All language subtitles for Fast.Cheap.And.Out.Of.Control.1997.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.EN 23.976

Wait a minute, son.
Don't be afraid.

I won't hurt you. Who are you?

I'm beru.
Are you related to beru tremaine,

the missionary who disappeared
in the jungle several years ago?

He was my father,
but he's dead now.

Have you been living
in the jungle all this time?

Since I left joba.

Joba? You mean the hidden city
beyond the mountains of despair?

What do you know
about that place?

I hear the natives mention it
once in a while,

but I always thought
it was a legendary city.

Yeah. They say
it's taboo or something.

When I was a kid,
I did want to be a wild animal trainer.

I wanted to be a Clyde beatty.

A lot of kids want to be
firemen, cowboys, whatever,

but I wanted
to be a wild animal trainer.

I was really interested in it.

There was a catholic priest friend
of ours that was a circus fan.

My mother told father berney...

To have a talk with me
to try to change my mind.

Instead, he encouraged me, so...

He told her the world
had to have lion trainers too.

Ta-ta. Watch it. Hurry up. Hold it.

Hurry up. Hup, hup.

Ta-ta! Caesar!

No, no! Come around here.

Caesar! Ta-ta. Ta-ta.

Come around. Hey, hey!
One, two, three!

I came there
after the '38 hurricane...

To help clean up the place.

It was in December,
but it was hot...

And Mary came down
with lemonade.

That's how I met her,

and then three years later
I married her.

Mary's father was ailing
at the time.

They were looking for someone
that could take over.

So I took over.

Whatever I thought
had to be done, had to be done.

When I was about 14 or 15,
I was in an insect club.

It was a group of children
who were interested in entomology...

And were interested
in societies:

How ants and bees and wasps
and termites function.

We're told certain things
could or couldn't be:

That mammals
would never be like insects,

that our societies and theirs
were radically different.

Over 20 years went by, and a friend
called me in the middle of the night.

And he said to me,
"ray, they found them."

I knew exactly what he was talking
about, and I said, "where?"

He said, "in Africa.
It's a thing called the naked mole-rat",

and they have a society
just like termites."

He explained to me
that a mammal had been found...

That lived underground
in these complexes.

The next day I ran off to a magazine
editor and told them the story and said,

"I have to take pictures of these animals.
You have to send me to Africa."

I like to build stuff.

I sometimes ask myself,
"why do I do this?"

I trace it back
to my childhood days.

I used to try and build
electronic things...

In a little tin shed
in the backyard.

I was always trying
to build computers.

There was always a task
I wanted to do,

whether it was add two numbers
or play tic-tac-toe or whatever.

But I just had this tremendous feeling of
satisfaction when I switched the things on.

The lights flashed,
and the machine came to life.

When I was at m.I.T. Building robots,
there was an even more dramatic moment.

One night,
the physical robot actually moved.

It was what I was working on, for days,
but it completely surprised me. It moved.

It had that
magical sort of thing.

It worked. And the best part was
that it completely surprised me.

I'd forgotten that this physical thing was what
I was trying to get to work, then it happened.

I saw Clyde beatty when I was a
very, very small child.

He was a motion picture
personality...

As well as a circus performer,
in those days.

We didn't have television,
but we did go to the movies...

Every Saturday morning.

The serials.
Thirteen exciting episodes.

And, even by the standards then,
it was pretty corny,

but kids loved it.

Guards! Guards!

For the young boys in those days,

he was an idol.

There was a parallel. Clyde and I were
from the same part of the country,

and I identified with him
for that purpose too.

I wanted to be a Clyde beatty.

And then I met him
when I was in the air force.

I spent a couple days with him.
Then when I got into the business,

I contacted him,

and we became
very close friends.

I like to look at what everyone is doing,

find some common thing
that they are all assuming implicitly,

but they don't even realize
they're assuming,

and then negate that thing.

Around that time, I saw a videotape of insects
walking, and they weren't even stable.

They were falling down all the time. There
I had the thing I was going to negate.

Everyone was
implicitly assuming...

That a walking machine
had to have stability, so I negated that.

I said, "let's have
a walking machine..."

That doesn't even worry about
stability, that's able to fall down."

So we started by building
a six-legged robot: Genghis.

When we started it, we weren't thinking about
walking as well as it actually walked.

We were thinking
about scrambling over terrain.

And it turned out to look
an awful lot like an insect.

That was pretty accidental,
I think.

It's a mammal that comes from
an area that's extremely stable.

The temperatures are constant;
Underground, especially.

When you don't need to stay warm the whole
time, number one, you lose your hair.

So they lost their hair.
Not very advantageous to be furry...

If you don't need
to get rid of any heat.

And then they lost
the ability to shiver.

When you're cold, you start shivering.
If you're never cold, you lose that.

Then they lost the ability
to sweat because they were never hot.

Although it's not exactly
cold-blooded like a snake is cold-blooded,

since they can't
regulate their temperature,

we can almost call them
a fully cold-blooded mammal.

One of the critical things
about genghis was:

You switched it on,
and it walked.

The walking isn't programmed in.

"I think, therefore I walk,
and how I walk is I do this, I do that."

Instead it's all these little
feedback loops,

and when you put them
all together, the robot walks.

A well-respected professor
from Germany said,

"but how do you tell
the robot what to do?"

"I don't
tell the robot what to do.

I switch it on, and it does
what is in its nature."

Sometimes I feel
a little like Yoda.

I have to say, sort of,
"just feel the force.

Don't try and control the robot, but feel
how the world is gonna control the robot."

To me, it's this incredible mammal...

That breaks the rules.

A mammal that...

Has a queen, king,
soldiers, workers,

all playing roles
that they will play out...

For, as far as we know,
their life.

The thing about mole-rats
is that they're so new.

Even within the knowledge that's
known, there's still worlds to explore.

How long do they live?
At what point can they no longer change?

For instance, you can take a worker
mole-rat that's five years old,

put it in a situation
where there's no queen,

and that worker
might turn into a queen.

It would be like a 45-year-old,
five-foot tall person...

Being put in a situation where you
needed somebody who was six foot five...

And growing to be six foot five.

That's an incredible thing
for a mammal to do.

This is all done from memory.

You know what an animal looks like,
so you just start making an animal.

Like the bear, for instance.

I just selected a plant that had branches
approximately where I wanted them,

and then you begin
to cut away everything else.

Keep them cut.

The head is most always
the easiest part to do...

Because all these things
want to do is grow straight up.

Then of course the arms...

You have to tie them down,
so that they'll stay down.

We bring the branches
up and over from one leg to the other...

And then crisscross them
from the front leg to the back leg.

The only piece of metal
in the whole thing...

Is under the neck
to hold the nose down.

A lot of people that come there
say, "we've traveled worldwide..."

And never seen anything
exactly like green animals."

Discover magazine said,
"we're gonna do a story on your mole-rats."

Everybody had heard me
talking about them.

"Would you like
to be the photographer?"

And I said, "yes," joyfully.
So that's how it started.

After I did that article, I was invited to
design an exhibit for the Philadelphia zoo.

This was about
a year and a half later.

So I had the opportunity again
to work with mole-rats.

This time to present them to the
public in environmental chambers.

I wanted
to create an environment...

Not of glass tubes
and plastic tubes...

Such as they keep them
in the laboratories for convenience sake.

Because that's so foreign
from the visuals of where the animals live.

I was looking for something that would
make you feel that you were there,

and you were a guest.

It's an old gag in old movies.

A building where half the building is falling
apart, and a guy's still taking a shower.

Somebody's still in front of the mirror
and the building is falling apart.

You're getting to look
at all these intimate moments...

Because a piece of the environment
has been removed so quickly...

That you haven't had time
to be startled yet.

The house was closed for 20 years.

Miss brayton always had the idea that
she'd like to come to live there permanent.

She never married.

She said, "there was one man
that I wanted."

It didn't work out,
so I just won't get married."

From her bedroom, miss brayton
could look out over the garden.

She'd call and she'd say, "George,
don't let anybody walk in the garden."

I want to see the garden before
there's any footprints in the paths."

She was in the garden every day.

She'd come out, and she says,
"I want the yellow snapdragon,

a pink snapdragon,
a red or a Daisy."

Or she'd tell me
what colors she wanted.

Then she says, "if there was any way
I could help you, I would help you."

I said, "you could be a big help to
me if you picked your own flowers."

When I first started in the business,

I saw a film of my act.

I was horrified because I saw several things I
was doing that could have gotten me killed.

I learned by trial and error.
I made some very serious errors too,

believe me. Hey!

I spent three months in the hospital
in lubbock, Texas, for an error.

The error was
I wore a wristwatch.

I had a wristwatch with
a very good expansion band.

Very good. It didn't break.

I had a lion swing,
catch my expansion band,

pull me into him.

He got one claw in between
my elbow bones here.

He had this hand in his mouth.

Fortunately, he had a broken tusk or
I would be missing a finger today.

Finally, the watch did break. The band
broke and the watch just flew out of sight.

I went in the hospital
on the third of January,

and I got out
the fifth of April.

And I have never worn
a wristwatch since.

Once you go through the door and close
the door, you're completely absorbed.

I couldn't tell whether it was five
people in the audience or 5,000...

Because you're completely
absorbed with what you're doing.

When they come through the door,

you've got about three seconds
to do what we call read them.

Are they coming after you?
Are they going to their seats?

It's not the same each time.
It's new every time you go in.

You have to be alert constantly.

Pongo! Bring it up here! Pongo!

The weather can be 30 degrees,
and I come out soaking wet.

It's not from running around,
although I do a lot of running.

Get set. Jump!

Pongo!

It's physical tension.

Mental stress.

That's the bottom line.

If you're not scared of them,
you're in big trouble.

When we started to design the exhibits,

I needed to do something that
would last for a period of time.

If you're doing
an exhibit for a zoo,

you can't expect them
to spend many, many thousands of dollars...

And have the animals
eat their way out in a week.

I was looking for something
that would be more permanent.

I tried concrete,
and they chewed their way through concrete.

And I tried plaster. Plaster was crepe
paper as far as they're concerned.

They went right through plaster.

Ten or twelve percent
of their musculature is in their jaws.

So the amount of pressure
they have when they bite is amazing.

Their teeth
are situated externally,

so they get a huge
opening of the mouth,

and then they come in
and scrape a surface.

So with the concrete, I don't believe
they were taking out chunks of it.

They were scraping down
until they hit...

One little pellet of quartz in the
concrete, and they would pop that out.

Then they'd take another.
They haven't got anything to do all day.

You got them in a cage.

You can design a burrow and think
the mole-rat's gonna do great in it,

and have the animal perform
in a totally different way.

So it was very important
for me to experiment with tunnel sizes,

chamber sizes,
chamber configurations.

I thought there would be
one chamber that would be a nest chamber,

but it was the last
chamber on the run.

In other words,
you would have a tunnel...

And then a chamber
and then another tunnel...

And another chamber
and another tunnel.

I thought maybe they'll eat here
and they'll sleep here.

I had it all set up like
a Dollhouse in my own head.

I'm telling myself stories while I'm designing
things, about how things are gonna function.

I thought I had a really beautiful nest
chamber at the end of this pattern.

We found out that mole-rats...
The last chamber is used as the bathroom.

We had to incorporate
that new knowledge...

Into the design of the environments that
we built in the back of the exhibit.

Now we could decide
where the toilet was gonna be.

So did you want the public to see it?
Did you want it right up front?

You could do that. Did you want it
hidden away, difficult to look at?

We could do that. Did you want it
out of the exhibit? We could do that.

If you hold a mole-rat,
it's best to hold it with your hand flat...

And have some control
over the animal.

Always be aware
of where the head is.

If they go down and they smell,
that's one thing.

But if they go down and push,
you want to lift the animal off.

The next thing after a push
would probably be a nibble...

To find out if they can
get through there.

And if it starts to dig into the palm
of your hand, it will rip it right open.

All along, we've been inspired
by an evolutionary analogy:

That inside the human brain
is a reptile brain,

and inside the reptile brain
is a fish brain.

Evolution just didn't pop out
with a person fully formed.

We've had that same idea
in building our robots.

Let it do simple stuff,
like move about.

Then add some more
complexity to it,

so it would move about
without hitting things.

Then add some more
complexity to it,

so it could go
and find a soda can.

The idea is not to go back
and change the earlier pieces.

Have the earlier pieces
run in parallel.

To an observer, it appears
as though the robot...

Has intentions and has goals...

And is following people
and chasing prey,

but it's just the interaction...

Of lots and lots
of much simpler processes.

That certainly...

Looks good enough...

To explain insect type behavior.

Now the more radical hypothesis:

Maybe that's all there is.

Maybe a lot of what humans are
doing could be explained this way.

After all, humans have evolved
from simpler systems over time.

When I think about it,
I can almost see myself...

As being made up of thousands
and thousands of little agents...

Doing stuff
almost independently.

But at the same time,
I fall back into believing...

The things about humans that
we all believe about humans...

And living life that way.

Otherwise, I think,
if you analyze it too much,

life becomes almost meaningless.

Miss brayton says, "George, it's beautiful",

"but don't leave that man
up there all by himself.

He has to have a lady.
So can you make a lady?"

I said, "yeah, I guess so."

She says, "all right,
make the frame, make the body",

but don't bother to dress it."

Well, she goes off
to New York, came back...

With a dress and a hat.

My wife saw the hat,
and the tag was hanging there.

She says, "forty-four dollars
for the hat for the scarecrow."

I says, "well, she figured
it was worth the $44."

The chair has four legs.
An animal has a one-track mind.

For instance, the animal is coming after
you with the idea of tearing your head off.

You put the chair up,
and, all of a sudden,

he has four points of interest.

He loses his original
train of thought...

Because this agitates him.

He can't comprehend those
four points of interest,

so he attacks the chair,
he takes his wrath out on the chair.

His mind now has been completely
distracted from his original thought:

"Eat the man
in the white pants."

Come in, Mitch! Caesar!

Pongo! Mitch!

Hold it!

It's basically
animal psychology.

You try to keep the animal afraid of
you, in that he does not understand you.

He does not understand
that you're weaker than him.

If you get injured
during a wild animal act,

you have to go ahead
and finish the act.

If you stop right then
and leave the cage,

the animal is liable
to comprehend that he hurt you,

and then that's it
with that animal.

Because, physically, there's no way to
really stop them, except bluff them.

Hey. Hey!

Hey. You can't really stop even
one if he knows his real strength.

Ta-ta, ta-ta. One more time.
Watch it. Hurry. Hup.

I've had them hit me and knock me clear
across the ring like a ping-pong ball.

Fortunately, I stood up,
and I just go ahead with my act...

Like nothing happened.

I had a lion, one time,
grab me and bite me through the calf,

and my boot
was filling up with blood.

But I went ahead and finished
the act and then left the cage.

My teeth rattled out,
but you just try to ignore that.

Never let that bluff down.

Evolution spent a long time,

billions of years,
getting to the point...

Of little creatures
which could chase each other around,

have mobility and interact with
the world in a meaningful way,

apart from being an amoeba
that just sits there and doesn't do much.

Once that stuff was there,
all this other stuff evolved very quickly.

Higher-level intelligence,
whatever that is, is pretty easy...

Once you have the ability
to move around, hunt, chase.

They're the tough parts.

I don't believe it's possible to
have a disembodied intelligence...

Without a physical
connection to reality.

Everything we think,

everything in our thought process is
built around being in touch with reality.

Even the word "touch."

A cockroach has 30,000 hairs,
each of which is a sensor.

The most complex robot we've built has
150 sensors, and it just about killed us.

We can't expect to do as well
as animals do in the world...

Until we get past
that sensing barrier.

My favorite lion was John-John.

He was an extraordinarily big lion.
He weighed 714 pounds.

Fortunately,
he was good-natured.

Way up high. John-John, hey.

Take it up. Easy!

He wasn't the type of animal
that you could pet,

but he was the type of animal
that would put up with you.

Hurry up.
Hup, hup, hup! John, -John, way up.

John-John! Hey! Take it up high.

Hold it high.
You better watch it. Tut-tut.

Ah-ah. Hold it.

You sit. Sit.

His father was one
of Clyde beatty's lions,

a big animal named pharaoh.

That's good. He's a good boy.
Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.

There's nothing like the hand shears.

I've been told by several
people: "You're old-fashioned."

You want to do everything by hand.
The shears are just as good."

I says, "for me,
they're not just as good."

This is the only way you can
do it, and do it right."

The electric shears is all right
for straight work.

You cannot use them for detail.

The ears on the animal... they're all
carved out. They're not just a big blob.

Every ear is carved to detail.

With electric shears,
you can't do that.

A little flip of your hand
or something,

you can lose the ear or a horn.

Or you go a little too far in,
the guy lost his foot.

During the hot weather,
when you have a lot of tender wood,

it doesn't give you a clean cut.

Then you get the one sunny day,
and they brown.

Then your animal
has that brown look.

Many people have said to me,
"this is something men do...

"Because men can't
have babies themselves.

This is a way of building
your own baby, if you like."

But I don't actually
buy that argument.

As it turns out,
in my lab there are more women than men.

I think there's some deeper-seated
thing which crosses the sex boundaries:

Of understanding life
by building something...

That is lifelike.

People just come and look.
You wonder what they're looking at.

It's not just this miniature shar-pei
with big teeth running around in a burrow.

They're looking to find
if there's a common ground.

Look, they're doing this.
Does that mean that this is gonna happen?

They're carrying a baby.
Watch how the mother does it.

They're constantly trying to find
themselves in another social animal.

These ideas
that we're developing...

Are gonna let us have robots
everywhere in our world.

Everything about us
will become intelligent at some level.

A door will have some agent
imbedded in it, every door.

Then when you walk up
to the door...

With two bags full of groceries,
you'll say, "open," and it will open.

These agents, which will be imbedded in all
these physical objects we have around us,

will be able to start talking
to each other.

Later versions can learn
about your habits,

doors will open and close
to control the air flow.

These much more intelligent systems
are gonna infiltrate our lives,

and they'll just be there
operating in the background.

For example,

I get annoyed at all the fluff that
accumulates on my TV screen, the dust.

What if you could buy 20 robots
for a dollar...

In a little bottle?

Empty this bottle of robots
onto the TV screen,

and, while the TV's on, they absorb
electrons and charge themselves up.

When you switch the TV off,

they come out,
spread out over the screen.

They'll each scrub a little
piece and then scurry off...

To the corner of the screen
and sit there again.

Sounds crazy
by today's standards,

but that will be a cost-effective
way to keep a TV screen clean.

The minute they put two colonies together,

they didn't come together
and share a beer.

They went right at it
and started fighting.

So, obviously, there had to be
something that separated them:

A language, an odor,
something that allowed them...

To identify the alien
in their midst to attack them.

They roll in their own feces.

It's a way of making
everybody smell the same.

So it could be that subtle differences
in the aroma that you carry around...

Is enough to set you off
against an enemy.

They don't urinate
on each other.

They urinate
in the midden pile...

Where all the feces is placed,

and then individuals
go there and roll in it.

You'll see them kicking
and rolling...

And shoving around in it,
and then going back into the nest system.

They very rarely just go to the
bathroom, turn around and leave.

When the young are weaned,
they will literally beg for fecal matter...

So they can eat it.

It's different
than the hard pellets...

That you see the adults depositing
when they're going to the bathroom.

This stuff is much more
undigested material.

"I'm gonna go to the bathroom,

"but I'm only going to expel
partially digested food...

"So that some of the whole
bacteria and protozoa...

That's in the fecal material
can be passed on as food."

A lot more zen
bowel movement going on...

Than what you would normally
imagine an animal having.

The nest chamber is like
listening to birds in a forest.

There's constant tweets
and whistles...

And grunts
that are going on inside of the colony.

So there's a language.
For sure, there's a language.

And in tunnel systems,

squeaks and grunts
work very well.

They have their own midden chamber
which is constantly turned over...

Like you would
any good midden pile.

It's kept fresh.

They also have an area
where they store food, so that the nuts...

And some of the tubers
that they're fed are put away.

And they seem to dream
while they sleep.

Parts of their body will twitch like
a cat's do or like the way we do.

Maybe they're thinking about digging
or finding the ultimate tuber.

The only consciousness we've
ever experienced is our own.

I know I'm conscious, but
I don't know about anyone else.

I sort of infer that they're
conscious in the same way I am,

but I don't know that.

What about a horse or a cow?

Or a cat or a dog?
How conscious are they?

What about a chimpanzee
or a gorilla?

Some people argue
that consciousness arises through language,

but I'm not quite sure
I believe that.

It seems to me that language...

Is a very late thing
that's come about accidentally.

I sort of have
this joke theory...

That consciousness
is put there by god...

So that he has this
very quick interface...

To find out
what we're thinking about.

So he can just check on us very
quickly, one after the other.

I had a lion one time that was
bothered by a peanut machine.

It took us two or three days to figure
out why that animal was acting up.

If the peanut salesman didn't turn
the machine on, we were all right.

But sometimes,
during the middle of the lion act,

he'd run out of roasted peanuts,
so he'd start the roaster up.

It was a drum that rolled
and roasted the peanuts,

and this animal would go
completely out of his mind.

Once we found out what
was causing this animal to act that way,

we told the peanut salesman, "don't roast
peanuts during the wild animal act."

I had a big male lion named Leo.

One day, in Lincoln, Nebraska,
he's headed for the door...

And instead of going out,
he went under the stand next to the door...

And waited for me.

One of my assistants hollered,

and I turned around just in time to catch
this animal with my chair and send him out.

He came within a hair of getting
me, so I knew at the night show...

He was going to try the same thing
because he had almost been successful.

Sure enough, the night show, I started
sending him out, but I stood sideways..

Where I could just see him
out of the corner of my eye.

He acted like
he was headed for the door...

Was starting to make a u-turn,

and I went right after him.

And he stopped...

And looked... And immediately went
in the cage and never tried it again.

He realized I knew what he was up to.
There was no use to try it again.

They're all different.
They're like people.

That's the problem
with a wild animal act.

Ladies and gentlemen,
boys and girls,

count together, backwards.

Five... four... three...

Two... one... fire!

Come here.
Come here to daddy. Bring it here to daddy.

Watch it now.
Bring it to papa. Bring it to papa.

There are always a couple
scheming to do something.

Good. Hurry up.

I had no trouble
with this animal for two or three months,

and all of a sudden he blew up.

I was lucky to get out
of the cage in one piece.

Finally, we got them back
in their traveling cages.

Then the next show, he came out,
completely forgot it.

It never crossed his mind again.

The whole concept of stability
is a concept of death.

It's part of my problem
with the Bambi concept of natural history,

where everything is
beautiful and cute and benign.

That's not the world.
The world isn't like that at all.

You're either prey,
you're an enemy or you're ignored.

Think about all the islands.
Island wildlife was wiped out...

Because people could walk up
to it with a stick and hit it on the head.

It's much easier to kill something
that doesn't see you as an enemy.

By the time they realized it,
they were extinct.

In '54, half of the garden
was completely destroyed.

The giraffe lost his head
at that time.

Miss brayton came out.

She says, "oh, my darling
giraffe lost his head."

I won't live long enough
to see a head on that animal."

I said, "it's gonna take
three to four years",

"depending on how much
growth we can get.

I'll have a head
back on it again."

She says, "I won't see a head on that because
I'm only going to live one more year."

She was in her sixties
at the time,

and she lived to be 94.

It's just cut and wait,
cut and wait.

I was watching a bunch of ants
carrying away...

Little pieces
of breakfast cereal.

They didn't have any idea
where they were going.

Some ants were pulling it
the wrong way.

Some ants were dropping it. It was dropping
on the ground. It was getting dragged.

But, nevertheless,
that little piece of breakfast cereal...

Started moving down the trail
in the right direction.

Together, they performed
some global task,

much bigger
than the sum of the parts.

Once we thought about how bees in
bee hives and ants in ant colonies...

Build big structures
and do useful things,

we realized we had to study
how to get robots to interact.

So we got a set
of 20 identical robots called the r-1s,

and we're trying to do
experiments in group behavior,

where we don't have
explicit communication between the robots.

They're not talking
to each other.

They're not negotiating
with each other.

Each of the robots is following
a simple set of rules...

And is able to sense
the presence of other robots.

So they know that thing
over there is another one of me,

another thing
of the same species.

We want to study two questions.

Given a particular set of rules
for all these robots,

what is the global behavior
that emerges...

When you put them together?

And the other way around.

If you want a group task done,
how can you synthesize a set of rules...

That will cause
that task to happen?

I can't imagine a scenario...

In which a woman
would be giving birth to 20 kids at a time,

and she'd have two husbands, and everybody
would be walking around like robots.

I don't know.
The ultimate kibbutz?

You want to have your kids
in your home...

And your security and your pension
plan and all of this stuff,

and to give all of that up
completely...

Is contrary
to how our society is set up.

We wouldn't tend to say,

"okay, listen. In this village,
because we've run out of food,

"we're only gonna be able
to raise one kid.

We all know it,
so let's kill the other 57."

Can you imagine a society
where that's going on? I can't.

Culturally, what we tend to do
is let everybody die.

We wrote a paper for the journal of
the British interplanetary society...

On using very small robots
to explore planetary surfaces.

The title we came up with was
"fast, cheap and out of control:

A robot invasion
of the solar system."

Instead of sending one
1,000-kilogram robot to explore Mars,

our idea was to send a whole
bunch of one-kilogram robots,

maybe a hundred of them.

If you got
a hundred little robots,

you'd be willing to try a higher
risk thing with one of the robots.

If you fail,
you lose that rover.

It's not the end of the mission.

Maybe we're looking
for water sources or some other chemical.

If it does find
what it's looking for, its life is over.

It stops where it is, and it turns up
this little corner reflector to the sky.

Wherever these robots are with their little
corner reflectors, you see a little sparkle.

Now all the robots have accumulated where the
particular chemical we're looking for is,

and you get this automatic map.

The soldiers have routines
and songs that are used...

When they're going out
to protect the nest.

One individual being attacked
by a snake...

Another individual is
walling that individual off.

Although the snake got one,
it wouldn't be able to attack the nest.

The expendability
of the individual.

In ideal situations, they would all
go and try to save the individual.

Right? Go attack the snake.

For all the workers,
it's safer to just say,

"well, 'x' died,
and we'll seal him off."

The queen will have another
22 babies or 14 babies or seven babies.

You have to experience...
An injury.

You have to experience chaos.

My fear is misjudging an animal,

being in the wrong place
at the wrong time,

misjudging conditions
outside the cage.

An electrical storm... thunder doesn't
bother them, an electrical storm does.

A lion or tiger can run 100 yards
in three and a half seconds,

and I'm in a 40-foot cage.

They can nail you
before you say, "oops."

No matter what happens, you always
have a couple of them at your back.

And it's always been...
I have the same nightmare:

One standing on his hind legs...

With his paws
around my neck, chewing on my head.

We were playing
rockford, Illinois,

and the power plant failed.

I was trapped in the cage
with lions and tigers all around me.

I backed up to the side of the cage, and I
took my stick and swung it back and forth.

Every now and then, I hit something.
I knew they were coming after me.

We had one heavy, wet snowstorm...

That weighed the animals down
and got them out of shape.

The camel's neck twisted down,
and it just hung there.

Then the horse and rider
collapsed.

It was a touchy situation.

You're fighting the elements to try to get
them to grow where you want them to grow,

get them to do
what you want them to do.

If it's not one thing,
it's the other.

Then there are different insects
that come in.

They'll eat anything.
If they haven't got what they like,

they'll take the next
best thing.

It's a constant battle
all the time.

In the ultimate form,
all of this stuff is looking at "other."

The exploring and finding
of animals...

It had absolutely nothing
to do with any control...

That we as a person would have.

That feeling that you are in the presence
of life that exists irrelevant of yourself;

That's the "other."

And the "other"
isn't something to be feared.

People are afraid of new,
different, strange,

but to me,
it isn't anything to be feared.

It's something to be wondered at
and looked at and explored,

perhaps communicated with.

Not to sit down
and have a conversation,

but to take pictures of it
and see if you can get...

The moment where the animal
is actually looking at you...

And you feel that there is
a moment of contact:

I know you are. You know I am.

It's not something
that happens every day.

You have to go out
and look for it.

This approach to building
robots will eventually...

Lead to robots as intelligent
as human beings. Look out!

Whether we'll be able...

To interact with them
as we interact with other human beings,

I think, is more open
to question.

It's unlikely they will be
embodied in the same way we are.

They will have different
physical experiences,

and they will be aliens to us.

They constantly need repairing
all the time.

If you don't do that,
they will get out of proportion.

You can't control them anymore.

Caesar! Hey!

No, no!
Caesar, get it over here! Over here. Hey!

Lay down.

Down.

I like the bear, myself,
because it gives me less work.

It looks just as nice during the summer
months as it does during the winter months,

with only two trimmings.

But it took me 15 years
to build the bear.

I won't live long enough
to make another bear like that one.

Only in captivity do
animals get to get old.

Perhaps a queen would become infertile and would
be forced out of the nest with no workers,

and a bird would come along
and eat her.

This is an example.

Or perhaps,
they're digging for a tuber.

Just as they're digging, and they're
about to get that perfect mouthful,

an elephant walks by and goes crunch
and crunches the ground a little bit,

and the mole-rat's squashed.

So very few of them
will probably reach old age.

I haven't seen any
gray-haired mole-rats.

Once they establish this is their cage...

This is where they eat. This is where
they sleep. This is where they drink.

All their creature comforts
are connected with that cage.

They don't particularly
want to leave it.

They don't really
consider themselves caged.

Outside the cage is the cage.
Inside is their world.

They represent a set of
concepts and ideas...

That were thought of
only intellectually,

that have now become a reality.

They were a fantasy that has now
become something that can be looked at.

It's gonna be harder to distinguish...

What is alive
and what is a machine,

and that boundary may start
to become meaningless.

On the other hand, there may
still be some distinction.

We have conquered flight.

We can make machines fly,
but they don't fly the same way birds fly.

That's not to pass
any value judgment.

Does a bird fly better
that a 747?

It depends on
what you're trying to do.

They're just different ways
of living.

Often I've called the robots that
we build "artificial creatures."

I like to think of them as
prototypes towards entities...

Which live in the world in the same
way that animals live in the world.

They may still be useful to us.

You can have a chicken
which lays eggs,

but you don't tell the chicken,
"hey, lay an egg every day."

You just put the chicken
in a chicken Coop...

And give it food,
and out comes an egg every day.

The zen of watching them.
They have the same fascination...

That you would have in looking
at fish in a fish tank...

Or ants in an ant colony.

It's constant movement, only it's
bigger, and it has more of a purpose.

It's trying to figure out
what the purpose is...

That interests me.

I don't expect anybody to
come in and do what I did...

Because they don't have
that experience.

I was told by several professors
from the different schools,

"George, nobody can come in...
With all the book knowledge they've got...

Nobody can come in
and do what you're doing."

I never really left the circus.

I left traveling
with the circus.

I never was completely
unemployed by them.

I couldn't go work
for somebody else, really.

The girl we have working now,

she's young
and doing a very good job,

but she has a lot to learn.

Cobra, come on.

She has all the young animals.

They're growing up together, and,
hopefully, they'll both learn something.

I hope the tigers don't learn
more than she does,

because that can be bad.

But I'm there.
We'll make sure nothing happens to her.

Simba, simba! Let's go, simba.

Like I say, it's a lot easier
for me to do it than watch it.

Easy, renzo.

- Get up. Up.
- I've tried understudies.

I've had several understudies,
but they lose interest in it.

Very few of them want to do
the same thing too long. Good.

They have an idea
that you trim 'em and then just sit back...

And that's it,
but it's not that easy.

It's been more
than half my life,

and I'd hate to see
anything happen to it.

For me, the interest with the
mole-rats is a lifelong interest.

But, in and of itself,

the mole-rat
could have been a bird.

It could have been something
that looked totally different; A pig.

It's the intellectual part of it
that's as stimulating as the reality.

This has nothing to do with science.
This is not scientific observation.

I look at them strictly
from the point of...

Self-knowledge, of learning
not only about them,

but about myself
and the way they react...

And act towards each other.

I now have a colony of mole-rats in
the studio, which is also my home.

They sit behind my desk
and when things are slow they chirp for me.

Many people will move
because they live in a rat...

Or a mouse
or a vermin-infested home.

For me,
it's a whole other issue.

I actually moved with my vermin to make sure
they would always be with me wherever I go.

Some of the researchers view
building these robots...

As the next step in evolution;

A step beyond mere human bodies,
which decay after 70 years.

Building something
that can reproduce at a much faster rate...

And carry on through the life
of the universe.

You always operate on the principle...

That they're never
gonna kill you.

I've had two friends that were trainers
killed since I've been in the business.

We know it can happen.
It's like lighting matches:

You can get burned
if you aren't careful.

But, no, I kind of figure
I'll probably...

Get killed
in an automobile accident...

Or run over by a bus...

Or maybe...

A heart attack.

The problem with most wild animal
trainers is they don't retire anyway.

Very few of them retire.

They train lions
till the day they die.

A lot of them die
of heart attacks.

Clyde beatty died of cancer.

Never smoked in his life either.

Of course, I don't think anybody
thinks they're ever gonna die, do they?

But it'll happen.

Do you miss Clyde beatty? Yes.

I miss him.

I think I miss him just like...

I think we lost part
of the industry.

We lost part of the circus
industry when we lost him.

And, uh...

I don't know
if there will ever be...

Anyone of that stature
left in this business.

I don't even know whether
the situation would arise...

That we could even develop
someone of that stature.

He may have been at the right
place at the right time,

but he was a great performer
and a great trainer.

And I don't think there'll
ever be another one.

Certainly not me.

Some people really believe that...

We are gonna replace ourselves
by building these machines...

And carbon-based life
is on the way out...

And silicon-based life
will be what emerges...

And is the next step,

if you want to make things
sequential, in evolution.

That may be.

There may not be a place
for humans in the future...

If we're really successful
at building these systems.

They may, in fact,

be our legacy to the future.

Earthquake!

She said, "don't let anything
happen to green animals."

Keep green animals going."

I said, "as long as I live,
I'll take care of it."

I don't know
what will happen after that.

Hup!

Okay, let 'em go! Ho!

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

count together, backwards.

Five... four... three...

Two... one... fire!