Why Intempus thinks robots should have a human physiological state

Summary

Teddy Warner, 19, has always been interested in robotics. His family was in the industry, and he says he “grew up” working in a machinist shop while in high school. Now Warner is building a robotics company of his own, Intempus, that looks to make robots a bit more human. Intempus is building tech to retrofit existing robots with human-like emotional expressions to help humans better interact with these machines and better predict their movements. Giving these robots human-like reactions will also produce data that can be used to better train AI models. These robots will show expression through kinetic movements, Warner told TechCrunch. “Humans derive a lot of our subconscious signals, not from face, not from semantics, but solely from the movement of your arms and your torso,” Warner said. “This extends to dogs and cats and other animals that aren’t humans.” Image Credits:Teddy Warner Warner said he got the idea for Intempus while he was working at AI research lab Midjourney. He said Midjourney, like many other AI research labs, was working on world AI models, or AI models that understand and make decisions based on the dynamics of the real world and spatial properties, as opposed to just cause and effect. But it will be really hard for these models to achieve this spatial reasoning, Warner realized, because a lot of the data the models were being trained on came from robots that didn’t have this spatial reasoning, either. “Robots currently go from A to C, that is observation to action, whereas humans, and all living things, have this intermediary B step that we call physiological state,” Warner said. “Robots don’t have physiological state. They don’t have fun, they don’t have stress. If we want robots to understand the world like a human can, and be able to communicate with humans in a way that is innate to us, that is less uncanny, more predictable, we have to give them this B step.” Warner took that idea and started to research. He started with fMRI data, which ...