Simone Giertz is not an engineer. Nor does she have any complete education that brings her close to that field, but her strange projects have turned her into the absolute queen of robots that suck at doing their tasks. In a recent TED talk, Simone shared with the audience how liberating and relaxing it is to build that kind of robot with their catastrophic failures, and how they have helped her combat her anxiety problems related to the perfectionism she pursued in her youth.
The Queen of Robots That Fail
Remember that yellow car turned into a giant computer mouse? The owner of the vehicle is Simone Giertz, one of YouTube's most popular inventors, who recently surpassed one million subscribers. In the past she has built robots to eat soup, brush teeth, cut vegetables, and wash hair. She also tried to cut it using a drone equipped with scissors, and almost lost a substantial part when she got tangled in her mutant alarm clock machine. In short, her robots fail, and they do so in a big way.
Why Build Robots That Always Fail?
Why does she build them then? The process is not only entertaining and educational for those of us watching on screen, but also a solution to help herself. In a TED talk she gave a couple of weeks ago, the inventor admitted to having suffered from serious performance anxiety in the past. She even shared with the audience an email dated 2007 that she had sent to her brother, a brief but worrying text, and the reason was that she had gotten a B in a math exam. The fact of building robots that always fail allows her to set aside all that anxiety, replace it with enthusiasm, and from a certain point of view, have 100 percent success in each project.
A Robot on Stage and a Personal Note
Of course, no Simone talk would be complete without one of her robots on stage, and she presented a kind of orthopedic neck brace with a rotating tray and a small robotic arm that shoots popcorn into her mouth and throws cups to the ground. Personally, I'm glad Simone decided to participate in TED, because she will have to step away from YouTube for a while due to health problems (they detected a brain tumor that requires surgery despite being benign). We hope she can overcome this huge challenge as soon as possible, and that her strange robots conquer the world once again.
