He Built Humanoids for DARPA: Sidd Srinivasa on Why They’re the Wrong Default Robot

Brad Porter sits down with Sidd Srinivasa, the roboticist he recruited to build Amazon’s Robotics AI org and now a professor at the University of Washington’s Allen School. They get into the gap between what robotics promised and what it actually delivered, why a robot that helps a paralyzed person eat is really a problem about dignity, why Sidd thinks the humanoid is the wrong default (“we humans are a local minimum in evolution”), why most robot demos are the easy 30 percent, and why moving the field forward takes uncommon sense: you have to be contrarian and correct.