E305 - Humanoid Robots and the Evolution of Space Fashion

[00:00:00] Nick Roome: Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Human Factors Cast. This is episode 305. We're recording this live on November 14th, 2024. Nothing big happened in the last couple weeks here. I'm your host, Nick Rome, joined today by Mr. Barry Kirby.

[00:00:16] Barry Kirby: Hello, and I promise I'm going to try and stay for the entire episode this time.

Okay. Yes. And we're going to stay focused

[00:00:22] Nick Roome: on the topic tonight. We do have an awesome show for you lined up. We have some cool stuff to talk about, including humanoid robots in the news. Again, we have some some making waves here and we're going to talk about axioms, new space suit.

That's been causing quite a a ruckus on the interwebs. We also have a couple of other stories that we might. Sprinkle in and out of there as it seems fit. But but first say some programming notes or community updates. We've been taking the last couple of weeks off, as you can imagine.

From my perspective here in the States, I didn't think it was appropriate that I sat here on the show last week and tried to pretend like nothing happened from my perspective as fairly left leaning dude. We are back and just we talked a little bit about this during this pre show, but I'll step on my soapbox here.

It's not the result that I'm wanted and I think many of us are feeling the same way. And just a quick reminder that to Focus your efforts on what you can control us here in human factors. I said during the pre show that human factors is not neutral. This is something that we work on in our day to day, and it's focused on the humans at the end of this thing focus on what you can control.

And if we make somebody's lives better through our work as human factors, engineers, human factors, professionals. Then we're making the world a better place. So let's push on, keep forward. But I'm not the only one here. We have an international perspective with us, Barry. I am curious as to what's going on over at 1202.

Did you have a regularly scheduled episode last week?

[00:01:50] Barry Kirby: scheduled episode and it was not distracted by the events of what was going on. So I interviewed Rosie Kane and she's the cluster manager for the, an organization called Space Whales. And really they exist to bring the space. those organizations and companies within Wales that have an interest in the space industry together to be able to work together and deliver the the requirements from the Welsh government.

So the Welsh space strategy. And it was really fascinating because I I'll be honest, I dropped her in it a little bit, because one of my criticisms is that here in the UK, that there isn't that much going on in terms of ergonomics and human factors within our space sector. Largely because it's still quite relatively immature.

And basically a lot of people don't think that human factors need to be involved because it's satellites And so I kind of One of the questions I dropped in was, what do you think the role is of economics and human factors within space Wales? And she came out with some fantastic answers.

And so I suggested you suggest you go over and have a listen to see what she was able to see, whether she held up her side of the answer, which I think she did brilliantly. And, but also listening, you listen to her career story and she's so dedicated that she was influenced really early on.

I think she's one of the few people I've met who've had that goal And actually went and just kept following it, delivering it through to what she's doing now. So yeah, thoroughly well worth a listen, I believe. But then I'd say that because it's

[00:03:17] Nick Roome: I have to say my like level of excitement over the course of you describing that went all over the place because when you said space whales, I was like, Oh, Pergil Star Wars, and then you're like, Oh, but we talked to somebody whales space industry.

Okay, but then as you were talking about it, it got me interested again. So I'm gonna have to check that out if you know about Pergils, all right, so let's we should get into the news. I think why don't we do it? Let's do that.

That's right. It's time about that time again, where we dust off the shelves, pull out what's going on in the world of human factors, Barry, we have a couple of stories up this week. What's going

[00:03:51] Barry Kirby: on? So yeah, the first one we're going to talk about is one of my favorite companies that I like to watch what they're doing, which is Boston Dynamics.

This time they have. teamed up with Toyota Research Institute and to create the, what they're calling the ultimate humanoid robot. So everyone's seen Boston dynamic robots do their thing. You see them do a lot of failure and the way that they learn and then when they go and succeed and the way that they succeed, You often find out about because a lot of people are trying to call them out, call them videos out for being fake.

They they then release the videos of how they got there. And so that's brilliant. But they're bringing that and teaming it with Toyota Research Institute or TRI. They're large behavior models or LBMs. What's an LBM? I'd never heard of it before reading this story. It's a large it's similar in approach to that of a large language model, chat GPT, et cetera, et cetera, but for robot behavior.

And so the idea is that you have all of that learning. It speeds up the learning process for robots. When you're looking at the skills of dexterity and. Really what they're suggesting is that this will change the way that robots are taught and how basically make them useful way quicker and Therefore commercially viable.

So Nick, do you think this is good news that we can have humanoid robots quicker? And to your house really quick. Do you want a humanoid robot in your life doing the stuff that you need done?

[00:05:25] Nick Roome: Yeah, I frequently joke with my wife that I we're going to have a robot in our kitchen doing dishes every night.

Whether she wants that or not, because it just makes life easier. But it is an interesting story and I think we can actually expand this beyond the Boston dynamics and Toyota story to include perhaps even another one that was in the news too, which was the Tesla event which I think was politics aside and who's in charge of that company.

I think we try to stick away from that, but the, that event too, also had this unveiling of their of their robot as well. And it's interesting to see this sort of trend towards needing a humanoid robot occupying your own personal space. It, there's a lot of interesting things that we could pull apart from this in terms of what it means to have a a robot servant in your home and whether or not, there's a, I'm going to say this, but there's some kids.

today who are like, what are some things that, you'll look back on and people will think that your ways are antiquated based on the ways that people think about other generations. And it's we not think that robots have rights or something like that. And so it's, when you have a robot in the home, are you treating them as a thing or as a.

Person or do robots have personhood? And I think we're beyond that question right now, but even my, my initial thought is that, yes, I want something like this in my home if only to make life a little bit easier. But Barry, I am curious on your perspective on this. Are you anticipating a new addition to your household when these become widely available?

Or are you a never robot in the home person?

[00:07:08] Barry Kirby: I don't see my gut reaction would have been, yeah, buy me three. I, let's have one in the kitchen one in the living room, sorting out, bring any snacks and things like that. But then there is an element there of, I do wonder why do they have to be humanoid?

Why are we set out to to have humanoid robots, as opposed to maybe robots that are more functional. So all the robots that we have now in factories and things like that are built around the function that they deliver. The Boston Dynamics robots seem to be focusing on delivering human like and dog like capability.

If you've seen the the dog version of their robot And seeing one of them in, I was going to say in the flesh, but in the metal was a really interesting experience a couple of months ago. Why do we need them to ha to be human on? Is that simply a research challenge or a manufacturing challenge to show that we can do, that we can develop this type of type of robot in this case, then actually get it to learn really quickly, or is it just showing off?

I'll tell you exactly why.

[00:08:15] Nick Roome: You want to know why it's part marketing and part use case. So you have specialized robots in the home already. You have Roombas that are vacuuming your floors. You have dishwashers. That are automated systems that wash your dishes that don't necessarily take the thing in and out.

They perform a function, but you have automated things within your house. And the marketing piece of this is, Oh, you can give it a personality. You can give it these human humanoid like characteristics, but then also the imagination piece is that anything that you can do. As a human, you can imagine this thing doing.

So whether you're training it to unload the dishes from the dishwasher and put them back away, or vacuum your floor with an actual vacuum cleaner instead of a robot vacuum, you can imagine that any one of these things can be adapted towards a humanoid form because they were built for humanoids to begin with, and so I think that is much easier to market.

From that perspective of Hey, if I can do this, I can train this thing to do it, and then I won't need to do it. I can get this thing to clean up trash off the floor. I can, I can get it to clean the cat litter box every week or something, because it's it's just a simple process of doing the thing.

I can have it unload the groceries from the car and bring them in. So you think about those types of things, it's much easier to make that close that gap. from what a human can do to what this robot can do, what can't it do? Anything that a human can't is probably at the limits of what that thing can do.

And there's probably limits that it can't do that a human can, but it's much easier to imagine what you can do with that. So that's the reason

[00:10:04] Barry Kirby: why I think it's right. I think it's, Interesting to see how basically there does seem to be this bit of a race on now, doesn't there? You mentioned the the tesla robot and I think that's that was quite interesting because obviously there was the I don't know whether it was proven because I never saw the end of the story, but There was the allegation made, I believe, that the Tesla robot was there and it was having a conversation with somebody.

But actually the voice of the Tesla robot was not the robot's voice. It was voiced in from someone, a third party, who was watching or listening to it. And. just them trying to then do what you've just said to get that one step ahead. Which is interesting. And the, this battle if it's a battle between Tesla and Boston dynamics going forward will only benefit science in the same way that Apple and IBM works or when.

And it was because of the stuff that, I'm sorry, Apple and Microsoft were doing. The Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were so using each other to push hard on what they were doing, that if they didn't have the competition, they wouldn't have developed in the way. Maybe that's what we're seeing here.

I had a bit of a random thought with this as well. What size do you make the robots? Do we make them all? So if you're making a humanoid robot, do you make them all the same size? So they every robot, if, we know by what we do, anthrop, metrically humans come in all shapes and sizes, and that is part of the fun of what we do.

So do we make robots in the humanoid robots all the same, or do we make them all different? Yeah. What would you do?

[00:11:49] Nick Roome: Yeah, and then the follow on question to that if robots eventually will have rights and their size impacts your perception of them, then are smaller robots like children.

So is

[00:12:01] Barry Kirby: there, is there a a, Dominance, submissive piece here where actually you create smaller robots because you feel like you can order them around, tell them what to do. And so if you get sized up wrong for your robot, do you size your robot to the human to make sure that there is a a hierarchy in place?

This has suddenly gone to a place I wasn't expecting.

[00:12:23] Nick Roome: So look like there's some good questions. There's some good merit to this question. And let's break it down because I think for me, the immediate answer that I came up with was the anthropometric middle average, you get the anthropometric average of humans and that would get it that first point that I made around being able to use or do anything that humans are meant to do or use around the home or in the office space.

You can imagine these being used for work or something along those lines. And so you might actually have a scenario where my wife is short, my wife is, it's five foot. And so she has trouble reaching things up high, but if you have the anthropometric middle, she might want a larger robot to help her assist with her getting things up high.

And, vice versa, you might have a smaller robot, you might not actually be able to fit inside a chimney to, to clean it, but you can send a robot in there that's tiny. So you, there's. There's absolutely use cases for every size, but I'd imagine the gut answer here of anthropometric middle would allow for more use cases and more adaptability to the various tasks that somebody might want to use one of these for, given that most things designed for humans could be used by this thing then.

[00:13:37] Barry Kirby: So there's, this does then bring out, so there's a lot of work, a lot of research work going on at the moment around this idea of human machine teaming. And however you dress it up, there's a lot of stuff that he's talking around around trust, around how you cooperate with robots, no matter what the shape, but a lot of the stuff I've been looking at has been focusing on the on humanoid robots in this space.

And one of the interesting use cases somebody gave me, so we've been looking at this from like ships and all this sort of stuff. But then with a lot of people working from home, if you suddenly decided that, or somebody said, I need you in the office tomorrow. And you're like, I want to be sat at home.

Could you send your humanoid robot? Who is your co partner now? So you have a co partner in the office that is your humanoid robot. Could you send them to the meeting in your place, given that they probably have all the data that you have or access to all of that data. It probably will, if by this point have been able to work out how you think and how you make decisions, therefore could probably make decisions or reference back to you as and when needed.

Do you know, do you ever need to leave your home office ever again? You can just send your your humanoid robot out to have meetings with other people's humanoid robots. Jobs are good.

[00:15:01] Nick Roome: That's fascinating. When I said workplace, I was imagining like these service roles, right? Bringing a drink to a table or grabbing papers from the printer around the office or going around as a waiter in the office to make sure that all your employees are taken care of, or some of the janitorial duties around an office, something that, that you could potentially You know pay an upfront cost for a robot like this to cover that, but you're taking it to the next level where it's almost like a telepresence thing where this robot would then act on your behalf or be an avatar for you in the physical space such that you could stay at home, have access to all of your data and everything.

And then in, in the physical environment still. Allow for that interaction. And that's fascinating. And that's not where my brain went. And to answer your question, I don't know. And that might be further out down the line. I can very much see the the sort of manual labor things being taken care of first.

But that's interesting. Cause you think about this cognitive load that we're all carrying. And if. If we can offset some of that to this robot, this humanoid robot I think that can absolutely have an impact on the human operator at some point because you start to think about things that that are overhead tasking for you.

That this robot could almost handle autonomously. Oh, Hey, I gotta go get myself some water. You could just send it to go get yourself some water. So that way you're hydrated, and when it notices your thing is empty, then you just send it off or it just goes and gets you more.

Or it prepares you food. And so you don't have to think about that stuff or, even to the extent of taking notes or note taking during a meeting, if it's permitted to where you could almost say ah what did they say there? And then it could in into it based on what you were saying that, oh, you're talking about so and so said this and play back a recording immediately.

And so that cognitive load then is reduced. And so I think all of these things together I don't know about the telepresence thing necessarily. I think that could be an aspect of it, but I think definitely we're going to start seeing hopefully, I don't know. Um, these we can focus our brain power on other cognitively demanding tasks and some of these keeping up to up to date with everything is going to be ancillary, secondary, whatever you want call it.

To the point where we're not worried about that stuff.

[00:17:24] Barry Kirby: Yeah, I think the, I think both is true, to be honest. I think, and it goes back to how are we going to best utilize robots in the future and almost any sort of machine. Cause it goes back to this. How do we create the best team that we have? So you can imagine.

So one of the ideas rather than telepresence going one step forward to tele existence, and that's the idea that you go into some sort of suit and inhabit. this robot body. So you'd want a humanoid robot, but you could get all the feedback, so it could go into areas that you cannot. So it could be, too hot, too cold.

It could be another world where you do this sort of stuff. But equally you can then have that robot acting on your behalf. in these inhospitable areas. And they are, that is real use cases that are being played with now. So there is a bit of that, but then you go back to, yes how do we use these and is it right?

Actually, going back to this ethical question, is it right that we just use them to clean up after us? You know, once we get, that's what we use. You bought out the rumba earlier. That, that's why we have auto automated grass cutting, automated vacuuming et cetera, et cetera.

Is it cause it's all about making our lives easier. We're going to get to a point where we are conversing and talking to these things. Like people in, we go back to whichever episode it was where we had our online girlfriends with it, with the chat bot. And you're talking to them almost like real people to the point that you could suspend.

Spend suspend disbelief. At what point do, does that become wrong? Or, questionable the best. So I think we're probably a long way from that, but possibly not as far away as we think.

[00:19:09] Nick Roome: Yeah. I was going to say, I don't know if we're as far away as we think, because like I said, I think there are some people like, I think older generations, of course They're robots, whatever, they're just mechanical parts.

But if you start thinking about what it means to be human and, if you're interacting with a large language model and if it, if eventually we do reach, AGI then I think there's Artificial general intelligence. I think there's definitely an argument to be made about what does it mean to be human or what does it mean to think?

And those questions will become much more problematic. But when you're talking to a large language model right now, hopefully we're not having those thoughts about it, especially there's an ancillary story that will bring in here about people hating stories that they think were written by AI, even if they were written by people.

So we can talk a little bit about that in context with AI. using large language models. And in this context, it's behavioral models. And so if you see robots behaving like humans, are we still going to think the same way? I don't know. It's an aggregate. I do want to bring up this question from Heidi though.

Is it, isn't one of most people enough? Do we really need doubles of us running around?

[00:20:17] Barry Kirby: It's an interesting question, is it? Cause would we want, do we want this humanoid robot just to be at load of ourselves? My gut reaction would be no. It's got to be something that is complimentary to you that works with you.

However, there's going to be other people who may want that whole idea of a a robot clone of yourself to do whatever that's. And I guess there's good, there's all sorts of people out there, aren't there? So yeah, I don't think we'll ever, we'll get to the point where you'll have doubles in that respect, but I think there will be, there will definitely be some because, just because the broad range of people we've got.

I guess that also lends itself to the question, we talked about the humanoid robot and we mentioned earlier about how would you size it, would you treat it as average? But actually, is there a thing that was going back to what you said? Actually you could create a shorter robot, but with longer arms for doing certain tasks.

Could you give it longer legs? So it actually be more efficient in walking, et cetera, et cetera. Or could it change its limbs on will depending on being test dependent or You'd almost be a Swiss army knife of humanoid robots to be task task specific. Or is that the point about having a humanoid one is the fact that we don't do that sort of thing.

And that the humanoid form is good enough to do most tasks.

[00:21:37] Nick Roome: Yeah, I think I think there's certainly some augments, right? How we think about a cell phone as an augmentation of our own cognitive abilities. We can offload some of that stuff to our phones as a an extension of ourselves, I think the robot might actually work the same way.

And then literally in the literal sense of extending arms and limbs to complete tasks that may be made easier by having those options to lengthen or shorten the limbs to do it. So like I mentioned the example earlier of, Putting things away or retrieving things from somewhere higher up.

You can imagine the legs and arms extend to go up to get that thing. So they don't need to fetch a ladder. They just have it built in. They just reach up, grab the thing, pull it down, and then they're back to normal. That would be cool. I can very much see you saying that. And utility for those types of things.

Cause I think you're right. The more ubiquitous we make them, the more they can actually do things that humans can't and increase the utility there. I mentioned an ancillary story and I think there's actually another one that, that actually makes more sense to talk about right now, since we're talking a little bit about ethics and everything, but there's a story here by Imperial college, London, who Did a study on humans and how they displayed sympathy towards, they protected AI bots who were excluded from playtime.

So we're really looking at bullying here of AI and how there's at least these emerging human behavior traits that are happening when it comes to looking at AI and starting to protect AI. And even the way that we interact with it that I think is really fascinating here from a. From an ethical perspective, we're starting to see it already.

People don't like that ostracism. And it's extended even towards AI where when we started treat AI as outcasts then we feel like we have to speak up and include them. And so will that then transfer to these home robots that we're talking about here? And I think maybe, I don't know.

I'm thinking. Early on, we'll have very much a situation where you have maybe one of these per household. So to get at Heidi's double question I don't see there being one per every human, but more one for, one per household. Really affluent folks might have multiple.

around the house doing multiple tasks. But I think, for most people, one should be enough. Most families, one should be enough. And will they be seen as part of the family? I don't know. These are all questions that

[00:24:05] Barry Kirby: are, And then, and almost like looking at this, that story around being bullied or the the AI bot being bullied will, if you've done.

a task yourself that has a certain amount of value. So you go and wash the dishes, say, so you turn around to your partner and say, it's okay. You sit down. I'm going to go and wash the dishes. Does that have a different flex rather than you say, go and sit down. You don't need to do them. The robots going to do with them.

So does the value of the task go down because you're getting the humanoid robot to do it rather than you do something? So you bake a cake or create something nice. You create a nice meal. That has a lot of love affection that goes into you creating that meal, which is very different from you saying, it's okay.

I got the robot chef. To create you a, a Michelin star level meal because it can do that because it's just following it, following the instructions. So we'll, how will we perceive the value of being done? And that goes to that other story. That if people have written if people think something has been done by an AI at the moment, so be the story saying that if you read a story.

If they think it was written by AI, people instinctively don't like it. They don't, they will pick fault in it, et cetera, et cetera. But if they think it's been written on AI, they will hate it, even if it has been written by a person anyway. And so they, we automatically put a different value scale on it because we think it's been done by a machine in some way.

Yeah.

[00:25:43] Nick Roome: Yeah. That's interesting. I'm, I don't know. I can imagine, I'd imagine it's the same thing that You might experience with a story. Here's the other story that we were going to pull into this was, people don't like stories that seem like it was written by AI, even if it was written by humans.

And so will we start to see that again with behavioral types of things where, as you were describing, you have a robot create a Michelin style meal that, that. lacks the, for lack of a better term, soul of what a human can put into a meal. Because that missing ingredient would be love and care that is just absent with a robot.

And so, when we start to notice it with these behavioral models and. I also wonder if that would make us a little bit more in tune with social cues. I really wonder about that thing because you can imagine that there's if you think about these behavioral LBMs, is that what they're called?

Large behavioral models. If you think about these LBMs, they're probably taking the average or the anticipated movements of the average response. And you're looking at very much like the status quo. And so you might be actually be able to tell when somebody is more excited because of the way that they're moving their hands or the way that they're moving their body.

Or when they're actually, depressed in the sense of moving slowly or hanging their head are you going to start to pick up more on these because it's outside of the average that these That these machines would exhibit in these LBMs, these large behavioral models that, that then makes us a little bit better communicating with humans.

Is this going to make us better communicating with humans in the long run? I don't know.

[00:27:26] Barry Kirby: Or is it? Yes. It's, there's almost there's two, two perspectives on that one. Yes. because it would allow us to if the humanoid robot was taken on these behavioral cues and you could then work with that.

And therefore you don't automatically do some of that too, especially if it could understand your behavioral cues you would, there'll be more honest on you to do that. However, not everybody does deals with behavioral cues in the same way. And we can talk about people, we, you're diverse.

Individuals who deal with social cues in very different ways and exhibit social cues in different ways. And that is part of the rich tapestry of human life. That's what makes cultures work. That's what makes us as a species work because we're not all exactly the same. So how are we going? So how are we going to deal with that?

Is there going to be a point where if somebody is Maybe got autistic traits or ADHD traits who maybe don't pick up on social cues or react to social cues in the same way. Are they going to be unable to use these robots? If the robots are reacting to social stimuli and exhibiting behavioral cues likewise, if the robot is expecting to see behavioral cues from somebody who just doesn't exhibit them that's going to be a really interesting user interface.

To try and work with to make them try to basically understand the breadth of inputs that you could have. Yeah,

[00:28:56] Nick Roome: especially when it comes to trust because if a robot misreads what the human is doing, then That's going to, it'll misread the input and some of that safety risk mitigation some of those factors will play in there too, if it misreads your intent and moves out of the way when in fact it's moving into your way, it's doing the whole dance thing of I'm moving this way and then it moves to correct.

And then how, yeah, how will those types of interactions happen? I do want to make sure that we have some time to talk about this other story here. So while this is super fascinating, maybe we could talk a little bit more about the post show. Any other closing thoughts on the the race to become the the latest and greatest humanoid robot?

[00:29:38] Barry Kirby: I look forward to seeing it. I think it's going to be really interesting to see how that particularly that battle goes, but just to come back to the last book we talked about behavioral interaction. One big difference between UK and us is the UK in the UK. We do sarcasm a lot. And Americans, you guys don't do sarcasm anywhere near as much as we do.

So how would a robot get that? Yeah, good luck. What about you, Nick? Are you happy with your robot that you got in order coming fairly soon?

[00:30:09] Nick Roome: Oh, yeah, I'm putting it down as soon as I can. I'll order one of these the day it comes available. And yeah, we need a sarcasm mode because it would be, I want nothing better to have a sarcastic robot in my life.

That I could yeah. Yeah. All right. What's what's the next story here, Barry?

[00:30:28] Barry Kirby: So NASA's been laying out contracts to design their next spacesuit particularly for the first moon landing. And the, in this case, the, so the sub subtitle reads the astronauts will literally wear Prada. So NASA contractor Axiom Space has been contract has been put on contract to design the next spacesuit that's going to be used for the moon landings for the Artemis 3 missions.

And this will be the first moon landing since Apollo 17 in 1972. So it's been a while since they've done this. So you want to look cool. When you got to go and do this. So they've got the Italian luxury brand Prada along for the journey to help develop this spacesuit. So if you want to see what it looks like it's out there on futurism.

com, which is where we're getting the story from tonight. So you can see that it looks, in some ways it doesn't necessarily look dissimilar to what they've had in the past. If you recognize it as a more of a NASA spacesuit than say a SpaceX spacesuit, but it's meant for different things.

I think the interesting bit here is the, whilst it looks similar, the leaps in technology. Is supposed to be quite well they call it groundbreaking in the way that it's been developed fundamentally there this is going to allow astronauts to go on space walks for eight hours a day and Be protected in what they're doing.

It can do carbon dioxide scrubbing all the way as it goes. So that's meant to be a brand new thing. And then they're also doing this alongside the new. Vehicles that they're getting that they're developing for this. So yeah, we'll see what it looks like. And I think it looks quite exciting.

It looks quite cool. And as you said, we've got friends of the podcast who actually had their hands on developing this stuff. We've got skin in the game. Yeah, we do.

[00:32:22] Nick Roome: I, I I mentioned this at the top, but we actually have a close connection to this. Katie, if you're familiar with Katie, she is been working in the lab with us since, oh, geez, 2000.

So she's been, she's no 2020. Wow. 2000 would be a long time 2020. And so she's been with us for a while and she actually had a involvement on this. I think she was in an internship working on this very project. So we have a very close a very close relationship to this this project.

So there's some really cool things here. You mentioned it looks cool, but really what we're looking at here is even deeper than that, because you look cool, but then also, I think, There's some increased mobility here that they're talking about in terms of being able to move around more freely.

And you have the human factors considerations built into the space suit beyond just looking cool. It, the whole thing is, focused around Prada. Sure. Fine. But like really we're looking at being able to operate in the environment longer.

We're looking at. The mobility piece of it there, there's a ton of safety considerations that went into this suit in terms of making sure that that there's safety during these lunar missions. I think there's there's a footnote here about using specialized tools and so that kind of gets at that mobility again, not just, range of motion, but also within with being able to do fine motor movements of the hands and being able to use those tools.

And if you think about some of these some of these evolutions here within the spacesuit, I think it's one thing to be functional. But then there's this whole other psychological component to being an astronaut that I think you, I don't know when I think astronaut, I think cool.

And so you want to have that you want to have the suit match the cool aspect of being an astronaut. And so now you can be out in space and look cool doing it. So I think, I just think it's so cool.

[00:34:20] Barry Kirby: It's interesting. And one of the comments that I saw and the reason I mentioned the SpaceX stuff because obviously they developed their suit as well.

And. They said, Oh, the SpaceX suit looks a lot a lot easier to use. It's it looks like it's a lot more suited to the body, but they would develop for very different things. And that's what I think a lot of people don't really understand is the space, the SpaceX suit that they've got at the moment is made to sit to allow people just to use dragon and use that platform.

Whereas this is going to be for. moonwalking. This is going to be going out for to go and actually do work in harsh terrains, conduct scientific experiments and whatever else they do out there. For me, when I see things like this, I immediately look at two things. That's the hands and then the articulation of the joints.

And you compare this to what, we go back to the early moon missions and that the suits that they were wearing, they're super clunky really hard thing. And we, you've got them iconic images of them bouncing on the on the lunar surface. Whereas you can look at this and see that they've really thought about the articulation in the knees.

There's folds in the material to allow the suit to give as you bend your knees, as you bend your elbows, but also that there's still lots of protection there. You can tell that this is a, that on the arms, it's quite bulky. There's clearly lots of fibers in there to keep, to provide insulation, to provide protection.

But what they've done this time, it's just going from the graphics from the pictures that the actual wrist, the gloves themselves go into they don't directly attach, they go inside the sleeve. So you've actually got more rain, greater range of motion there. To work with. So actually focusing on allowing the operator the astronauts do the job that it is that they want to do.

And presumably allow a wide range of roles to be undertaken here as well. Yeah I think it looks cool. But I, it also looks. Looks functional, so I can't wait to see this thing actually being tested or further testing next year and and see what, see where it gets to.

[00:36:27] Nick Roome: Yeah. Here's a cool point that I had missed, excuse me on my initial read through, but they're designing this to be to fit.

Astronauts from the first to the 99th percentile which, which is making sure that it can fit everybody. So it's this inclusive design, which again, talking about at the top of the show, really, I think is awesome because it's now saying instead of just a certain body type, anyone can be.

An astronaut which is just cool, regardless of gender whatever you look like. I think this is super rad that they're designing for this wide of a percentile. Do you think that's,

[00:37:07] Barry Kirby: do you think that's actually possible? Cause are they talking about first 95th percentile?

Sorry, first, was he first to 95th or first 99? 99th. Is that of the general population or of their astronaut popu as in their, their That's a good question.

[00:37:22] Nick Roome: Because

[00:37:23] Barry Kirby: if it's of the general population, that that's a shout. That's a one heck of a requirement. And if I was the requirements manager for that, I would, I'd be.

Really? Are we going to do that? But, again, with the way Really? Are we

[00:37:41] Nick Roome: Sorry, your requirements manager cosplay was perfect in that moment.

[00:37:45] Barry Kirby: But when you again, when you look at it, you can see how some of these bits may be modular. So the the torso section looks like it's got a, almost an upper jacket and a lower could it be almost like a dungaree type thing under there.

And so does that allow for greater variation in torso length? And the same could be said for For potentially the AMS and the legs as well. So maybe there, there is some interesting design elements in there that if only we had an expert that knew something about it. You could answer some of these questions, that would be fantastic.

But it'd be interesting to know how they. What design decisions they've made in order to meet such a, quite frankly, outrageous requirement. I'm quite a fan of that type of thing as a challenge because you're absolutely right. If we can design for the broad audience, we absolutely should.

I just don't know how well that's going to work for a particular mission.

[00:38:40] Nick Roome: Yeah, no, yeah, I know that was on the HFES post regarding it. So I, and I'm looking at the source article now and I'm not seeing anything about percentiles. I'm not sure where that information is sourced from.

Hopefully that is true, but maybe we can get some clarification

[00:38:56] Barry Kirby: on that. So is this, so look at the suit as well. Is this Now that blend of HF and UX, so one of the things that I've always said is around the, the UX brings, it brings the style, it brings the beauty to a to a product rather than HF could be seen as a bit more functional.

So is this bringing Prada in to help look at the style of this? And in a similar way, we keep referencing the SpaceX stuff, but they're the people who produced other spacesuits recently. Everybody commented on how cool the space X stuff looked as well is bringing the style now into this important because NASA has historically been known for maybe substance of a style.

Does this leap to style? Is it important?

[00:39:43] Nick Roome: Yeah, that's a good question. I'm sure there's, they're sticking to some of the standards that, that they need to , I don't know of any aesthetic standards that might influence this other than make it look cool. Yeah. I mean there's, it's interesting though, because you could, I can very much see a sort of a requirement for making it look and feel awesome such that it's part of this propaganda machine of we want, we need more people to grow up to want to be astronauts to drive that exploration space.

And it's all marketing and advertising and propaganda from that perspective. And I don't know, I just don't know.

[00:40:21] Barry Kirby: It's just, it's an interesting one, isn't it? Cause you, I w I would almost love to be a fly on the wall when the design sprint was going on and you've got NASA human factors representatives in there with, they'll have the standards that they've developed in their best practice and all that sort of stuff.

And then they'll have a designer from Prada in the same room going. What about making it red? What about having this stylistic look to make it look cool on? Because you're absolutely right. One of the we need people to find this impressive. We need people to find to want to do this. And that was exemplified on the the Apollo 13 when you watch that and they, before the incident happens, they highlight that they're doing some of the live streaming from.

From the spacecraft itself. But when you see it down on emission control, it's not being streamed because none of the networks wanted it. Space wasn't sexy anymore. And so when this goes up, it's not only going to function well, but it's got to look good doing it. So I'd have loved to be in the fly on the wall with that.

We'd. The two different worlds coming together and to see, almost understand the D the influences that the Prada designers had into this and what they can lay claim to. Yeah.

[00:41:39] Nick Roome: And while we're doing social posts here, I'll just read Katie's post about working on this. Hey, I got to work on this over the summer.

So exciting to see it getting over the finish line, rocket ship. Astronaut emoji. All right. I think we gotta end the stories there for tonight. So thank you to our friends over at IEEE Spectrum, The Byte, Science Daily for all of our news stories this week. If you want to follow along, we post the links to all the original articles under Weekly Roundups on our blog.

Also join us on our Discord for more discussion on these stories and more. We're going to take a quick break. And then we're going to see what's going on in the human factors community right after this.

Yes, that's right. Huge thank you as always to our patrons. You truly do keep the lights on over here and help support all of our endeavors. I don't know if you know this, but the patrons really help support a lot of things outside of just the weekly shows. But it also helps attendance at events.

Things like HFES and some of our ancillary coverage that we put out there into the ether. So thank you all for that coverage or for that support truly helps us over here. All right. With that, let's get into this next part of the show. We simply call. I've got

to do something with that clip. All right. It came from, this is the part of the show where we search all over the internet to bring you something that the human factors community is talking about. So we have we have one up this week from LinkedIn and this is a particularly interesting piece.

And this was posted. Not ironically, but this is posted into the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors. You might be familiar with it. And this this post is by, is it Gary Guan? And writing why human factors and ADHD can be a good mix. You can tell we pulled this in October because it says October is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder awareness month.

So we're sharing the story of human factor specialist and CIEHF chartered member Charlie Turner on his journey to ADHD diagnosis and what it meant for him. ADHD is a condition that affects people's behavior. They can seem restless, may have trouble concentrating, and may act on impulse. But there are benefits too, such as having great attention to detail, having endless ideas, and being creative, all of which can help a career in human factors.

Charlie says, Those of us with ADHD only find it hard to focus on things that we don't find exciting or interesting. If it's something we enjoy doing, we're all able to hyper focus. to an extraordinary degree. And then there's a link to the full story from Charlie there. And you Barry had also posted a a sort of supplementary.

Post in relation to that. Do you want to go over that one?

[00:44:17] Barry Kirby: Yeah. So this was highlighted by a friend and colleague of mine Kelly Davis, and she'd. Put a post out there saying, As somebody who's diagnosed as autistic at 46, the post completely resonates. People keep commenting about the increasing, increase of people suddenly having ADHD and ASD, and suggesting it's a social trend, that somehow these conditions are cool or even temporary.

Worst of all, these people keep saying everyone's a bit autistic. I'm sorry, but they're not. We're human. We still act like humans. We still have traits that are supercharged and have impact on our lives. Sometimes resulting in shocking statistics like the ones that are in the article below. More awareness and understanding is absolutely needed.

The preconceptions of ADHD and the naughty boy problem. Or the result of bad parenting need to be broken. And then this led on to another comment by Amanda my wife around highlighting the differences in the way that the male and female ADHD is perceived and understood. There's a lot of that the misdiagnosis or undiagnosis of A DHD is much further much higher in women than it is in men at the moment.

And that, that way when you look at com, at the, the whole A DHD think is way underdiagnosed anyway. To have that imbalance, as always seems to be the case between male and female as well, is still a huge thing. But I would just highlight that the original story the Charlie Turner story is in the Oconomist magazine in the June edition and so it came out in 2023 and so that, that is linked in that original story for the full for the full book.

Process that Charlie went through to really get into that idea about why he was why he thought he should be diagnosed in the first place. And the interesting bit is that he did a, one of these things that you do online that sort of, filter questions effectively. And it was like, Oh, maybe there is something there.

Yeah, interesting. Yeah,

[00:46:15] Nick Roome: I I just want to echo the sentiment of ADHD in human factor. I think it is really just a a great mix. Not self diagnosed. I had a similar experience to Charlie where I had answered some of those questions like maybe you should or I had read some accounts from folks of I have ADHD and this is.

This is something that happened to me. And and those types of accounts had encouraged me to go get my own diagnosis. And I think it's really interesting from the perspective of of the overlap between ADHD and human factors. And really they are complimentary. I used to work in a building where I could work on a different thing every week.

And especially in the podcast realm, we talk about different stories every week. So go and talk about, Hey, it interests me this week. Let's talk about it then. And it's very much that self serving. That self serving rotation of new things that keep the dopamine hit coming, which is why it's been sustainable for so long.

But I think, beyond that, it also the superpower aspect of it really helps me do work as well. Sometimes I'll lock myself. Alone at night to focus on a task when I don't have the distractions. And when I get into that superpower mode, I can do a lot of really great things in a focused amount of time.

And it's just, it just feels like there's always something coming. Oh, new information. Okay. Rope that into how we do things or new, a new project, even if it's within the project that you're working on, there's a new thing to work on that thing. And so it's just a conveyor belt of never ending things to learn.

[00:47:50] Barry Kirby: Absolutely. And it's, I think what I quite like is the more that we talk about it, the more people will start at least reflecting. Oh maybe this is a bit of me, or maybe we should have the discussion or this, I should have the discussion with a loved one or something like that. Cause certainly working with with our children and understanding what, how, what their traits are.

And then the fact that it's genetic means that we've had. conversations with ourselves. And then we've had conversation with our parents around have you maybe thought about the fact that the, it isn't new. It's just the fact it's just been around for a long time. And I think the, what I find quite, it's quite sad in a way and that I recognize why the older generations are going I had to put up with it, deal with it, crack on.

Because it's one of these things that, yes They've been undiagnosed for a long time and it's not, it didn't exist. It just, we didn't know about it. We didn't know it was a thing. And now we understand about it. We can leverage that better. But I also get the fact that they didn't have that opportunity.

They didn't have that. So I think that their attitude of look, we had to deal with it. So should you, I don't agree with it, but I definitely get it.

[00:49:09] Nick Roome: Yeah, it's it's fascinating. And if you're curious about what some of those things were, feel free to reach out to me on discord. I'm happy to walk through some of those things.

I'm quite open about the process of how I found out. If you're curious, let me know let's get into this any other final words on that, Barry?

[00:49:27] Barry Kirby: No, that's good. I think, but just, yeah, keep talking, be kind. Keep talking. Be

[00:49:30] Nick Roome: kind. All right. Let's just get into a, one more thing.

This is, there's no intro for this one. It's just where we talk about one more thing. Barry, what's your one more thing this week?

[00:49:39] Barry Kirby: I've been out for a while. So I'm going to go for two things. Firstly, is more of a formal announcement that I'm now on the IEA communications and public relations committee, which is not an easy thing to say.

Very quickly specifically, I'm quite, I'm responsible for re refreshing and delivering social, the social media output. If you want something shared by the IEA on LinkedIn specifically, I'm focusing on that at the moment as a growth area tag me in it or tag in the IEA, new LinkedIn page.

And I will make sure that we that we share what you're doing. But the thing that I've had to learn over the past couple of weeks I wouldn't necessarily go to the reasons why, but I've never been able to take pills, never been out. So I always have to have the soluble paracetamol. I always have to have either dissolvable ibuprofen or crunch them.

Um, and with my teeth to sort them down, I got used to that, but because of some pills, I'm not having to take, I have to take them whole and I'm having to learn how to take pills. My children think it's hilarious. But I've just had, and you talk to the doctor and say I can't take pills. Then I, Oh, is it just cycle?

Have you tried all the tricks? Yes, I've tried all the tricks on the internet. I know it's psychological. It's part of my job. I get why it is. It still doesn't mean that I can swallow these tablets. So I've had to put on my big boy pants and learn how to take pills. I still have to give myself a pat on the back every single day that I take these couple of pills that I need to take.

One of them is quite small. That's fine. One of them is bigger and it's, I still get a rush of adrenaline every time I have to take this.

[00:51:03] Nick Roome: What's the biggest pill you got? I'm trying to find my biggest pill right now. I think I

[00:51:07] Barry Kirby: have, by most people's standards, these pills are small, but they I have a flashback of when I choked on a pill years and years ago.

Yeah. And so I have to physically do this whole thing. Yes. It, no, that's all right. There you go. That's

[00:51:23] Nick Roome: my pill. That's the size of my pill right there.

[00:51:25] Barry Kirby: Yeah. That's just not for reference. The fact that my so my kids can like dry swallow pills. And you're just like I just know I have to have a gallon of water per pill.

Anyway, Maybe in a few years. I might be a bit more going to be able to take these things. But yeah You'll get

[00:51:42] Nick Roome: there. You'll get there. Hey, i'm proud of you. I'm proud of you. Take It's it can sometimes be a hard pill to swallow when you don't know how to do something and or can't do something and you're just You're just doing great.

Wow. This is a whole inch. This is a whole inch big. I'm just now comparing this to to,

[00:51:59] Barry Kirby: I do, I would refuse to take that. I would have to, I would just have to refuse. I couldn't do it anyway. Enough mocking me, my, my inability to take pills. Nick, what's your one more thing?

[00:52:10] Nick Roome: I have something really,

[00:52:11] Barry Kirby: really weird.

[00:52:12] Nick Roome: That I'd like to talk about. And the thing that's weird about it is that I've I have newly discovered a new team dynamic. And so I had this weird experience where I went to a conference in what was it early September? You may have heard of it. It's HFES Aspire. And when I returned my son had suddenly became much better at a game that we enjoy playing together.

And and so then he started exploring with playing online and, You get the sweaties online. You get people who are really good at the game online. And just for reference, this is rocket league, right? So nothing super, like you can get really sweaty and rocket league, but it's cars pushing around a ball to play soccer.

Okay. And. And so he's gotten to the point now where he can play online against other people and we win almost every time we play together. And this whole team dynamic is just so interesting to me because I'm explaining strategy to a five year old. Where I'm saying, okay, so here's how we tackle it.

You stay in the zone in front of me. So that way you can try to block it before it gets to me. And then as you, if you miss it, I have a chance to hit it. And then if you hit it, then great. Then you get the points. And so trying to explain to him how all this logic happens is really interesting, and then we get into this zone where we're just performing well.

And to the point where we won a tournament together, which is just. Cool. It's fascinating. And so team dynamics with a five year old is just something that's completely different and fascinating. And I, and now he doesn't want to play games at all. And he wants to do regular five year old things.

So it's he probably has ADHD too, and he's just dropping one thing and moving to the next, but that's what I had for what my one more thing. All right. And with that, I think that's it for today, everyone. If you like this episode and enjoy some of the discussion around Tesla bots, I'll encourage you to go listen to one of our previous episodes.

I know we we had a whole episode on Tesla bots that you can go check out comment, wherever you're listening with what you think of the story this week, or tag Barry in it so he can retweet it read Repost it from the IEA LinkedIn account. For more in depth discussion, you can always join us on our discord community, visit our official website, sign up for our newsletter.

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Mr. Barry Kirby, thank you for being on the show today. Where can our listeners go and find you if they wanna talk about how to swallow pills?

[00:55:11] Barry Kirby: I'm a terrible person talk to about that but you can come and mock me on social media and you can find me on Facebook and on LinkedIn and various places like that.

But if you want to listen a bit more about, me chatting to other people in the Human Factors community and seeing what they're up to. Then come and find me at 1202 The Human Factors Podcast at 1202 podcast.com.

[00:55:30] Nick Roome: As for me, I've been your host, Nick Rome. You can find me on our discord and across social media at Nick Rome.

Stay tuned for the post show and thanks again for tuning in to Human Factors Cast. Until next time, it depends.