AI Is About To Leave The Screen. Who Gets To Drive It? | Hans Peter Brøndmo, Former Google X Robotic

Full Episode Transcript

This is the full recorded conversation from The Human Protocol Podcast, published by The Human Protocol Group. © 2026 The Human Protocol Group. Please link to and attribute the original episode when referencing this conversation.

mykel (00:02.062)
We all think AI lives only on our screen. It doesn't. Not for much longer, at least. It is about to walk into our workplace, your hospital, your government, a body making decisions in the real world. And the only question that actually matters is: who gets to drive this? Please stay with me. Welcome to the Human Protocol, the podcast about staying human while building the future. I am your host.

Hans Peter Brondmo (00:19.867)
Thank

mykel (00:31.906)
Michael Solomon. My guest today is Hans Peter. He has spent his whole career at the exact edge of where AI stops being software and becomes something that acts in the real world. Hans Peter Brandman ran major robotics moonshot at Google for seven years. He has also founded and sold companies, advises the startups, and is writing a book called Being Human.

Hans Peter Brondmo (00:34.596)
Thank you.

Thank

that.

Thank you, Michael. It's great to be here.

mykel (00:59.466)
in the in the in an age of intelligent machines. His core idea is simple. Robots are the physical manifestations of AI. Hans Peter, welcome to the Human Protocol. It's a pleasure to have you on.

mykel (01:16.468)
Awesome. I appreciate you taking the time to be with us today. And I'm very much looking forward to this conversation. And I want to get started if you can maybe take us back a little bit from your journey at HP, robotics at Google, right? What were you actually trying to unlock with the robotic moonshot back then?

Hans Peter Brondmo (01:36.148)
and bye bye.

You know, I joined Google X, the Unleashed Factory, back in early 2016. And, you know, it was very secret. I didn't exactly know what I was getting myself into, but I knew it had to do with robots and I knew it had to do with AI and that was enough. So I get there and, you Google had made nine acquisitions over the last couple of years in robotics. They bought a few companies.

It was, you know, Larry Page and Andy Rubin had been kind of the core of that. And so I came in to find all these great people and interesting technology. And it then became, the question became, okay, what do we do with all this? The main stipulation though, was that people have been trying to do robotics for tens of years in this way, robots that could operate in the real world, not just in factories, not that.

dumb, dangerous and dirty robotics that work in factories. And if you get too close to them, they can knock you over and hurt you. But the smart robots that could work, and the only way we were going to do this was leveraging AI. And remember, this was late 2015, early 2016 when I joined in January of 2016. So we committed to go all in on AI for robotics. So that was the beginning of a very exciting and ongoing journey.

mykel (03:02.411)
What a one life what in a lifetime opportunity to get to, you know, being in a company as Google and having that possibility to get started and and on on that. And and I'm curious to hear from you, Hans Peter, when did when did it click that really AI was the key to robotics, not the other way around?

Hans Peter Brondmo (03:23.638)
You know, to be perfectly honest with you, there were people there who believed it beyond what I was able to believe because I hadn't seen what they had seen yet. So when I first arrived, I was, well, that sounds exciting and it sounds kind of like sci-fi. And, know, again, remember 2016, this was one year before the Transformers paper was published by Google Brain.

and it was Google's research organization and the Transformer paper was the foundation for what we today know as large language models and kind of the modern AI era as we've seen it emerge over the last few years. So it was very early and it took me a little while to fully understand and to see what they could see because now I could actually play with it and talk to really smart people working with it. And the reality was that we knew AI didn't, you couldn't program a robot to live amongst us.

That's the key insight. You can't program a robot to live with voice test. You have to teach it. And by that, mean, you know, much like you can't program a robot or a computer to translate from German to Korean, you have to teach it. You have to build algorithms that can basically embody and understand grammar and then can take one language and translate it to the other. So Google Translation was often held up actually as a

breakthrough that had happened a few years earlier, where we had been trying with Chomsky and grammars and heuristics, we've been trying to figure out how to encode grammar and how to encode rules to do human language translation from one language to another. And it just never really worked. There were too many edge cases, too many mistakes. So suddenly one day it worked and there was a small group at Google that had used machine learning to figure this out.

And so the belief, the high level belief was that what if we could do that for robots? What if we could do it in a robotic space where the robot could go from instead of trying to program a robot to deal with all the ambiguity in the real world? Like I'm sitting here right now and there's a window to my right. You can see the light on my face, right? If I turn like this, you see more of my face lit up. To a computer, I look different if I'm sitting like this, if I'm sitting like that, or take this. I have a glass of water here.

Hans Peter Brondmo (05:49.306)
It's glass. So if you look carefully, you can see through it and see this image on the wall behind me through the glass. Well, how does a robot figure that out? How does it know that something it can see through is actually something it can pick up? You just can't program these endless and then maybe we're sitting here. It's morning right now, my time in San Francisco, but let's say it was evening and the sun started going down. Everything would look different by the time we finished this conversation. So computers have to learn that.

mykel (06:14.987)
Right.

Hans Peter Brondmo (06:18.386)
from huge amounts of data, as we know, they can't be taught. So that was our core stipulation. You can't program, you have to teach the robots.

mykel (06:26.221)
That's an inter interesting way of of of looking at things 'cause that's it takes us to kind of how things got started, right? And and and why the data became such a crucial part of it, right? Especially in these language models and and and how the mechanics and the logical aspects of looking at robotics, but actually from the the language model point of view, it's really what's kind of

trigger this understanding this is the the way we should go.

Hans Peter Brondmo (07:01.817)
Exactly, exactly. And so, you know, we set out on what was essentially an exploration and I would argue maybe still is to this day with a lot more knowledge and information and breakthroughs today than we had then. But, you know, there are many ways to think about how you teach a robot to live and work alongside us. And so we explored a number of these different ways of thinking about it and approaching it and discovered some

some really interesting things on that journey.

mykel (07:34.764)
While working in all that, especially with access to this technology and and and your engagement in in the robotic world, when did started kind of started thinking on triggering in you, hey, this is this is not only about robot, this is kind of about the future of the human society that we're working here.

Hans Peter Brondmo (08:01.829)
I'm a big believer that technology doesn't just sort of change really, really meaningful technological innovation, doesn't simply change kind of applications and the way we work with the technology. It has actually changed society. And, you know, these days,

increasingly people are referring to the industrial revolution as a as a example of a major transition and then they're saying the cognitive revolution, which is presumably what we're in with AI right now, will have an even greater impact on an even shorter timeline. Demisosavis of Google DeepMind said not too long ago, it'll be 10 times the impact of the industrial revolution in one tenth the amount of time.

That to me is incomprehensible. I don't know how to compute that. I don't know how think about it. But the point is, when that happens, a lot of the conversation today circles around the future of work. When that transition of that scale happens, it's about a lot more than the future of work. It's about the future of society. So if you go back to the Industrial Revolution, what people kind of skip over is that after the invention,

of the steam engine and then from that electricity and sort of the energy harnessing that allowed for for the, for, for, for factory production and for manufacturing at scale and for essentially amplifying hugely amplifying muscle power. That was the technology, right? It started with the steam engine and then, and what happened was for the first 80 years of that transition, it was chaos. was mayhem. Children were working and dying in coal mines.

to get the fuel for these steam engines and power plants. Workers were being treated horribly. Wages and living standards went down. Urban centers were starting to pop up, but no real planning or thinking about how they should function. So urbanization really took on a whole new level because people worked at factories. They had to live near the factories, all be gathered together. The whole structure of society changed.

Hans Peter Brondmo (10:21.14)
And if we believe that we are now in a transition comparable to that, or maybe even amplified by that, what makes us believe that the same wouldn't happen now? That the way we think about society, the way we think about what it means to be human in this age, will be kind of like how people thought about what it meant to be human in the agrarian society, then the industrial revolution happened, 80 years of turmoil, we got new legislation, new institutions, new, you know, we had

workers' rights, had labor unions, we had a whole set of new institutions and organizations and also new government institutions that ultimately kind of became the society we're living in today. Well, if it's going to happen again now, and it's going to be 10x, 10x, 10x faster, 10x more impactful, then we got to get ready for a societal transition that's going to dwarf the Industrial Revolution. And one more point there is

The beginning of the Industrial Revolution, were 1 billion people on this planet. Today, we're at like around eight and a half. So that's the other thing is this has now become a global phenomenon. It's going to happen globally. It's going to happen very fast. It's going to happen. The future is going to be unequally distributed. It's going to happen in different places at different times. We're in a radical time with radical transitions and radical shifts. And I think people are talking about safety legislation.

for AI and they're talking about future of work, those are obviously very important, but they're like this much of something that's giant and huge.

mykel (11:59.192)
So

We are in transition. Basically, that's what you're telling us today. And we have seen this transition, you know, the civilization has it's it's we have transitioned from the industrial revolution, as you merci, and the after the industrial revolution, it created this industrial society. Then we have the the information society, right? When it comes after the the all the what IT created back then, and then this AI transition and this AI revolution is

Is that it's probably will create this AI society in a way, right? Because every transformation has created a new, let's not say a new society, but a new way for us humans to live, to work, right? how would you define it? What do what is it on the top of your head lately and and what how do you envision this transition coming into this new AI society? Let's put it this way.

Hans Peter Brondmo (12:37.055)
Thank you.

Hans Peter Brondmo (13:01.911)
I think that anyone who makes predictions today are doing it based on personal beliefs rather than real knowledge. I think that you can kind of make up any story you want about what the future is going to look like. And you hear

the very dystopian ones where the machinists are gonna kill us all and their algorithms will optimize for how humans are actually in their way and so we'll just all die, all the way to a utopian life where we live in enormous abundance and the machines are just there to help us and serve us and our companions and make sort of transcendent society. And then a lot of stuff in between.

I think that any story you or I could make up here today, and we could make up any fantastical story, there will probably be an expert out there, and probably that expert will be an engineer, which is its own set of issues, but there'll be an expert out there who will vehemently, passionately, convincingly agree with you and say, yes, that's exactly what's gonna happen. So I think that the...

The is we can't predict the future. But I was playing with a funny little metaphor the other day. So we're not quite in hurricane season yet, but we're getting close, right? So what happens in hurricane season is they see some movement over on the African coast and they predict that there'll be some hurricane and it'll land somewhere. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. The meteorologists, the experts. And every...

hours, they update their predictions, but they don't know what it's going to turn into yet. And then it gets bigger and bigger. And then eventually it makes landfall. And when it makes landfall, it can cause a little bit of damage. It can cause a lot of damage. It can just be a big wind, can be a fun storm. can be kind of anything. So I think we're kind of approaching this early stages of an AI hurricane or an AI storm. We don't know where it's going to make landfall. We don't know what the implications are going to be.

Hans Peter Brondmo (15:27.535)
But we're sort of like, we know it's coming. So what do you do if you live in North Carolina or South Carolina or Miami or Florida or in the Gulf somewhere on the Alabama coast? What do you do if you know there's a big hurricane coming? You start planning and ideally, you know they're coming every year, so you plan ahead. I think we're kind of in that stage. I think we're in the pre-planning stage where we just need to look at how do we...

improve our infrastructure. How do we improve the ways we live because there's going to be a series of really big storms. now ideally we harness those storms for good even. There's a lot of good that could come out. So that's where the analogy breaks down a little bit because I'm a not tech techno optimist. I'm excited about it. I think you can do so much amazing stuff, but we need to start planning now. So my, have stories about what I think the future is going to look like, but you know what? They're going to be as good as the next one.

All I know is that something very big is happening and there's some core principles there, among others that we're going to have super intelligent machines that are more intelligent than people. So we can start making some preliminary plans for what kind of society we want to live in.

mykel (16:41.335)
Not a lot.

I love the analogy with the hurricane because you know, I live in Florida so I go through it every year. So all we can do is plan and try to be as informed as possible. And you know, sometimes the information and the models are good. They are predicting things that happen, sometimes they don't. But the core of it, which is I love that analogy that you just went over, is really all we can do right now, no one knows what the future will look like.

Hans Peter Brondmo (16:49.273)
There you go.

mykel (17:12.687)
But we can plan and and we can try to think based on where things are heading and how things are shifting from one day to the other, where where things may land, right? But what do you think would happen once every institution, including our government, goes hybrid in a way, meaning we have AI schools, AI companies,

companies, AI governments, AI military, so even maybe AI friends, which we already see in people using AI as their personal friends.

Hans Peter Brondmo (17:52.951)
Thank

Hans Peter Brondmo (17:58.859)
Did you happen to catch that, I think yesterday or the day before, Chi Ping basically said that China does not want people to have personal relationships with AI. So, yeah, they're making it a law that you can't have romances and personal relations with AI, which of course will probably then also be

mykel (18:11.639)
Yeah. I saw that. Bekin a law, I believe.

Hans Peter Brondmo (18:25.693)
instituted in models so that when models detect that somebody is getting attacked, know, so it's an interesting policy policy shift. And China, course, has a population problem. Their population is going to plummet. The predictions I've seen is that while today it's 1.3, 1.4 billion people, by the end of this century, it'll be about 750 million. So China with their, you know, one child policy.

has put themselves in a position where they're going to see ginormous, enormous changes, which means that they don't have the workforce to produce and to do the manufacturing that they, course, today have become world leading in. instead of people sitting around and talking to and falling in love with AIs, they want them to talk to each other and fall in love with each other so they can have babies. So there's sort of an interesting bigger picture thing here. So yeah, I think this is...

mykel (19:18.634)
Hans Peter Brondmo (19:23.028)
This is interesting because we're going to have, like you said, I like the word hybrid a lot. I think there's a hybrid model emerging of the hybrid human. You you hear the extreme cases of that, which is we're going to have implants. So we'll basically just have AI in our head, accelerating our own way of thinking. For now, maybe it's glasses or earbuds and things like that. That'll always have us plugged into the AI.

There'll be, like you said, there'll be hybrid organizations, there'll be hybrid companies and AI corporations, AI government, AI, all these things will be emerging. And so when I contact, when I'm interacting with a company, I will be interacting with probably machines a lot more than I do today and maybe exclusively in the language that I speak, right, in English.

as I'm going back and forth with the machines and they will be servicing me and there might never be a person in the loop. mean, perhaps all the way down the supply chain. Maybe the product they offer will be an AI product or an AI produced product. Maybe the factory that produces the product I'm buying from them will be produced by robots and by AI. So increasingly there will be this sort of interface to the world and then my AI, which will kind of be my twin, my AI twin or my AI agent, my hybrid sort of.

AI profile, we'll reach out and do a bunch of things. Right now, I'm planning a somewhat complicated trip with a lot of stops and lot of hotels and rental cars, etc. on the East Coast in a few months, a few weeks. And I wish I could just say to my AI, you go take care of that. And my AI would talk to the rental car, AI would talk to the... That's the world we're moving towards quite fast, I think. So in that world, you end up

mykel (21:07.181)
Wait for

Hans Peter Brondmo (21:18.855)
having to ask some fundamental questions, both about the role of the human, but even further, what it ultimately means to be human. We rely today on organizations run by humans. And I think that gives us some comfort, although no single human in a large organization knows how the organization works. And that's another interesting factor which

you know, the company, you know, that I was most recently with Google, you can't find even, even Sundar, the CEO, he can't tell you how the company works. He tells you what they're trying to do. He could tell you their strategy, can tell you their goals, but he doesn't know how everything works because it's a complex machinery that is partly based on algorithms, but also based on hundreds of thousands of people that are Google, right? They are what the Google brain, they are the hive mind of sorts.

So now we're transferring that into machines so it'll be even further removed from us, humans. So then obviously a lot of questions. What do we do? What is our role? How do we think of ourselves in a world like that? And what does it ultimately mean to be human?

mykel (22:35.629)
Yeah, it's so many so many interesting aspects of you know transitioning into a society that it's gonna be, you know, as you are saying, probably humans plus machines, right? And and that's where the hybrid part of it comes into. It's what I keep thinking about is really who's gonna drive that and I hope it's us and continue to be us, right? Depending on who you're talking to. And you know, I'm not that you are

Optimistic, I'm an optimistic myself as well. Sometimes it it's the lack of conversations like this, Hans Peter, that concerns me a bit because I think there's so much and it's so quick things happening around AI today, new product, new models, government fighting for the latest. And the conversation about what is the society that we want to build, it's it's not

As amplified as I would like it to be, because I think we need to discuss more. It is we are human beings and we are complex, right? This is our nature. We are different from each other, and and now we are introducing kind of a variable to the future, which may be what this may be as an AI society, human and machine.

Hans Peter Brondmo (23:54.027)
Okay.

mykel (24:01.335)
How do you see the conversation around this going on today? Are you satisfied where we are or you also think we need more of it?

Hans Peter Brondmo (24:12.939)
we absolutely need more and we need more voices in that conversation. having real conversations, not just shouting at each other or making, you know, opinionated statements. I think, you know, there's, there's so many interesting aspects to where we are right now and interesting analogies and historical references as well. I.

very recently been geeking out a bit on the New Deal and on what led FDR to do what he did in the early 30s and what the conditions were like for him to do what he did. And obviously the New Deal happened in response to the Great Depression and

When Roosevelt came in as, was sworn in as president, you know, in his first hundred days, he had a lot of political momentum. So he was able to run a ton of experiments in the form of new legislation, et cetera, and then try out a bunch of new things. What people often aren't as aware of with the New Deal was that the New Deal was fundamentally based on humanist principles. You know, we think of it as all these programs, the Tennessee Value Authority, there were all these sort of well-known programs that became

that came out of the New Deal. And I think that those are with enduring value even today. And it was based on some core principles, principles that humans have a right to exist outside of work. Humans are not just a unit of work that can be discarded once the work, the company doesn't need them anymore. And so when you look at it, it was also a time of oligarchy.

FDR called, you know, this sort of class of oligarchs back then, the economic royalists, which I think is as we think about, as we have no King's protests in our streets, et cetera, there's some echoes of economic royalists, know, the billionaire debate and discussion right now, the income disparity and wealth inequality that's emerging.

Hans Peter Brondmo (26:35.371)
the sort of tech oligarchs, if you like, the very sort of powerful tech leaders. There were so many interesting analogies to back then, yet to your core question, where's the debate happening? Do we see interesting discussions? You don't see on the political side yet the kind of leadership that I think we need around really stepping back like we were talking about a moment ago and saying, this is a societal shift.

It's important to do safety legislation for AI and everybody's focused on safety. Yet it's more than that. That safety and safety is an important. And again, Xi Ping comes out and says, you know, the world needs to be open around this. need a giant collaboration. The skeptic in me says, well, he's saying that because they're behind. of course, openness will support China. And then of course, I also believe that we do need cross border agreements.

We need safety legislation and safety organizations. But that's only such a small part of the whole thing. so I think where we find ourselves today is in this place where, like we talked about, it's impossible to predict the future. But it is possible to lock down some values and principles and goals for how we want society to function. And that, in my view, if somebody ran

on that platform in 2029 for president of this country. And they said, I believe in AI, I believe it's going to be a huge multiplier and accelerant. In fact, I even think it would be very difficult if we didn't have it because of demographic shifts and because of so much of what's happening in the global sort of demographic landscape. So we need that type of productivity boost in our society. And

it needs to be based on humanist principles. So I think that conversation, honestly, I've spoken to a lot of people I know in the industry. I don't know exactly where that conversation is happening. I think it needs to happen. think podcasts like yours are starting to put it on the map and I think that's great. And it also needs to start emerging in the public dialogue.

Hans Peter Brondmo (29:03.368)
And I think it could be a winning strategy for a politician to define part of their platform around this, much like FDR. Of course, FDR in the wake of a huge crisis, which we don't necessarily have yet, and that's the other part of this, that makes it a little complicated. yeah, so the simple answer to that, was a complicated answer, the simple answer is no, there isn't enough debate happening and there's no...

I don't see any particular strong convening yet around the conversation of the modern human, the hybrid human, the hybrid organization, and the AI society and where that all comes together and how we design it against humanist values.

mykel (29:50.526)
I

When I look at our you know and also around the world especially our political spectrum today, I have concerns because these are people that they have a hard time understanding how the internet works. Okay. I've seen so many debates in Congress where the very basic of how the internet works, it's they are lacking that. So when I think about are they really gonna

understand what is it that we need as a society to build this society of the future with AI if if they probably don't also are having a hard time understanding AI, not only the technology but the implication and ramification in society. So I have I have my concerns there because of that. And I also have concerns because I while I totally agree with you, I think we should embrace AI and politicians should embrace AI with the understanding

That they they they need to have a message that land on people, right? Right now, we have seen across colleges and universities, every time someone talks about AI, you know, these college graduates and undergraduates are just booing. And and at the moment the word AI, it's just gets communicated because what we see in the news are concerning news about companies.

laying offs and letting people go and even though it's not directly tied about it nowadays everything that you hear about bad news and layoffs is tied to AI even when that's not the reason. So I think we all as a society we really need to do a lot more just to talk about AI in a way that people don't think it's only the bad news that people heard and here there. And we should all really think about what what do we want this society to be because

mykel (31:51.616)
it will happen we like it or not AI is here to stay so so that's where I am with that

Hans Peter Brondmo (32:01.581)
Yeah. I think it not only will happen, but again, I want to emphasize that it must happen. I've looked at demographics and when a society in our economic kind of world and system stops growing, some very fundamental things happen.

So obviously you end up with more old people, you end up with fewer young people entering the workforce, so fewer people to care for the old people, old people not being productive contributors to society, so therefore not producing value and becoming a financial weight on society and a logistical weight and in the way things are configured today.

And the interesting thing is when we go dip below 2.1 in terms of replacement rates, right? So if every couple that has less than 2.1 children, or on average if couples have less than 2.1 children, the population drops, right? And when that happens, it kind of falls off a cliff. It's not a steady slow drop, it's more of an exponential.

because then they're fewer couples again to have children and then they have fewer children. So it falls off a cliff. And in countries like Korea, South Korea right now has a huge issue. Japan has a huge issue. And so they don't have enough people to actually produce and therefore create the goods. So these countries are rushing towards automation, robotics, AI as a means to keep producing even when they have fewer people. There's so much good that comes out of that, right?

What's good is fewer people working means less of a burden on the environment. It means more, potentially could mean more spare time, more time for those people to be people and be together in community and potentially supervise the AI, but not be pulled down into the rabbit hole of doing work that ultimately now can be done by machines. All of that is happening, right?

Hans Peter Brondmo (34:27.646)
Yes, what we need is we need somebody to tell us or tell us we need to tell a story that acknowledges all that and says and acknowledges the hardship that some people will experience in the transition, but then also has a plan for how to address that hardship. And that's where humanism comes back into this. Humanist principles are about people first, right? It's about

saying, like, you I grew up in Norway. So I spent the first 20 years of my life in Norway before I came to the US to go to college and then stayed here. So in Norway, of course, everybody points to the oil fund and says, you know, have so much money over there. And that is true. And there is an ethos, a way of thinking, a way of caring for the other person, which I think is very powerful.

And I think the Scandinavian countries, the Scandinavian model is a very powerful one. And I think, well, it's too simplistic to say, let's just do that everywhere. Some people have tried to say that, that doesn't really work. But it provides some guiding principles for how we can actually configure a society and how we can act in community in ways that I think AI can actually be very

a beneficiary, a positive accelerant for enabling that type of society and that type of way of.

mykel (36:03.733)
Yeah, it's not trying to derail us from this conversation, but have you been following the World Cup? Yeah. Okay. Should be a proud moment for you as a exact. boy, they they really played. It's it was really good to see all that drive and all that energy. we all connected with Norway one way or the other during the World Cup. It was great. Yeah.

Hans Peter Brondmo (36:11.998)
Yes I have.

Rude. Rude. Rude.

Hans Peter Brondmo (36:25.694)
Yeah, it was fun.

Hans Peter Brondmo (36:30.578)
Yeah, it was very fun to see.

mykel (36:33.831)
okay. So so yeah, many things that that we really need to to to think about and we still need to try to figure it out. But that's also should be, you know, the exciting part about all this, right? That we have some way, one way or the other, a say on on what this future will be for us. And and we all should participate, right? we all should have a voice and we one way or the other try to

you know design talk about brainstorm discuss you know really what is it how how we want to do it and and and this is where you know for me and I know for you as well and speeder it gets kind of deeply human right because the question isn't only from my point of view how powerful these systems get it's really what happens

Hans Peter Brondmo (37:12.602)
and.

mykel (37:33.295)
happen to the human dignity when machines becomes right our you know assistants and and and teachers potentially workers what does protecting our human dignity will look like for you

Hans Peter Brondmo (37:38.192)
Thank

Hans Peter Brondmo (37:53.308)
I'll tell you a short little story to illustrate the complexities of this. My mother lived in Norway and I would call her on the weekends here from California. And she passed away a few years ago, but towards the end of her life, she was suffering from some chronic illnesses.

And I would call her and she would pick up the phone and she wouldn't even say hello. She would just say, Hans Peter, where are the robots?

And this was her greeting and it almost became a little bit of a thing between us. And then I would say, well, mom, they're coming, but it's going to take a while. And then she would go, well, they better come soon. And for my mother, the robots didn't come fast enough. And what she was looking for, and this became a real inspiration for me in my work, what my mother was looking for was actual dignity.

She had, I she was in a fortunate position. She lived in Norway. She lived in her own apartment until she passed away. And she had three people, three government funded people that would show up every day, one in the morning, one in the middle of the day, and one in the evening, early evening, to help her. And mostly they would help her with, you know, things like, I think towards the end they helped her with getting dressed and undressed. They helped her with...

with bathing, they helped her with some cleanup in the apartment and things like this. Now imagine if she had a robot that could take care of some of these things, where she could just tell the robot, know, for example, she was, she was having some problems with movement towards the end. She loses her book on the floor. She can't pick it up. So now for three hours while she's waiting for this person to show up.

Hans Peter Brondmo (40:00.301)
to pick up her book, she can't read her book. She could say to the robot, robot, pick up the book. I mean, just very simple things, little things in our lives that you and I take for granted became a real hurdle. Things like cleaning up a little bit in her apartment. So when those people showed up, she loved to play cards. So towards the very end, she also liked, even though she had some movement challenges, she liked to go in the neighborhood, go for little walks around her apartment. But she needed a companion to do that with.

what if that could have been the human's role, right? Instead of the human coming in, cleaning the dishes and helping her get dressed, what if the human could come and play cards with her or go for a walk with her? And so this became a real inspiration for me because again, as aging populations emerge as a major issue for societies,

they're going to even fewer of those people to come and help. And it's going to be expensive to have people come and help. So it's not that we want to outsource everything to robots. Although these robots, you know, increasingly you can have interesting conversations with them. They can tell you about everything. They can ask you questions about your life. I mean, there are interesting capabilities in these machines for sure. And I think that, you know, we have to acknowledge and recognize

that this technology is a necessary part of our future if we want to continue to live at the level of support and level of material wealth that we in the West have the privilege of having, and especially as more people around the world also want to achieve that same level of

of life quality. So again, I find myself being an optimist in this and looking at the long game here and then looking at what we need to do in the shorter transitional periods to fully manifest that transition.

mykel (42:18.433)
Yeah, thank thanks for sharing that story with us. I know that's very personal. and and it's one of those stories that we need more stories like this so people understand that there's really good coming out of AI, right? like this story like you were saying, what could been if we have an AI companion in a way that can help elder elderly people, senior people, right?

I have on the sh I had on the show a couple months ago Bruce, someone that he's building a company that is basically he provides a piece of software that is it's called memory lanes. Basically what it is is a game where people with dementia they can with a tablet they can start playing cards and the game has AI embedded on it.

Hans Peter Brondmo (43:11.158)
.

mykel (43:18.287)
And start asking questions to those people with dementia, trying to bring them back, you know, good stories and history of themselves and connect them and keep them talking. So there are so many areas where where we can leverage AI to really amplify what is the best in us human beings, right? Of course, while we keep our concerns and our check and everything that can go wrong, it's always like the way I've seen life, it's

We focus our energy and what we wanted to focus. If we want to focus on the good, I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of positive coming on it. So I think stories like this, it's really what we need to to try to discuss more for sure.

Hans Peter Brondmo (44:06.397)
There's a tendency that we're all familiar with, which is to use fear as a tactic for motivating people. And for obvious biological reasons, it is a strong motivator, right? If we were told there was a dangerous tiger on the prowl, we took precautions and we would walk around on high alert.

alert state and maybe even not go into the forests so he wouldn't be eaten by the tiger until we realized it had moved on. You know, in today's world, you know, that survival principle, that important, that important evolutionary, you know, trade, which is we fear motivates us to stay alive and to stay alert is being weaponized. And I think

You know so much of what we see on the news so much what we see on in politics and the political debate is driven by fear and this really saddens and you know, frankly annoys me because Well, of course there's room for being skeptical and critical and concerned for many things There's also so much to celebrate You know in our in our

in our lives and when you, know, it's easy to say, well, look at all these statistics and these numbers and how much better off we really are than we were 50 years ago or 20 years ago even. But of course, statistics holds, is in sort of a distant contender when it's competing against fear. And so what I'm hopeful for and what I'm hoping for and what I'm trying to contribute to

is a narrative that is not fear-based, but a narrative that says, yes, we have concerns and we should be very real about these concerns. People losing work is a concern. And it's a concern that we should figure out, we're really ingenious, we people. Like we're really creative, we're really smart, we're really industrious, we can do so much wonderful stuff. We're incredible, it's a marvel what has...

Hans Peter Brondmo (46:31.627)
emerged in the human. So why don't we take that marvelous thing, which is being human, the ability to communicate, the ability to collaborate, the ability to come up with, you know, put a person on the moon, the ability to harness energy from the sun and have it, you know, feed our homes with cold kitchens or cold refrigerators and warm plates to boil water. I mean, it's just remarkable what we've achieved.

Let's get back to that. Let's have the remarkable be the bar we're going for, not the sort of dismal fear based narratives. And so I, you know, I I wanna encourage remarkable. I wanna encourage discovery. I wanna encourage curiosity. And for all of that, I think AI is actually again, a powerful tool. Like I learned, as I mentioned, I've been geeking out a little bit on the New Deal and on.

you know what led Franklin Roosevelt to it. you know, I can get from an AI very quickly what it would take a PhD months to research and produce or to communicate to me. And I wouldn't even have access to that PhD. can now turn to, know, Stari Omode says, you know, we're creating a country of geniuses in a data center. I think this is becoming increasingly true. There are sort of geniuses.

At our disposal, anyone can access a genius that can also talk to us at a level that we are capable of understanding it. So I'm not a historian. I don't have all the context, but I can get a lot of help and references and have a conversation with Claude or with Gemini such that I can learn things that previously would have taken a lot of time to learn.

And again, lots of issues, AI and education is its own thing. I'm not glossing over any of that, but I'm just looking at it and saying, I've never had better access to expert knowledge and information. And occasionally it hallucinates and makes shit up. And so it's up to me, the human, to be wise, to be knowledgeable, be, you know, to be critical, to ask questions, to ask follow-up questions, not just to sit back and think everything is given. But that process is so...

Hans Peter Brondmo (48:57.878)
to me so amazing. It's another expression of our genius, of our amazing ability as humans to create this stuff. So I think for me it's just let's lean into wonder, let's lean into our own ability to do what we've already done, do it better, do it cleaner, do it fast, and not do it from a place of fear and

but from a place of hope and wonder and curiosity.

mykel (49:34.496)
And if I may add on only one thing there, let's also be more intentional, right? 'Cause the you know, the more intelligent these machines get and they will get, kind of the more intentional we as humans, we we should continue to thrive to be. Intentionality is part of what makes us humans humans, and it's really what's gonna determine how we're gonna succeed in in this future, because it's all gonna be on what

are your intentions that's back to your point and how intentional we are on approaching you know these machines and these AIs and and basically what we want to get out of them I think that will continue to be important as well.

Hans Peter Brondmo (50:16.521)
it.

Hans Peter Brondmo (50:20.882)
I couldn't agree more, Michael. And I have a personal practice, is every, probably twice a year, I take a piece of paper and I write down on that piece of paper any number of words that come to me that represent a value that's important to me. You know, it could be something like love and connection. always makes it kind of high up on my list. It can be...

making an income that could be of value. It's important for me to make some money. It could be be kind to one person a day or be kind or it can be health. You know, just any number of words like that. And I write it all down on a piece of paper. Then I have this paper filled with words. And so now I make myself pick 10. Pick the 10 most important words that I want to be kind of

signify a value that's important to me. So now I have 10. Then I make myself stack rank those 10. All this by the way, it takes half an hour an hour, so it's worth your while. So now I have my top 10 and I have them stack ranked. So the first one, the second one, the third one, the fourth one, the seventh. And now I say, okay, I can only remember on any day, I can only remember five, maybe even three. So I'm gonna take the top of that list.

and I'm to put that, maybe put it on a sticky note and put it on my fridge or put it in my phone or something, where I have easy access so that I can remember them. Now comes the hard part. I look at my calendar. I look at the choices I make every day and I map them against these values. Is what I'm doing here in alignment with what I've told myself are the key things that I want to manifest in my life?

intentionality, right? Am I being intentional about my choices? So now I say, well, it turns out that I have all this stuff on my calendar and all these things I'm doing that I can't map to my values. Well, what does that mean? That either means that I'm not being really truthful about my values. There's something else that is really important for me that I'm not, maybe I'm not feeling, maybe I'm feeling a little shame. Maybe I'm unaware.

Hans Peter Brondmo (52:46.108)
But why isn't that showing up on my list of values? So, or I'm making choices that are not in alignment with my values, right? And this little exercise, and then I keep that top list of top three, top five, I keep that with me for a while. And I revisit it every now and then I make a choice. I get a request to travel somewhere and give a talk. that's interesting. That might be good for my ego. Somebody wants me to talk. Well, this

Is feeding my ego one of my top three or five values. If so, I go, maybe it's well, they'll pay me to give a talk. So, a certain amount of income every year is important. I need to pay my bills. And so I will go do it because it's an alignment with, with that process. What, what, whatever is important for you. It just, and occasionally it'll, it'll, there'll be some dissonance and, and incongruent, but what it does is it just puts you in a place. And I think.

This, when you say intentionality, I think our ability to be in alignment with values, and this gets all the way back to kind of where we started, which is if we're going to design an AI society, what are the core values? What would we want that AI society to manifest as a society, as a culture? And obviously it's going to be more than three, but it doesn't, you know, like what are some high level, like the statement of human rights, for example?

the Declaration of Human Rights. This is a relatively short list that manifests some key values and it's been very important. It's guided a lot of what has defined us as a society. I think that today, if we mapped a lot of what we're seeing against that list, it might be out of alignment. So do we no longer believe in those principles in the Declaration of Human Rights?

as a society, as a world, as a community, or are we out of alignment and we need to get back in alignment and act more to align with those principles? So as we look at this AI society and the emergence of it, a challenge I am working on and I think is going to be very important is to start a discussion around what in a debate, healthy...

Hans Peter Brondmo (55:10.069)
set of disagreements and agreements and discussions about what the values should be that we want to manifest. And when I bring up humanism earlier, it's in that context, right? I think putting the human first should, seems pretty obvious. I think most people could agree on it, but putting the human first. So then let's make choices in alignment with that, where you have to be able to articulate why the choice you're making over here is in fact in support.

mykel (55:37.41)
Yep. those values. Yeah.

Hans Peter Brondmo (55:39.529)
of putting the human first.

mykel (55:42.74)
And and it's part of that discussion, right, Hans Peter, that that that we need to have more and more. And and we all live fast paced lives, right? And and part of the conversation I see sometime and and thank you for sharing that by the way. It's it's all if we all try to live our life in a way that we're more intentional towards what our values are and what we want to achieve, we probably would have better results, you know, or bet met maybe getting

better to faster to to the destinations that we want to go through. And this is exactly what we need to. It's what are those human values that we want to keep

what are the things that we're gonna be able to compromise and what are the things that we don't want, what what good looks like and what is it that we're not able to to accept, right? One way or the other. But is the conversation that this society, we as a society, we need to have more and more. Yeah, totally.

Hans Peter Brondmo (56:42.461)
That's right. And if I can just maybe intersect one more thing. Yes, it would be good for society, but what I've actually found personally is I think I've always been relatively value aligned.

But I've also found myself doing things over the years where I'm like looking back or at the choices I made or maybe looking at the outcome, the consequences of those choices and saying, whoops, how did that happen? And so what actually happens when you live more in alignment is it's easier because before you make a big choice, little choices, but even little choices like that donut.

looks really good. I should eat that donut. Well if a value is health then maybe I would stop for a moment and say is that in alignment with me being healthy. Another value is fun and adventure and so maybe fun is fun and maybe another value would be pleasure. It could be a value that somebody could have. But pleasure and health can go together but they can also be in competition.

So what it actually does is it sort of simplifies life for me as an individual. And that's part of it. It's like it simplifies society if it's clear, if we have a clear set of principles, if the principles of humanism is a clear principle that we're solving for, that simplifies things as well. It just makes it easier because if you can get general agreement around that value, then

people have to, be, we can point out whether we're making choices, whether we're acting in alignment with that value or not. And so it actually simplifies life.

mykel (58:34.463)
And we know how hard it's to get general agreement into anything. We are not saying that this is gonna be easy, but we as we as a society we have to go through one way or the other for sure. quick question. It's how's it are you still writing the book?

Hans Peter Brondmo (58:53.054)
I am. I am working on the book, yes.

mykel (58:56.415)
Okay. So I guess we will hear more in the future about it, right? Once we

Hans Peter Brondmo (59:00.668)
Yes, thank you. I've decided to write a series of smaller pieces as I'm building up to the book. there will be some publishing coming and some writing coming over the next months that will kind build up ultimately to the book itself.

mykel (59:23.433)
Awesome, looking forward to it. And and Hans Peter, I I like to kind of close these conversations with my guest with one question, which will be: what would be your piece of advice to a younger version of yourself watching him today, getting ready to start this journey with AI?

Hans Peter Brondmo (59:48.797)
Hmm. Well, I would probably have already given my little pitch for being in alignment with your values. I would recommend that exercise. Take a blank piece of paper or a notepad in your favorite notepad tool and write down your values and stack rank them and just see how far you can get with that. So as it comes, as it goes to AI, you know,

A lot of my friends over the last years have come to me and their children will come to me and they say, well, what should I do? should my, or give me your thoughts on what I should do. And the parents wanted them at least for the longest time to get an engineering degree or, and I've always been a little bit of the mindset that education, whether it's high school or college,

is a time to learn how to learn. It's a time to learn how to think. It's a time to learn how to be human. And therefore, and you know, maybe this is, you know, a little bit arrogant, but I feel like a lot of the other stuff you can kind of pick up later. So that doesn't mean that studying, getting a PhD in mathematics isn't a wonderful thing to do or getting a PhD in

in biology isn't important. It certainly is. so education is very important. And while you're doing that, have an art practice. While you're doing that, study some philosophy. While you're doing that, go take dance lessons. Be in your body, be in the world, be connected to this rich and incredible history of humanity.

and again on what it means to be human and immerse yourself in that because one day when you become powerful, when you make decisions that matter for other people, grounding that in more than the science, grounding that in a deeper understanding and a deeper connection to the world around us and to the knowledge set and to the corpus of human knowledge and wisdom, that to me seems more important than ever.

mykel (01:02:13.633)
Love it. Be present, be intentional, you know, be human. And and I cannot appreciate you more for taking the time to be with us today. This has been as a human of a conversation as anyone can possibly expect it. So I do appreciate you. Thank you very much, Hans Peter.

mykel (01:02:39.201)
You there?

Hans Peter Brondmo (01:02:42.436)
Thank you very much. It's been a real, real joy.

mykel (01:02:45.826)
Alright. Thank you. And for all of you watching and tuning in with us today, if this meant something for you, make sure that you follow us and you send this video to your friends, to your family, and talk to you guys soon. Take care.