To Understand Robots, Get a Horse

In Eakta Jain’s urban, engineering-centric New Delhi childhood, the closest she got to intimacy with living things was watering the plants. Even the household pets were robots (both her parents worked in the field).

Today, Jain is still into robots — she grew up to be  a computer scientist and robotic engineer herself. But she now spends a lot of time with horses. For good robotic reasons.

Some years ago, Jain’s interests turned to autonomous vehicles, and the subtle problems of connecting them — physically and psychologically — with their human drivers. What makes a robot vehicle’s actions understandable to a person? What makes the machine's choices acceptable to its passenger?  People don’t “get” autonomous cars, and they largely don’t trust them. And the cars don’t entirely “get” people, either.

A couple of years ago, Jain decided to look into what roboticists could learn from at humanity’s very first autonomous vehicles — horses. This led her to cross her campus at the University of Florida, to the barns where the Equine Sciences Department trains horses, and riders (in the podcast visual, she’s the person standing on the left). She was looking for insights into how humans and horses train one another in a complex and trusting relationship. Jain began by interviewing trainers and riders. But soon, she was taking riding lessons herself. Today, she rides a few times a week and is hoping to acquire a horse of her own.

In this episode, Jain and I discuss how people could communicate with robots in horsey ways -- by gesture, touch, body language. And how robots might use their own kind of body language to communicate with us. And how the experience of using a robot can be more like meeting an unfamiliar animal than like unpacking a new laptop. Also: how different traditions of horsemanship can help foster different approaches to robots (the Western way to ride horses isn't the only one, so why should the western way of using robots be the only one?) And of course she explained how an engineer came to understand and admire the world of horses and their trainers. Give us a listen!