StarTalk Live: I, Robot (Part 2)

About This Episode

For Part 2 of StarTalk Live: I, Robot, host Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Gorevan of Honeybee Robotics bring the focus back to robots here on Earth. You’ll learn about a robot inchworm that crawls through the steam pipes below New York City, welding shut the holes it finds, along with the use of robots at Chernobyl, robotic nursing aides, aerial drones and other killer robots, and hacking a Roomba. Together with comic co-host Eugene Mirman, comedians W. Kamau Bell and Jason Sudeikis, they discuss their favorite movie robots: Maria from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Terminator, and R2D2 from Star Wars. Neil recites Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” and the discussion turns philosophical: what is intelligence, what does the Turing Test show, and what is the nature of free will in both humans and robots. Will we ever reach a day when a human brain or human intelligence can be transferred to a robot to cheat death as a cyborg. Or, as comedian Jason Sudeikis says, “Do you want to be burned, cremated, or uploaded?”

NOTE: All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: StarTalk Live: I, Robot (Part 2).