As far as I could tell at the time, my very first interview at JPL did not go well. This was at the end of an internship when I was poking around about full time jobs and my mentor helped me set up a meeting with a couple of supervisors. I was expecting a friendly get to know you meeting, but boy was I wrong! I started getting roasted as soon as I walked into that office and was not prepared at all. I never heard back from either of those supervisors that summer and left feeling a bit dejected.

I still recall the first question, it went something like, “so you’re working on robots, what is a robot to you anyway?” I don’t recall what I stammered next but I can’t imagine it was particularly comprehensive or interesting. Regardless, I was recently reflecting on this moment and realized that I now feel like I have an answer. I wish I would have said something like: a robot is a device that has the ability to semi-autonomously interact with its environment by sensing the world around it and the ability to react to stimuli. This implies a device that includes some sort of sensor, some sort of actuation, and at least a bit of computing power to make decisions.

I wouldn’t consider a washing machine or a toaster to be a robot as neither have the ability to react to changes in the environment. Similarly, I don’t think even the most intelligent of computers, if not connected to some form of actuation, is a robot either. The region I find most interesting is the liminal space in between these extremes where technology is neither a passive machine, nor a disembodied superintelligence, but is instead a participant in the real world that we experience every day.

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Epilogue: Things must not have gone that bad in that initial interview. Six months into grad school I received an email from the same manager that said something like “Hey Evan, I was impressed with your interview last summer and am hiring engineers, what are you up to these days?” I was hired by the same person a year later after I finished my Master’s degree. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere about not being too hard on yourself and believing in your skills but I’m not quite sure what it is.