The ICRA retrospective

The ICRA retrospective

It had been 3 weeks since we’d last caught up—Raghav and I independently ended up at two different conferences happening at the same time.

• He was at a conference called “Mathematics of the Origin of Life and Self-Organized Complexity” in Chicago through the Gang Lab
• I was at the International Conference on Robotics & Automation in Atlanta - through the Columbia Robotics Club (CURC)

We had both returned to NYC not too long ago, so we met up at Dun Huang for our promised conference debrief.

The state of robotics

I told him that I feel more up-to-date on the current state of robotics and AI (at least on a high level).

Robotics as artificial life

Raghav told me about the cool people and intricate ways in which people were recreating life on the molecular stage.

I excitedly shared that I saw a lot of biology inspired robots as well!

• Moth-bots which path corrected using rubber-banded antennae to sense obstacles
• Aquatic robots with fish-like mechanical structure allowing them to swim with ease

Cynthia Sung from UPenn shared this GIF of a fish swimming upstream as the inspiration for her robots. This fish is dead, by the way.

I also realized through the various talks on incorporating foundation models into robotics, that these large-data driven artificial intelligence models are super analogous to life as well.

• Foundation models are like the DNA which humans share amongst one another.
• Fine-tuning is like the lived experiences (which create outsized impacts)

All of this excited me. The field itself felt almost like man’s attempt to recreate (artificial) life.

“Robots will replace our jobs”: Good or bad?

A large theme at the conference was also in that AI is not even close to reaching its societal potential. I saw applications of robotics and AI to cities and infrastrucuture:

• intelligent traffic lights, AI-powered carpooling services
• autonomous robotics for packing logistics, bionic suits for container unloading

And that there exist many more ways in which human manual labor can be freed up and automated to become more efficient.

But there are the people who fear robots replacing our jobs will be a net negative, that it will exacerbate the increasing wealth gap and leave more people homeless than before. Some of my friends have shunned me / other tech-minded people for “chasing too much growth” when it’s not necessary. That we should be focusing on addressing poverty, inequality, and other social issues instead.

AI is a sharper knife

Personally, I don’t think we should discourage technological advancement. I see technology and AI as being able to add net positive to society, provided they are accompanied with a fair way of distributing the net wealth added.

Just like a sharper knife requires more care to wield, I think having more net wealth in the world would just require more need-aware socioeconomic systems to prevent harming ourselves in the process. But that in the presence of this care, the added sharpness can allow you to do so much more than before.

Becoming startup-pilled

I met some really cool people at ICRA too.

A chance encounter with Caltech

It was 11am, and my team and I had actually just landed in the ATL airport when we overheard another group of undergrad-looking kids talking about their robotic hand and the upcoming ICRA conference.

They ended up being Caltech students! We exchanged contacts, bonding over the struggles of being robotics clubs that got decimated by COVID, and spent the rest of the week hanging out.

• Going on a GT nuclear robotics lab tour
• Watching them get crushed by a Chinese team that git pull‘ed the winning competition code from last year
• Getting KBBQ and watching our friend get assaulted by the grease smoke

Everyone else is startup-pilled…

Over the week, I learned that a lot of them were interested in founding their own startup.

• Donny was the president of the Caltech Robotics Club, and he told me about his dream of wanting to “bring manufacturing into America.”
• Alex was a Berkeley student who took a year off from school to do robotics research at Harvard. He told me that he was “planning to drop out of school” next semester to work on a project.
• …

And I overheard them making plans to hang out at YC startup school.

Rag goes, “Why didn’t you go to that?”
To which I shrugged, saying I didn’t even know it was happening.

I’m sold!

After seeing these smart people all interested in startups, and after having hosted YC @ Columbia last year as well, I was sold on the premise.

• I like making things and solving problems
• The potential for growth excites me
• The day-to-day aligns with my busy + ambitious temperament
• My leadership/organizational experience at CURC is helping me prepare and find cool people to one day work with

So for all these reasons, I decided then that I wanted to found my own startup.

What now?

After deciding this at the conference, I made a more concerted effort in analyzing what skills these people were honing in preparation for their startup ambitions.

On relationship currency

And honestly, what stood out to me most in these new people is how much they valued creating and maintaining their relationships.

We attended a post-ICRA mixer hosted by OpenMind, where Alex knew one of the organizers. I noticed Alex made a very concerted attempt to chat him up, congratulating him on the turnout, asking friendly questions on what it was like organizing the event, setting up expectations of a continued relationship into the future.

Looking back, I realized I needed to step up my game and really make a conscious effort to maintain my own relationships. That if I wanted to create societal-level change, it wouldn’t happen alone.

The utility of CURC

And it reaffirmed that CURC is a way which I can hone these skills!

• Building and maintaining relationships - within the club, with other clubs, with companies
• Leadership - having the birds eye view on all the operations of the above
• Marketing - the club existing in a context, finding the best parts of the club and tailoring it to the role it plays outside of it

On solving real-world problems

Hand-in-hand with building out my social network, was the equally important task of to find an interesting problem to solve… which required learning what problems even exist out there.

Luckily, the conference was exposing me to different facets of the world:

• manufacturing
• construction
• logistics
• urban planning
• healthcare
• …

—all containing ample problems, ripe for solving. Doing some research, I tried skeleton out an understanding of the world… but I quickly got overwhelmed. I realized this journey, of understanding the world, would take more time than a glance through the Wikipedia page on the taxonomy of industries.

I sighed in exasperation to Raghav. I lamented how frustrated I feel with not knowing anything. Hell, I didn’t even know what an “actuator” was until this conference.

Rag consoled me that no one knows anything, but that the fun is in trying.
That we’re all trying to figure out the world together!

…so began my summer.