Uploaded October 2019 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago

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Dr Tessa Lau (@tessalau) is the founder and CEO of Dusty Robotics, a startup who's mission is to address construction industry labor shortages by introducing robotic automation on the jobsite. Prior to Dusty, she was CTO/co-founder at Savioke, where she orchestrated the deployment of 75+ delivery robots into hotels and high-rises and she's spent an impressive career (including 11 years at IBM) focused on automation and giving people superpowers.

Full episode ---- https://disruptors.fm/152-delivery-drones-and-a-robot-future-tessa-lau

In today's episode we discuss:

- What makes scaling a robot fleet so hard
- Why Tessa is a big proponent of universal basic income
- How far are we from human-level intelligence
- Why we'll have full self-driving in ten years
- The risk of building robots that look human
- Why construction is prime for disruption
- The unique challenges of building a hardware robotics company
- What automation will do towards affordable housing
- The state of drone delivery and more
- Why we're headed towards a future with no privacy
- Where to focus for a career for the future
- The big problem with robot anthropomorphism

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