Ayanna Howard

"I became particularly fascinated with the TV show – The Bionic Woman. Watching the show, which correlated with my love for science fiction, helped me to figure out what I wanted to do– I wanted to make an impact on the world and the rest of my life has been about figuring out what that means. Of course, that naturally leads to developing new innovations to make things that matter to people."

"Having diverse perspectives is an important aspect to developing innovative solutions to hard problems. Some of it is because, when you have a group of individuals with different experiences that collaboratively contribute to developing a solution, it gets everyone else in the room to think differently and ask different questions. Studies have shown, time and time again, that when you combine different perspectives from a diverse group of people, the result is having better innovations."

"We are getting closer. In addition to Figure’s advances, Amazon is testing Agility Robotics’ Digit, a two-legged robot, in its U.S. warehouses and Elon Musk’s Tesla is developing a humanoid robot called Optimis. That said, I think we are still a little ways from the tipping point since we don’t yet have a low-cost platform at scale."

"I think we are about a year to three years away from that. When we get there, these robots will begin to displace the factory floor’s lower skill manual jobs, but it will not yet replace the knowledge worker, at least not immediately."

"Robots will take away jobs but, on the more positive side, it will also lead to the creation of new jobs. We are not yet at the stage where robotic systems are fully intelligent. They can navigate in different factory environments, but they aren’t able to think adaptively in dynamic situations. Humans will therefore be needed as their work partners."