On today’s episode we’re talking about our national nightmare: robots rising up to kill their masters and letting the yards get totally gnarly. This has everything from AI to robotics to “are lawns even necessary?”
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, This Tech FINALLY Makes Robot Lawn Mowers Worth it https://youtu.be/e3F6L-AQOSo?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7HT9O73K9oYUe19eS-wjxX
YouTube version of the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/stilltbdpodcast
Get in touch: https://undecidedmf.com/podcast-feedback
Support the show: https://pod.fan/still-to-be-determined
Follow us on X: @stilltbdfm @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf
Undecided with Matt Ferrell: https://www.youtube.com/undecidedmf
And luckily for me, my brother is that mad of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And on this lazy June morning, Matt, how are you today?
I’m doing well. I was actually planning, I’ve mentioned this before, I’m putting, going to be putting solar panels on my shed as a little DIY project and I was going to do it yesterday and this lazy summer day you just mentioned, it’s been raining all weekend, so I haven’t been able to do it, so I’m very disappointed.
How are you doing? I’m
doing, uh, lovely. It’s been a beautiful weekend here in New York City. So we have rain today, but yesterday was a glorious day. And I spent most of it outside, uh, with a friend of mine who’s having a going away party as he and his wife are preparing to move. And it was bittersweet, but it was a lovely afternoon for it.
So I had a nice day out and then, uh, came home and my 18 year old son. Who, while we were out, was like, oh, my eyes are starting to itch a little bit, I’m getting itchy eyes, and so I gave him half a Benadryl, and then we went to dinner, and we came home, he disappeared into his room, my partner and I were waiting, waiting for him at 8 o’clock, To watch a TV show when I went up to see where he was, and he was sound asleep, fully dressed, lights on, just passed out from half a Benadryl.
So this is my public service announcement to parents out there. Keep your kids off the drill. And now to our discussion about our recent episode, which was episode 221, in which we discussed Matt’s video about AI and its ongoing evolutions. And there were, we gave a call out to the viewers and listeners and asked you all, what would you like to see about this topic moving forward in the future?
And there were a lot of interesting responses. Uh, Babarudra jumped in to say, I would love to see a series of deep dives into the different aspects of AI, good, bad, and to be determined. Ha, see what I did? And yes, as a resource, I trust your channel to handle something that is technological, even its policies or lack thereof.
Turn your headlight on and hit that rabbit hole. Thanks for all that you do. I appreciate the, the comments on that. That’s a terrific endorsement. I really appreciate it, but it’s also, leads into some of the other comments like this one from Russell Grafe who said, I prefer to hear encouraging news.
There’s enough negativity all around. Please, please let us know where AI has solved problems in the real world. So there was a big swell in the comments that I noticed of people saying like, we do get it. The negative news is out there constantly. And I think this is something that is widely talked about and recognized in our pop culture, that most news tends to be negative news.
And a lot of your commenters seem to want you to lean into what are some of the positive aspects. There is a difficulty there though, as some of the comments pointed out. Dibyendust said ethics, good and bad sides look so interconnected, you cannot completely deep dive into one side without touching on the other.
And I think that’s the thing you wrestle with. You start digging into that rabbit hole a little bit and before you know it, you’re seeing every current running through the conversation.
That’s something I’m always struggling with on these videos is like the general tenor of my channel is to like try to show the optimism and the crazy awesome engineering and feats that humanity can do when we put our minds to it.
That’s the general theme of what motivates me to go into this stuff. But there’s, there’s definitely downsides, negatives that we can’t ignore, we have to look at them and discuss them and bring them up, um, and then kind of look at it in context of, okay, it does have negatives, but the positives outweigh the negatives, or however you want to look at it.
But I do have that same feeling of, there’s so much negativity. Out there right now, especially in the news media and on social media, I don’t want to add to that noise. So it’s like, I’m trying to come at it from a different point of view a little bit from a little more of that. Let’s look at the bright side of things a little bit more, but you can’t ignore the downside.
Or otherwise, it’s not genuine.
I think that’s a concept that is reflected in most of the comments I saw, which was, no matter what stance you take, there’s going to be an aspect of the audience that’s going to see you as either all you do is look at the negative, or you’re a shill for an industry that we don’t quite understand and trust.
And so the balancing act there is, strangely, do you find yourself, and this is a question for you now as a YouTuber, not as, as, you know, the producer of a, of a segment on AI. Do you find yourself looking to land in that place where you’re going to get criticized from both sides, knowing that you’ve struck the right middle of, well, if 50 percent of my audience is saying I’m a shill and the other 50 percent is saying all I am doing is doom and gloom, naysaying, then I must be doing a fairly fair and balanced response to this subject.
I would. I would say in general, yes, it’s like if you get everybody mad at you, you’re kind of doing something right. Uh, but at the same time, I’m also not a believer that every story has two sides. You know what I mean? It’s like to say there’s two sides to look at every issue. It’s like, no, sometimes there is only one side.
Sometimes there’s 15 different sides. So it’s like, you kind of, it’s like you can’t win. My attitude as a YouTuber towards the comments is, You can never win. I can’t win. I will never win. I can’t win. There’s always going to be some contingent that is just unloading because from their perspective, I’ve completely missed the mark, whether that’s I’m a shill or I didn’t talk about the negatives, right?
Or whatever it is. Um, it’s, it’s a, it’s a battle you can’t win. So as a YouTuber, I had to get, I had to get a thicker skin to a certain extent and try to, um, recognize that that’s just the norm. That’s just the way it is.
Yeah. It’s interesting. The, the aspects of being a creator of something and putting it into the world is always been like, from the first person to dip their hand into ground up, you know, leaves with some water and put their hand print on the cave wall. There was probably another cave person who walked up behind them and went, Mmm. Me no like angle. And so the idea of criticism and public response to something that’s created is built into the sharing of that thing.
But, and I say this as somebody who, I am a creator, I have created works of fiction and I put them into the world, but there’s no comment section in any of my books. I put them out. I say, hope you all like it. And then I’m able to walk away, not go to the comments. And it’s a very different format on YouTube, which we are both right now, you know, in, in experiencing that.
Cause I am experiencing as a result of partnering with you in these, in these conversations that we have, but the interaction that you have with your audience, you do have an open door. It really. It’s demonstrated your responses to people’s comments. I see them as I’m going through looking for conversation points for upcoming videos.
And I see you engaging with your audience. And you of course also have a Patreon community, which of course is a friendly terrain because anybody who’s going to become a Patron is already looking upon you kindly, so coming into that conversation with them is a different conversation entirely.
I’m curious, do you see, how wide a gap do you see between that audience that’s like, oh yeah, we love what you’re doing and we want to support you directly and we want to be involved in this conversation with you in this aspect of your community and the wider community? Is it, Is it like, does it go from like a 1 to a 10 or does it go to 1 from a 1 to a 5 as far as like number 1 being very friendly, 10 being totally hostile?
It’s funny because I have a team that works with me on these videos and we’ve had this exact discussion. It’s really funny to see like on this. Like, we publish Still to be Determined, it’s an audio podcast, but it’s also on YouTube on its own channel. And if you look at the community vibe here on Still to be Determined versus Undecided, it is night and day, Sean.
It is like, the community here on Still to be Determined is a much smaller, narrower group from Undecided. And so it’s more targeted, and here, the conversation tends to be, it’s not, it can be critical. But it’s also, I don’t know, I think it’s a little more
insulatory.
Yes. And then on Undecided, it’s pulling in the masses, it’s pulling in random people.
Some people who don’t even know who I am, some people who do, some people who only watch a video every once in a while, some people who watch videos all the time. So you get this, this is like, it’s like a big cauldron of just like positive comments and horribly negative comments and then people attacking me personally and just like, it’s just like a whole, like just stew.
And then you go over to Patreon and of course, like you said, it’s even narrower. Um, so the, the reactions and the conversations are extremely pleasant, even when people don’t agree with me and they call me out on something on Patreon, it’s still extremely like a wonderful back and forth and a wonderful conversation.
So it’s, it is kind of a one to a 10 depending on where you are in the conversation with people. Right.
And maybe depending on the subject as well. I imagine you have some episodes on your main channel that get a fairly tepid critical response. Like, I don’t imagine a lot of people showed up in your lawnmower video.
I didn’t see any comments in the lawnmower video that were just like, you’re a shill for big lawnmower. You’re like, I didn’t see anything like that. I can’t imagine this tapped a vein in the same way as AI or maybe, windmill or a lot of your solar and I do see those comments because of course I go through the comments looking for touch points there. On this conversation, though, I’d like to end with this comment from J Mac, who reflected something that you and I touched on in our conversation last week, J Mac writes the advent of AI helping to create misinformation isn’t the problem. The underlying problem is a combination of the bias you mentioned, along with the massive lack of critical thinking. It goes back to real ownership of your response and I, what I mean by that is it is understandable to have a response to information that’s been given to you, but it is very valuable to stop and ask yourself occasionally, why am I responding the way I am?
And questioning your standing in your understanding of a subject, our bias, and I do believe it is ancestrally connected to us. It is a part of evolution. I am sure too. If you had a I’m talking about cave people a lot in this episode for some reason. Uh, if you had somebody living in a cave who second guessed every choice they were making and every response they had to what was coming in from the outside, you would have somebody who would freeze and eventually just die from either lack of action or being taken over by something else.
You know, the, Tiger jumps out of the woods, the person who doesn’t run properly is going to be eaten. So I think evolutionarily, there is a reason why we are prone to not questioning assumptions and leaning into repeated use of a tool that we think has served us well. And I think that bias is born of that, but it’s worth thinking in those terms and then stopping occasionally and saying like, what is my bias here?
What am I liking or not liking about this video. Am I positive or negative about it just because I would have been yesterday and the day before? Or am I actually thinking critically about what I’m being given? And that also then ties back into something we’ve talked about before. We talked about how to have impacts on policy.
And we talked about leaning into reaching out to your policymakers. Well, that includes reaching out around education and looking for critical thinking skills as a prime component of education instead of just being able to do rote memorization and regurgitate facts onto a test. That’s not going to serve anybody well in the future.
But somebody who doesn’t know when the War of 1812 started, but can actually help interpret some of the causes and break down some of the reasons that it led to change, that is a better use of our educational time, I think. Agreed. Also, just big picture, I saw several people in the comments point something out, uh, regarding your future look at AI, and there was this refrain again and again.
What we are seeing right now is narrow use, focused use of AI, and what people are afraid of is broad use, meaning the AI that is just out in the world and able to do whatever it wants at any time, and people are encouraging you to look along those lines of, what are the narrow use cases? What is the wide use argument from AI development?
And what are we actually seeing when we’re talking about it?
On now to Matt’s most recent this is Are Robot Lawnmower’s Finally Worth It? This episode dropped on June 4th, 2024. And I titled this episode of Still to Be Determined Based upon a comment from Consta Gold, who hat tipped to Consta for the comment, I can’t believe you missed the opportunity to say Robot MowverLords.
I,
perfect comment. I know. Perfect, perfect comment.
I know. This is one of those facepalms. I wish I had thought of that. I really wish I thought.
The comments on this one were interesting. A lot of people who have Robot lawnmowers, and even somebody who was involved in trying to invent a robot lawnmower. This comment from Andy, who lives in the UK, wrote, I have had a robot lawnmower since 2013, and I can say it is the best thing since sliced bread.
A couple of things Matt didn’t mention is when you are on holiday, your lawn gets mowed. I am retired and go away for six weeks at a time in our motorhome. The mower is also so much quieter than petrol mowers. The main thing now is I am disabled in a wheelchair and my robot mower christened Ron does the business.
I would highly recommend a robot mower. Andy, thank you for jumping in and telling us all about Ron. And, uh, hat tip to you for like living that good life going off in the motorhome for six weeks at a time. That’s, that sounds lovely. Uh, and not having to worry about the mower. There was also this, which I actually thought about, Matt, and I have a question for you.
Uh, thisbymaster wrote, We got rid of our grass completely. And replaced it with raised garden beds and native flowers. It helps with my grass allergies and produces tasty food. My now manual push mower sits in the lonesome in the back of the garage. And there was this aspect that occurred to me while I was watching your video, which is there has been a growing movement amongst environmentalists encouraging people not to mow their lawns at all.
And they’ll tolerate the grass. Water conservation, also providing more of a haven for natural wildlife, we have in recent years been talking about what’s going on with the bees. And then recently I saw articles that were like, ah, we worried too much about those bees. I’m like, I don’t know what to do about the bees anymore, but there is an aspect of wildflowers in the yards.
And the fact that we have created an environment that doesn’t have a pro pollinator environment. So here is somebody who’s gone back to some wildflowers, growing vegetables, using their land in a different way. Uh, in your research, did you see anything about the prevalence of that kind of approach versus a yardscaping approach?
It’s, it’s a, it’s a growing movement. I got, I got a lot of messages about this. That was it’s a growing movement. It’s growing movement. You like that? Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. Uh, I got a lot of messages along this lines, along these lines. In fact, I got one from a patron who was kind of pushing back on me and like, you’re promoting mowing and lawns when you shouldn’t be. Which was obviously not intended. That was not the purpose of the video. It was more about robots in our lawns. Like this, it’s kind of AI tangent. It’s like, uh, it’s related to the previous video in a way. Um, but it was a fair point. This is a, a lot more people are doing this.
In fact, in my neighborhood, there’s quite a few homes that have done exactly that. Um, there’s one house that has no lawn of any kind. It is just wild. Personally, I can’t do that. I can’t do that. I’m not pro lawn. I just can’t do that. Uh, my allergies would like forget about it. Like I am allergic to so much of that stuff that is growing wild in that person’s lawn I could never do that.
Two, the pests that it brings in closer to the house would drive my wife nuts. And then two, I have a dog that likes to go out in the yard and run and they would not be able to run in the areas like that. But having said that, this video actually did a good thing for me. It kind of like, kind of like triggered that in me of like, Oh wait, I need to be doing more of that.
So it’s like, I’m now reconsidering redoing areas of my yard to let it go a little more wild, to let some things, right, in a more curated way. I just don’t want to like let it go wild, but it’s like get some of the natural grasses, the natural plants and let them kind of do their thing in certain zones.
Um, and the landscaper we use that helped do our yard actually used a lot of local plants and trees and things like that that are natural pollinators and things like that that are already planted in my yard. So it’s like we were already kind of doing some of that. So this is something that is important to do.
And also my defense, you’ve been here, Sean. The very back of my yard is completely wild. There’s a big chunk of my yard that is just wilderness. It’s just a big part of my property that is still just completely wild. So this is, um, it’s something that I’m seeing a lot more and based on the comments I was seeing, it’s clear that it is very much on people’s minds.
I’m reminded as you were talking of the fact that we were, uh, what is it now? Two years ago now, it seems like remarkable to think in those terms that it’s been two years already. We were trying to help our parents who had decided to sell their home and move to a retirement community. We were helping them clear out their house and we were spending, Matt and I spent multiple trips going into their basement and rediscovering that at a certain point in mid, I think 1978, my parents stopped throwing anything out.
And amongst the things that we found were a couple of bags, Ziploc bags in the kitchen. One was full of acorns. One was full of chestnuts. And when we found one of these bags and held it up and said, what the heck is this for? Our almost 80 year old mother said, Oh, I take those into the forever wild behind the house and throw them out there
so trees will grow. We’re talking about a forever wild that was literally forever wild. It was just a forest. So my quick question for you, Matt, is what is the square footage of your yard?
Oh, I don’t know off the top of my head. I think it’s like, um, a third of an acre. I think it’s about a third of an acre.
So rough in, in square footage, like if you just had to guess. It’s a few thousand
square feet, I think.
Okay. So let’s say, let’s, uh, let’s say 2750 square feet. How about that? Yeah. Okay. If I was living there, It would cost me approximately 4, 125 to turn the entire yard into a gravel lot, which when I was in high school, talking to dad, every time I had to mow the lawn, I would say, if I ever own a home, the yard is going to be a gravel lot, never have to mow, and you can park where you want.
So, just to give everybody the priced analysis, you know, like, okay, the lawnmower, some of those lawnmowers were pretty pricey, weren’t they? I mean, some of them, what was the top price of one of them? Like $4, 000. $4, 000? Yeah. Um, as my son would have pointed out, Uh, he was talking, we were talking about something else and, uh, rental cars, as a matter of fact.
And he was talking to me about like, well, how many times are you going to rent a car? If you’ve rented it that many times, you’re about a fifth of the way to buying a car. So if you’re spending $4, 000, you’re well on your way to buying a big item. And I just can’t help but wonder, what are you getting for $4, 000 that you’re able to say that’s worth a mower. Like, yeah. What are you getting for $4, 000?
I would never spend $4,000 on one of these things ever. It’s like you’re not going to get your value out of it. At that point, it’s just a very, very expensive toy.
Right. Do you know what the bells and whistles on that are? I mean, what could they possibly be?
The
only difference between the one I’ve got, which was not that one, mine was still expensive and it was the $2,000 one, uh, is the size of yard that you can mow. And if you have a yard. Also for your
battery.
It’s got a larger battery, it has a longer run time, stuff like that. Uh, if you have a yard that’s that big that needs to be mowed, it’s like the people who are saying, you shouldn’t have a lawn, you should let it go wild.
It’s like, that’s the point where it’s like, okay, yeah, why do you have a 8, 000 square foot yard?
Why are you mowing four, yeah, why are you mowing, mowing four acres and letting, you Instead of mowing one acre and letting three go wild. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There was this comment that stood out to me from Nathan Banks.
I always like sharing comments that make me, uh, stop and salute the viewership for their, the wide variety of expertises and explorations and interests of your audience always stands out to me. Nathan wrote in, I tried making a robotic lawnmower years ago as a thesis for my bachelor’s degree. I was trying to use ultrasonic sensors to detect the position.
The GPS with base station looks so much better. And the cost will probably go down a little with volume and competition. Thank you for the comment, Nathan. I really liked, uh, you’re tapping into the tech behind the, uh, mapping mechanisms. And it raises the question, are there other options, Matt, that you think are available?
But right now the price point is simply too high that if the price was lower would be a better option than what you’re currently seeing or do you think that this model that you were talking about in your video is really kind of like this is kind of the pros and cons like you’re not going to get better than this?
The ones I talked about are the ones that are like you’re buying a high end BMW. It’s like, this is like the cream of the crop. This is the best tech. It’s got robot vision, so it’s got like stereoscopic video cameras. It’s, you know, using vision detection to detect what’s in your yard in addition to physical bumpers and, you know, sensors to detect if people are close.
It’s like doing everything you can think of. To be as safe and efficient and accurate as possible
where similar to what a driving car would be using, right?
Yeah. It’s just like a Tesla or Rivian or Ford, anything you want to talk about, but it’s kind of like the car market too. It’s like how you have high end cars
they have all the bells and whistles, the latest, greatest tech. And then you have a super cheap Toyota Camry that has the bare bones, but over the course of the next five years, some of those high end features trickle down into the lower end cars. So it happens over time. That’s what’s going to happen with this.
It’s what’s happened with lower tech. It’s what happened with robot vacuum cleaners. It’s like you can pick up a robot vacuum cleaner now for a few hundred bucks and it has the same tech that robot vacuum cleaners used to cost a thousand dollars just like five years ago. So it’s like it, there’s like a trickle down that slowly happens.
So while it may be two grand for the one I’ve got now in like five years, it might be 800 bucks. So it’s, it’s we’re going to see that happen again. Um, but I don’t know what the next greatest thing would be for this. I don’t know. I honestly don’t know how you’d make it that much better. Literally just putting an RTK antenna somewhere in your yard and set the thing up and just letting it do its thing.
It’s, it’s pretty, pretty impressive what it can do already.
I hate to think what, uh, somebody out there might be trying to design a drone mower. One of these flying would be terrifying.
Flying planes.
Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown that out
there. I just threw that, I just threw that out into the biosphere and now it’s, now it’s out there and somebody is going to make that idea a reality.
What could possibly go wrong?
I wanted to share a couple more comments like this from Osberg, who wrote, My robotic lawnmower is now 7 years old and still going strong.
Complex lawn and yes, a guard wire. But that is a memory that is 7 years old and I’ve had no issues with it. In terms of cost, they are more expensive up front but require no gas, almost no electricity, and minimal maintenance. So overall, over that period of time, it has been cheaper by far compared to a gas powered lawnmower.
Also, the lack of noise is amazing. Side note, watching it cut is quite the ASMR experience. So there were also then the people who were looking at it from the questioning side. I thought, says Arista Frustato, I thought the elephant in the room was the fact that they require proprietary apps that can be, that can remove features on a whim or simply get delisted,
so now you have a motor that’s inaccessible. Do you have, an understanding of what that comment is about. I couldn’t track down details of what this was in reference to, but I figured you might have some.
Yes. It’s, it’s kind of like, um, robot vacuum cleaners. You get a iRobot, you plug it in, you have to install the iRobot app on your phone.
You have to create an account, log in, it links to your thing, it creates, it links to your account. You set it up how it works. If iRobot went out of business and their servers shut down, you open up the iRobot app, nothing’s going to happen. That means now you have a huge paperweight that can’t run in your house anymore.
So it’s, it’s one of those that’s, that is a really good call out for an elephant in the room. Cause that is the same exact problem you’d have with these uh, mowers. It’s the same thing. It’s like for the Mammotion mower and the NaviMow, I have a NaviMow app and I have a Mammotion app and that’s how I set it up, that’s how I get it to run.
But if either of those companies shuts down, those servers stop working, I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen to the machines themselves. My hunch would be, kind of like the vacuum cleaners, they probably would run. Like if you told it, there’s a button on it that you hit mow, the map that you had already installed for your house, it would probably still work.
But if you had to make any changes, any tweaks, anything like that after that, you’re not going to be able to. So that that is a huge call out. I should have brought that up.
I would also be hesitant from a safety perspective, be hesitant to use a mower that was no longer getting any kind of software updates over for the long period of time.
If I knew that, oh, the company went out of business and I’ve got this let’s I mean, another elephant in the room, we were talking about a robot rolling around with whirling blades and the idea of saying like, Oh, I still feel confident that it’s safe and it’s not going to just cross out of my yard and then go toward the neighborhood children or dogs that are playing in the next yard.
I would hate to think of, of some of the things that would happen as a result of that. But I also imagine there’s a kind of built in safety mechanism in deciding what time you could run these things. You could run them at a time when you know, people are just out and about, so it could run at like 9am, I imagine, right?
Like
mine run at midnight. They’re running in the middle of the night, like, you’d have to get there with night vision goggles in my neighborhood to see it going to anything. If you’re walking around at night, all you’d hear is a very faint little whirring sound and every once in a while, a little click, click, click, click, click, click, as it’s cutting the grass.
All right. So it’s, I did that deliberately because I mentioned this in the video, but when I first set the Mammotion up, it was kind of the talk of the town. It was a sight to behold. It was like people would be walking their dog by and they’d stop and watch it just mow my front yard. And then it was just like this nonstop stream of people just watching this thing mow.
And when I go outside, they were like, tell me about
that mower. You just stood next to it while it was mowing, doing the dougie while they all watched.
So yeah, I did it. I moved it to overnight deliberately. Cause it’s like, I didn’t want to be putting on a show in my front yard every time I mowed the yard.
I’m surprised that you haven’t put some kind of scarecrow on it. Some like frame with a sheet. My
producer Lewis for Undecided, for the Undecided channel, he, uh, he recommended that I put big googly eyes on the
front of it. Yes. I like that. I like, you know, just, um, putting some kind of like wind, uh, propeller.
So like a little handheld whirligig so that it looks like it’s powered by that. There’s so many things you could do with this Matt that you’re not doing. Yeah, I know. Last comment I wanted to share was from TooManyWins, who had the simple comment, Kids are still cheaper. Not in the big picture.
You don’t have to put a robot lawnmower through college. Let me just say that. So there
you go.
So thank you everybody for your comments. I appreciate them. They drive the content of this show and they help inform the content of the main show Undecided with Matt Ferrell. Don’t forget, if you’d like to support the show, you can leave a review, you can subscribe, you can leave a comment, and you can share it with your friends.
Those are great, easy ways for you to support both programs. And if you would like to support us more directly, you can click the join button on YouTube, or you can go to stilltbd. fm and click the become a supporter button there. Both those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads, and we appreciate the welts, and then get down to the business of making these conversations happen.
Because Matt and I hate talking to each other and wouldn’t do it if we weren’t being paid. But, no. Thank you everybody for your comments, and we’ll talk to you next time.