Episode Summary
In this highly anticipated episode of My Space, host Manav sits down with David Hanson, the visionary founder of Hanson Robotics. Known for creating groundbreaking humanoid robots like Sophia, David shares the inspiring journey that led him from sculpting mythical creatures for theme parks to pioneering the intersection of art, science, and artificial intelligence.
David opens up about his early days as a curious, creative student, fascinated by both figurative art and the growing world of robotics. He discusses his experiences at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, blending AI programming with animation and sculpture, long before concepts like ChatGPT or large language models were widely known.
The conversation delves into David’s time working as a sculptor for Disney, his drive to leap boldly between disciplines, and the moment he invented “frubber”—the specially engineered, patented material that gives Hanson robots their lifelike faces. David shares the origin story behind both frubber and Hanson Robotics (originally named Human Emulation Robotics), highlighting the evolving vision and challenges of merging engineering with artistry.
Manav and David also dive into thought-provoking topics like robot sentience, the societal impact of automation and AI, and the ethical responsibilities facing innovators in the field. David addresses the hurdles of bringing robots like “little Sophia” to consumers, noting the financial and cultural challenges of developing cutting-edge technology that blends machine learning with expressive, human-like interaction.
Rounding out the episode, David reveals what’s next for Hanson Robotics: more advanced AI architectures, a commitment to open source collaboration, and a bold aim to empower humans and AI to work together for a brighter, more inclusive future.
It’s a fascinating, hopeful, and candid conversation with one of the leading minds in robotics today—perfect for anyone interested in the future of humanity and our increasingly lifelike machines.
Transcript
Manav [00:00:00]:
Do you believe robots will be sentient?
David Hanson [00:00:02]:
I do. I think that there may be a path.
Manav [00:00:04]:
How did you get into robotics working at Disney?
David Hanson [00:00:07]:
I started as a sculptor, but then I did have the chance to go into robotics at Disney.
Manav [00:00:12]:
When you decided to start a robotics company.
David Hanson [00:00:14]:
Name of the company was Human Emulation Robotics. Immolation means to destroy with fire.
Manav [00:00:21]:
So material behind Sophia.
David Hanson [00:00:23]:
The reporters asked me at the time, what is this material that you've created? Created? I didn't have a name for it. I was like a rubber.
Manav [00:00:30]:
I really want to buy the little Sophia.
David Hanson [00:00:32]:
It takes millions of dollars.
Manav [00:00:34]:
What's coming next?
David Hanson [00:00:35]:
Sophia would be.
Manav [00:00:43]:
All right, guys, today we have the guest I've been looking forward to for a really long time, David Hansen, the founder of Hanson Robotics. Yeah, David, it's really good to have you on the show.
David Hanson [00:00:53]:
Thank you. It's wonderful to be here.
Manav [00:00:55]:
Initially I thought you were inspired by the movie Simone by Al Pacino, which came out in 2002. But then I found out you built your first humanoid robot in 1995.
David Hanson [00:01:06]:
1993, yeah.
Manav [00:01:07]:
So I'm guessing they were inspired by you.
David Hanson [00:01:09]:
Probably not. The first humanoid robot that I made was not very famous. I just exhibited it at an art science technology festival called Pong, which was a cross institutional thing between Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design. I was an undergraduate student at the time, but I was very interested in artificial intelligence. The combination of art and humanoid robots and this idea of bridging these different disciplines to the benefit of them all was very strong with me. Those ideas seemed far fetched at the time to many people, but they really drove me from a young age.
Manav [00:01:45]:
So how did you get into robotics? Like, I'm guessing you're in your 20s, like stumbling around. What was the inspiration or who guided you to get into robotics?
David Hanson [00:01:53]:
I was pretty nerdy kid. So as a teenager, I was familiar with the work of Marvin Minsky and the robots coming out of the media lab and so forth. And I had these interests in art, figurative art and time, music and fiction. Writing was very strong. And I was most interested in artificial intelligence. So I took artificial intelligence programming classes. I joined the Brown University Robotics Club. I was doing this degree in film animation video at Rhode Island School of Design and weaving in the robots that I was building into some of the films that I was making. And how these things intersect to me is just like, you know, the truth of the way these disciplines work. The disciplinary boundaries are convention, and what we do with it is our own decision. We can be as creative as we want. So these were ideas that really enlivened and motivated me and they were difficult.
Manav [00:02:40]:
To grapple with for a little bit of context. There was no large language models. Now when people think of AI, they think of ChatGPT. Correct. You're talking about the 90s. People didn't even know what AI means.
David Hanson [00:02:51]:
There were chatbots. They were pretty much all expert system based chatbots. Speech recognition was working, but just in a rudimentary way. There was some computer vision. And looking at these things through the lens of a greater creativity can be really empowering. Empowering to young people like me. When I was in my 20s and then when I was working at Disney, I started as a sculptor making, you know, sculpted figures. Cause I like drawing. I have a knack for doing figurative drawing and figurative 3D.
Manav [00:03:18]:
So you had a more artistic background or more engineering background?
David Hanson [00:03:21]:
It's hard to say. I would dive pretty deep in each of these areas. I mean, I didn't have an engineering degree, but I knew basic electronics, I could put together things. I knew C programming, C programming. I had programmed a little bit of lisp to make the robot not bump into the halls at Brown. So in a sense I was a tinkerer. I also didn't study sculpture actually. I jumped in, somebody asked did I do it? I said I think I.
Manav [00:03:45]:
There was no YouTube.
David Hanson [00:03:46]:
But you know, if you just jump in and try to figure something out, you don't hold back. If you don't, you realize that maybe there's a script running that says you can't. If that script is deep and always telling you, if you, if it's not proven, then you can't. This is a script that actually probably runs deep in a lot of us. It creates a kind of fear when we hit the unknown. So if you can unwind that a bit and get comfortable in these uncomfortable risk taking situations, jumping into disciplines that you don't know, you can learn a lot more. And I would hold myself to very high stakes when I would do these things. So if I was going to do some portraiture or drawings, if I was sitting with a friend or what have you, I wanted it somehow soak in the information of that person and their personality would shine through that. So I was very passionate about it, in other words. And so when I went to work as a sculptor for like two and a half years, I was very prolific and made a lot of work and my heart was in those works.
Manav [00:04:36]:
What were they? Were they robots or were they just.
David Hanson [00:04:38]:
They were like things for those two and A half years, mostly for theme parks, so some for Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure, the themed resort called the Atlantis in the Bahamas, sort of mythical creatures, and for Disney. So I had this strange portfolio and resume with these, with these things. And I was offered a job doing 3D development for a video game company in Boston and then doing online development for Prodigy at the time, and then the sculpting job that would be working for a contractor for Disney and these other theme park things. So learning fast was a thing and I was pleased that it was good. And then hired directly to work for Disney, which was an amazing experience and I had a lot of great mentors and I'm really proud of the works. You know, I learned a lot. But then I did have the chance to go into robotics at Disney. So then I got to propose research projects and write research papers and get these things funded and go to conferences and meet people in the world of AI and robotics.
Manav [00:05:35]:
How much of that was behind the computer or how much was. Because most nerds love computer, but you're kind of like different. You. You like to sculpt with hand and.
David Hanson [00:05:44]:
Yeah, I do both. And back and forth between working digitally and working in the domains of the, of learning the science and applying the science.
Manav [00:05:53]:
I want to get back to the material because a lot of people, service level, they don't know what frubber is. I want to ask you, how were you able to patent like frubber and like the material behind Sophia? Like, and this has been 18 years in the making, so I want to hear the story behind it.
David Hanson [00:06:08]:
Yeah. So the first formulas for forever came in 2002. So. So this is 22 years ago. I was exploring different ways of achieving highly elastic porous polymers. The silicones I wasn't quite getting to be good. But in 2002 and 2003, I made about six different robot faces. By that time, I had developed a lot of robots along the way with a lot of experimentations in different kinds of these foamed rubber tighterials. So I had some pretty good results along the way, but very little attention for what these robots were. And then press conference was held and everybody, all the reporters wanted to see the humanoid robot, the one humanoid that they can take a photo of, Take photo and interview. And so I pull this thing out and it's making these facial expressions and photos are going off. And it became a cover story for Popular Science and all these things. But the reporters asked me at the time, what is this material that you've created? I didn't have A name for it. I was like a. For rubber. What does it stand for? What does that mean?
Manav [00:07:10]:
You were gonna say rubber, Face, Rubber.
David Hanson [00:07:13]:
No, I was. I just was thinking the words face and rubber and it just kind of like fell out of my mouth and it stuck. We haven't thought of a better word for it since then.
Manav [00:07:22]:
So it's a good word.
David Hanson [00:07:23]:
Yeah. So 2003, I filed the patents on a wide variety of things. The software and the hardware and the materials.
Manav [00:07:30]:
So then you go to 2007, you decided to start a robotics company.
David Hanson [00:07:34]:
No, 2003, I founded Hanson Robotics. Hanson Robotics, I founded. In 2003.
Manav [00:07:40]:
You got to correct that, by the way. Google says 2007.
David Hanson [00:07:44]:
You can't always control what Google's going to tell you.
Manav [00:07:47]:
You're right about that, and there's a.
David Hanson [00:07:48]:
Lot of information out there. But the company was founded in 2003. We changed the name. The first name of the company was actually Human Emulation Robotics.
Manav [00:07:58]:
That's why.
David Hanson [00:07:59]:
And it was very awkward. Human Emulation Robotics. What? Human Emulation Robotics. Emulation means to destroy with fire.
Manav [00:08:08]:
Hanson Robotics flows. Yeah.
David Hanson [00:08:12]:
So I had some mentors who. Executives who came in and mentored me starting in 2003, 2004. And by 2005, one of them, Lou Schwartz, said, you've got to change the name. Let's call it Hanson Robotics. Okay. You know. All right.
Manav [00:08:27]:
I want to ask you about little Sophia for a second. I actually was telling my partner, I was like, I really want to buy the little Sophia and put it on my desk and ask it questions daily. And, you know, my idea was what if the robot could initiate the conversation even though it's creepy a little bit. I would like that.
David Hanson [00:08:44]:
Yeah, me too.
Manav [00:08:46]:
You know, because I feel like a lot of time people don't use ChatGPT because they have to do the work of asking.
David Hanson [00:08:52]:
Yeah.
Manav [00:08:53]:
Do you guys have any plans to, like, sell the little Sophia?
David Hanson [00:08:56]:
Oh, absolutely. We designed it that way. The problem with these robots is getting people to believe in this interesting agglomeration of art and engineering is really hard. Engineers are like, what's that art thing? I don't believe in it. It's not real engineering. You know, people from, like, existing arts industries, like the toy industry, they're like this AI thing. They're not sure about it. So it's hard to get people to leap and trust. So we haven't actually been able to raise the funds yet, honestly, to finish the manufacturing on this because it takes millions of dollars.
Manav [00:09:27]:
Do you believe robots will be sentient I do.
David Hanson [00:09:30]:
I think that we may have the right architecture for it. And just like, you know, people didn't believe in, you know, these neural nets for a long time and you feed it the right data. Once you give the right belief, it's not just the data, it's the compute time, the resources. Then neural networks started showing these great leaps forward and then once you have a culture of belief, then you can have something like Google Brain, which gave rise to, to transformers. And so that culture of innovation leads to these breakthroughs. And now people are starting to believe in artificial general intelligence and the prospect of machine consciousness. You have a lot of people who will say no, you haven't proven it can be done. You haven't proven how consciousness actually works. And of course that can dampen things and dampen progress. But the thing is that there may be a path. I think there is a path.
Manav [00:10:14]:
So we saw with ChatGPT a lot of white collar jobs getting affected. Now we're seeing companies like Figure and all the, they're raising billions of dollars to blue collar jobs mainly they want to replace the industrial workers and then they'll come for the household jobs as well. What do you think about that?
David Hanson [00:10:30]:
People have been worried about this, you know, since maybe the 18th century, certainly since the 19th century. The Luddite movement stopped. The textile factories did not shut down the economy. It created an enormous amount of wealth, but also it does create a lot of turbulence, sort of social turbulence. And social change doesn't mean that it's all good. But we are seeing more productivity. I mean that's automation, including artificial intelligence and robotics. Especially when you start to see more general purpose AI and robotics, then you're going to see more abundance. It's up to us humans to decide ethically what we're going to do with those abundance. Do we accumulate it into an increasingly thin layer of ultra wealthy people and keep just sucking resources out of the ecosystem or do we apply apply it to make the world better?
Manav [00:11:17]:
What's the future of Hanson Robotics? I'm excited about the little Sophia as well, but can you tell everyone what's coming next?
David Hanson [00:11:23]:
Hanson Robotics is developing next waves of artificial intelligence. And so we had some interesting studies that was showing glimmers of consciousness in Sofia, mathematically tested using the integrated information theory. And I believe that that's not fully indicative, but it is interesting. And I think our latest architectures, the way that we're going, I think that we can make a huge difference. So Sophia would be more motivated, more autonomous, able to then learn more effectively spontaneously. Hanson Robotics is a company that cares about the people and about the future. So we would be doing this in a way where we're sharing open source tools, open source technologies, trying to help people all around the world to participate in the AI revolutions. So it's not just hands on robotics that benefit in the so called first world. And the future is not just AI brain power, but actualizing human brain power. Because humans and AI working together are far smarter than either. Independent.
Manav [00:12:19]:
Thank you so much, David. I really appreciate your time and everything. Like, you've been very generous with me. Thank you so much.
David Hanson [00:12:26]:
Thank you.
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