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
And he walking toward us. And now I'm starting to think, oh, she was right.
And then he holds up this passport and he says, Monsieur Goldbeer. You know, they're French. And I looked forward. And then he looks at me. He looks at the passport. He looks at me. And then he throws open his arms. And with his big smile with gold teeth, I remember he says, welcome home. What? And I have no idea what he's talking about. Right.
Just what you said. It was the first time I had set foot on the continent of Asher.
yeah since you were here oh my god does he have any sense of that it's in passport that i was born in africa but i have no stamps or anything else wow that is like very heartwarming it was wonderful the delta between what you were expecting what came yeah the biggest delta of your life oh my god yeah exactly i was ready he was gonna clap me in handcuffs or something welcome home with a hug is incredible also for
Yes. They actually have one of the few AI departments in the world there. I didn't know that. Is this Edinburgh University? Yeah. They had connections with Alan Turing and all the early work in AI. So they had this department. And I remember going into this fair. All the departments had these little tables, geography, art history. And I saw this little table with AI. And I was like, what?
Yeah, that's early, early. And I loved it. And it was a great course. We had a little bit of robotics, a little bit of natural language, a little bit of computer vision, all these different aspects of AI. And it was so much fun.
Basically controlling these arms to move in certain ways. And the kind we're used to seeing in like automotive assembly plants? Those claws. That was big thing was like, how can you get it to just move around on a table or something like that? Why do you think that was so exciting? Well, I loved machines like that. I guess it was partly my dad's influence. We had a go-kart when I was a kid.
Model rockets were a big thing. And also, of course, I watched those shows like Lost in Space and things, and I liked robots from that.
So I was there yesterday, and it's actually so nice to return. It was wonderful. Okay, the story is that when I graduated in 1990, there were no jobs for robotics. And this comes back to what you were saying earlier. Robotics has had these waves, and it was in a trough at that time. It was a backlash to a lot of the over-optimism about robots. So there's this thing called AI winters.
Yes, since then. maybe the year 2000 it's only been positive there's been no negative so the students don't know they've never seen that but feifei and i we've lived through it and it's quite dramatic when suddenly everybody decides it's not going to work and it's not useful and all the funding dries up yes At that time, it was very interesting.
Japan was on the rise and everybody thought Japan was the future. There was a whole lot of hope that robots were going to do all the things we're saying today. And it didn't work. And so it was dismissed. It was a backlash.
That was later, but in 1990, I was looking at jobs in Japan and that was my only option. And then this job at USC came along. I was so lucky. I was so happy that they hired me.
Okay, so my version of this is that I was visiting California, and we were driving from San Francisco down to L.A. This was a couple years before. Someone had figured out that you could go to Esalen in the middle of the night and just go in and experience the hot tubs.
Well, it's been around for a long time, right? And it's on the coast. I remember we go and it's dark and there's nobody there. And I remember thinking, they're not going to open up in the middle of the night. What are you talking about? So we were standing there and I was like, let's go. And then all of a sudden this mysterious figure comes and unlocks this gate. We go in.
And sure enough, a couple comes out of those shadows and it's these two beautiful women. Okay. And they come in there. So there's three guys. Are they clothed? Everybody's clothes at this point, but then we go in at this point and they say, well, that's the thing because they say you can leave your clothes here and we'll walk down to the thing.
I'm sort of like, I don't know what they mean by that. So I take off everything but my jeans. Okay. I go down there. As soon as I get down there, it's on the coast, like right on the cliffs. I realize everyone's naked. Yeah. And so they all get in. So I take my pants off and I jump in.
And I'm sitting there at this moment with the stars above me and everything else and thinking, this is where I want to be.
I'm never leaving. This is California. I'm talking about culture shift. Pennsylvania. After being there for an hour or so, we get up to leave and I pick up my pants and I had put them down at a place where the water was rushing through. So they were completely soaked. Seawater dungarees. Rest of the ride. Exactly. Exactly, my only pair. So how do you end up at Berkeley?
I love Berkeley because I love the counterculture part, too. When I was a kid, there was also a head shop in Bethlehem. So I got a little taste, like the furry freak brothers, and I listened to Grateful Dead. I don't know what a head shop is. Where you go buy a water pipe and some tie-dye clothing. Yeah. Oh, okay. Countercultural. They had also those posters with the blue black light. Yeah.
Yeah, and they also had a smell to them, remember? Yep, patchouli kind of.
Showing 61–80 of 221 · page 4 of 12
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