to invite David Mindell.

David Mindell is the Dibner professor

of the history of engineering and manufacturing at MIT.

He has 25 years of experience as an engineer

in the field of undersea robotic exploration

as a veteran of more than 30 oceanographic expeditions,

and more recently, as an airplane pilot and engineer

of autonomous aircraft.

He is the award winning author of "Iron Coffin-- War,

Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor,"

and "Digital Apollo-- Human and Machine in Spaceflight."

And his most recent book, "Our Robots, Ourselves"

was published by Viking on October 13 of this year.

Please join me in welcoming David Mindell.

[APPLAUSE]

DAVID MINDELL: Thank you Susanna for that nice introduction.

It's a pleasure to be here.

And I'm going to talk about my new book,

"Our Robots, Ourselves."

I come to this book sort of out of the experience

of my previous book, which was called "Digital Apollo."

And "Digital Apollo" was about the computers

and the software that were used inside both the command module

and the lunar module for the Apollo lunar landings

in the '60s, how they were designed,

how they were engineered.

It was really the first embedded computer.

It was certainly the first computer

that software became central to human life

and was life critical software, and one of the first real time

control computers, and the first digital fly by wire system.

And you can see in this image over on the right, which

is the cover image-- it was made actually by John Knoll who you

may know from Industrial Light & Magic-- and a little bit more

clearly presented here.

The book focuses on this kind of climactic moment in the Apollo

11 lunar landing where the mythology went,

Armstrong reaches up and turns off

the computer the last minute and lands the spacecraft by hand

to avoid this crater that you can see there

out the window, West crater.

And the book sort of takes that moment as a starting point

for why would he turn off the computer,

and why was that important?

And now it turns out that he didn't turn off the computer.

He turned it from a fairly highly automated targeting

mode that kind of allowed him a kind of cursor

control around the moon to a still fairly highly

semi-automated mode, attitude hold

in his right hand, rate of descent

with a switch in his left hand.

Still very much a fly by wire kind of automated mode.

That's actually not so far from how pilots

fly Airbus airliners today.

He didn't turn off the computer.

He moved it to a different level of automation

to suit what he felt was the situation at the time.

And this was a very interesting moment because I learned,

in the course of writing this book, at the time,

the Soviet spacecraft were controlled by analog computers.

And they were very highly automated.

They left very little discretion and role for the astronauts.

The American computer was a general purpose

digital computer, one of the first integrated circuits--

uses of integrated circuits.

In fact, this computer consumed 60%

of the national output of integrated circuits

for a couple years during the '60s.

So it was a very advanced, forward looking thing to do,

including all the complexities of the software.

And yet all that advanced technology

did not make the machine more automated.

It just made it automated in a more nuanced, sophisticated way

that gave the human better control over the spacecraft.

And that gave me this idea, which I then

pursued throughout this new book,

that often the highest level of automation--

we talk about levels of automation--

is not necessarily full autonomy.

And the most difficult challenging

technological problem is not full autonomy,

but rather what I've come to call a perfect five.

If you think about level one as fully manual,

level 10 as fully automated, the perfect five

is really the most complicated, difficult,

and I think also socially and financially rewarding

place to have automated systems where the human is in control.

There's trusted, transparent autonomy.

And the system can be moved up and down various levels,

turning things on, turning things off,

in order to suit the particular situation.

And what you see through the Apollo story,

and many of the stories in the book is that a lot of systems

start out in the engineering phase

as imagining full autonomy.

The engineers on the Apollo computer

thought there would only be two buttons on the interface.

One would be go to moon, and one would be take me home.

And instead of course what you ended up

with was this very rich, very carefully designed

mix of instruments and controls.

As these systems frequently, time and time again,

move from laboratory to field, there

are human interventions and human controls

put in at critical moments.

So again, I've been talking about the perfect five.

So the subtitle of the book is "The Myths of Autonomy."

I want to read you a little bit from chapter one

about what those myths are.

First there's the myth of linear progress,

the idea that technology evolves from direct human involvement

to remote presence, and then to fully autonomous robots.

Political scientist Peter Singer--

you may be familiar with his book "Wired for War"--

epitomizes this pathology when he writes that quote,

"this concept of keeping the human in the loop is already

being eroded by both policymakers and the technology

itself, which are both moving rapidly toward pushing humans

out of the loop," unquote.

But there's no evidence to suggest

that this is a natural evolution,

that the technology itself, as Singer puts it,

does any such thing.

In fact, there's good evidence-- a lot of it

is presented in this book-- that people are moving into deeper

intimacy with their machines.

Second is the myth of replacement,

the idea that machines take over human jobs one for one.

But human factors, researchers, and cognitive systems engineers

have found that really does automation simply

mechanize a human task.

Rather, it tends to make the task more complex,

often increases the workload, or at least shifts it around.

And finally, as I mentioned, we have the myth

of full autonomy, the Utopian idea that

robots today and in the future should operate entirely

on their own.

Yes, automation can certainly take

on parts of tests that were previously

accomplished by humans.

Machines do act on their own in response

to their environments for certain periods of time.

But the machine that operates entirely independently

of human direction is a useless machine.

And I used to say that only a rock is truly autonomous.

But then my geologist friends reminded me

that even rocks are shaped and formed by their environments.

Automation changes the type of human involvement required,

transforms it, but does not eliminate it.

For any apparently autonomous system,

you can always find the wrapper of human control

that makes it useful and returns meaningful data.

The questions that I'm interested in then

are not manned versus unmanned, human control

versus autonomous, but rather where are the people?

Which people are they?

What are they doing, and when are they doing it?

And so you can trace through networks of-- in some sense,

any programming task is a kind of placing

of human intention, and human design,

and human views of the world into a piece of software that

is later executed at some future date.

So the book covers four extreme environments.

And the idea is that in these extreme environments like space

flight, people have been forced to use robotics for 30

or 40 years because, in many cases,

it was the only way to do a job where

people couldn't physically be.

And we can look at those environments

and see something about our robotic future

in more ordinary environments like automobiles

and other aspects of daily life.