Ken Goldberg
speaker
221 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 7 May
Ken Goldberg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That's what keeps us human. But it has these amazing insights. Like, it'll just come up with these analogies and things, and they weren't in the document that you gave it. Yeah. It just came up with these other things. Yeah. But the back and forth, like the pacing and everything else, is so good. It is.
It has a sense that they're comfortable with each other. They're kind of back and forth. You can feel their rapport. Rapport. Yes.
Don't worry. You have a very special. And also, by the way, if you listen to a couple of these and I have, it starts to become a little repetitive. It's not like that's going to do a whole podcast series.
There's something that's not quite new and fresh about them. At first, it sounds really great. But after a while, it's not really satisfying.
Yeah, I think unless we can figure out ways to sort of feed it and prompt it. And so we can use it as a tool to discover new things. And sometimes it's good at that where you give it a paper and you say, come up with 10 extensions of this paper. And maybe one of them will be really interesting. Or you could do it for subjects for the show.
You could say, well, what are some good brainstorming topics that would come up that we could have as our, what do you call it? Like conversation starters? Yeah. It could come up with new ones of those.
Yeah. Like prompts.
It's hard to say. One thing I do think we're going to see is the extension of the Roomba is a robot that can pick up clothes and declutter around the house.
And I think it might have four legs. So it'll be a little dog with an arm.
I think it might have a tail, because tails are actually really important. For balance? For also user interface. A dog's tail is very interesting, and that's very deeply rooted also in our psychology. We have a reaction when you see a dog with a tail wagging.
But if you notice, none of these dogs that are out there yet have tails. So we're building one.
No, I'd love to tell you. So she's a filmmaker and has been involved in technology for a long time, Tiffany Schlain. And she and I have collaborated a little bit, but this is our first big collaboration. And we've been having so much fun. We got invited as part of the Getty is doing this citywide exhibition on art and science. It's going on for a whole year.
And so they have each of these different institutions do exhibits. And so the Skirball invited Tiffany and I to do one for them related to art and science. We've been working on it for like three years, and we came up with this idea of talking about history more broadly, but also using trees and the science of tree ring dating. You know how you count the rings?
Right. And they're very Western patriarchal. And so she had started actually over the pandemic doing a feminist tree ring. Okay. And then a couple of other ones, she's been developing these sculptures and they're salvaged wood. So we don't cut down trees to do this, but there's a lot of these big redwoods and other forms out there.
So for this show, we wanted to do something around that started with the tree of knowledge. Uh-huh. This is very cool. We found a tree stump that was gigantic, almost as big as this room. It's 7,000 pounds.
It's a eucalyptus, but it was uprooted and sort of fell over. And then one side is sanded down. And so when you walk into the gallery, you see the back end of it. So it's all this knotted, gnarly roots. And then around the other side, we inscribed it with questions trying to talk about the history of knowledge and how it evolved.
from what is fire and can I eat this, which is thousands of years ago, the kind of questions he asked. But those evolved into, will machines be intelligent? Yeah. And on the far end. So it has 600 questions or something on there.
It's another piece, actually, that we call abstract expression, which is a redwood. Yes, it starts with Pythagoras. But remember, it's not literal because that tree wasn't 5,000 years old. We take some liberties. Okay, okay. How old was that tree? I think like 400 years old. Maybe 500. But that's the idea. It's like we're kind of playing off of that known concept.
But this time we wanted to tell the history of science and do it through just equations. And we never say Pythagoras on there. It just says the equation. But those equations are kind of beautiful in their own right. And they're kind of artistic because in a way art takes an image and there's a lot of content and meaning behind it. And that's true with the scientific equations.
Yes.
Showing 181–200 of 221 · page 10 of 12
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