Observing Child Development
Watching my kids grow up, it’s been amazing to see how the brain develops and how quickly they learn. Kids have like a super plasticity in the brain, so they can make connections really quick. When I decided to move into robotics, I think a lot of that came back to me because, in a sense, it’s sort of like the same thing. The robots that perform our experiments are not explicitly programmed; they also have to learn to perform.
From Hobby to Career
Before I started my journey into robotics, I was really into remote control airplanes. At that time, I was just an engineer with a passion for airplane models and never thought that I could apply my hobby to my work and fuse it together with something as advanced as artificial intelligence. My background is quite diverse, but I just knew it could be applied to something that interested me. That’s where I discovered a job opening for a mechanical design engineer on the DeepMind website and finally got the job.
Daily Responsibilities in Robotics
On a day-to-day basis, I design, build, and assemble the experiments that we run on our robots. It is fundamental to have a robotics department because if we are to build an artificial general intelligence, then we will need to have some sort of body to test this algorithm in the real world. In this sense, robotics becomes a sort of proving ground for these algorithms.
Challenges and Triumphs
It seems like something good happens right when we start using small humanoid robots. They don’t know how to walk, so we have to accept that the robot is going to break. Maybe it’s something with a connection that is not solid. When I see them being able to finally do something, it brings me joy. Do we need to change the gain, or did we remember it? Now it knows the robot did what it was supposed to do. We’re not surprised, but we’re happy that it still works.
We’re not building algorithms that are focused on
The Future of Robotics
solving one problem; we want to be able to solve all kinds of problems. There’s the simulated camera view of the robot. It’s like if you have a robot that walks around and gets confused. Eventually, more and more robots are going to be around us, and I think DeepMind is uniquely placed to develop this technology safely so that, in the future, robots can be beneficial for everyone.