I'm Alan Alda and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

And that is literally the moment.

I'm like, I have got to work on this problem of autonomous robots being able to interact with anyone and everyone in a way that can

collaborate with us and help us and believe it or not nobody was really working seriously

on that problem and that became what's known as the field of

social robotics and it was about if you're going to interact with people they need to be

socially intelligent they need to be emotionally intelligent they need to be able to

communicate in natural ways.

They need to be able to collaborate with us in human center terms.

So that was the beginning of it.

That's Cynthia Brazil. The mission she set for herself three decades ago began with the creation of two desktop robots that I had the fun of meeting and interacting with, Kismet and Leonardo.

And that mission of hers went on with the creation of the first commercially

available companion robot, Jibbo,

which had the misfortune of competing

with Amazon's Echo and its assistant Alexa.

As Cynthia continues to create robots,

that can be understanding helpful companions.

She's also focused on making sure we humans understand both the strengths and the risks posed by the artificial intelligence

that powers not just her robots, but also so much of the rest of what we now encounter every day.

This is really going to be fun.

We first met about 20 years ago

when we were doing the show Scientific American Frontiers.

...