TEDxBrussels

A day in the deep future

Luc Steels isn’t a man you often get the chance to talk to, given the commitment of his in-depth research. But it’s this very work that makes him so fascinating, for he studies robots.

“It turns out there are three problems with robots: empathy, meaning and insight,” he tells me. “It is all about the relationship of the robot with the world around it. For example, with empathy, how can we get robots to recognise behaviour in other robots or in people and relate it to their own behaviour? If they see someone moving or waving their arm, how can they relate that to moving their own arm? It’s about the relationship of your own body and the behaviour of another.”

Insight, meanwhile, is difficult for robots because it “is about being able to solve a problem without applying a routine solution. So if you don’t have a hammer but have to hit a nail, you could use something else, like your shoe. This sounds abstract, but I hope to make it clear and concrete in the talk.”

A professor of computer science at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), Steels will present his research at TEDxBrussels and, in keeping with the event’s format, will inundate the audience with fascinating stories and examples limited to just 18 minutes. This is the kind of person whose brain you’d want to pick for hours, but instead of getting frustrated, you will most likely get distracted.

Joining Steels in the event subtitled “A Day in the Deep Future” are more than 20 experts in entirely different fields with an equally fascinating perspective. They include Lorenz Bogaert, co-founder of Ghent-based social networking site Netlog (pictured); Canadian Andrew Hessel, an advocate for open source DNA coding, British-Israeli quantum mechanics guru David Deutsch and American business commentator Julie Meyer, a passionate supporter of entrepreneurs.

With such a short time frame, Steels actually hopes to raise more questions than answer them. “I hope to particularly to make people aware of the limitations and what we need to tackle for artificial intelligence,” he says. “We’ve been asked to think about the future for this particular event, so I’ll probably talk about the deep problems we’re facing trying to develop autonomous, intelligent robots, illustrated with experiments I’m doing myself.”

The moment he starts describing his work, ideas, questions and possibilities begin to flood the mind. This is, in fact, the goal of TEDxBrussels, says its director Samia Lounis. “From the beginning, we focused on science, technology and entertainment. This year, we wanted a battle of visions, only with speakers who are able to give their vision of the world in 50 years. I’m very interested in the world I live in and what’s next, where we’re headed. We live in a global, open world. The more we share, the more we can have a common narrative and do something good with it.”