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
I tried all these methods and it was basically extremely difficult to try and prove that it would work for all these geometries. I was living at the end of this alley and it was down some stairs and so I was sitting on my porch all the time just like working on this. I have this moment where this pops into my head to use this step function and it looks like stairs.
I remember writing down these equations and crossing off terms and everything turned into zero. And then it worked.
It was this moment where when the whole thing integrated to zero means that there had to be a solution for any polygonal part. Wow. Did it feel transcendent? It felt quite transcendent.
Totally. It was not something that I felt like I did. It was just revealed.
Yes. Very much. I still remember that very distinctly. And I'll admit that one of the equations on the tree is yours.
Yeah, that's your signature. I put it in there. Up with Gauss and Einstein.
The elegance of some of these. Euler's equation is the one that mathematicians truly love.
It's E to the I pi minus one equals zero. It's amazing because you have these three quantities. You have E. which is the natural logarithm, which is like this 2.78 blah, blah, blah. And then you have pi, 3.14159. And then you have i, which is for imaginary numbers. And those three, there's no reason that those should all relate.
The irrational numbers, yes. And they all came from very different sources, but they all come together at this magical moment. Oh, wow. And it's mind blowing. Wow. Like to a mathematician, it shouldn't be. Yeah. And it's like one of those moments where you're like, the universe makes sense.
By the way, I feel like that's where I believe in a higher power. Yes.
There's structure. There's some kind of beauty that makes sense. And that's out there. And when we discover it, we get a glimpse of it. It's like there's something beyond us. I had that one little taste of it. Yeah. That I'll never forget. And that really influenced me. I know it's out there. And I think that's when these breakthroughs happen. In 2012, you had the one breakthrough with AI.
And then in 2022, the second one was ChatGPT. And that has changed so much. And so many people are in robotics, by the way. That's the new wave that everybody's excited about. But now we'll have to wait for the next one. If you look at it, it's every 10 years or more when we get another breakthrough. And I think we need a few more breakthroughs.
Exactly, Dax. You're the anthropologist. Punctuated equilibrium, you have a sort of plateau and then there's a breakthrough or a change. And then there's a long plateau where it kind of gets digested and everything. But that's really what progress looks like.
You would think it's just this nice linear. Not at all. And people say exponential. That's not the case at all. We're not living in exponential times. Most technologies do not increase like that. There'll be a little breakthrough and then a long. Look at air travel. Hasn't really improved. There was a huge jump when it started. Yeah. And we have had things like carbon fiber planes.
And there's definitely things to make it more energy efficient. But in terms of comfort level.
You guys are so great. I have to say, I get this real joy listening to you. Oh. Because you're so open and the way you bring out the best in people. Now I see how it works. You sit down and you just make us feel so at home. Oh, good. But your real genuine rapport is so incredible. And I think that's why you're so incredibly successful. Because people hear it. It's a pleasure. And it's so genuine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Showing 201–220 of 221 · page 11 of 12
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