Targeting dirty air, pollution from dead satellites, and a book on embracing robots

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Sarah Crespi
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This is the science
This is the science.

Sarah Crespi
Podcast for July 26, 2024. I'm Sarah Crespi. First up this week, how the practice of burning up satellites in the stratosphere may cause pollution problems as mega constellations take to the skies, staff news writer Daniel Clary talks about how metals from deorbiting craft might change the chemistry of the upper atmosphere.

Next, senior science editor Michael Funk joins me to talk about the magazine's special issue on air pollution. We discuss the broad scope of this topic, from home cooking to transmissible diseases.

Finally, books host Angela Saini is joined by author Daniela Rus. They discuss Rus book, the Heart and the our bright future with robots for our 2024 book series that takes an optimistic look at the future.

Daniel Clery
Mega constellations are on the way. Multiple companies are planning to launch thousands of satellites into orbit. Here on the podcast, we've mostly talked about some of the light pollution issues from these many, many flying objects, their ability to interfere with astronomy, for example. But this week in science, staff writer Daniel Clary wrote about a different concern, pollution from the satellites burning up in the atmosphere. Hi Dan.

This is the science
Welcome back to the podcast.

Daniel Clery
Hi. Nice to be here.

Daniel Clery
Yeah. So the concern here is with deorbiting satellites, intentionally burning them up in the atmosphere of our planet. Is that the only option right now for, you know, when the satellites can no longer do their work? They need to be decommissioned.

Daniel Clery
Yes, most satellites, the ones that are in low Earth orbit, such as communication satellites, they need to be got rid of because when they retire, they can potentially collide with other satellites or other bits of space debris and disintegrate, create more debris. That's the nightmare scenario that satellite operators have, which they want to avoid at all costs. So it's standard practice to make them deliberately deorbit and reenter the atmosphere, where they burn up. Occasionally a satellite, a fragment of it will reach the surface, but that doesn't happen very often. Mostly, they're lightweight materials. They burn up in the atmosphere and they're disposed of. But once the numbers start to increase.

Daniel Clery
Right. How often are we doing that now?

Daniel Clery
Up until a few years ago, it was only a few hundred times a year. And the upper atmosphere is a big place. People didn't think it would cause a problem. But the start of mega constellations like Starlink from SpaceX changed all that. They currently have more than 6000 in orbit, which is two thirds of all operational satellites that belong to Starlink.

Daniel Clery
And the goal is in what, the tens of thousands?

Daniel Clery
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think the first phase of Starlink is something like 12,000.

And then they've applied for permission to launch 30,000, I think, to provide more services. The first round, the idea was to provide Internet access, but they're also talking about doing cell phones from space, so people can use their cell phones anywhere on Earth.

Daniel Clery
Starlink's not the only one in the game either. Amazon is looking into this. Other countries.

Daniel Clery
Yeah, Amazon, China, I think, is about to start launching satellites of a similar nature. So the numbers are going to grow exponentially. And these satellites don't last a long time. I think Starlinks are designed to live for five years. So pretty soon since they started in 2019, they're going to start disposing of them.

The numbers will go up very rapidly.

Daniel Clery
From 100 or so a year to, well, thousands.

Daniel Clery
I think in 2022, there were 2000 deorbits. It could go up to 10,000 satellites a year being disposed of.

Daniel Clery
What people are concerned about is it will increase the amount of debris that could hit the earth. But also it's going to start just adding molecules to the stratosphere. What gets left behind when a satellite burns up in the atmosphere?

Daniel Clery
You get different things. You get particles. Most of it is broken down into very small particles, which are called aerosols. These are micrometer sized, very, very small, but they have potential impacts on the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. And some of it is completely atomized, so you get metal atoms as well as these very small particles.

Daniel Clery
Right now, that's a pretty negligible amount. But at some point it might become concerning for the chemistry of the stratosphere.

Daniel Clery
Yes, I mean it is tons of material every year at the moment. Its small compared to the amount of material coming from space, because from outer space were getting bombarded by meteoroids all the time. Little rocks from asteroids. These make shooting stars which we can see in the night skydehe. They're also contributing to the contents of the upper atmosphere. And this happens all the time and has always happened. But what we're doing now is contributing different metals and also larger particles. So the meteors are traveling so fast that they are completely atomized. And so you only get atoms from them. But the satellites are making these particles which could have a different effect.

Daniel Clery
Has any of this been measured? Have we been able to see a difference in what's coming from meteors versus what's coming from satellites? Or can we see this happening right now?

Daniel Clery
It's very hard to do because it's quite hard to sample the upper atmosphere. But there was a study, what if.

This is the science
You had some satellites, Dan?

Daniel Clery
Well that's right. Well the satellites are too high sadly, if you're actually going to do an in situ measurement. So there was a study a couple of years ago where a NASA researcher search plane that could travel very high went up 19 km above the Arctic, and it had a mass spectrometer on board, so it could analyze the content of very small particles that were sucked into the aircraft as it flew along. And what they discovered was metals that they didn't expect to see because you wouldn't see them from meteors. A lot of aluminium, other things like hafnium and lithium, which are known to be part of alloys from spacecraft. And in fact they were present in ratios that matched the ratios of spacecraft alloys. So they came to the conclusion that they were actually measuring debris from satellites above the Arctic. So that was the first hard evidence that it was there. And many of those metals were present in greater quantities than were coming from space. So they were already exceeding the natural input into the atmosphere that we are.

Daniel Clery
Getting from meters of those metals, not.

Daniel Clery
Like of all, not of all metals, but of those certain particular ones that were common in spacecraft were already exceeding the natural input.

Daniel Clery
Do we know anything about the chemistry that those satellite contributed metals might do way up there at the top of the stratosphere?

Daniel Clery
Again, only people hypothesizing about it, it's not really known. And again, it's quite hard to replicate the chemistry that goes on in the upper atmosphere, which often takes place on the surfaces of tiny particles.

So aluminum is a particular problem because it gets oxidized into aluminum oxide or hydroxide and that can react with hydrogen chloride which already exists in the upper atmosphere to liberate the chlorine. And chlorine attacks ozone as we know from the days of chlorofluorocarbons. Nobody wants chlorine in the upper atmosphere. And the chlorine that's up there in hydrogen chloride is quite safe. It's quite hard to break that apartheid. If you make it into aluminum chloride, that's easier to break up so it can be split apart by light.

Daniel Clery
We don't really need to test whether or not more satellites means more aluminum.

This is the science
But is there a way to test.

Daniel Clery
Whether or not this chemistry is actually happening?

Daniel Clery
Absolutely, and some organizations are starting to do that. The European Space Agency has become aware of this problem in the last year or two and are trying to set up some laboratory facilities so that they can do that sort of experiment. People also want to sample more from the upper atmosphere. At the moment theres just not much data. Theres a lot of concern but not much data. So its one of those cases where to be sure of whats happening and that there really is a problem. People have to find out more so that they can then go to space agencies and satellite operators or regulators and say this is a real problem that we need to deal with.

Daniel Clery
Yeah, if it is or if maybe it's just not a good idea to just keep hitting the earth with satellites thousands of times a year. What's the other option, assuming that the satellites go up in the first place?

Daniel Clery
That's a very good question. I mean you don't want them deliberately sent through the atmosphere so they land on the ground. Because I know they're dangerous to people on the surface and you don't want to leave them where they are because of the space junk.

Daniel Clery
What about pushing them out? That's a lot of energy.

Daniel Clery
Yeah, I would require a lot of energy. So you'd have to save a lot of fuel to do that at the end.

Daniel Clery
Shorter life.

Daniel Clery
Yeah exactly. But you've still got the debris problem because you know if you're putting that many satellites up, if you put them in a parking orbit higher up, that's soon going to fill up as well. And you've always got a potential for accidents. So disposing of satellites in the atmosphere, I don't know, it's hard to know what the alternatives are. People have talked about making satellites from other things. Apparently there are a few satellites being made from wood.

This is the science
I love it.

Daniel Clery
I'm already on board with that.

Sarah Crespi
Yeah.

Daniel Clery
One of your sources mentioned a circular space economy, which sounds pretty cool. Can you talk about what that would be like?

Daniel Clery
Well, that's the idea, that instead of making satellites disposable, you might be able to repair them or refuel them in orbit. So you would have a robotic spacecraft that could chug around carrying new fuel to put into a working spacecraft, or you could recycle them in some way. You could have manufactories of some sort in orbit that could take material that is no longer working and turn it into something else. So we're a long way from that at the moment. But people are certainly working on it. Certainly. The repair and refuel side of it is an active area of research from many space agencies. So that time may come, and that would mean we're not throwing so much stuff into the upper hemisphere, but also not launching as many satellites, which causes a lot of pollution from rocket fuel.

Daniel Clery
Definitely. Okay, Dan Sidequest here. Has someone done the math and said, okay, if you have this many satellites in this orbit, the chances of a collision or debris causing a chain reaction of collisions?

Daniel Clery
Yes, people have, people have done simulations.

Daniel Clery
What's the magic number?

Daniel Clery
I don't know. I mean, they're wild estimates and people have suggested numbers, but I think we may have passed them already and it hasn't happened. There's a thing called the Kessler syndrome. This was the suggestion that once you got to a certain density, you'd have a collision, and that collision would create a lot of other collisions, and then the whole thing would break down and you would end up with this sort of cloud of debris around the earth, and we wouldn't be able to launch anything anymore because you couldn't get through it. Any rocket that tried to go up would get hit by something, would just.

Daniel Clery
Be pelted with thousands of things, little objects moving at high speed.

Daniel Clery
Yeah, thats it. So that was the disaster scenario, but it hasnt happened yet. And thats why theyve passed these regulations now, saying that you have to dump your satellites at the end of their life into the upper atmosphere, because youve got to do that while you still can control them, because once theyve run out of fuel, then you cant control them anymore. So you have to be able to save a bit at the end of the life to dispose of it so that you're not worsening the junk problem.

Daniel Clery
Super interesting. Thank you so much, Dan.

Daniel Clery
It's a pleasure.

Daniel Clery
Daniel Clary is a staff writer for Science. You can find a link to the story we discussed@science.org.

Sarah Crespi
Podcast up next, my chat with senior editor Michael Funk about all the ways we pollute our air indoors and outdoors, and how it's being measured and amended.

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This is the science
This week in science, we have a special issue on air pollution. The convener for the special issue, senior science editor Michael Funk, is here to discuss some of the papers in the special issue and why now is a good time to cover this topic. Hi Michael. Welcome to the Science Podcast.

Michael Funk
Hi Sarah. Thanks so much for having me on.

This is the science
Oh, sure. I never really thought about how broad this was, but then I saw the news contribution to the special issue. They have feature stories on air pollution and osteoporosis in India, and a second piece on air pollution from mine waste. And on the research side, which we're going to discuss on the episode today, we have even more directions to take this in. So is that one of the reasons that you thought this would be a good topic for a special issue is how much can fall into it?

Michael Funk
Yeah, I mean, it's a huge topic and it kind of affects everyone everyone has to breathe air and everyone's. And exposed to air pollution in some way, shape, or form. It was great to get together a bunch of different editors on a bunch of different areas to see how we could triangulate.

This is the science
Yeah. And how does your particular focus at science fit in with air pollution? So you're more of a biochemistry?

Michael Funk
Yeah, I'm kind of an odd duck for this special issue, especially as the person convening it, because my main focus is biochemistry. But I also cover some topics around pollution and how pollution might impact the health of different populations. That's kind of my intersection with it.

This is the science
I think the review in this section that surprised me the most. This is a review about how Covid has lessons to teach us about indoor air quality and basically air pollution. I just never. I mean, I definitely paid a lot of attention to the debate about if this coronavirus was airborne and whether or not we should be turning over the air in our public spaces or in our homes. But I didn't quite make the connection with air pollution.

Michael Funk
Yeah, this is a huge debate early on in the pandemic, back when we were debating whether we should be washing our hands versus wearing masks. But air pollution does include infectious disease particles. Covid is one example of something that's airborne, but there are other infectious diseases that are spread by dust in the environment, or obviously, human to human contact or human to animal contact, all things that can fall under air pollution, if you think about it the right way.

This is the science
So what are some of the big takeaways from the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic for how we should be treating the air that is inside the spaces we occupy?

Michael Funk
Yeah. One of the surprising things from that review that I found was it made me think about how much I hadnt really thought about the air that I breathe in my home and my office and places like that. I used to live in a big 1960s condo building, and there was no air circulation from the outside at all. So it really made me think about that in my own life. More modern buildings have much better air handling and filtration. I mean, I think filtration is a big factor, especially in places where I. You really can't be bringing in a lot of new air because of heating or cooling costs.

Daniel Clery
Right.

This is the science
Like today, I don't want to do a lot of air exchange because it's 90, 90 fahrenheit already.

Michael Funk
Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

This is the science
There's some really good figures in that review that kind of just like, it just really lays it out very clearly that what we thought and how that thinking has changed and the really sharp change that happened in 2020.

Michael Funk
Yeah, there's a lot of new technologies, or maybe not new, but at least technologies that people are thinking about more, things like tumor cycle, uv treatments and filtration treatments that I think people are really starting to incorporate either at an individual basis or sort of at a more societal policy basis.

This is the science
Yeah, that's a big step. You know, we didn't really see a lot of policy implementation in the US for like clean air regulations for inside the house. But you will see people monitoring, at least on Twitter.

Michael Funk
Yeah, yeah.

This is the science
People will monitor CO2 levels and try to guesstimate what's happening. Or some schools have installed their own kind of room by room air filtration systems, but we haven't seen a lot of movement at the larger level there.

Michael Funk
Yeah. And the review kind of gets into some of the problems with those technologies and how we might sort of get around them. But I think we do need more. We need more research and more technology development in that area to make this a possibility.

This is the science
Okay, so next I want to talk about this review on basically doing fine scale mapping of air pollution in urban settings, which makes sense because out in the countryside, air is fresher. You just have to admit it. There's no two ways about it. But in a city, you're surrounded by cars and building exhaust and all other in factories and all that kind of stuff. So tracking, that is basically step one.

Sarah Crespi
If you want to remediate it and.

This is the science
Make sure people have lower exposures. So what does this review focus on for urban air pollution mapping?

Michael Funk
This review covers all the different sort of technologies people are using, the different kinds of monitoring systems, and especially looking at different scales and really fine, fine grain scales. I think one of the things that I was really impressed by the figures was that you can really see at the street level differences. If you have a big highway, you have a lot more different kinds of pollution.

This is the science
Absolutely.

Michael Funk
And some cities are generally doing a much better job at mitigating those factors than others, and they try to highlight those effects in the review.

This is the science
Yeah, it's very complicated problem, because not only is there variety across the city, but there's also varieties in the kinds of steps we can take for pollution. Like if we're talking about a highway, what are we going to do if the highway is particularly bad that day?

Michael Funk
We don't always need really fine scale mapping to know that a highway is going to have really negative effects. But figuring out the mitigation strategies, those mapping techniques can sort of help guide us.

Sarah Crespi
We talked about COVID and other transmissible diseases as a form of indoor air pollution to start with. But now we're going to turn to outdoor air pollution, I guess you could say, and its links with public health.

This is the science
And basically millions, like multiple millions of people die from various aspects of air pollution. I think fine particulates and ozone are kind of the big culprits. We're going to fold Covid in there. We get another one, but for outdoors anyway. So what does this review focus on in terms of the connection between air pollution and health?

Michael Funk
Yeah, this review gets into trying to calculate and figure out how those connections are made between the pollutants and how they impact people on an immediate level and how that translates into death statistics.

This is the science
So it's a big public health epidemiology type problem that, you know, it's just step one. Yeah, right. It's just the part where we figure out what the connections are, how they happen, and then what happens next.

Michael Funk
We had a paper a couple of years ago that this review calls back to looking at coal pollution in the United States and how. How many millions of people that that was impacting and hundreds of thousands of deaths. So it's. It's a really big problem. And there are still new statistical methods being developed to trace the connections at.

This is the science
The level of mitigation, at the level of curing these problems. There are really big challenges at the global scale. So, yes, the US, we have a car culture. We have a lot of cars and a lot of driving, and it's kind of constant. But there are other sources of pollution in the US. But in other countries, there are, you know, there's coal, there's fires in the home for cooking, all these different sources. And fixing those problems is also its own challenge, because if in a lower or middle income country, policy and the funding for it is difficult to come.

Michael Funk
By, I think in home cooking is a huge factor for so many people around the world, and it's not one that we always think about in the United States or in more wealthy countries, but it's huge. And it's.

You would think that it would be relatively simple to fix, but getting these things changed is really hard.

This is the science
Yeah.

Sarah Crespi
In this case, we're not talking about gas dose, which I know can be something of a hot topic in the US.

Michael Funk
We didn't get into that. But yeah, if you're not burning wood in your house, you're probably okay.

This is the science
It's not the worst offense that we have in our house.

Michael Funk
You know, it's all a trade off.

This is the science
So speaking of, you know, this difference between middle income and upper income. There is a really big problem with pollution and discrimination. This last review really gets into the nitty gritty of how there's been policies in the past that affect the present that kind of perpetuates some of these problems.

Michael Funk
We were just talking about highways through cities, and that's one example of one of these effects where back in the mid 20th century, we put a lot of highways through cities, and the neighborhoods that were left behind were directly impacted by the pollution from those highways. You also see this with big industrial factories. You have these so called sacrifice zones where people are just expected to live with the pollution because of the economic benefits that come from it.

This is the science
Yeah. And who has the power and the money to lobby against, like, you know, don't put that in my backyard. Put it in somebody else's backyard who can't fight you as much. Yeah. And that's. That's something that in the review, they really try to pick apart. And do they make any recommendations, like, for how to prevent this from the cycle, from continuing?

Michael Funk
The review is mostly focused on understanding how we study these things. I think ultimately, I'm sort of speaking for myself. I think we have to give people political power and political say in these decisions if we want things to change.

But, yeah, it's mostly focused on how we study them rather than direct interventions.

This is the science
Yeah. It does seem like it wouldn't be a one size fits all solution when you're looking to make a big fix like that.

Michael Funk
Yeah, for sure.

This is the science
All right, Michael, we have run through all four reviews from the special issue. I should also mention that there is a policy forum in the commentary section that's part of this special issue and that's focusing more closely on law, policy, and air pollution.

So, yeah, I just think this is going to be such a good resource for people who are really involved in this field. What other takeaways do you have from talking about air pollution for, like, six to nine months?

Michael Funk
Well, it's interesting because this all sort of started coming out of the 2023 wildfires that impacted the east coast. And I usually bike to work in DC, and I always have to sort of check the air quality conditions in summer because we have particularly bad ozone. But the summer in 2023, you really couldn't avoid it. And it created some scenes that I think really shocked people and, and made them think about the quality of the air that they're breathing.

This is the science
Yeah, I actually was introduced to the air Quality index because I live in Indiana near a town where a big recycling center depot caught on fire.

Michael Funk
Oh, no.

This is the science
And it burned for more than a day, and we couldn't smell it. But that doesn't mean that we're safe. And so we had to look at the air quality index, which my friends in California were very familiar with from their seasonal fires.

Michael Funk
And yes, for sure.

This is the science
And then after the canadian wildfires, there's a lot of it on the US.

Michael Funk
East coast as well, related to the wildfires on the east coast. Our cover image is a photo of New York during the middle of that smoke influx into New York.

This is the science
So is there really any of New York in the photo, or is it.

Michael Funk
Just, yeah, you can see the image is the Chrysler building, and it's just shrouded in this orange, smoky haze. And it really looks like something out of the mid 19 hundreds where we still had coal heating and a lot of industry in New York. It's really a ghostly picture.

This is the science
All right, Michael, thank you so much for talking with me today.

Michael Funk
Of course. Thanks so much, Sarah.

This is the science
Michael Funk is a senior editor for science.

Sarah Crespi
You can find a link to the.

This is the science
Intro for this special issue and the papers we discussed@science.org.

Sarah Crespi
Podcast Stay tuned for the third installment of our six part series on books that look to an optimistic future. This month, host Angela Sainy talks with MIT's Daniela Russ about why robots should be embraced rather than feared.

Angela Saini
Hello. Im Angela Saini, journalist, author, and the host of this segment of the podcast, where I interview authors on a particular theme this year. That theme is a future to look forward to. My guest this month grew up in communist era Romania, where she dreamed of being able to fly and leap far beyond what the human body allows. Daniela Russ is now a roboticist and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, where her job really is to develop robots that might one day help us feel superhuman. In her new book, co authored with writer Gregory the heart and the our bright future with robots, Bruce is cautiously optimistic about a world in which robots might be our ubiquitous companions, helping to carry out the work that we're unable or unwilling to do ourselves. Daniela, thank you so much for joining me today. You know, it wasn't until I read your book that it really occurred to me how many of these robots we already have in our everyday lives. You know, robot vacuum cleaners, we have delivery drones. And this has happened quite quickly without very much fuss from the public. In fact, people often seem to welcome these kind of robots.

Daniela Rus
We have so many robots helping us with all sorts of cognitive and physical tasks. We have robots that work side by side with people on the manufacturing floors. We have robots that support surgeons in the operating rooms. We have robots that help us at home. We have robots that clean your floor, vacuum your pool, mow your lawn. We even have robots that milk our cows. And in the future, we will have intelligent machines that can do so much more for us, essentially taking on the aspects of the physical work we do that are routine. And this actually gives us time. It allows us to focus on more interesting ways of spending our time.

Angela Saini
Yeah, and you are in quite a special position professionally in being able to spot these kind of everyday problems in your own life and then developing robots to fix them, which you have done many times. You mentioned quite a few examples in the book. Can you describe one or two for us?

Daniela Rus
Well, our work at MIT is really driven by our desire to understand the science and engineering of intelligence and build helpful machines. It's important to know that robots are made out of a body and the brain. The body of the robot consists of all the physical components, all the hardware components of the robot, the chassis, the sensors, the battery, the computers.

The brain consists of all the algorithms and the software that drive the body of the robot. I'm telling you this because it's really important to think about this machine as the body and the brain working in tandem, because the robot can only do what the body is capable of doing.

If you want a robot to climb up the stairs, you cannot have a wheel based box, because that's not going to climb up the stairs.

With this context in mind, going back to your question on what are some of the machines we have built? And we usually build this on top of a scientific foundation which helps us move the science forward, move forward our understanding of intelligence.

One of our recent robots is a recycling robot.

Every week you probably take a box full of paper and plastic and metals, and you put it out for recycling. Your recycling has to be separated by people. This is very hard and unpleasant work that shouldn't be done by people, but it can be done very well by machines. So in our lab, we have built a recycling robot. We call it rocycle. And we built this robot by engineering a very special robotic hand with fingers that are sensorized with a kind of a robotic skin. The sensor can detect whether the object in the hand of the robot is a paper object, a plastic object or a metal object. And I think that in the future, this kind of technology will really ease the important work of people who help us preserve our planet by doing recycling.

In the same spirit, we have developed a robot that can bag your groceries for you. This robot has a different sort of hand. The hand looks a little bit like a tulip, and the hand can open and close. And when it closes, it's very adaptive. It can wrap around whatever you give it to hold. So it can wrap around grapes or tomato or a box of milk. The third example I want to give you is a robot we call the mini surgeon. The robot is actually kind of like an accordion that is squished together, and it fits in a general pill shape and pill size.

The pill consists of ice.

Imagine this robot embedded in this pill shaped ice. The concept is that with this robot, you can enable incision free surgeries in the future.

Someone who may have accidentally ingested a button battery today has to get a surgical procedure to remove the battery from the stomach. These batteries are actually being ingested by thousands of people every year. They are very dangerous because within an hour, they get completely lodged inside the stomach tissue.

Angela Saini
Yeah. And this happens quite a lot with toddlers, doesn't it? They pick these things up and they think they're sweet.

Daniela Rus
You have to go to the hospital, and you have to do surgery. And this is painful. It has risk of infection, and it's not a very good outcome. But now with our mini surgeon, with our ingestible robotic pill. Imagine that toddler swallowing a pill. And when the pill arrives in the stomach, the ice melts, the robot deploys, and the robot can be guided externally using programmable magnetic field, the kind of thing you might have in an MRI machine. We have the ability to guide that robot very precisely to where the button battery is located. And using a tiny magnet that is embedded on the robot, we can pull out the battery and eliminate it through the digestive system.

In our experiments, these robots are made out of sausage casing. And after you remove the pill from the stomach, you could send another robot to patch the wound or to deliver medicine in a very precise way.

Angela Saini
One of the arguments you make is that machines aren't really capable of achieving the creative depths or originality or sensitivity always, that humans can reach at our best. But you do say that in tandem, if we put them to kind of clever use, that humans and robots can do great things together. How do you see that playing out, then, in the future?

Daniela Rus
I really imagine a future where machines will be partners for people.

And, in fact, the title of the book is the heart and the chip, because the heart stands for people who have wisdom, and the chip stands for machines who have speed and strength. There are things machines can do so much better than we can. Machines can move with greater precision. Machines can lift heavier objects. Machines can compute much faster than we can. People have empathy. People can reason at levels of abstraction that so far have eluded our machine learning solutions.

Angela Saini
One of the things you focus on also is wearable robotics. So many of us have these kind of science fiction movie images in our mind when we think about these, you know, these hard, rigid exoskeletons, like the ones worn in Iron man. But in your book, you describe how engineers like yourself are developing very soft, fluid fabrics with light electrical components woven into them. How do these work, and what could they potentially be used for?

Daniela Rus
Your pants could be a robot. Your shirt could be a robot. Your socks could be a robot. And we can do this because today we actually have the ability to make clothing out of electrically conductive fabric. And we can then embed computational processing, and we can embed sensors in these fabrics. And so we end up with wearables that are as comfortable and cool as the clothing we have today, but become functional. And so we have fibers whose color we can change, we can program. So your shirt could be programmed to have a different color in an hour, for example.

Angela Saini
Wow. Amazing.

Daniela Rus
Also have the ability to embed machine learning inside the devices that you wear. In our lab, we have shown the possibility of doing this by creating a sensorized glove that looks just like any other glove. But now this glove has a computer attached to it, and this glove is capable of interpreting and understanding human gestures and mapping them onto sign language.

Angela Saini
So you mean translating the sign language into vocal speech or into written speech?

Daniela Rus
Yes. So, exactly. So you can sign with your hand, and that will immediately be mapped onto either written words or spoken words. Another example of an exoskeleton we developed was to support the blind and visually impaired people to have a greater experience that is richer than what they can get with a walking stick.

Essentially, what we have done was to take the sensor suite of a self driving car, the lasers and the cameras and all the computers, along with the algorithms that operate on a self driving car, and map those onto wearable devices. We map them onto a belt that has all the laser scanners for measuring distance. We have a necklace that has the camera, and we have computation. And with this, we can provide visual impaired people with the ability to experience the world in so much richer ways than what is currently possible.

We can use the system to describe a fabulous window display, or say, hey, your friend is passing by. Say hello. Or we can help people find a bench where they could sit and feed the ducks. All of this made possible by technology.

Angela Saini
It sounds so positive and optimistic, all these applications that you've been developing. But it does come at the same time that in wider society at the moment, there are all these public fears around, for example, the rise of artificial intelligence. In your book, you don't seem to think that the risks are as big as they're sometimes made out to be. So why is that?

Daniela Rus
Let me just say that there are many people in the field who believe that there are all sorts of catastrophic and existential risks to technology, to robots, to machine learning, and to AI.

I, for one, do not share that view. But I also believe that to fail to plan for it and to investigate and put in place the guardrails to make sure that we don't get there, that would be irresponsible.

I believe that we can develop technology that meets our standards, that is checkable, that is safe, that is deployable for positive applications, and at the same time, we can create societal and technological guardrails that ensure that the supervillains do not get access to the technologies that empower people to do good things.

Angela Saini
So, is there a part of you that does worry that robots in the future could be used more for destructive or damaging purposes than for constructive ones? The defense and arms industry already makes widespread use of robots and drones. It's investing even more. And of course, robotics firms are there ultimately also to make a profit.

I appreciate so much that you're trying to do wonderful, important, good things for people, but there are those other drivers. And does that worry you at all?

Daniela Rus
Let me say that I believe that there aren't bad algorithms. There are bad people using algorithms in a bad way. And so what we need to do as a global society is to ensure that when people use advanced technology, that technology is used in the way it's intended to be used.

You can take a knife and use that knife to prepare your dinner, and you can also use the knife to cause harm. But we have solved that problem at the societal level by putting in place social norms, laws, and rules to avoid the bad uses. Now, please imagine extending those solutions to machines that have a broader range of capabilities than the knife.

Angela Saini
Finally, given how upbeat you are in your book, and the optimistic theme of this podcast as a whole, it really is about a future to look forward to. Where do you feel, then, that robots could do the most good in the world?

Daniela Rus
Potentially, the conversations around the impact of robots and Aihdenhe on a global scale tends to focus on doomsday scenarios. And these scenarios are obviously important and absolutely must be accounted for. But we also have an opportunity to think about how we can use machines to solve some of the largest problems we face as a species.

I believe that these intelligent systems that are powered by advances in artificial intelligence and robotics offer huge capabilities to analyze vast data sets, to identify patterns, to execute tasks with a precision and efficiency that surpasses the human limitations. And these capabilities can help us with combating climate change by optimizing energy consumption and reducing emissions. They can help us revolutionize healthcare through personalized medicine and incision free surgery. They can help us in agriculture to predict and deliver crops in a way that is sustainable at a global scale. They can help us with disaster response. Also, very importantly, these intelligent machines are pivotal in advancing scientific research through automating experiments, simulating complex theoretical models, and doing some of the routine work that currently takes a lot of people and a lot of time to do. And so I think that by merging the heart and the chip, the work of humans and the work of machines, and by guiding the development and the application of these powerful tools with wisdom, with foresight, and with a commitment to the greater good, we will solve some of the largest challenges facing the people and the planet today.

Angela Saini
Wonderful. Professor Daniela Rus, thank you so much.

Daniela Rus
Thank you. Thank you very much.

Angela Saini
And thanks also where you are for listening. If you've been reading along with this series, then get ready for next month when I'll be speaking to Akshat Rati, a reporter at Bloomberg News, about his book climate capitalism. See you then.

Sarah Crespi
And that concludes this edition of the Science Podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions, write to us@sciencepodcast.org dot to find us on a podcasting app search for Science magazine. I've been seeing some comments on Spotify, so yeah, we do read those, if that's where you're listening. Or you can listen on our website, science.org podcast. This show was edited by me, Sarah Crespi, Megan Cantwell, and Kevin McLean. We also have production help from Megan Tuck at Prodigy. Special thanks to Angela Sainy for her robotic interview. Our music is by Jeffrey Cook and Wen Khoi Wen on behalf of Science and its publisher, AAA's. Thanks for joining us.

Targeting dirty air, pollution from dead satellites, and a book on embracing robots

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1. Satellite Pollution

2. Air Pollution Overview

3. Robots and the Future

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