Unfamiliar Intelligence: Art, AI, and Robots - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University
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RI Seminar

March

14
Fri
Ken Goldberg Professor Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley
Friday, March 14
2:30 pm to 3:30 pm
1403 Tepper School Building
Unfamiliar Intelligence: Art, AI, and Robots

Abstract:

Shortly after the 1918 pandemic, the word “robot” was coined in a play about mechanical workers organizing a rebellion to defeat their human overlords. A century later, emerging advances in Artificial Intelligence and robotics, fueled by venture capital and governments, are disrupting labor, trade, and political stability. Claims about “superintelligence” and existential threats to humanity raise new questions about the essential distinctions between humans and machines.

To contextualize a series of his artworks that explore this boundary, Ken Goldberg references Sigmund Freud’s Uncanny (1919) and Masahiro Mori’s Uncanny Valley (1970). Ken will share robot paintings from his first art exhibit at CMU and art installations such as the Telegarden (1995-2004), a living garden tended by a robot operated by over 100,000 visitors over the Internet, and AlphaGarden (2020-), a fully automated garden that took an unexpected twist during the pandemic.

Ken will also present two new projects: Ancient Wisdom (2024), a collection of wooden sculptures addressing AI and ecology in the Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time exhibition in Los Angeles, and Breathless (2023), an 8-hour robot-human dance performance that premiered at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY.

Bio:

Ken Goldberg (CMU SCS PhD ’90)
William S. Floyd Distinguished Professor of Engineering, UC Berkeley