Can robots teach you how to live? | Lakshay Sharma | TEDxPenn

Robots can't act until someone writes down what they should optimize for, something humans have never managed to do for happiness. Drawing on work hunting for Planet Nine, launching rockets, building off-road robots with DARPA, and studying astronaut cognition with NASA, Lakshay Sharma explores what building intelligent systems teaches us about our own decisions. He argues that robotics works as a mirror for how we live: our surroundings are our training data, and we have to choose deliberately when to stick with what we know and when to explore. Lakshay Sharma is a robotics engineer who founded and serves as the CEO of Cerulion, a robotics middleware service that provides efficient, excellent ways to build, test, and deploy robots. A Penn and MIT alum, his academic and professional experiences point to the argument that the way in which robots are designed reveals the assumptions held by their designers more than the limitations of the technology itself. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx