Golan Levin, an artist and engineer, uses modern tools robotics, new software, cognitive research to make artworks that surprise and delight. Watch as sounds become shapes, bodies create paintings, and a curious eye looks back at the curious viewer.

Now a lot of robotics is very impressive, but manipulation robotics is really just in the dark ages.

The Bible actually talks about cognitive psychology, very primitive cognitive psychology.

So, it really was cognitive psychology you know, cognitive dissonance that I was experiencing.

But let me show you cutting edge robotics.

Robotics systems are just incredible these days, absolutely incredible.

And this is like robotics without wires or motors.

So we're really entering the era of wearable robotics actually.

And now this is the early era of wearable robotics.

Welcome to RoMeLa, the Robotics Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech.

Then I underwent cognitive training.

Third step is cognitive dissonance.

I call it cognitive surplus.

I'm at Carnegie Mellon we've got a great Robotics Institute there.

And many, many other robotics projects I want to talk about.

The first C is cognitive training.

It's limited by our cognitive biases.

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Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics

Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy.

I took here a model from robotics it's called the Subsumption Architecture.

And we will be bringing robotics of all sorts into the ocean.

We worked with, by the way, Honeybee Robotics. This is the brain.

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It's way below your cognitive thinking process.

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That's the second half of cognitive surplus.

Both of these rely on cognitive surplus.

There is no generalization at all from one task to another in robotics.

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Cognitive surplus is made up of two things.

Can we really scale this up? Can we really embed robotics into every part?

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And then I started Hanson Robotics, which has been developing these things for mass manufacturing.

But the robotics part is the hardest part. That's the old brain. That's really hard.

At our lab RoMeLa, the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory, we have these fantastic brainstorming sessions.

There's a cognitive illusion. We cognitive psychologists know that the easier it is to recall specific instances of something, the higher the probability that you assign to it.

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And it actually has a growing repertoire of cognitive skills.