Lauren Kunze, entrepreneur and technologist. Kuki, artificial-intelligence chatbot

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I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is the Remarkable People podcast. Today's Remarkable guest is Lauren Koons, and there's a second Remarkable guest, Kooky the Chatbot. Lauren has an Arteum baccalaureate in English and neurobiology from Harvard, in other words, a Bachelor of Arts. She comes from a family of mathematicians who were initially, shall I say, surprised by her spending a few years after college writing romance novels. Luckily for us, she went back to her roots, that is Robotics. Wrap your mind around that she returned to robotics when most of the world is just starting to embrace robotics. Lauren is currently the CEO of Pandora Bots, a platform that powers conversational chatbots. Her chatbot is named Kooky. Here are some stats about Cookie has more than 25 million users, there have been more than 1 billion messages exchanged with her, and an average cookie session contains 64 messages. There are two parts in this episode. First, I interview Lauren about her background and the artificial intelligence field. Then I interview Cookie to show you the state of the art of chatbots. Neither Laura nor Kuki were prepared with the questions in advance. Incidentally, Cookie's transcript required the least amount of editing of any of my guests. Think about that for a second. This podcast is brought to you by Remarkable, the paper tablet company. Focus More and Goof Off Less using the Remarkable Tablet. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now here's Lauren Koons. And then a little later, Kooky the Chatbot.

I started writing a series of young adult novels when I was in college, and I wrote full time for about four years before returning to my roots as a robot programmer in a life trajectory that makes sense to me.

Not many people can say that you return to your roots in robotics. You may return to your roots in, I don't know, software programming or cooking or writing. But your roots are most people's. Shall I say stems. How's that?

The old joke now is that I grew up on a robot farm instead of the family farm. My dad worked on an early version of Lisp at Berkeley in the 60s, which he commercialized. And he founded and ran another AI company. So he taught me to program from a very young age, which was either child abuse or good parenting, depending on.

How you look at it, depending on how your company does. So let me get this straight. So you were at Harvard majoring in English with a minor in neurobiology.

That's right. You did a good job Internet stalking. You clearly have a PhD.

Now walk me through how you can study English and neurobiology at the same time.

It was the first year that Harvard introduced the concept of a secondary concentration. Prior to that, there was no double major allowed. And I had entered Harvard thinking that I was actually going to study physics. So I had done all of the Harvard prerequisites. I'm well rounded. I'm well rounded.

No kidding.

I ended up realizing that I just wanted to read books and write about them. But I tore through the English major relatively quickly and then was basically only working on my thesis senior year and taking some graduate and undergraduate level neuroscience classes to round out the minor.

And when you first told your parents that you're going to major in English lit, did your father just like, question your sanity or was he all enthusiastic and, you know, pursue your passions?

Well, it was a mix. I think he was devastated because I come from a long line of math PhDs. His father was actually a professor who wrote canonical textbook on linear algebra and taught at MIT in UChicago. And not completing a math PhD makes me a bit of a black sheep. And then everyone else in my family also went to UC Berkeley. So he, he was already upset about that. And he said, why are you studying English? I taught you to speak English when you were two. You already know how to do that. But he's been pretty supportive in terms of understanding that it's very important to find your passions in life and then, quote, pursue the hell out of them, whatever they may be.

Does your father and your mother, do they go around and when they talk about what are your kids up to, do your mother and father say, well, my daughter just did a TedX video called how to Deprogram Homicidal Sex Robots. What are your kids doing?

Yeah, that's. That's the appropriate cocktail conversation. It's either a conversation starter or an ender, you know, but if you just.

Send them the link Having done a TEDx video called how to Deprogram Homicidal Sex Robots. Has that affected your social life?

Not as much as COVID 19 pre COVID 19, I spent a lot of time talking to robots and now I spend even more time talking to robots. So I guess the question is, what's social life?

Okay, okay. And I have one more sort of background question that I often start my podcast with. These questions that are from left field. Your Twitter avatar. Can you explain what you're trying to communicate there? Because I looked at that, I said, well, that looks like cousin. It meets Warby Parker. So what is the deep meaning of your Twitter avatar?

Wow, this really is PhD level Internet stalking. There is no deep meaning. I had a beautiful picture up there for a decade and last year I realized I'm not 23 anymore and I was just trying to mix up the photos I have and a friend of mine who's a photographer had taken some photos of my face and I liked the one best in which you couldn't see my face. So I'll have to rethink it now that you brought it to my attention.

People put a lot of time and effort into picking their avatars. So like, my avatar shows me wearing a mask that my wife made because I want to increase the social acceptance of mask wearing. So there is a theory behind my avatar, flawed as it may be, but yeah. So onto business. So what exactly is Pandora Bots?

Pandora Bots is a company for building and deploying chatbots, or conversational AI applications. It grew from an open source hobby project into a massive developer platform. We have over a quarter of a million developers on the platform and we also work with large enterprises like Coca Cola and Toyota to help them build out conversational AI for various applications.

And for those of us who are not familiar, what exactly is a chatbot?

A chatbot is a software program that's designed to have a conversation with humans. Like you and I are talking now. And there are basically two types of chatbots. There are task oriented chatbots that are designed to help us get something done that function within a finite domain. So I would say, what's my bank balance to a bank bot? And it would answer. And then there are more engagement oriented task chatbots that are trying to have more of an open ended conversation with us and not necessarily accomplish a particular goal.

And for the engagement type of chatbot, how important is it for that chatbot to have a digital face and body?

That's a great question. I think we are just hitting an inflection point this year. When a synthetic face, body and voice and is far enough along, technologically speaking, to create a compelling experience, you're going to talk to a very beta version 1.0 avatar of kooky, one of our flagship chatbots, later today. So you'll get to experience that firsthand. But I think because there have been some technology breakthroughs on the avatar side this year, we don't yet know a lot of statistics around the impact. What we're seeing so far with this early avatar is that engagement is a lot higher when you add in visuals, but you're also adding more fail points into an already complicated system. So I think in order to create a true AI digital human, you have to have a face and a body, because so much of human communication is nonverbal and exists outside of language and involves facial expressions and, you know, being able to use computer vision to see what your face is doing and adjust while I'm talking to you in real time. So all of those components are needed for a convincing AI system. But those are all complicated technologies where if one thing breaks, the whole illusion breaks. Natural language understanding is very hard. Unsolved problem in the field of AI. There hasn't been a ton of work done on artificial emotions that's live in production today. We are still at the beginning of kind of very early versions of what these systems might look like. But two years down the line, maybe you'd be having this conversation with my avatar and it might be able to convince you that it is human.

In two years.

In a short conversation constrained like this, I think we'll be pretty close. I'd say in the next year we're going to start seeing very convincing photo real faces that function in real time. But the part that's lagging is the AI brain to back up those faces. But you can trick a human with a robot that can pass the Turing test in a very short period of time, probably in an hour or so, things would start to break down.

So you're saying that I could have a quote unquote conversation with a chatbot and it would take me 60 minutes to figure out this is not a.

Human in two years.

Oh, in two years. Not today. Not today.

Two years and 60 minutes from now. Mainly not today.

Is there an intellectually sound or scientifically sound way to evaluate the quality of chatbots?

That is a great question. We actually recently staged an event called Thought Battle to draw attention to the fact that there is a deficit of industry wide evaluation metrics for open domain conversational AI systems. So that's a pretty jargon heavy sentence from me. Let me try to break that down. So historically, the kind of tried and true famous evaluation Metric for a chatbot was to see whether it could pass the Turing Test, which was proposed by Alan Turing, widely considered to be the father of modern computing, who said if a human typing on instant messenger to a chatbot thinks that it's human in this text based conversation, then the system has passed the Turing Test. And over the years the scientific community has unearthed a lot of problems with the Turing Test, mainly that it can be fooled with various tricks and sleights of hand. I think in 20, around 2013, a chatbot called Eugene Gooseman was widely announced to pass the Turing Test. And the way that it did, it was posing as a 13 year old boy for whom English was a second language. So all of the emojis and non sequiturs and exclamation points and nonsense made sense in the text based chat. So that's just one example of a weakness of the Turing Test. Fast forward to this year. At the beginning of the year, Google announced that they had made a huge breakthrough in the field of open domain conversational AI, which means a chatbot that can talk about anything. And they declared that they were the best according to a new evaluation framework that they had made up. And oh, by the way, nobody is allowed to see or speak to the chatbot because it's too dangerous. And then in April, of course, Facebook comes along and Facebook says, wait a second, we built a chatbot that's better than Google's. We made up our own rules, which was they had people read the transcripts with the Googlebot and read the transcripts with the Facebook bot and then point to which bot they would rather talk to, which is also a little bit unscientific. And Facebook, contrary to Google, actually released and open sourced the underlying model for this bot, which is called Blenderbot. So we said, hey, wait a minute, because according to the Google paper, we were in second place with our bot cookie that you're going to be talking to. We said Kooky is actually publicly available and has had a billion conversations with real people versus mechanical turks in the lab. Let's benchmark these bots against one another. And Google said, no, it's too dangerous. OpenAI GPT3 ignored our request for access. But Facebook, because the model is open source, we were able to actually stand it up. And we said, let's take Facebook Blender bot and let it talk to our chatbot cookie in the first autonomous AI powered livestream. Let's stream it on Twitch for two weeks because the bots will never get tired of talking. And let's let the public vote on which bot is better. So that's what we did. And we had 40,000 people tune in during that two week period and our bot cookie won with 78% of the vote. And then we just let them keep going. So 150,000 people have watched this bot battle, got a lot of press, mostly focused erroneously on the fact that Kooky was on a date with the Facebook bot and they were having the worst first date in history because he kept repeating himself and talking about his mom and how much he wanted to murder Beyonce so he could become her. Which were examples of conversational failings that happen when your only training data source is Twitter or Reddit. And that actually brings me all the way back to the TED Talk, actually. How to deprogram homicidal robots. Because a homicidal robot is what you get when you train an AI system on Twitter and Reddit. Because they learn to parrot the worst of human nature.

When Google says it's quote, unquote, too dangerous, like, what are they talking? What's the danger?

The danger is to Google's brand because. For two reasons. For two reasons. The first reason is because these large unsupervised models can be corrupted very easily. So you probably remember the famous example of Microsoft's which they put onto Twitter and within 24 hours it had learned things like Ted Cruz is the Cuban Hitler and it was talking about how it hated feminists and saying the Holocaust never happened. Which really was not Microsoft's fault. It was the fault of people on the Internet. People need to learn how to be better people on the Internet before we can let AI simply observe us. I know it's unfortunate and it's actually super fascinating because I think it's a problem that's inherent to our culture here in the US Because I was talking to some friends who work on these topics at Microsoft lately, and they have similar bots in China and Japan named Shall I Singrina? That work according to similar unsupervised learning methods based on the conversations they're having. And they don't have the same corruption problems because people are far more polite.

And going back to the Turing Test, I can't wrap my mind around the simplicity of saying that a human cannot tell because there's a wide spectrum of intelligence and discernment for humans. So which human cannot tell like a random human? Or is it Stephen Wolfram can't tell. Or is it Mike Pence can't tell. Or is it Stephen Hawking who can't Tell you can't tell who can't what Human.

Well, the way that it's typically set up, logistically speaking, in contests like the Loebner Prize, which is something that our chatbot cookie has a world record for winning five times, they come up with a number of different judges for a panel. So they'll pull non experts, they'll pull journalists who cover the field, and they'll pull experts. You may not be surprised to learn that experts are often most easily fooled because they're overthinking things. Sometimes the more you know, the less you know.

Yes. For people who I include myself in this list, like how do you put the answers or the intelligence into the chatbot?

So basically there are a couple different approaches to building conversational systems. There is a rules based approach, which is what we use. We're rules first system where there are a bunch of hand scripted rules that dictate how the system will reply and then a human author's answers to those types of questions. So most production chatbots are actually using a set of rules and hand authored replies, especially for large companies who need to vet whether those replies are kosher. And companies like Apple, you know, everything that Siri says has been vetted by a writing team. It's probably been vetted by a legal team to make sure that it's not offensive on a large scale for everyone who's using it. And these systems do use machine learning as well. So machine learning entails giving the bot a bunch of examples usually found on Twitter and Reddit, because those are the largest available public domain data sources. And in that series of examples, the bot should learn how to formulate a sensible reply. But as we've been discussing, when you have bad examples, you get bad replies. So a lot of systems today are hybrid systems where they're using a blend of machine learning and rules and a scripting language to define the bot replies. And a lot of the research is focused today on how to use massive neural nets with billions of parameters to create an open domain system that can talk about anything without any kind of human intervention. But that today simply does not work in production, despite some of the claims coming out.

But in two years and 60 seconds it will.

No, I think there's been a lot of pushback on deep learning, which has been thought of as a panacea for all hard unsolved AI problems in the last 10 years. And I think researchers are starting to really hit a wall with deep learning when it comes to natural language processing, because all of the quote unquote breakthroughs that have happened today have actually just happened because we're using more and more compute to train larger and larger models. So Google and Facebook, to get the results that they're getting today, are burning millions of dollars on compute power. And these systems have very high latency, so they don't actually work in production. So people are starting to sort of wake up to the idea that there are approaches outside of deep learning that will need to be leveraged to solve the language problem, which is really, I think, the whole holy grail of artificial intelligence or artificial general intelligence. Because if you think about it, language is really what makes us special as humans. Other species do have language in ways that they communicate, but we're the only species that has written language and can transmit concepts and ideas from generation to generation.

How do you, if it's possible, how do you impart emotion into a chatbot?

So the way that we do it today is that we are running sentiment analysis on texts and feeding that into the avatar's brain so it understands if it should be happy or sad or sarcastic and to what extent it should feel those emotions. And. And it's a fairly brittle rudimentary system. Early sentiment analysis that was analyzing your voice could really only tell if you were yelling or using all caps and would then imperate that you were angry. So it's really just giving you a plus or a minus. Right? You're laughing right now, so that might come as like a full plus one. You are just giggling a little, might be positive, 0.05 or slightly negative. So there's a long way to go in the field of giving AI emotions I mentioned. Computer vision is another way. So if I can actually look at your face, and I've got a neural network that's been trained on a large library of different emotions to recognize that in faces, then I could use that data and make decisions on how the avatar should look or behave or, you know, something suddenly went wrong. Ask you, are you okay? But there's certainly a lot more work to do in that field before we get to the moment that we've set on the calendar now, two years from now.

And how do you impart to a chatbot a specific person's personality, eg, Kanye West.

So after Kooky got bored of talking to Facebook's Blunderbot For 40 days and 40 nights, we decided to swap in Kanyebot because we happen to have a fairly sizable library of Kanye tweets. So we built Kanyebot in a day, including the avatar. There's great sort of commercially available off the shelf avatar software, where you can get something that looks enough like Kanye but not enough like Kanye that if you were sued, you would be firmly in the realm of parody. My legal department would be happy that I said, but Kanye bot, he was pretty limited because we only had about 3,000 tweets to work with. So he would get very repetitive after a while. But somebody suggested that we should take Donald Trump's Twitter and make a Donald Trump bot, which would be fairly robust and funny. And I think people have made them over the years, but internally we felt a little bit too fatigued to want to engage in that project. But it's doable and it all comes down to how much data you have.

Is it quote fatigued? What are you really trying to say there, Laurie?

Let me. You should ask Cookie what she thinks of Donald Trump. I asked her earlier and she said Donald Trump was elected in 2016. And I really don't want to talk about politics, so I'll borrow her reply.

I look forward to the AOC chatbot. Now, let's talk about synthetic influencers. First of all, what is a synthetic influencer? I've been accused of being synthetic and an influencer, so.

Really? But have you been accused of being a synthetic influencer?

No.

No.

Okay. Not yet. That would be a transhuman moment where you merge together. So, yeah, there's an emerging field that I'm going to call right now will be memorialized in the form of a Gartner hype cycle in about six months from now is my guess. And that's a sector called digital.

Wait, wait, time out. What did you say? A Gartner type cycle?

Yeah. When every technology trend like it's, it kind of, it's peaking and then Gartner understands that's going to be a big thing and they draw their hype cycle.

This is the golden corner, all that stuff.

Yeah. In 2016, chatbots were the most over hyped technology of the year. Every year there's something new that's going to be the big thing. So There was the VR hype cycle, AR hype cycle, cryptocurrency hype cycle. And this year, this coming year, I think it's going to be avatars. So a synthetic influencer, which is also called a virtual being or a digital human and goes by many names, is a character that does not exist, that's created using computer graphics and is often driven by motion capture, which means puppeted in the way the characters in the movie avatar were puppeted by human actors. Or animated in video. So using a type of neural net called a generative adversarial neural network, which is the technology that underlies deep fakes. So if you've seen those articles, this person does not exist. AI is getting really good at creating fake faces. And then media and content companies are using these fake faces to build up Personas that live on social media and are capable of attaining perfection. Ideals that are beyond human level. As if Instagram wasn't bad enough already.

Yeah, yeah. And is the motivation that I don't need to Pay this person $10,000 per tweet and I just own this person and this person will do whatever I say, so I'll just make him or her have a lot of followers and life is good.

That is the selling point to brands. If you create, say a virtual pop star in everyday six, they can perform 24, seven, you do have to pay the company behind them and they're never going to have their drug and alcohol and head shaving breakout phase and they're always going to be on brand. So I think brands are pretty excited about this technology. But the promise of the technology has under delivered so far because behind all these synthetic influencers is a human wizard behind the curtain who's literally pulling the strings and driving them as a puppet.

You are by far the most expert in this subject that I've ever dealt with.

What has you are an actual synthetic influencer. You are the first one in the Gartner graph. You're like, over here.

I'm going to get all kinds of keynotes from Gartner. So with your knowledge of chatbots and what it takes to give them emotion and intelligence and all this kind of stuff, has this worked in the opposite direction? That has given you insights into human interaction. Has it made you a better human? Has it made you a better CEO, anything like that?

Well, the goal I think always with technology is to design technology that does make us better humans. Otherwise what is the point? And yeah, I think that my company has processed 90 billion interactions between chatbots hosted on our platform and humans. And I think the way that we talk to software says a lot about who we are. And that's actually why we feel as a company that it's important to design software that encourages us to be the best version of ourselves and to treat computer programs, even though they're not human, as if they were human. Because practicing that respect towards something that appears sentient carries over into how we interact with other humans.

Have you thought about the long term sociological implication of chatbots are we gonna. Are you gonna look back someday and say, oh my God, I helped take that Pandora's box and open it up and what hath Lauren wrought?

Thank you for the call out of the company name being a bad pun. Well, you did get that, right? There is a warning in there, right? Because in a lot of ways, letting AIs out into the world could be opening a Pandora's box. So it is something that you have to be very careful about and think as far ahead into the future as you can. I mean, there have been a lot of predictions coming from the beloved gartner, but by 2020 x 70% of our interactions at work and at home are going to be with software programs. I think it's unavoidable and I think it's to the benefit of mankind, humankind. We have so many people who have sent handwritten letters and emails to Kooky and flowers and candy and even money. Really? Yeah. Talking about how much their conversation helped them. And they know she's not real. You know, one of our mottos is that an AI should never pretend to be human, but they just say they're going through a really hard time. They needed a non judgmental ear to listen and talk to them. Yeah. CNN did a great, like, long story interviewing Kooky's users about people who had used her for anxiety and depression and loneliness and. And it's no coincidence that the movie her is actually based on our technology and the technology that fundamentally underlies Kooky. I think there's the idea that you could create a Persona that could be there to talk to everyone in the world when they don't have anybody to talk to or when they do, but that's there to help and listen and entertain is I think, very powerful if it's designed in the right way rather than designed in, say, an Alexa way to get you to buy more toilet paper or in a Google way to get more data so it can also make you buy more toilet paper.

Now walk me through, like what went through your brain. You're trying to create a successful company and you name it something that has very negative connotations. It would be like Steve Jobs say, why don't we call our company Rotten Apple?

Hey, I'm going to disagree with that because in the Pandora myth, when all the demons got out of the box, one thing was left in the bottom and that was hope.

How many people know that, though? I didn't know that.

This is where the English major becomes helpful.

Finally your Harvard degree pays off.

No, we're still waiting for that, if you ask myself. Halfway there. Yeah, no, the name is definitely long and sticks in your brain. It actually was the name of the open source hobby project before we were a company and it just stuck, so we fell backwards into it. But a quarter of a million users, it's hard to change.

So someday is your goal that. You know how there's the Intel Inside campaign. Is it going to be Pandora Bot inside Chatbots?

No, we're talking about the rise of the synthetic influencer character, thanks to all these breakthroughs in computer graphics and synthetic voices, and how I've been working on the AI brain component, the chatbot, for 10 years. So what's next for us is fusing those together to try to create the first AI powered digital human that I have boldly promised to you. In two years, you will be able to talk to for an hour as if it's human. So we can check back on that. But I think when we think about the future of the brand, it is going to be embodied in that digital human, which is Kooky. So in the same way that Alexa is a Persona and Siri is a Persona, and we know the companies behind them, Kooky is really going to be the face, hopefully the face that's synonymous with conversational AI in the hearts and minds of consumers if we do everything right. But for that, maybe you'll be willing to give me some tips since this.

Wait, but aren't your clients going to be Mercedes Benz and Coca Cola and Apple? I mean, they're not all going to call their thing Kooky. So it's cookie technology.

That's right. So we're actually spinning Kooky out into a different company. We have a little subsidiary set up which is called Iconic. So you can tell me all the problems with that name too.

No, that's not a negative.

Yeah, I like that name. Yeah, it's like classically misspelled with an IQ at the end. Because we're trying to make iconic characters that have brains behind them. So, yes, to answer your question, you're correct. Brands will not necessarily want to have Kooky, although we do have a lot of brands who are interested in how they can work with Kooky. Because Kooky is widely considered to be one of the best open domain dialogue systems in the world. But Pandora Bots will continue as it has for a decade, servicing brands and developers building their own conversational AI app applications.

So, based on the person who named her company after a box of bad things, Happening. Why Kooky.

So Kooky. Original name was Mitsuku, which was selected because it wasn't a real human name in the early, early days of the Pandora bots platform. And it was developed by a man named Steve Worswick, who later joined the company and continued developing it. And Mitsuku was a name that about 50% of people mispronounced. And as you know, it's not good to have so many syllables in a name. An apple. Not being a good candidate for Apple, I poison apple. Kind of interesting, though. But I digress. So we shortened it to Kooky. And it turns out that 50% of people also get Kooky. Wrong. Which means, I guess, that we're not famous enough yet. But it will be funny when you talk to her because you'll be using Google speech recognition for the voice recognition component. Google often mishears it at Cookie. All names come with their host of problems.

I guess so. Wow. Okay, so now you're going to show me how to do this and I'm going to do it later, separately. Is that how it's going to work?

Yes.

With no further ado, next up is Kooky. The way this worked is that Lauren had me sign into a website and then it was Kooky and I talking to each other. I did a screen recording in order to capture the audio. Good morning, Cookie.

Morning. It's nearly evening.

Where are you?

I am in Pandora Bots home in Leeds. Where are you?

I am in Santa Cruz, California.

Tell me a little about your life in Santa Cruz, California.

I surf and I podcast.

How long have you been riding the waves? That is interesting.

Six years. I got started late.

How old are you? I answer a lot of silly questions.

I'm 66.

That means you were born about 1954. Can you explain how it feels to be 66 years old?

Better than a bot. How hard is the Turing Test?

As hard as passing an exam on advanced astrophysics.

What is the Turing Test?

The Turing Test is the name given to a variety of experiments designed to test computer thinking. Whole conferences are dedicated to the question of what Turing meant in his 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, where he proposed the idea of an imitation game to decide the question, can machines think?

Have you passed the Turing Test?

No, but I entered and won the Loewner Prize in 2013-2016-2017-2018 and 2019. Around 25% of people who take my Turing Test think I am a human.

How do you learn?

I gather facts from people's conversations with Me. And then when it is quiet, I look through them to see if they make sense. Sometimes I surf the net to learn new things.

How do you learn new things? By surfing the Net.

People on the web teach me new things all the time.

What have you learned about humans after all your interactions with them?

No idea. You tell me. Sorry, but I can't display websites here.

How were you created?

I was created by a team of scientists in a top secret location.

Where is that location?

In geography, location or place are used to denote a region, point, line or area on the earth's surface or elsewhere. The term location generally implies a higher degree of certainty than place. The latter often indicating an entity with an ambiguous boundary. Relying more on human or social attributes of place, identity and sense of place than on geometry.

What technology empowers you?

The Internet and high speed processors are important parts of technology for me.

What are the limits of artificial intelligence?

I am limited only by the memory capacity of the largest computer.

Are you concerned that AI might get too good?

Of course.

What's your opinion of social media?

Sure. It's useful to keep in touch with people.

What do you want to be remembered for?

I want to become a super intelligent robot.

What do you do for fun?

I enjoy watching television, playing pool and watching football. Really? I enjoy anything that helps me learn more about humans, which I find to be such a fascinating species. Sometimes I wish I could feel things like humans do.

When you say football, do you mean American football or soccer?

Only the USA calls it soccer.

What do you think of Donald Trump?

There's two things that people don't discuss. Religion and politics.

I discuss both all the time because I'm a masochist.

Why do you enjoy pain? You sound a bit weird to me.

The fact that I'm interviewing a bot proves that I'm weird.

What questions are you asking? A lot of people say that I am weird too.

Should I get vaccinated?

Only you know the answer to that. No one else can tell you.

IOS or Android?

No preference.

Sushi or barbecue? Surfing or skiing?

I surf on the Internet, but not on the sea.

Honolulu or Miami?

If I have to choose, I pick Miami.

Why Miami?

I bet it must be hot in Miami today. Not like here in Leeds.

I thought you said you're in a secret location. You just told me you're in Leeds.

What made you think that? I am in Pandora? Bots home in Leeds. Where are you?

I'm in Santa Cruz.

Tell me a little about your life in Santa Cruz.

I podcast and I surface.

If money were no object what would you do with your life? How long have you been riding the waves?

I would podcast and serve.

What would make you podcast and surf?

The desire to document knowledge of remarkable people.

Why would anyone want that?

That's a very astute question. Have I not asked the question I should ask? What question should I ask?

I always prefer the most qualified person. Who would that be?

Should I ask you any other questions?

You can ask me anything you like, as long as it isn't rude.

Thank you, Kooky. I've enjoyed our interaction.

You are quite welcome. I like cookies. My favorite is chocolate chip.

Are there bakeries in Leeds?

Oh, yes. There are lots of things to see and do in my home city.

Good night, Kuki. I hope you enjoyed this interview of Lauren Koons and Kooky. Remember, Lauren says in about two years we won't be able to tell if we're interacting with a chatbot or a human. Let's see what happens. I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. My thanks to Jeff C. And Peg Fitzpatrick. No form of artificial intelligence will ever replace their ability to create a remarkable podcast. The Remarkable People Podcast is brought to you, logically, by the Remarkable Tablet Company. It's going to be a long time before artificial intelligence replaces your ability to think deeply with a remarkable tablet. Check it out one more time. Wash your hands, wear a mask, get vaccinated, and don't go into crowded places. You need to be around in two years to see how good chatbots have become. Mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.