Deep Future Robot Massage is Alive! – Eric Litman
One of the really important things to solve for is how do we get robots working much more closely with humans. And this is really difficult for a whole bunch of reasons, and you guys know some of them. But the truth is they need to be able to really get close. We need them to touch our bodies.
And right now what we do with robots is we put them in giant cages and keep them away from the humans in case they need it. move at the wrong time. And that’s, that’s a good stopgap for now, but where we really want to be able to go is a world where we can trust the robots to treat us as the way that our, friends and family or massage therapist would.
And so today we get to hang out with Eric Litman, who’s on the forefront of trying to solve this problem by making robots that can give you a massage. And I, for one, have been wanting to do this for years. If you listened to the episode that Ash and I did, about the MassageBot 5000, you got a kind of a preview.
This week I got to go visit Aescape which is Eric’s new company,. They’ve been working on this robot since 2017. I got a massage from it. My first massage from a robot. It’s in beta here in New York City. You can do that too. And hopefully soon these robots will be all over the world. And so Eric and I talk about his, journey, what caused him to get into doing this, taking this on in the first place, the hard problems that they ran up against, why this is difficult.
And look, these guys are pioneers. They’ve been at it for seven years. They’ve spent a lot of time and effort figuring out how do you make a. robot that’s literally right up on you, specifically trying to manipulate your body. That is safe, trustworthy, comfortable, not scary. And they have solved all that.
I can tell you for sure. If anything, I wanted it to be more aggressive with me than they’re willing to let it be at the moment. But it is a really competent. Massage therapist already. And so it’s very exciting, why I want to share this stuff with you and why I’ve been seeking out these kinds of roboticists, and there are a couple of others that you’ll meet soon, is that there’s really important inflection point coming.
And Eric and I talk about it a little bit here in this conversation, but the thing that has to happen is we have to make it a lot easier to go do new things with robots. And in the past, up until now, and even with Aescape they’ve had to just build everything from the ground up, and it’s too much for a startup to take on.
It’s too much to do, in one, company. We really need to get to a point where building robots and building, automation and building all these automated tools is as easy as building things in software. And this is happening. The toolkits are coming, the frameworks are coming, the SDKs are coming, the software to be able to integrate these things is coming, and we’re at an important inflection point where those things will start to exist in the next couple of years, and so the, as you listen to this conversation, think about how the next company that’s trying to do something like Aescape not going to take seven years.
We will be able to do them faster. We will be able to do more and more of them and it’s going to make a huge difference. So look, Eric is an experienced, guy who spent his whole career in the tech industry, had a couple of exits, was able to take on doing something new. We don’t really need to pick all that apart.
If you want to go read his bio, we’re going to link to it in the notes, but as you’ll get immediately by listening to this conversation, he’s a great entrepreneur. He’s got a lot of energy. He knows what to do and they’ve been, they’ve been at it and it’s really exciting. Please enjoy this conversation and then, quit your job and go work for Aescape.
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Recorded on July 27, 2024The post Robot Massage is Alive! – Eric Litman appeared first on .