Dr. Tessa Lau (@tessalau) is the founder and CEO of Dusty Robotics, a startup whose mission is to address construction industry labor shortages by introducing robotic automation on the jobsite. Prior to Dusty, she was CTO/co-founder at Savioke, where she orchestrated the deployment of 75+ delivery robots into hotels and high-rises and she’s spent an impressive career (including 11 years at IBM) focused on automation and giving people superpowers. In today’s episode we discuss:
- What makes scaling a robot fleet so hard
- Why Tessa is a big proponent of universal basic income
- How far are we from human-level intelligence
- Why we’ll have full self-driving in ten years
- The risk of building robots that look human
- Why construction is prime for disruption
- The unique challenges of building a hardware robotics company
- What automation will do towards affordable housing
- The state of drone delivery and more
- Why we’re headed towards a future with no privacy
- Where to focus on a career for the future
- The big problem with robot anthropomorphism
