Even Robots Grow Old

I don't know what was cooler: Robot Kindergarten or the Great Wall. Neither was the reason for the detour to Beijing.

Aging is a problem the world has in common, and I was honored to be invited by Walter Greenleaf to join a US delegation on digital health to meet with leaders from across the world innovating in this space. I went eager to learn where the challenges we each face overlap, and where they don't. Over the trip we met with senior officials and municipal leaders to discuss needs. My goal was to learn.

You can imagine the elephants in those rooms. Our hosts in Shunyi still made a point of telling us the district's name translates to "success and trust." Tianjin's leader pointed out that the name of their ancient river is one syllable away from how you say Silicon Valley in Chinese.

All that said, I hadn't felt this nervous getting off a plane since stepping into forty below in polar-bear country in Barrow, Alaska. I had little tech with me, so I was back to asking for help the way I'd learned to while parking a big rig, this time with a major language barrier in the middle. It put me deeper in the shoes of our own customers, who feel exactly that way about technology, and are not wrong.

Three insights I'd share from the trip.

Aging is a global truth. It was fascinating to learn how other cultures solve the problem we work on every day within the context of the US. For example, the nursing home is a relatively new need at scale in China, and because it is new, they are largely designing for it from scratch. Thinking back to my consulting days, being in a position to start from the future state has its benefits over retrofitting old and overworked processes. Meanwhile we share similar headaches around workflow, automation, and the security of health information that come with any system so large.

Communication is more important now than ever. We had at least two translators in every meeting, plus translation software, and even some translating glasses. Still, what was said and what was understood were two different things, and you could watch the gap open in real time. When people ask my biggest takeaway from my time at Stanford, this is my answer. I saw a new level of it in these settings where we had hours of traditional translation coupled with modern technology.

Robots raised as toddlers? I had hoped to catch the Humanoid Olympics, but my flights didn't cooperate. Later in the week, at a startup summit called HICOOL, a founder walked on stage with his child-sized humanoid robot. When it came time to leave, the robot would not cooperate. So instead we watched him and another grown man carry the three-foot robot off stage kicking and screaming. The difference: instead of one parent picking it up, it took two. And the metal didn’t seem to let up on the kicking. The room laughed, which scares me.

The expert who introduced him called the initiative "Robot Kindergarten": to make the next advances in robotics, robots have to be raised early and alongside humans, like children. It makes sense from a technical training perspective, however I feel there are already far too many parenting analogies for AI. We are hearing this all over the news now, and we seem much less than a decade from a massive acceleration. The bigger these robots get, the less likely we are to have two parents on hand to carry the temper tantrum off stage.

Globally, there is a lot of work to do. Walter is often quoted as saying that health can be the backbone of innovation. After watching so many countries work the same problem from opposite ends, I am inspired by the potential. However, time isn't on our side.

I am grateful for the hospitality, the generosity, the opportunity, and, yes, the fact that my bicycle made it safely around the globe, its longest loop yet. And of course, very proud to be an American.