty Tales from the Afterlives."  and even has a podcast where David is working his ass off, writing these deep lectures about humans, their brains and their physiology. It's called "Inner Cosmos." It's a work of art. You need to listen to that. On top of that, he's the founder of a company called Neosensory, which is doing sensory substitution.





We talk about that a bunch in this episode, an incredible ability that they've learned in research for human brains to rewire themselves. To take input from different senses and map them on to other ones.



Recorded in Ojai, California on Sunday, March 24th of 2024.



Important Links:




Neosensory



Center for Science and Law



BrainCheck



David Eagleman



TED Talk – Can we create new senses for humans?




About David Eagleman





David Eagleman is an American neuroscientist, author, and science communicator. He teaches neuroscience at Stanford University and is CEO and co-founder of Neosensory, a company that develops devices for sensory substitution. He also directs the non-profit Center for Science and Law, which seeks to align the legal system with modern neuroscience and is Chief Science Officer and co-founder of BrainCheck, a digital cognitive health platform used in medical practices and health systems. He is known for his work on brain plasticity, time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw.



He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a New York Times-bestselling author published in 32 languages. He is the writer and presenter of the international television series, The Brain with David Eagleman, and the host of the podcast "Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman." As of early 2024, Inner Cosmos was nominated for the best science podcast of the year at the iHeart Podcast Awards at SXSW.