All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference
I was reading an article about AI in robotics, about the different ways we learn to exist in and move our bodies, and how we’re trying to get machines to learn how to exist and move. While our machines can defeat us in games like chess and Go, a robotic hand can only tie a shoelace under very specific circumstances. There are competing techniques - let human hands drive the robotic hands in “imitation learning,” in which humans demonstrated how to put a shirt on a hanger 8,000 times in order for the robot to be able to do so, or simulation, in which the program amasses all available information about how to do a task like baking … but truly is unable to comprehend the lived nuances about things like how hard to smack the egg on the side of the bowl in order to crack it.
Image courtesy ChatGPT: “Make a a photorealistic image of a robot making a cup of coffee in a suburban kitchen.”
Steve Wozniak apparently once proposed “a simple test that has yet to be passed: Can a robot go into your house and make you a cup of coffee?”
Not yet. I’m thinking of robots and how they learn, and how we learn and grow and evolve and adapt. A lovely essay on the writer Brian Doyle gets to the soft stuff of learning and living:
“This, then, is the agreement: Learning to live is learning to love … We may or may not be lucky enough to live out the two billion heartbeats our creaturely inheritance has allotted us. But no matter how many we actually get, it matters how we spend them and what we spend them on. It may be the only thing that matters.”
The robots can’t make the coffee yet. But we keep trying - we keep giving, which is an act of love. We keep giving in the Deep Mind robotics labs, in our work here, and in our own daily lives. I’m thinking of some of the ways we see and acknowledge our acts of giving (a few from Slack):
“Solving problems before we even experience the problems.”
“what would I do without you???”
“slaying Hubspot integration dragons!!!”
“We are the ones we've been waiting for”
“Always there with the assist.”
“You’re the gift that keeps on giving!”
As a company, as teams and as individuals, we’ve been through a lot this year. We have supported each other through heavy times, and celebrated times of true achievement. We do get to decide how to spend each day, and I am so glad to spend a hearty chunk of my days with you, whether we’re collaborating directly, exchanging Slack messages, or working in parallel on all that Phase2 is. Thank you for all that you do - for each other, for Phase2, and for our clients. You are breathtaking.
If you are taking these few days off, I hope you savor the time with your loved ones. Having made some major life changes this year, I’ll definitely be reflecting on the abundant gifts in my life, including each of you. I’ll leave you with this, from the poet Alberto Rios.
Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.
You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me
What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made
Something greater from the difference.
Thank you for what you give, for how you show up, and for who you are. xoxo -e
Some citations:
A Revolution in How Robots Learn, James Somers
How to Live a Miraculous Life: Brian Doyle on Love, Humility, and the Quiet Grace of the Possible, Maria Popova
Alberto Rios, When Giving is All we Have
(I sent an annual Thanksgiving email to my team at Phase2. This is from 2024.)