(YELLING)
(SCREAMING)
(ROARS)
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.
(BELL DINGING)
(CROWD APPLAUDING)
(GRUNTS)
DAVE: 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.
(CHUCKLING) Instead, he encouraged me, so...
He told her the world had to have lion trainers too.
(LIONS GROWLING)
DAVE: Ta-ta. Watch it. Hurry up. Hold it.
Hurry up. Hup, hup. (LION GROWLING)
(CONTINUES GROWLING)
Ta-ta! Caesar!
No, no! Come around here.
Caesar! Ta-ta. Ta-ta.
Come around. Hey, hey! One, two, three!
(WHIP CRACKS)
I came there after the '38 hurricane
to help clean up the place.
It was in December, but it was a hot day,
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.
(THUNDERCLAP)
RAY: 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.
(CHIRPING)
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."
RODNEY: 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 MIT building these 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, and then it happened.
(RUMBLING)
(RUMBLING CONTINUES)
(CRACKS WHIP)
(FIRES PISTOL)
DAVE: 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, 13 exciting episodes.
And, even by the standards then, it was pretty corny.
(LAUGHS) But kids loved it.
Guards! Guards!
DAVE: 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. (CRACKS WHIP)
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.
RODNEY: 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?"
My only answer was, "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."
RAY: 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, 5'0" tall person
being put in a situation where you needed somebody who was 6'5"
and growing to be 6'5".
That's an incredible thing for a mammal to do.
GEORGE: 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.
GEORGE: 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."
(SHEARS CLIPPING)
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."
DAVE: 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.
(CRACKING WHIP)
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.
(GROWLS)
Get set. Jump!
Pongo!
It's physical tension.
Mental stress. (CRACKS WHIP)
That's the bottom line.
If you're not scared of them, you're in big trouble.
(LION ROARS)
RAY: 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.
(BOTH BARKING)
GEORGE: 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, "$44 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."
DAVE: 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. (GROWLING)
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.
(GROWLS)
Never let that bluff down.
RODNEY: 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.
DAVE: 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.
(GROWLING)
GEORGE: 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.
RODNEY: 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.
RAY: 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.
RAY: 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.
(CHIRPING)
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.
Interesting concept to say, "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.
(CROWD CHEERING)
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.
RODNEY: 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.
(WHIP CRACKS)
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!
(GUNSHOTS)
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.
(GROWLING)
RAY: 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.
(THUNDERCLAP)
GEORGE: 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 60s at the time,
and she lived to be 94.
It's just cut and wait, cut and wait.
(SHEARS CLIPPING)
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?
RAY: 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.
RODNEY: 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 rover to explore Mars,
our idea was to send a whole bunch of one-kilogram rovers,
maybe a hundred of them.
If you got a hundred little rovers,
you'd be willing to try a higher risk thing with one of the rovers.
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.
(BEEPING)
Wherever these robots are with their little corner reflectors,
you see a little sparkle.
(BEEPING)
Now all the robots have accumulated
where the particular chemical we're looking for is,
and you get this automatic map.
(BEEPING)
RAY: 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.
(CLOWNS HOOTING)
(CANNON FIRES)
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.
GEORGE: 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.
RAY: 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.
RODNEY: 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.
(LION GROWLING) DAVE: Caesar! Hey!
No, no! Caesar, get it over here! Over here. Hey!
(CRACKS WHIP) Lay down.
Down.
GEORGE: 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.
RAY: 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.
Just as 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.
DAVE: Once they establish this is their cage wagon.
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.
RAY: They represent a set of concepts and ideas
that were thought of only intellectually,
that have now become a reality.
(CROWD CHEERING)
They were a fantasy that has now become something that can be looked at.
RODNEY: 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 than 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 exist in the world and live 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.
RAY: 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.
GEORGE: 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."
DAVE: 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.
DAVE: 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. (CHUCKLING)
But I'm there. We'll make sure nothing happens to her.
(CHUCKLING)
(CRACKS WHIP)
Simba, Simba! Let's go, Simba.
DAVE: Like I say, it's a lot easier for me to do it than watch it.
(SIMBA GROWLS)
(CRACKS WHIP) Easy, Renzo.
Get up. Up.
GEORGE: 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.
(TIGER GROWLS)
(WHIP CRACKS)
RAY: 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 in 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.
(CHIRPING)
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.
(CHIRPING)
RODNEY: 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.
(MEOWS)
DAVE: 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. (CHUCKLES)
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?
(CHUCKLES)
But it'll happen.
INTERVIEWER: 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.
(CROWD CHEERING)
RODNEY: 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.
(FIRES GUN)
(RUMBLING)
(WHIRRING)
(GONG SOUNDING)
Earthquake!
(CLOWN YELLING)
GEORGE: 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.
(LION ROARING)
(WHIP CRACKING) DAVE: Hup!
Okay, let 'em go! Ho!
(LIONS GROWLING)
(DAVE URGING)
(BIRDS CHIRPING)
(SHEARS CLIPPING)
(CLIPPING CONTINUES)
(BIRDS CHIRPING)
(THUNDERCLAP)
(RAIN POURING)
(RAIN CONTINUES)
(THUNDERCLAP)
(MOLE-RATS CHIRPING)
(CHIRPING CONTINUES)
RINGMASTER: Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,
count together, backwards.
RINGMASTER: Five, four, three... CROWD: Five, four, three...
...two, one. ...two, one.
Fire! (CANNON EXPLODES)
(CROWD CHEERS)
(ROBOT SCURRYING)
(ROBOT WHIRRING)