Star Simpson

Building Personable Machines

in Bot Summit 2016

When Darius asked me to speak I had to think a lit­tle bit about what I would say to peo­ple who make soft­ware agents, which I think is real­ly real­ly cool. And to me, in think­ing about it, I think what is a bot to me? A bot is fun­da­men­tal­ly a piece of soft­ware that involves per­son­al­i­ty. And I’ve had a long-running inter­est in build­ing phys­i­cal robots that have per­son­al­i­ty of vary­ing degrees. So I pro­posed to give a talk about that.

Star Simpson at the Freedom to Innovate Summit

in Freedom to Innovate Summit

One of the most sur­pris­ing out­comes since then is to find just how many peo­ple I know who are engi­neers [have] had some expe­ri­ence with the law. It’s unbe­liev­able the num­ber of peo­ple who’ve come to me and said, Look, the same thing hap­pened to me when I was a teenag­er, when I was in col­lege, a lit­tle after.”