News/Research

Ken Goldberg at the Applied Innovation Exchange

28 Jul, 2017

Ken Goldberg at the Applied Innovation Exchange

Update

Goldberg delivered an engaging lecture at this month's "What's Now: San Francisco" on why we shouldn't be afraid of Artificial Intelligence.

Refuting notions that robotics, automation systems, will drastically ruin future job prospects, Goldberg asserted that "Diversity in hiring is not about correcting a historic wrong or being politically correct, it’s about getting better performance.”

Read the whole recap of Goldberg's talk over at Reinvent.

Original Post

BCNM's ever-industrious Ken Goldberg continues to spread his findings on robotics — this time he spoke at "What's Now: San Francisco" at the Applied Innovation Exchange.

Once a month, Reinvent and Capgemini gather a diverse group of innovators at the new Applied Innovation Exchange in SOMA for an evening of discussion and networking, along with food and drinks. Each month they feature a remarkable individual embedded in one of the Bay's rapidly expanding fields —someone who can explain the big story, what’s most important now, and what’s coming next. Over the course of a year Applied Innovation has explored a range of sectors – from AI to biotech to clean energy to food – that make San Francisco ground zero for breakthroughs that soon will impact the rest of the world.

Goldberg led July's conversation "Singularity or Multiplicity: Envisioning a Benign Robot Future," on the important innovations emerging from the Bay Area.

Goldberg doesn't believe the prevailing robot panic of our times. His experience running a robotics lab suggests that AI and robots will empower humans, not replace them. “The important question is not when machines will surpass human intelligence, but how humans can work together with them in new ways,” Ken wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal. Rather than fearing the Singularity, the point at which artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence, Ken encourages us to focus on what he calls Multiplicity, which he defines as “diverse groups of people and machines working together to solve problems.” Multiplicity characterizes much of the recent innovation at Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Uber, where input from people plays a central role.

Read more about the event here.