Transcript
Tye Brady (00:01)
You put people to center the robotics universe always, right? Always you put people at the center, like your employees, your frontline employees, the women and men who designed these systems. make it for people. It's not people against machines. It's people and machines working together. And the onus is on us in order to make it responsible, accountable, and ethical for human consumption.
Brian Heater (00:26)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to yet another episode of automated. My name is Brian Heater. I am the managing editor at a three. This week we have a great conversation with Amazon's chief technologist and generally affable gentleman, Ty Brady. We basically go down to his resume and discuss how he helped Amazon amass a one million robot army. We talk jobs, humanoid, AGI, moonshots, spaceships, Star Wars and all that fun stuff.
If you're enjoying the show, please like, subscribe, maybe tell a few friends. Now sit back, relax and watch me and Ty Brady talk for about 45 minutes or so. So I have to say Chief Technologist is a pretty good title, but for my money, it's tough to principal spacecraft engineer.
Tye Brady (01:26)
How about just geeks anonymous? No, I'm not sure about that. I'll tell you. ? I love verbatises. I do love verbatises. I like technologists. ? I like all things nerdy. So whatever title it is, as long as I'm building something, I feel like I'm pretty good.
Brian Heater (01:47)
Obviously, undergrad, you studied aerospace, you entered that world, you stayed in that world for a really long time. You saw yourself really getting into and staying in aerospace and space exploration.
Tye Brady (02:01)
Well, I'll tell you how it all started. Here we go, Brian. Here's how it all started. All right. Let's go. It's in the 70s, late 70s. I loved Star Wars as a kid. Like space and robots was my jam. It was like, isn't that amazing? Just the power of storytelling. I'll share another story. So I love R2D2. R2D2 is definitely my bot. But I'm going to share another very personal story is that
Brian Heater (02:13)
Very familiar story. Literally everybody in this industry has.
Tye Brady (02:30)
When just at that moment in 1977, that moment when Star Wars came out, I'm like, that's really cool. My family's not really the tech family at all. Is that I had one teacher, one single teacher who said to our class, our fifth grade class, is anyone interested in computers? I just saw Star Wars. I'm like, hey, that seems pretty cool. I'm interested. So I raised my hand and another kid raises his hand and it turns out this teacher was on the the board for a technical high school in the county. I grew up in a kind of a one stoplight town and this technical high school, had a deck PDP eight and I didn't know anything about computers and I thought he surely knew about computers. He's asking about it and we show up there because it's like the seventies. We show up there in his car and there's a computer boxed that hasn't been used in six months and So we looked to our teacher and like, hey, what's going on? He was like, I don't know, let's bust out the manual and start to figure this stuff out. So over the next three months, I kind of figured out how to do a little bit of programming, how to write my name. And I was hooked. I love computers. And then the 80s comes around and we have the personal computer revolution. I'm like, oh my gosh, I can actually, I had a TI-994A. Shout out to all my homies out there that know that that's the first 16-bit computer. was going on. really learned to program. fell in love with computing, all things software. I could go to any local arcade and kind of rip off that game maniacally and program at my house. I love that. Then I started doing radio control airplanes as well in the early 80s. And I said, wouldn't it be an amazing, awesome world if I can combine my love for radio control and computers all into one thing. And lo and behold, that's the field of robotics. it's one person. Just one person can make a huge difference in someone's life.
Brian Heater (04:34)
It's wild, you know, especially now looking at how competitive things are, like, sometimes it's just about being the right place at the right time and literally being the one of two people raising your hand. And that's all it takes.
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