Ken Goldberg and the Multiplicity at Tata Communication Summit
Ken Goldberg, EECS professor and automaton extraordinaire, presented at Tata Communications's CEO Summit earlier this July in Ascot, UK. The summit is an exclusive event for a select group of CEOs from a wide range of sectors lead by global thought leaders. The theme of the 2016 Summit was "artificial intelligence meets emotional intelligence," with the thought that industry is bound to fulfill the potential that AI holds while safeguarding against it's disruptions. With this in mind, the summit pulled 50 CEOs from finance, manufacturing, energy, distribution and technology to hear AI experts speak.
Ken, who serves as the Director of the People and Robots Initiative (a CITRIS multicampus multidisciplinary research program established in April 2015) and UC Berkeley's Automation Sciences Research Lab (since 1995), spoke on "Multiplicity: Combining the Power of People and Machines" and also reviewed three books sensationalizing 'the singularity'. The singularity is the hypothetical event when a self-upgrading intelligent agent hits an intelligence explosion and surpasses human abilities. This is assumed to be the end of the human era. While AI and robots are becoming more capable, they are not threatening such an event. In the meantime, the rhetoric of such a future distracts from the growing trend of human and machine collaboration.
Ken proposed instead a focus on 'the multiplicity.' Multiplicity combines machine learning, the wisdom of crowds, and cloud computing — people are essential to it. Multiplicity characterizes an emerging category of intelligent systems where diverse groups of people interact with diverse groups of machines to solve problems like searching for documents, filtering out spam emails, translating between languages, recommending news and movies, driving cars, and interpreting photos and videos.
Learn more about the Summit, Prof. Goldberg's work and his thoughts on the Multiplicity.