I believe you with Ted talks daily and I'm recording this in Los Angeles, which is world renowned for its car culture, but no matter where you are in the world, spending so much time on roads, whether it's driving or parking places, astronomical costs on clean air and affordable housing opportunities at Ted 20-20, Ali Kashani shares a vision of the future to help stop vehicles from wasting energy and space on the streets.

He's the VP of Special Projects at Postmus, the food delivery company, and his vision of the future drivers won't have to be the ones delivering your food.

Food delivery is the thing that saves millennials from starvation. By my calculations, Americans or there are about 20 million restaurant deliveries every single day. Over half of the deliveries are actually within walking distance, but nine out of 10 are delivered in cars. So basically we are moving a two handle item in a two time car 20 million times a day. The energy to bring you that burrito is actually bringing you a two time metal cage with heated seats. Let's be honest, we are addicted to our cars.

Did you know that in America, for every car there are four parking spots in some downtowns, over half of the real state is for cars. We have designed our cities around our cars because we drive whether we're going two miles or two hundred miles solo or with our whole family. But getting to the same SUV to go buy coffee or a coffee table, if we could free up some of the streets and parking lots, we could build more housing, more social spaces, more parks.

But to do that, first, we need to rethink how we are using cars today in the city of the future. If you want to go five blocks, you summon a bike or a scooter. If you rush a passenger, train would pick you up. And if you need food, no need to have someone drive over. The food will make its way to you. Let's go back to those 20 million a day restaurant deliveries. If we could get these deliveries off the roads, we could reduce the need for as many as one and a half million cars just in the US.

That's twice the size of San Francisco. Now, think of the impact this could have on cities like Delhi or my city of Tehran, where car pollution is killing thousands of people every year. So how do we get some of these deliveries off the road? Well, that's a question that my team and I have been obsessed with over the last three years, and the solution is actually one of the building blocks of the city of the future. We've been creating small self-driving robots that navigate quiet alleys and sidewalk on a walking pace and have a secure cargo to deliver your food and supplies.

Now, before I tell you more about the robots, let's do a quick thought experiment. In your mind's picture, a city with thousands of robots, Hollywood dystopia is what a lot of people expect, but our job is to create a friendly future that's designed for people. So instead of making aliens, we set out to create robots that are unfamiliar robots that would belong in our communities. But we also wanted a little surprise, something unexpected and delightful.

Think about it. You're walking down the street and you see your very first robot. That's the moment when you're going to decide if this is a future you love or fear. And with a lot of people having this dystopian ideas, we need to open their minds. We want to surprise and delight them so that we can win them over on first impression. As soon as we drove us out on the street, we learned some really interesting problems like how should robots cross the road or how should robots interact with people with visual or mobility impairments.

We quickly realized that we need to teach robots how to communicate with people. People on the sidewalk come from every walk of life, so we needed to create a new language, kind of a universal language so people and robots can understand each other right off the bat because no one is going to be reading user manuals. We started with ice because ice are universal. They can show that the robot is going or if it's confused. Plus, ice make robots more human.

We also use sounds. For example, we created this running sound with frequent gaffes so that people with visual impairments could locate the robots using a Doppler effect. But it turned out these were not enough at intersections cause with cut in front of our robots, drivers were getting confused. Sometimes because robots would take too long before they started crossing, even ordinary pedestrians were getting confused. Sometimes they couldn't figure out which side to pass the robots because robots make a lot of small adjustments to the direction as they move.

This actually sparked a new idea. What if we use movements to create a universal language like at intersections, robots with gently move forward before they start crossing to signal to drivers that it's their 10? If they see someone in a wheelchair, they yield by pointing themselves away from the sidewalk to signal that they're not going to move. Some of you may remember this in twenty fifteen Canadian researchers sent a robot hitchhiking across the US. It didn't get very far.

It turns out that robots can also use some social skills like if they're being tampered with, Carnegie Mellon researchers have shown that small toy robots should play dead because people feel bad when they think they broke it. But they live in robots and toys. They're not smart. They're out there in public. We found that we delivered robots to get people to stop tampering. Robots need to show awareness. It's kind of the opposite of saying that in this case, robots need to acknowledge the situation to get people to step away.

Also, word of advice. If you are a robot and you see small kids run towards the closest adults, it turns out that some kids just love harassing robots. So besides dystopia, Hollywood also promised us some really cool robots that would run our errands or keep us company. So far, we've really focused on food delivery. But in the future, these robots can do more like they could gather excess food and bring it to shelters every night, because in America we waste 30 percent of our food while 10 percent of our people experience food insecurity.

These robots could be part of the solution. Or when we have hundreds of robots running around cities, we could have robots carry emergency medications at all times just in case someone nearby has an allergic reaction or an asthma attack. These robots could be on site within a minute or two faster than anyone else. And during pandemic's robots can be a key part of our infrastructure. They can ensure that we can provide our communities with their essential needs, even during emergencies.

Let me leave you with one last thoughts today. Objects you can't get from A to B without human help, because our three dimensional world is quite complex. But new sensors and I can change that in a way. Technology is like a baby that has just learned to recognize objects and understand words and maybe even hold a basic conversation. But it hasn't learned to walk yet. Now are teaching technology how to navigate the three dimensional world without our help.

We are entering this new era where incents objects are going to get up and move freely. And when they do, they're going to make sure they don't look like aliens. My vision for the future is that when things come to life, they do so with joy, know less like the movie Terminator and more like Toy Story. Thank you. Hi, I'm Sally Russian, while a host of a new podcast from Ted called PIN Drop. Every week you'll travel to a different location around the world, get lost in a new vibe and tap into a surprising idea.

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