Ken Goldberg: AI and Robotics Expert

Many fear that advances in AI will lead to massive job losses or human extinction. I’ll present a much more optimistic outlook based on history and science.

In the decade after the 1918 Flu Pandemic, the world economy flourished with advances in electricity and transportation. Today, the world is poised for similar growth based on advances in artificial intelligence and robotics. In the 2020’s, a new generation of robots will assist workers in warehouses, factories, agriculture, and healthcare.

I’ll use images and video to illustrate recent advances where robots learn to: grasp unfamiliar objects, untangle cables, tend polyculture gardens, and manipulate surgical needles. Rather than replacing workers or causing destruction, AI and robots are much more likely to enhance human productivity, collaboration, and creativity in the Roaring 2020’s.

Why hasn’t the dream of having a robot at home to do your chores become a reality yet? With three decades of research expertise in the field, roboticist Ken Goldberg sheds light on the clumsy truth about robots — and what it will take to build more dexterous machines to work in a warehouse or help out at home.

To improve patient care, a new generation of robots is being developed to actively assist surgeons in the operating room.  These robots can autonomously perform tedious subtasks such as suturing and debridement to improve consistency and reduce fatigue, analogous to advances in automotive anti-skid braking and intelligent lane-keeping systems.

New companies and labs are using Recent advances in AI and deep learning are being applied by researchers and companies worldwide to develop this new generation robots, which also opens the door to long-distance tele-surgery.

I’ll present recent advances from our lab including novel hardware and software with applications to cutting, suturing, palpation, dissection, retraction, debridement and a recent result — “Superhuman Peg Transfer”, where a robot autonomously performs a standard surgical task with accuracy and speed on par with a surgeon and with significantly more consistency.

Humans have grown food for over 10,000 years.  As the climate changes and the global population seeks fresh and healthy nutrition, advances in robots are being applied in agriculture.  This talk will review recent progress including John Deere’s use of drones to fine-tune fertilizer delivery and EarthSense mobile robots that roll beneath leaf canopies to closely monitor plant properties that optimize breeding. 

I’ll share results from RAPID, a USDA-sponsored project developing Robot Assisted Precision Irrigation Delivery, and two projects that incorporate art and research: TeleGarden (1995) where over 100,000 people remotely collaborated to tend a living garden, and AlphaGarden (2020), where simulation and measurements from a living garden are being combined to train a robot to sustain a diverse polyculture garden. 

This talk will explore how the the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions can be extended by the AI Revolution.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has surpassed humans at Jeopardy and Go, and driverless cars are widely believed to be around the corner.  News articles claim we’re on the brink of a “Singularity” where robots will steal 50% of our jobs.  Are AI and Robots an existential threat to humans as Elon Musk warns? 

Or is Mark Zuckerberg right in stating that humans have many good years ahead?  “Automation Anxiety” has a long history, with widespread pronouncements about the imminent loss of jobs to Automation in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s.

Drawing on his experience as a robotics and AI research expert, Goldberg explores these issues in three parts:

1. What Isn’t New,
2. What Is New, and
3. How We Can Prepare. Ultimately, Goldberg reveals how new innovations will empower humans, not replace them, revealing the potential for new trends such as “Cloud Robotics”, and “Multiplicity”.