Jeff Burnstein, President of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), reveals why eight countries have national robotics strategies while America doesn't—and what four decades of industrial robot history teaches us about humanoid adoption.

In this interview from Humanoids Summit SV 2025, Jeff explains the critical role of safety standards in commercialization, why Japan's 1960s strategy created sustained leadership while China dominates today, and how A3 is reframing "robotics" as "embodied AI" to gain traction in Washington D.C.

Key Topics:

• Why national robotics strategies drive competitive advantage

• Safety standards: from 1986 industrial robots to 2025 humanoids

• Cultural barriers: Hollywood's Terminator vs. Japan's friendly robots

• Hospital robotics: the under-recognized opportunity beyond manufacturing

• Historical lessons: hype cycles, dark periods, and realistic timelines

• Data privacy and AI training data issues for home robots

About Jeff Burnstein:
Jeff is President of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), leading the organization's standards development, industry advocacy, and policy work including the push for a National Robotics Strategy. A3 developed the first American national robot safety standard in 1986, which became the basis for international ISO standards. With four decades in the robotics industry, Jeff witnessed the first industrial robot revolution and brings essential perspective on adoption cycles and commercialization barriers.

Resources:
Association for Advancing Automation (A3): https://www.automate.org

World Robot Conference (Beijing): https://www.worldrobotconference.com

This interview is co-released by Turn the Lens and Humanoids Summit. Humanoids Summit is organized and hosted by ALM Ventures.

Recorded at the Humanoids Summit SV 2025, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.

For more on Humanoids Summit, including May 2026 in Tokyo visit https://humanoidssummit.com/

For more from Humanoids Summit SV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRz7mBlytVs&list=PLJCOPK6OJb1CLbLLXmBCS9sQPTj3kyE-F

Jeff Burnstein: Robotics Imperative, Standards, National Strategy | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick Ep49

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Ed Colgate, Northwestern University, and Director of the HAND ERC reveals why the secret to dexterous manipulation isn't precision engineering, but something surprisingly simple: softness and large contact areas.

In this conversation from Humanoids Summit 2025, Ed explains the fundamental difference between human and robot manipulation, how AI finally enables control of complex hands, and why artificial muscles might solve the chronic overheating problem.

Key Topics: • Why large soft contact areas matter more than finger articulation • How softness enables sensing and control, not just collision safety • The HAND ERC: 5 universities, 33 faculty tackling robotics' hardest problem • AI-enhanced prosthetics bridging the brain-machine interface bandwidth gap • Artificial muscles using thermal, light, and electrical stimulation • The "beautiful negotiation" of dexterity between humans and environment • Why motion smoothness dramatically affects human acceptance of robots

About Ed Colgate: Ed is a Professor at Northwestern University and Director of the HAND ERC (Human AugmentatioN via Dexterity Engineering Research Center), a major NSF-funded initiative bringing together MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Florida A&M, and Texas A&M. The center focuses on advanced hardware, AI control systems, and human-robot interfaces with a decade-long mission to develop dexterous robots that help people be more productive.

Recorded at Humanoids Summit 2025, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California

Links & Resources: • HAND ERC: [URL] • Northwestern University Robotics: [URL] • Ed Colgate Faculty Page: [URL] • Humanoids Summit: https://humanoidssummit.com • Full show notes: [your website URL/episode] • Video version: https://youtu.be/rO_miJL--n4

What surprised you most about the role of softness in robotic hands? Share your thoughts on our website or social media.

About This Series: Part of our comprehensive coverage from Humanoids Summit 2025, featuring 10+ conversations with leaders in embodied AI and robotics.

More Humanoids Summit Interviews: • Carolina Parada (Google DeepMind) • Pete Florence (Physical Intelligence) • Jeff Burnstein (A3 - Association for Advancing Automation)

This interview is co-released by Turn the Lens and Humanoids Summit. Humanoids Summit is organized and hosted by ALM Ventures.

Recorded at the Humanoids Summit SV 2025, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.

Subscribe for more interviews on the future of work, AI adoption, robotics, and organizational change.

Nic Radford, Co-founder and CEO of Persona AI, sits down with Jeff Frick at Humanoids Summit 2025 (presented by ALM Ventures) to unpack a hard truth: robots aren't difficult to build—they're difficult to make useful.

Radford's career arc reads like a tour of extreme environments: NASA space robotics, deep ocean exploration, and now shipbuilding automation. Each demanded solving communication, distance, and harsh conditions. This time, he's focused squarely on commercial viability from the start.

His framework for finding the right market is brilliant: look beyond the traditional "3Ds" (dirty, dull, dangerous) to the fourth D—declining labor supply. But not just any shortage. Radford specifically targets industries where workers are well-compensated, the labor pool is shrinking, and companies are open to innovation. That intersection led him to shipbuilding and the skilled trade of welding.

The technical insight? Focus on generalizable skills, not general-purpose robots. Welding represents tool manipulation within defined rules—a capability that extends to painting, grinding, and other skilled trades requiring precision with tools.

But the conversation goes beyond technology. Radford addresses the non-technical barriers that can kill adoption: insurance, liability, ethics, and regulatory frameworks. He reveals that Persona's first advisory board hire was an ethics committee chair. Drawing parallels to autonomous vehicles, he explains why insurance companies struggle with accidents "at the hands of a machine," even when overall fatality rates drop dramatically.

After three robotics ventures, Radford finally has the convergence he needs: capable AI, willing investors, and most importantly, customer partnerships embedded from day one. He's tired, but he couldn't stay away from the opportunity.

This interview is co-released by Turn the Lens and Humanoids Summit. Humanoids Summit is organized and hosted by ALM Ventures.

Recorded at the Humanoids Summit SV 2025, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.

Transcript and Extensive Show Notes

YouTube

For more on Humanoids Summit, including May 2026 Summit in Tokyo visit
https://humanoidssummit.com/

For more from Humanoids Summit SV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mbbeOzRPQk&list=PLJCOPK6OJb1CLbLLXmBCS9sQPTj3kyE-F

Five game-changing AI tips from my training with Kyle "KMo" Moschetto. Discover the RGCOA framework for prompt engineering, why paying for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini is essential for serious work, and how understanding tokens, context windows, and temperature settings can dramatically improve your results. Practical, tested insights you can apply immediately to get more from generative AI tools.

Stop the Slop: Five AI Fundamentals, Smarter Prompts, Real Results | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick Ep 45

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOMin0E1BoA&list=PLZURvMqWbYjk4hbmcR46tNDdXQlrVZgEn

Transcript and Show Notes

Carolina Parada and the team have delivered Gemini Robotics, Google DeepMind's vision-language-action (VLA) foundation model. Gemini Robotics provides the general-purpose 'understanding' enabling robots to go from pixel to action.

How do you teach a machine to understand the physical world well enough to move through it, manipulate it, and help people in it, when every case is a corner case, never experienced in training?

Embodied AI. AI with arms and legs and the ability to interact with the real world. Gemini Robotics is designed to generalize across platforms, so it works for robots that walk, roll, fly, and swim, with any end-effector, be it a hand, gripper, pincher, or suction cup. Gemini Robotics is designed to generalize across tasks and skills to respond to just about any request that the robot receives.

I sat down with Carolina to explore Google DeepMind's approach to embodied AI at the Humanoids Summit 2025, hosted and organized by ALM Ventures at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

Carolina has been working on teaching machines to recognize and respond to the environment in more human-centric ways, starting with speech and voice, then computer vision, and now robotics.

At the heart of her work is Gemini Robotics, a foundation model that takes the multimodal reasoning capabilities of Gemini and extends them into the physical world. It's a VLA, vision-language-action, model. Going beyond "how many cars are in this image?" to "dunk the ball" when playing with a basketball toy. Embodiment-agnostic, it can adapt to control any robot: manipulators, mobile platforms, and the quickly developing humanoids.

Data, Constitutional AI, teleoperation, video training, good candidates for the top concepts covered. But what impressed me more was her description of bringing new people in to experience the robots, inevitably asking the robots to do things they've never heard before, or interacting in Japanese or another language, only to have the robot respond appropriately, creating 'delight, surprise, and joy.'

That is a robot future I can get excited about.

Please join me in welcoming Carolina Parada to Turn the Lens, in collaboration with Humanoids Summit and ALM Ventures.

This interview is a collaboration between Turn the Lens and Humanoids Summit, and was conducted at the Humanoids Summit SV, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California, December 12, 2025. Humanoids Summit is organized and hosted by ALM Ventures

Carolina Parada: Embodied AI, Gemini Robotics, Delightful Surprise | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick Ep 44

Learn more about Humanoids Summit at
http://www.humanoidssummit.com

YouTube
https://youtu.be/BUH1CysZX6A

Trancripit and Show Notes

Welcome back.

The world has changed quite a bit since we launched Turn the Lens. And in 2025, my new episode frequency was not as high as I'd like. For a bunch of reasons, some in my control and some not, I haven't been as consistent as I want to be. And I know consistency matters. I appreciate it in the creators I follow, it matters to me, and it matters to you, our community.

My commitment for 2026: More. More frequent, more consistent, more solo segments, same interesting guests and topics. More Turn the Lens.

Part of that means new tools. Not only desktop tools like Claude and Gemini, but also embodied AI tools like the autonomous drone I used to film this episode. It means getting out of the studio more. And it means more collaborations around the events and conversations that matter.

We're excited to announce a collaboration with Humanoids Summit. Over the next few weeks, we'll be releasing ten interviews with some of the leading minds working on humanoid robotics and embodied AI.

So thanks for sticking around. Thanks for reaching out and connecting—it means a lot. Get ready for more topics, more guests, and more conversations about the trends that matter. Not just the headlines, but why these developments actually matter to you and me, our kids, and future generations.

That's what Turn the Lens has always been about.

Important work to do. Let's get back to it.

Welcome Back: New Technology, Horizon Explorations, Human Lens | Turn the Lens podcast with Jeff Frick, Ep43

YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P8kRL_Px1I&list=PLZURvMqWbYjk4hbmcR46tNDdXQlrVZgEn

Episode page with transcript and extensive show notes:
https://www.turnthelenspodcast.com/episode/welcome-back-new-technology-horizon-explorations-human-lens-turn-the-lens-ep43

Andra Keay, Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics, has been at the forefront of robotics research, commercialization, and policy for decades. A self-described “techno-pragmatist,” Andra has her pulse on the robotics industry, in the San Francisco Bay Area and around the world. Importantly, she is conscious and intentional to try and get ahead of the big issues we face down the road with the societal shifts coming as millions of robots, humanoid and other form factors, populate more of our world and interactions.

Andra is pro RoboTopia, and against an AI apocalypse. And robotics offers an insight into the world of AI, as they are AI with arms and legs, removed from the black box behind the screen, but out among us, where the consequences of a hallucination or miscalculation can have physical implications. Industrial robots were behind barricades and safely screens. Next gen Humanoids will work in homes, senior care facilities, factories, and other places with direct interaction with people.

Andra is a frequent industry speaker, and in fact, we’ve shared a few panels together over the years, but this is the first time she’s visited Turn The Lens so we could really get into it without restrictions.

And the timing couldn’t be better. Humanoid robots are having their moment. Figure just raised a $1B Series C, with a $39B post money valuation. Customers are moving from pilots to commercial engagements. Capacities are compounding at an exponential rate.

Oh Yeah, and did I mention LLMs and their like have transformed the robot training paradigm.

The next great wave of technological change is upon us. Humanoid Robotics, AI with arms, legs, and an ability to navigate the world, and do things.

If you follow no one else, follow Andra to keep up on this part of our rapidly changing world. Subscribe to Robots & Startups on Substack.

Andra Keay: Robo-Pragmatist, Humanoids, Technological Shifts, Laws | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick, Ep42

#AndraKeay #Humanoids #Robotics #AI #TechnologyShifts #Automation #Ethics #RoboticsLaw #TurnTheLens #JeffFrick #FutureOfWork #Innovation #TechPolicy #Simulation #GenerativeAI #GenAI #RoboticsIndustry #FiveLaws #Society #Interview #Podcast #TurnTheLens

YouTube -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp46AO7aC_4&list=PLZURvMqWbYjk4hbmcR46tNDdXQlrVZgEn

Transcript and show notes -

https://www.turnthelenspodcast.com/episode/andra-keay-robo-pragmatist-humanoids-technological-shifts-laws-turn-the-lens-ep42