Simone Giertz & Terrible Robots
This week our woman of the week is Simone Giertz who specializes in building bad robots. But before we talk about Simone and her bad robots, I wanted to highlight a few of my favorite bad robots. I’ve actually been thinking about building a collection of bad robots—a kind of Wall of Fame for AIs that make terrible choices. Here is my current favorite in action:
Yes, this is a robot telling us with nearly 100% confidence that this is a fridge full of ping-pong balls. (This is an AI that lives on Twitter that takes meme images and tries to figure out what they’re pictures of. It makes mostly terrible guesses, but it’s very rarely so incredibly confident in them.)
Microsoft’s AI chat bots are also contenders for the Wall of Fame. The first one, Tay, was released in 2016 and, after learning from the conversations it had with people on Twitter, in 24 hours it had become racist and homophobic. A few years later, Microsoft released a second AI, Zo. “Learning” from their mistakes with Tay, Zo refuses to talk about anything related to religion or politics, going so far as to shut down any conversation that mentions “bar mitzvah” or “hijab.”
And then there’s this AI that’s supposed to help with vetting candidates in online interviews in a more “objective” way… but it turns out that adding an image of a bookshelf behind the candidate causes the AI to think the candidate preformed significantly better in the interview.
Sometimes I find myself thinking that the future has arrived and computers really can do everything they did on the SciFi shows I loved as a kid and more—it’s crazy to remember how cool the Star Trek tricorder seemed… and then realize that it now looks like ancient tech compared to modern smartphones. So it’s good to be reminded that the robots and AI we have today are mostly really terrible! They shouldn’t be trusted with anything! And we especially shouldn’t trust them to be objective about their own abilities. They will tell you to your face that the one thing they are the most sure of is that the eggs in your fridge are actually ping-pong balls.
So now to introduce Simone Giertz! She makes bad robots, but they’re the good kind of bad.
Simone Giertz is a Swedish maker and robotics enthusiast who makes mostly useless robots. She shows off her inventions and the process of making them on her YouTube channel, which has over 2.5 million subscribers. Over the years, she’s made lots of different robots—from an alarm clock that slaps you in the face to a robot that feeds you soup (my favorite!) to her own version of a Tesla pickup truck. She says embracing her useless inventions has helped her to overcome her perfectionism and fear of failure, and that making useless things has allowed her to learn about engineering with joy and enthusiasm rather than anxiety.
Lesson Idea:
Introduce Simone Giertz to your class
Watch her TED talk, Why You Should Make Useless Things (11:58)
Have your students come up with a design for a robot. They should describe the problem the robot was built to solve and how it will solve it. Encourage them to draw a picture of the robot or build a prototype of it out of paper!