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 don't like them, but I'm glad you like them. Oh, interesting. Okay, all right. Well, that was a big thing for me. Like, it was somehow a little bit illicit and off-limits, and I found it very interesting to see what was going on there. And I also loved the beat poets and all the rebels. So Berkeley was a big attraction.
I agree. There was this idea that it's really about being a rebel at some level and being able to buck the status quo. And that I've always admired from Oppenheimer. They discovered all these elements and all these Nobel Prize winners.
You know, it's not about just being space cadets. Being on acid all day. Right. Because there is a sort of berserkly kind of idea, right? But it's not because you have to be grounded. Berkeley is not the easiest school to attend because it's big and it doesn't hold your hand. I've driven up to just look at it and you don't get the sense of, oh, I'm entering this secure border. It's very shaggy.
There's no real border. There's no gates. By the way, USC has these gates. You have to have an ID and everything. Nothing like that at Berkeley. A hippie vibe is still floating around. It's definitely got a lot of coffee shops, which I love that. But the rigor is that you have to work hard and you have to be willing to get what you want.
Like you can't get into this class, but you go and you camp out in your sleeping bag next to the professor and talk your way in.
Motivated and grit. Angela Duckworth.
Yes, exactly. She's the queen. I think that word really sums up. Students, when they ask, should I come to Berkeley or not, or even faculty, and I say, well, if you want to be comfortable, maybe not.
Oh, really? Yeah, because if you think about something that looks... human or a machine that has like surprising abilities. So people have been always fascinated by that. And they had these statues that use steam to sort of move their arms and stuff. So that has a long history. But they were functional or these were ideas drawn? No, they're functional. Wow.
Yeah, with like levers and chambers that would fill with fluid and then they would raise their arm.
Yeah, it wasn't steam per se, but it was just like liquid that would fill up a chamber. But they had simple mechanisms that goes up through the Greeks. And then there's all these stories about Pygmalion coming to life. You know, the statue comes to life. And the story, of course, there is that he falls in love with the statue. I don't know Pygmalion, so help me.
Pygmalion is a really good story to know. It's one of the Greek myths. And it's a sculptor who's renowned for being incredibly skilled. And he, at one point, sculpts this beautiful woman. And it's so lifelike that he falls in love with her.
How could he not? But then it has a tragic end because he won't eat and it never returns his affections.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's this archetype. It's Frankenstein. It's the same story that you see over and over again. Falling in love with an inanimate object. Falling in love with your creation. Oh, your creation. Oh, that's a good detail. Yeah, it's hubris. It's hubris. Oh, yeah, that's juicy. That's so deeply rooted in Western culture that we're warned against these kind of things.
It's overstepping to try to take on this God-like role. It's challenging God because you're being a creator. Exactly. So there's a lot of idea that that's going to come to a bad end. And I think that's largely what's behind all these fears.
That it's in the back of our minds that if we do this, there's going to be some price to pay. It's going to run amok. And that's the story with Frankenstein, right? It runs amok. And then the golem story, it precedes Frankenstein. In the 14th century, a rabbi, there was a lot of pogroms in this little village. So he makes a robot out of clay, just a being out of clay.
He puts these words on his forehead that bring it to life. Oh. And then it goes around and it basically defends against all the bad guys and defends the community. But then when it's done, he's like, well, now why don't you go fetch some water for me? Then he goes to sleep. Anyway, he wakes up and he's drowning because the robot just keeps fetching water over and over again.
And he has to stop it, but he doesn't know how. So he then reaches up and he wipes off the words on the forehead and the golem collapses on top and kills him. Wow.
Yeah, no, no, it's actually really good. So the Industrial Revolution, with the invention of the steam engine and all those things, all the machinery starts coming out. And so Henry Ford is definitely part of the assembly line and the car, but robots actually also start at Ford. There are some very early robots in the late 50s, early 60s. They're like a programmable robot. machine.
And so you can basically tell it to go from point A to point B. And so it's very primitive. But they're in like the World's Fair and people start talking. Oh, and by the way, the word robot is coined in 1920. By a sci-fi writer? Yeah. By a sci-fi writer. It's actually a playwright in Czechoslovakia. So interestingly, it's right around the time of the pandemic, the 1918 pandemic.
And also, I think significantly, Sigmund Freud wrote this essay called The Uncanny in 1919. So a year later, this play comes out about essentially robots. That's where the first time this word has ever been used.
Showing 81–100 of 221 · page 5 of 12
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