Robots in factories can afford to be stupid — we built a perfectly controlled world around them. Take one outside, into a forest or a field or “national security out in the dirt,” and it falls apart. Rolf Mueller’s work lives at that frontier: machines that have to be both genuinely nimble and genuinely smart in the messy real world. The catch is that fusing a capable body to a capable brain means searching a space so vast no supercomputer can brute-force it. His cheeky solution is intellectual-property theft — steal the answers from the one entity that already ran the search for billions of years: evolution. The thief’s target is the bat. Mueller makes the case that bats are little superheroes carrying exactly the powers autonomy demands — sonar that brings its own light into total darkness, and powered flight no other mammal has — which is why more than one in five mammal species is a bat. But the detail that should stop you is how cheaply nature pulled it off. A bat matures in under a month on less biosonar data than you burn through your phone in a month, while training one outdated chatbot reportedly took thousands of times more. If we don’t learn that kind of frugality, he warns, we’ll drain the planet’s power just to train chatbots — while a creature that hunts through the jungle with its eyes closed runs on almost nothing. Then he shows what his lab has actually built — and where it’s headed. The talk earns one of the strangest closing images you’ll see on a TEDx stage: a “robot breeding program.” Watch to find out what gets bred, and why marrying a smart brain to a nimble body might be the only honest path to machines that can survive outside the lab.
