To be new at TED -- it's like being the last high-school virgin.
(Laughter) You know that all of the cool people are -- they're doing it.
And you're on the outside, scott66@example.net.
You're like the Raspyni Brothers, where you've got your balls in cold water.
And -- (Laughter) -- you just play with your fingers all day.
And then you get invited.
And you're on the inside, and it's everything you hoped it would be.
It's exciting and there's music playing all of the time and then suddenly it's over.
And it's only taken five minutes.
And you want to go back and do it again.
But I really appreciate being here.
And thank you, Chris, and also, thank you, Deborah Patton, for making this possible.
So anyway, today we'll talk about architecture a little bit, within the subject of creation and optimism.
And if you put creation and optimism together, you've got two choices that you can talk about.
You can talk about creationism -- which I think wouldn't go down well with this audience, at least not from a view where you were a proponent of it -- or you can talk about optimisations, spelled the British way, with an S, instead of a Z.
And I think that's what I'd like to talk about today.
But any kind of conversation about architecture -- which is, in fact, what you were just talking about, what was going on here, setting up TED, small-scale architecture -- at the present time can't really happen without a conversation about this, the World Trade Center, and what's been going on there, what it means to us.
Because if architecture is what I believe it to be, which is the built form of our cultural ambitions, what do you do when presented with an opportunity to rectify a situation that represents somebody else's cultural ambitions relative to us?
And our own opportunity to make something new there?
This has been a really galvanizing issue for a long time.
I think that the World Trade Center in, rather an unfortunate way, brought architecture into focus in a way that I don't think people had thought of in a long time, and made it a subject for common conversation.
I don't remember, in my 20-year career of practicing and writing about architecture, a time when five people sat me down at a table and asked me very serious questions about zoning, fire exiting, safety concerns and whether carpet burns.
These are just not things we talked about very often.
And yet, now, it's talked about all the time.
At the point where you can weaponize your buildings, you have to suddenly think about architecture in a very different way.
And so now we're going to think about architecture in a very different way, we're going to think about it like this.
How many of you saw USA Today, today?
There it is.
Looks like that.
There's the World Trade Center site, on the front cover.
They've made a selection.
They've chosen a project by Daniel Libeskind, the enfant terrible of the moment of architecture.
Child-prodigy piano player, he started on the squeezebox, and moved to a little more serious issue, a bigger instrument, and now to an even larger instrument, upon which to work his particular brand of deconstructivist magic, as you see here.
He was one of six people who were invited to participate in this competition, after six previous firms struck out with things that were so stupid and banal that even the city of New York was forced to go, "Oh, I'm really sorry, we screwed up."
Right.
Can we do this again from the top, except use some people with a vague hint of talent, instead of just six utter boobs like we brought in last time, real estate hacks of the kind who usually plan our cities.
Let's bring in some real architects for a change.
And so we got this, or we had a choice of that.
Oh, stop clapping.
(Laughter) It's too late.
That is gone.
This was a scheme by a team called THINK, a New York-based team, and then there was that one, which was the Libeskind scheme.
This one, this is going to be the new World Trade Center: a giant hole in the ground with big buildings falling into it.
Now, I don't know what you think, but I think this is a pretty stupid decision, because what you've done is just made a permanent memorial to destruction by making it look like the destruction is going to continue forever.
But that's what we're going to do.
But I want you to think about these things in terms of a kind of ongoing struggle that American architecture represents, and that these two things talk about very specifically.
And that is the wild divergence in how we choose our architects, in trying to decide whether we want architecture from the kind of technocratic solution to everything -- that there is a large, technical answer that can solve all problems, be they social, be they physical, be they chemical -- or something that's more of a romantic solution.
Now, I don't mean romantic as in, this is a nice place to take someone on a date.
I mean romantic in the sense of, there are things larger and grander than us.
So, in the American tradition, the difference between the technocratic and the romantic, would be the difference between Thomas Jefferson's Cartesian grids spreading across the United States, that gives us basically the whole shape of every western state in the United States, as a really, truly, technocratic solution, a bowing to the -- in Jefferson's time -- current, popular philosophy of rationalism.
Or the way we went to describe that later: manifest destiny.
Now, which would you rather be?
A grid, or manifest destiny?
Manifest destiny.
(Laughter) It's a big deal.
It sounds big, it sounds important, it sounds solid.
It sounds American.
Ballsy, serious, male.
And that kind of fight has gone on back and forth in architecture all the time.
I mean, it goes on in our private lives, too, every single day.
We all want to go out and buy an Audi TT, don't we?
Everyone here must own one, or at least they craved one the moment they saw one.
And then they hopped in it, turned the little electronic key, rather than the real key, zipped home on their new superhighway, and drove straight into a garage that looks like a Tudor castle.
(Laughter) Why?
Why?
Why do you want to do that?
Why do we all want to do that?
I even owned a Tudor thing once myself.
(Laughter) It's in our nature to go ricocheting back and forth between this technocratic solution and a larger, sort of more romantic image of where we are.
So we're going to go straight into this.
Can I have the lights off for a moment?
I'm going to talk about two architects very, very briefly that represent the current split, architecturally, between these two traditions of a technocratic or technological solution and a romantic solution.
And these are two of the top architectural practices in the United States today.
One very young, one a little more mature.
This is the work of a firm called SHoP, and what you're seeing here, is their isometric drawings of what will be a large-scale camera obscura in a public park.
Does everybody know what a camera obscura is?
Yeah, it's one of those giant camera lenses that takes a picture of the outside world -- it's sort of a little movie, without any moving parts -- and projects it on a page, and you can see the world outside you as you walk around it.
This is just the outline of it, and you can see, does it look like a regular building?
No.
It's actually non-orthogonal: it's not up and down, square, rectangular, anything like that, that you'd see in a normal shape of a building.
The computer revolution, the technocratic, technological revolution, has allowed us to jettison normal-shaped buildings, traditionally shaped buildings, in favor of non-orthogonal buildings such as this.
What's interesting about it is not the shape.
What's interesting about it is how it's made.
How it's made.
A brand-new way to put buildings together, something called mass customization.
No, it is not an oxymoron.
What makes the building expensive, in the traditional sense, is making individual parts custom, that you can't do over and over again.
That's why we all live in developer houses.
They all want to save money by building the same thing 500 times.
That's because it's cheaper.
Mass customization works by an architect feeding into a computer, a program that says, manufacture these parts.
The computer then talks to a machine -- a computer-operated machine, a cad-cam machine -- that can make a zillion different changes, at a moment's notice, because the computer is just a machine.
It doesn't care.
It's manufacturing the parts.
It doesn't see any excess cost.
It doesn't spend any extra time.
It's not a laborer -- it's simply an electronic lathe, so the parts can all be cut at the same time.
Meanwhile, instead of sending someone working drawings, which are those huge sets of blueprints that you've seen your whole life, what the architect can do is send a set of assembly instructions, like you used to get when you were a child, when you bought little models that said, "Bolt A to B, and C to D."
And so what the builder will get is every single individual part that has been custom manufactured off-site and delivered on a truck to the site, to that builder, and a set of these instruction manuals.
Just simple "Bolt A to B" and they will be able to put them together.
Here's the little drawing that tells them how that works -- and that's what will happen in the end.
You're underneath it, looking up into the lens of the camera obscura.
Lest you think this is all fiction, lest you think this is all fantasy, or romance, these same architects were asked to produce something for the central courtyard of PS1, which is a museum in Brooklyn, New York, as part of their young architects summer series.
And they said, well, it's summer, what do you do?
In the summer, you go to the beach.
And when you go to the beach, what do you get?
You get sand dunes.
So let's make architectural sand dunes and a beach cabana.
So they went out and they modeled a computer model of a sand dune.
They took photographs, they fed the photographs into their computer program, and that computer program shaped a sand dune and then took that sand dune shape and turned it into -- at their instructions, using standard software with slight modifications -- a set of instructions for pieces of wood.
And those are the pieces of wood.
Those are the instructions.
These are the pieces, and here's a little of that blown up.
What you can see is there's about six different colors, and each color represents a type of wood to be cut, a piece of wood to be cut.
All of which were delivered by flat bed, on a truck, and hand assembled in 48 hours by a team of eight people, only one of whom had ever seen the plans before.
Only one of whom had ever seen the plans before.
And here comes dune-scape, coming up out of the courtyard, and there it is fully built.
There are only 16 different pieces of wood, only 16 different assembly parts here.
Looks like a beautiful piano sounding board on the inside.
It has its own built-in swimming pool, very, very cool.
It's a great place for parties -- it was, it was only up for six weeks.
It's got little dressing rooms and cabanas, where lots of interesting things went on, all summer long.
Now, lest you think that this is only for the light at heart, or just temporary installations, this is the same firm working at the World Trade Center, replacing the bridge that used to go across West Street, that very important pedestrian connection between the city of New York and the redevelopment of the West Side.
They were asked to design, replace that bridge in six weeks, building it, including all of the parts, manufactured.
And they were able to do it.
That was their design, using that same computer modeling system and only five or six really different kinds of parts, a couple of struts, like this, some exterior cladding material and a very simple framing system that was all manufactured off-site and delivered by truck.
They were able to create that.
They were able to create something wonderful.
They're now building a 16-story building on the side of New York, using the same technology.
Here we're going to walk across the scott66@example.net.
It's self-lit, you don't need any overhead lighting, so the neighbors don't complain about metal-halide lighting in their face.
Here it is going across.
And there, down the other side, and you get the same kind of grandeur.
Now, let me show you, quickly, the opposite, if I may.
Woo, pretty, huh.
This is the other side of the coin.
This is the work of David Rockwell from New York City, whose work you can see out here today.
The current king of the romantics, who approaches his work in a very different fashion.
It's not to create a technological solution, it's to seduce you into something that you can do, into something that will please you, something that will lift your spirits, something that will make you feel as if are in another world -- such as his Nobu restaurant in New York, which is supposed to take you from the clutter of New York City to the simplicity of Japan and the elegance of Japanese tradition.
"When it's all said and done, it's got to look like seaweed," said the owner.
Or his restaurant, Pod, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
I want you to know the room you're looking at is stark white.
Every single surface of this restaurant is white.
The reason it has so much color is that it changes using lighting.
It's all about sensuality.
It's all about transforming.
Watch this -- I'm not touching any buttons, ladies and gentlemen.
This is happening by itself.
It transforms through the magic of lighting.
It's all about sensuality.
It's all about touch.
Rosa Mexicano restaurant, where he transports us to the shores of Acapulco, up on the Upper West Side, with this wall of cliff divers who -- there you go, like that.
Let's see it one more time.
Okay, just to make sure that you've enjoyed it.
And finally, it's about comfort, it's about making you feel good in places that you wouldn't have felt good before.
It's about bringing nature to the inside.
In the Guardian Tower of New York, converted to a W Union Square -- I'm sorry I'm rushing -- where we had to bring in the best horticulturists in the world to make sure that the interior of this dragged the garden space of the court garden of the Union Square into the building itself.
It's about stimulation.
This is a wine-buying experience simplified by color and taste.
Fizzy, fresh, soft, luscious, juicy, smooth, big and sweet wines, all explained to you by color and texture on the wall.
And finally, it's about entertainment, as in his headquarters for the Cirque du Soleil, Orlando, Florida, where you're asked to enter the Greek theater, look under the tent and join the magic world of Cirque du Soleil.
And I think I'll probably leave scott66@example.net.
Thank you very much.
There was a day, about 10 years ago, when I asked a friend to hold a baby dinosaur robot upside down.
It was this toy called a Pleo that I had ordered, and I was really excited about it because I've always loved robots.
And this one has really cool technical features.
It had motors and touch sensors and it had an infrared camera.
And one of the things it had was a tilt sensor, so it knew what direction it was facing.
And when you held it upside down, it would start to cry.
And I thought this was super cool, so I was showing it off to my friend, and I said, "Oh, hold it up by the tail.
See what it does."
So we're watching the theatrics of this robot struggle and cry out.
And after a few seconds, it starts to bother me a little, and I said, "OK, that's enough now.
Let's put him back down."
And then I pet the robot to make it stop crying.
And that was kind of a weird experience for me.
For one thing, I wasn't the most maternal person at the time.
Although since then I've become a mother, nine months ago, and I've learned that babies also squirm when you hold them upside down.
(Laughter) But my response to this robot was also interesting because I knew exactly how this machine worked, and yet I still felt compelled to be kind to it.
And that observation sparked a curiosity that I've spent the past decade pursuing.
Why did I comfort this robot?
And one of the things I discovered was that my treatment of this machine was more than just an awkward moment in my living room, that in a world where we're increasingly integrating robots into our lives, an instinct like that might actually have consequences, because the first thing that I discovered is that it's not just me.
In 2007, the Washington Post reported that the United States military was testing this robot that defused land mines.
And the way it worked was it was shaped like a stick insect and it would walk around a minefield on its legs, and every time it stepped on a mine, one of the legs would blow up, and it would continue on the other legs to blow up more mines.
And the colonel who was in charge of this testing exercise ends up calling it off, because, he says, it's too inhumane to watch this damaged robot drag itself along the minefield.
Now, what would cause a hardened military officer and someone like myself to have this response to robots?
Well, of course, we're primed by science fiction and pop culture to really want to personify these things, but it goes a little bit deeper than that.
It turns out that we're biologically hardwired to project intent and life onto any movement in our physical space that seems autonomous to us.
So people will treat all sorts of robots like they're alive.
These bomb-disposal units get names.
They get medals of honor.
They've had funerals for them with gun salutes.
And research shows that we do this even with very simple household robots, like the Roomba vacuum cleaner.
(Laughter) It's just a disc that roams around your floor to clean it, but just the fact it's moving around on its own will cause people to name the Roomba and feel bad for the Roomba when it gets stuck under the couch.
(Laughter) And we can design robots specifically to evoke this response, using eyes and faces or movements that people automatically, subconsciously associate with states of mind.
And there's an entire body of research called human-robot interaction that really shows how well this works.
So for example, researchers at Stanford University found out that it makes people really uncomfortable when you ask them to touch a robot's private parts.
(Laughter) So from this, but from many other studies, we know, we know that people respond to the cues given to them by these lifelike machines, even if they know that they're not real.
Now, we're headed towards a world where robots are everywhere.
Robotic technology is moving out from behind factory walls.
It's entering workplaces, households.
And as these machines that can sense and make autonomous decisions and learn enter into these shared spaces, I think that maybe the best analogy we have for this is our relationship with animals.
Thousands of years ago, we started to domesticate animals, and we trained them for work and weaponry and companionship.
And throughout history, we've treated some animals like tools or like products, and other animals, we've treated with kindness and we've given a place in society as our companions.
I think it's plausible we might start to integrate robots in similar ways.
And sure, animals are alive.
Robots are not.
And I can tell you, from working with roboticists, that we're pretty far away from developing robots that can feel anything.
But we feel for them, and that matters, because if we're trying to integrate robots into these shared spaces, we need to understand that people will treat them differently than other devices, and that in some cases, for example, the case of a soldier who becomes emotionally attached to the robot that they work with, that can be anything from inefficient to dangerous.
But in other cases, it can actually be useful to foster this emotional connection to robots.
We're already seeing some great use cases, for example, robots working with autistic children to engage them in ways that we haven't seen previously, or robots working with teachers to engage kids in learning with new results.
And it's not just for kids.
Early studies show that robots can help doctors and patients in health care settings.
This is the PARO baby seal robot.
It's used in nursing homes and with dementia patients.
It's been around for a while.
And I remember, years ago, being at a party and telling someone about this robot, and her response was, "Oh my gosh.
That's horrible.
I can't believe we're giving people robots instead of human care."
And this is a really common response, and I think it's absolutely correct, because that would be terrible.
But in this case, it's not what this robot replaces.
What this robot replaces is animal therapy in contexts where we can't use real animals but we can use robots, because people will consistently treat them more like an animal than a device.
Acknowledging this emotional connection to robots can also help us anticipate challenges as these devices move into more intimate areas of people's lives.
For example, is it OK if your child's teddy bear robot records private conversations?
Is it OK if your sex robot has compelling in-app purchases?
(Laughter) Because robots plus capitalism equals questions around consumer protection and privacy.
And those aren't the only reasons that our behavior around these machines could matter.
A few years after that first initial experience I had with this baby dinosaur robot, I did a workshop with my friend Hannes Gassert.
And we took five of these baby dinosaur robots and we gave them to five teams of people.
And we had them name them and play with them and interact with them for about an hour.
And then we unveiled a hammer and a hatchet and we told them to torture and kill the robots.
(Laughter) And this turned out to be a little more dramatic than we expected it to be, because none of the participants would even so much as strike these baby dinosaur robots, so we had to improvise a little, and at some point, we said, "OK, you can save your team's robot if you destroy another team's robot."
(Laughter) And even that didn't work.
They couldn't do it.
So finally, we said, "We're going to destroy all of the robots unless someone takes a hatchet to one of them."
And this guy stood up, and he took the hatchet, and the whole room winced as he brought the hatchet down on the robot's neck, and there was this half-joking, half-serious moment of silence in the room for this fallen robot.
(Laughter) So that was a really interesting experience.
Now, it wasn't a controlled study, obviously, but it did lead to some later research that I did at MIT with Palash Nandy and Cynthia Breazeal, where we had people come into the lab and smash these HEXBUGs that move around in a really lifelike way, like insects.
So instead of choosing something cute that people are drawn to, we chose something more basic, and what we found was that high-empathy people would hesitate more to hit the HEXBUGS.
Now this is just a little study, but it's part of a larger body of research that is starting to indicate that there may be a connection between people's tendencies for empathy and their behavior around robots.
But my question for the coming era of human-robot interaction is not: "Do we empathize with robots?"
It's: "Can robots change people's empathy?"
Is there reason to, for example, prevent your child from kicking a robotic dog, not just out of respect for property, but because the child might be more likely to kick a real dog?
And again, it's not just kids.
This is the violent video games question, but it's on a completely new level because of this visceral physicality that we respond more intensely to than to images on a screen.
When we behave violently towards robots, specifically robots that are designed to mimic life, is that a healthy outlet for violent behavior or is that training our cruelty muscles?
We don't know ...
But the answer to this question has the potential to impact human behavior, it has the potential to impact social norms, it has the potential to inspire rules around what we can and can't do with certain robots, similar to our animal cruelty laws.
Because even if robots can't feel, our behavior towards them might matter for us.
And regardless of whether we end up changing our rules, robots might be able to help us come to a new understanding of ourselves.
Most of what I've learned over the past 10 years has not been about scott66@example.net.
It's been about human psychology and empathy and how we relate to others.
Because when a child is kind to a Roomba, when a soldier tries to save a robot on the battlefield, or when a group of people refuses to harm a robotic baby dinosaur, those robots aren't just motors and gears and algorithms.
They're reflections of our own humanity.
Thank you.
(Applause)