Ken Goldberg
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And I drove her and then I didn't even know who her boyfriend, but she said it was Eddie, who was a very tough guy. Perfect name for him. Exactly. And I was like, oh, no, that's not good. I did not want to cross Eddie. And so next thing I know, we had gone over. I dropped her at her friends and the doorbell rings. And it was Eddie. I came out and Eddie just cocked me right in the mouth.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Right out of the gate. Right out of the gate. Like a sucker punch. And I remember I was snowing and all this blood on the snow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
I don't know. It's interesting because it wasn't talked about. You know, we didn't report it. I don't remember it even occurring to me to even tell anyone.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah, like I wasn't going to... Well, that would lead to more abuse. Probably. So you just sucked it up and you took it. It was definitely rough. Although, you know, it's interesting because now the way it does come up, a few years ago I was in this academic setting and this guy double-crossed me. And he basically said, well, we're going to do it my way.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And I remember sitting across from him and I was really upset because I had put all this work into something and he was basically going to trash it and put somebody else in to take the credit. And I said... You don't know, but where I come from, I don't stand for that. I said, I'm going to really... You have your hands full. I'm going to get physical. Oh, no, I'm not going to get physical.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
No, I didn't say that. Somehow, I can't remember actually the language, but I wasn't saying I'm going to hit you, but I was going to basically say, I'm going to come back. I'm going to fight this. Yeah, I'm not a pushover.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
I learned that the best way to deal with them was to stand up to them, even if they were bigger than you, and then oftentimes, they would cave in.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
You only had to kind of do it once or twice. Oh, that's interesting because there was a big reputation thing. It was very weird. You had this whole pecking order. And so people knew not to mess with you. And you had to be in a few fights and then people would lay off. Yeah, then you could exist.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah, because my mom was an artist. She would paint, and she took us to this art school in the neighboring town, and I really loved that. They were both into modern art and would take us to museums, like in New York or in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Museum, I have very fond memories. They discouraged you from pursuing that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah, I remember talking to my mother and saying, I think I'm going to major in art. And she said, oh, great, you can major in art after you finish your engineering degree. Sure, sure, sure.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Well, it was also because my parents had a lot of financial troubles growing up. And so it was hard because there were times when we didn't go on vacation for many years. I want to be really careful because I don't want to sound like we were suffering, like there was some real poverty out there and we weren't facing that. But we had money problems and my mom and dad would fight a lot about that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And I'll come over and I'll be like, what does it cost? And she'll be like, oh. She's like, I don't know.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah. She's evaluating if it's beautiful. But the first thing I'm looking at is the price. Before I try something on, I want to know if I could even afford it. Right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
No, no, it's true. Another pet peeve is if I'm in a hotel or something and you know how they charge like $20 for a Diet Coke?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And then they deliver it and it's an additional delivery charge and a tip on top of it. Yeah. And then it comes, you're going to give a tip on top of that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
I know, but that's the way it is. This language is madness. I know, but it is Edinburgh.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
No, no, no, you're absolutely right. But I'm glad you brought that up because that was a huge turning point in my life. Yeah, tell me, where in this eight-year schooling? My junior year abroad, and also my dad was very sick. He had gotten leukemia because he had the plant that was a lot of toxic chemicals and stuff. But then he got remission, so he was feeling better.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
I remember that distinctly because I remember saying, I'm 19 years old and I'm on my own. And I had a backpack and the Let's Go Europe, this big volume. And it was my Bible. And I would just travel as much as I could. Yeah, you're around the train schedule.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
One of the highlights was going to Morocco. Back to your continent of birth. Oh. It's very interesting you say this because this is the story I always like to tell, which is that basically we have some friends that said, let's go somewhere really exotic. We'll go to Morocco. It was over Christmas. And we went to Spain, Madrid. And then we were taking the train down.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And on the train, it was like all these soldiers, everybody was drunken. And it was really super fun. And we're having this blast going to the last stop. And it was packed. When we get there, we get on the ferry and we all have to turn in our passports for processing. And my mother had warned me. She said, you're going to Morocco, but you're Jewish. It's an Arab country and you should be careful.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
But I was like, oh, that's ridiculous. And so we get off the ferry and all my friends, there were about three or four of us. They had gotten their passports. I didn't get mine. So we're waiting. And then it got stretched into like 45 minutes. And I was like, listen, guys, I think there's going to be a problem. Go ahead. I'll just go back. But I was definitely queasy about what would happen.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah, because you're already now on the side. We were on the other side, but we're still on the ferry because we can't get off without the passports. So then this door opens. I'll never forget this. I can see it like it was yesterday. Across the back of the ferry, I see this guy walking over. He's like in a full keffiyeh headdress, very Arab looking. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And he walking toward us. And now I'm starting to think, oh, she was right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Just what you said. It was the first time I had set foot on the continent of Asher.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah, and they also had a smell to them, remember? Yep, patchouli kind of.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah, with like levers and chambers that would fill with fluid and then they would raise their arm.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
How could he not? But then it has a tragic end because he won't eat and it never returns his affections.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah, robot, which means worker or forced worker in Czechoslovakia.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And it's programmable. So then you can make a whole bunch of them over and over again. And that's still used, by the way, very heavily. And then what's the next big leap forward? There's a lot of fear around that time that robots are going to take over. In the newspaper, there's all these articles that they're going to do all the work, but that doesn't happen.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And the first robotics conference is in 1984. Then there's a big research field that starts to grow around robotics. But then it started really taking off in factories, especially automotive. The big thing that it's used for is welding. And spray painting. The welding's awesome. Yeah, the welding's fun because you get those sparks. It's like little pinches just come in, boom, boom, boom, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And welding sheet metal is very hard to do. For humans. You burn right through it so easy. Right, so it's very delicate, but then you're just basically doing the same thing over and over again. So it's repetitive, and that is very good for factories and also some of the assembly, putting together various devices and appliances and things like that. That's a big wave.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And that's also happening in Japan and other places. So that's growing, the industrial robotics. And the biggest breakthrough is now in 2012 in the breakthrough of deep learning and AI.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Let me back up a little bit, which is that when I did my PhD, I was interested in this incredibly simple problem of just trying to pick up objects just to grasp. It's something everybody does. Babies do it. I was actually clumsy as a kid. I later thought maybe that's why I wanted to study that. But it's still an open problem.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
What is it? Oh, yeah, yeah. Moravec. There we go. There we go. Okay. So Moravec was actually at CMU when I was there. He was this very eccentric guy. And he wrote this book and he was saying it's a paradox that what's easy for robots, like lifting a heavy car, is hard for humans. But what's easy for humans, like stacking some blocks, that's hard for robots. And that's still true today.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah. It's very counterintuitive because humans, it's so easy. But we've sort of evolved over millions of years, just like dogs and crows. Crows are able to pick up things amazingly. They can put coins in slots and they can do eight-step problems.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Exactly. Robots, there's a lot of uncertainty in the environment. And even if you tell a robot to go to one specific spot, because of the motors and levers and gears that are in it, it won't go to that exact spot. You want it to put its jaws or something at a specific point to grasp this cup, it'll be slightly off. And that will cause it to miss, drop the object.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Exactly, and then the other is sensing. So we can take a high-resolution picture of an environment like this room, but there's no sensor that can give me the depth, the three-dimensional part of this room. What if you used a 3D camera, so you had bilateral? There's errors. There's little noise in those things.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
If you look at the result of that, there'll be a depth map, which is like a 3D camera image, but you'll see there'll be lots of noise and imprecision and mistakes in those. And those are inevitable. There's no camera that really works reliably for 3D.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Okay, all right. Because I don't know if you meant rare as a human being. Rare and special. Rare and special. Okay, I'll take that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
That's such a good way to put it. And that's exactly right. And so if you look at that history, hundreds of millions of years of evolution to see to mobility and being able to manipulate just the opposable thumb and all of those things. And so all these other things like math is relatively very recent.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
That I think is helpful for people to understand why we've made all this progress in these, quote, hard problems like playing chess and go.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
But we really haven't made much progress in just being able to like clear the coffee table.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
You're right. The muscles in the human body, there are hundreds of muscles and bones, and they pull in all these nuanced ways. And we have the skin that's very complex. What's amazing is how much we don't know about human biology. We don't understand how touch works. Touch is incredibly complex. Like we can feel things that are so small. They're much smaller than human hair.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
We can perceive up to very complex vibrations and other things. You add in temperature we can feel.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
When I was in undergrad, I tried to use electricity to do that, and it failed. It did not work. Okay. But what people are using now is light. Okay. And they transform the touch into light. And so imagine that you have a little camera in your fingertip. It's looking inside at a pad from the bottom. And so when the pad gets indented, you see the pattern of what it's touching. Okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
So there's like a membrane, and above that, the membrane's being observed? That's exactly what it is. But what happens is the membrane gets rubbed off, or over time, those sensors get deformed, and so it doesn't solve the problem. It's just the latest method that we're trying. Great.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Multi-celled organism. You're right. The Roomba is the most successful robot of all time. So when they count robots out there, they count these Roombas where there's like 10 million of those. But that's the robot, right? And it's very simple. It's basically just random motion. And over time, it does cover your carpet. And it's pretty reliable.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
But of course, it also has this problem that it gets stuck. all the time and tangled up in stuff. And so it's not ideal and it can't go upstairs. Also, a lot of people bought them as a novelty. There's a lot of them sitting in the closet somewhere.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
No, I need like six hours to basically figure it out. And it's sitting in the box.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Right. So everybody's impressed. The analogy, if you say, okay, you can beat the best person in the world at chess, then that means you have a very powerful machine, artificial intelligence. Now it can beat the best person at Go. And nobody can play Go or chess that well. So you think this is smarter than everybody.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
That's the way people reason. But then it can't drive a car. It's a whole bunch of things it can't do. And anything physical is just picking up or opening this can that I just did that is impossible for robots.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Splatters, broken glass. Yeah. But I agree, taking things in and out of the dishwasher would be great. Just unloading and loading the dishwasher, right? And some would say that their dishwasher is a robot. It is, it's very successful. See, there's this idea that if you can use humans and robot together, that's very powerful. So that's what I call complementarity.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
When if you figure out that you have a machine, you can use it, but you have the human do the parts that we're good at and then let it do the parts it's good at. Together, you have a great system. And a dishwasher is a beautiful example. And the washing machine, they do all this, but we have to load it and unload it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
In a laundry aspect, it's also that you want your clothes to be folded at this precise time, right when they come out, because then they're at the perfect stage.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
No wrinkles. And if you do it too soon, they're kind of soggy. If they're too late, they get all wrinkled. So having a machine to do that would be quite good. And there's some really interesting new results that just came out about this. But we've been working on it too. And one of the ideas is you fling the clothes up and you use air to help smooth them out.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Like humans do that all the time, right? You snap, you know. Yeah. That has only been really done in robotics in the last five years.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
So I'm super optimistic. I love working on this topic. And I feel like we have a lot more work to do. So that's also encouraging. I don't worry that it fails. I actually love the times when it does succeed. That's super rewarding, knowing how hard it is. You're like a fan of hockey instead of basketball.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
But when I get it, boy, it's... Oh, that's interesting. I never thought of it that way. Yeah, because... In grasping, we've actually made some good progress just in picking up objects. And that was the breakthrough. So coming back to this timeline, so in 2012, there was this breakthrough in vision.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And suddenly deep learning, this new way of building these very large networks, we're using lots of data and using GPUs, graphical processing units. It's basically a new kind of computer. It has this breakthrough where suddenly machines are able to recognize images and things in images. Like it'll say that's a book and that's a cup and that's a microphone. That's part of Fei-Fei Li's work.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Exactly. So Fei-Fei Li is actually at the center of this. She builds this data. So she plays a pivotal role. When all that gets put together, suddenly it's a revolution. And that's a big moment in robotics and history. We apply it to robotics. And so her system was called ImageNet. And so the system that we designed for grasping, we called DexNet. As an homage to her. Oh, that's great.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
So DexNet was our system. We worked on it for five years, and we basically applied deep learning techniques to be able to figure out where to grasp objects. And it started working better than anything had been done before. And I was so surprised because I had been trying to work on this problem, and then I suddenly was able to pick up almost everything we could put in front of it. Oh, wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah, no, that's a really great point. There is a critical point when you get enough data and suddenly it starts working. It took a lot. It was 80 million plus images that Fei-Fei put together. Right. And in our case, we had 7 million grasp examples that we had found. And then it started to work and it was like, oh, this is so exciting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And think of it with a very simple gripper, just a parallel pincer. So you would put a bin of objects in front of it and it would start to pick them one by one and put them out. And so we would test it by going into the basement of the garage. We'd just throw all kinds of stuff in there. And it would just pick them up consistently and clear the bin. And we would try and fool it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
He must have been elated. It was so much fun. There's a story where we got invited to show this to Jeff Bezos. And he invited us down to this event in Palm Springs. He said, bring the robot. I want to see this. We had never left a lab before, so it was a big deal to put it on a truck. And we weren't sure it was going to work. We had like 300 objects that we brought with us, got it all set up.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
He came in the booth and it was working. And we were so relieved. And he was trying it with different things and it was just like it was in the lab. And everything was going great. And then his assistant was standing there and took off his shoe. And he said, well, can I try my shoe? And I remember my mouth goes dry. Because of all the things we've tried it with, we've never tried a shoe.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
So I have no idea. But what can we do? We have to say, go ahead. Otherwise, it feels all mapped out, maybe.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah, right. Like the panties on the ground. Right. Exactly. So he drops his shoe into the bin, and we're all sitting there. And the robot just reached over and picked up the shoe.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Wow. And I remember calling Tiffany, my wife, and I said, this was the best moment of my life. Wow. And she said, what about our wedding?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
That's exactly right. That's very important. You can't tell it to select a specific object.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
You can't say go through this bin and find me all the pennies.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
That's called rummaging. Okay. That's very interesting. We're looking at that now. Much different problem, much harder. That could be incredible for recycling. Yes. And also, you think about it, you do this all the time. If you reach in your pocket and you want to pull out a pen, you can always find the pen or your purse.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Right? People are very good at that. And what's going on is very complicated. Robot cannot do that at all. But pulling one thing out of the bin is really interesting because you have to kind of move things around a little bit, sort of see a little piece of it, then pick it up. And that's actually very important for warehouses and for Amazon to be able to deliver packages.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
You have to be able to rummage and find the thing you want. And that's still unsolved.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah, because there's physics. We really don't understand friction. And friction is so important. It's what lets us all sit here and things not slipping around. Friction is so important, but it's a very, very complex process. We can approximate it, and there's this model Coulomb friction, etc. But to really get friction right is actually impossible.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
If I want to push something across the table, the way it's going to move and react to my pushing force is going to depend on what's underneath it. So if you have one grain of sand... It's going to change it. Yeah, if it's in the right corner, the whole thing's going to rotate clockwise. Exactly. If it's in the left corner, it's going to rotate the other way. But I can't know that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
The robot can't know it. So right there is like one of the great mysteries of nature, right? You don't have to talk about quantum physics. That is one unknowable thing that's sitting right in front of us. Oh, my God. Wow. And we deal with it all the time. So you might say, what do we do? Well, we kind of compensate. When we reach for a glass, we don't just reach our gripper right up to it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
We scoop it up. We're almost anticipating the many different ways it could go wrong. Exactly. We haven't figured out how to do that for robots yet.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
It's both. It's largely software because we don't have the sensors. We don't have the control. We don't understand the models of physics. But I also think we need better grippers, too. But that's a whole other story. But the bottom line is that we're far from anything approximating human level performance. And there's been so much hype. And that's what I worry about.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
I really do. I think we're on a collision course with a kind of bubble that's going to burst because people are expecting that we're almost there, especially when they see these videos. OK, great. Tell me about these videos because you watch them and you think. We're there. And this is a big problem.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Right. Okay, the first thing to ask is how many takes were required? Many times they get to work once, and that's the video they show.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
It's violent when it gets it wrong. In a research lab, that's what we're dealing with. It's always failing. You'd be lucky if you get it to work once. But so if you put it on YouTube, we'll say the success rate is one out of 200 or something. But nowadays, there's so much hype that is not putting those caveats in there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Someone might say, I have to do that. That's how I'm going to get the next round of funding. But I really cringe about that because that goes against my instincts of I like to say under promise and over deliver. And I'm going to be really careful, never over promise about what we're doing or a result in a paper. We're always careful. Don't exaggerate the result.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And it really is a problem for robotics where you see the videos. And then the other thing is they can be teleoperated. And there's a human behind the curtain. Okay, so what about this Tesla robot?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Okay, so I know this is going to disappoint people when I tell you this, but it's far from being human-like in its abilities. In dexterity, it's very, very weak. It looks good, and there are beautiful designs. And they actually have made progress in the motors and the hardware so it can move more smoothly. And they're also getting very good at walking.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
So there's definitely something positive there. But what can they do? And see, this triggers that old idea that we've had in the back of our mind, which is we want these things. We've been reading about them, watching them on movies and TV. We think they're going to come. And yet there's this huge gap. So if you watch carefully at the demos, they're being somewhat teleoperated.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
That means that there's a human moving them around, essentially remote controlling them. Or if you watch what their hands are doing, they're very primitive. Now there's a lot of work trying to address that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
So it's a great question because it just came up yesterday at USC because people were talking about there's not so much funding available from the government agencies, DARPA and others that used to fund a lot of this research because it was more esoteric. Now they're saying, well, the companies are doing it. and yet it's not necessarily being shared, so it's closed and complicated.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
But fortunately, a lot of the companies are pretty open. Google and NVIDIA and many others are actually publishing their results. We work with them. They work with us. And so robotics is surprisingly open. The minute they get a result, they publish it, and we all see it. You see it on Twitter or Archive or this other thing. But so there's a lot of communication.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And by the way, all this tension between China and the U.S., it's really interesting it doesn't exist in academia. Yeah. We are freely exchanging information. Students are coming from China. Just came from a conference. Half the papers were from China. It's a free open exchange.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
A lot of it is open now. Facebook or Meta has actually been quite exemplary in that they share all the models. They're doing their AI as open source, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Really wonderful. And actually, we use it all the time, those tools, and it's very, very helpful. And then others like OpenAI, we use the tool, but we don't actually get access to the source code. So we don't know how it's doing it right behind the scenes. But they let us access it and use it, which is doing some incredible things.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
But that idea of, I guess your question is about government versus private sector.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And not only that, but that individual also has a lot of power in terms of let's say Twitter and X. Media.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And seems to know how to use it very effectively. So I think it's a concern. Coming back to the fear, the reason roboticists, and I'm not the only one, almost all of us are not fearful that robots are going to take over. And also that they're going to eliminate humans because it's just not that sophisticated by a long shot. And certainly the other fear is about jobs.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And I don't see them taking over jobs and putting people out of work because all the jobs that require manual labor are extremely difficult to automate.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
A huge amount of those jobs cannot be replaced.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Like mechanics are so complex where they can reach around things and feel they can take off screws. Bell housing on a trans. You can't see anything. So that's the kind of thing way beyond robots. And I think that there's a shortage of workers. The trades, because we're aging and we need more people to be doing all these jobs, they're not going to be unemployed.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
In fact, it's probably most job security. People are realizing that they're actually in demand, which is great. They're actually getting higher wages.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Well, I have a theory about this. I think some of the most vocal doomsayers who are saying we're on the verge of these things taking over. It was very telling. The person who just won the Nobel Prize, Jeff Hinton, he said, we have never encountered anything more intelligent than ourselves. That was his big line. And I read that and I thought,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Wait, I encounter something more intelligent than myself every day. I mean, there's tons of people around that are more intelligent than me. I'm not afraid of them. They don't freak me out.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
We love that. We weren't scared. Right. Exactly. And so most of us aren't afraid of something more intelligent than us. But there's a small group, and I think they think they're the most intelligent.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
We're constantly bumping into people smarter than us and it's fun.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
It's great. And actually, I think this is something about AI is that it actually can be this interesting partner for us and can enhance our world and our abilities. Well, like this thing I was talking to you guys about. You sent us. Notebook LM. Is that what it's called?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
But it has a rhythm that is very much like you two.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
That's what keeps us human. But it has these amazing insights. Like, it'll just come up with these analogies and things, and they weren't in the document that you gave it. Yeah. It just came up with these other things. Yeah. But the back and forth, like the pacing and everything else, is so good. It is.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
It has a sense that they're comfortable with each other. They're kind of back and forth. You can feel their rapport. Rapport. Yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Don't worry. You have a very special. And also, by the way, if you listen to a couple of these and I have, it starts to become a little repetitive. It's not like that's going to do a whole podcast series.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
There's something that's not quite new and fresh about them. At first, it sounds really great. But after a while, it's not really satisfying.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah, I think unless we can figure out ways to sort of feed it and prompt it. And so we can use it as a tool to discover new things. And sometimes it's good at that where you give it a paper and you say, come up with 10 extensions of this paper. And maybe one of them will be really interesting. Or you could do it for subjects for the show.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
You could say, well, what are some good brainstorming topics that would come up that we could have as our, what do you call it? Like conversation starters? Yeah. It could come up with new ones of those.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yes. Okay, I remember that I was in this place also a little intimidated because a lot of A-list people and I was sitting there and- I forget who it was. He was on the stage and you raised a comment and said something about he looked really sharp. Pharrell.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
It's hard to say. One thing I do think we're going to see is the extension of the Roomba is a robot that can pick up clothes and declutter around the house.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And I think it might have four legs. So it'll be a little dog with an arm.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
I think it might have a tail, because tails are actually really important. For balance? For also user interface. A dog's tail is very interesting, and that's very deeply rooted also in our psychology. We have a reaction when you see a dog with a tail wagging.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
But if you notice, none of these dogs that are out there yet have tails. So we're building one.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
No, I'd love to tell you. So she's a filmmaker and has been involved in technology for a long time, Tiffany Schlain. And she and I have collaborated a little bit, but this is our first big collaboration. And we've been having so much fun. We got invited as part of the Getty is doing this citywide exhibition on art and science. It's going on for a whole year.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And so they have each of these different institutions do exhibits. And so the Skirball invited Tiffany and I to do one for them related to art and science. We've been working on it for like three years, and we came up with this idea of talking about history more broadly, but also using trees and the science of tree ring dating. You know how you count the rings?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Right. And they're very Western patriarchal. And so she had started actually over the pandemic doing a feminist tree ring. Okay. And then a couple of other ones, she's been developing these sculptures and they're salvaged wood. So we don't cut down trees to do this, but there's a lot of these big redwoods and other forms out there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
So for this show, we wanted to do something around that started with the tree of knowledge. Uh-huh. This is very cool. We found a tree stump that was gigantic, almost as big as this room. It's 7,000 pounds.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
It's a eucalyptus, but it was uprooted and sort of fell over. And then one side is sanded down. And so when you walk into the gallery, you see the back end of it. So it's all this knotted, gnarly roots. And then around the other side, we inscribed it with questions trying to talk about the history of knowledge and how it evolved.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah. I think I said like he was really dazzling. Exactly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
from what is fire and can I eat this, which is thousands of years ago, the kind of questions he asked. But those evolved into, will machines be intelligent? Yeah. And on the far end. So it has 600 questions or something on there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And I just love the way you said that. I thought it was such an unusual thing to say. It was spot on. But it was just the kind of thing that nobody would normally say.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
It's another piece, actually, that we call abstract expression, which is a redwood. Yes, it starts with Pythagoras. But remember, it's not literal because that tree wasn't 5,000 years old. We take some liberties. Okay, okay. How old was that tree? I think like 400 years old. Maybe 500. But that's the idea. It's like we're kind of playing off of that known concept.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
But this time we wanted to tell the history of science and do it through just equations. And we never say Pythagoras on there. It just says the equation. But those equations are kind of beautiful in their own right. And they're kind of artistic because in a way art takes an image and there's a lot of content and meaning behind it. And that's true with the scientific equations.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
I remember writing down these equations and crossing off terms and everything turned into zero. And then it worked.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And so I think it was after the lunch or something, I saw you standing over there and I just went over and I said, hey, I love that comment you made. And then we started talking. That's how I remember it. I didn't know anything about you. You must have known Kristen. No. We were just having this fun conversation and you guys were so charming. And then Tiffany came over. Your wife.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Totally. It was not something that I felt like I did. It was just revealed.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yes. Very much. I still remember that very distinctly. And I'll admit that one of the equations on the tree is yours.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah, that's your signature. I put it in there. Up with Gauss and Einstein.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
The elegance of some of these. Euler's equation is the one that mathematicians truly love.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
By the way, I feel like that's where I believe in a higher power. Yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And there's definitely things to make it more energy efficient. But in terms of comfort level.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Also dazzling and unicorny. Yes. We walked away and she said, you don't know who they were? And I was like, no. And then we had several great conversations at that thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
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.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Okay, I'm always looking for good. Very comfortable, very playful.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
I'm kind of thinking, like, what else was going on?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
I'm glad you did, because if you had just not said it, it would have been sort of this lingering presence. Yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Did they know if you were really planted? Oh, my God. That is brilliant. The elephant panties in the room. Oh, my God.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
So my parents were idealists during the 60s and they were at Penn in Philadelphia and they were going on civil rights marches and things like that. So they wanted to continue that idea of doing things for civil rights. So when they were graduating, they wrote to various people in Africa and they said, we'd love to help.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And so one person who ran a school there, and he's actually quite famous in Nigeria, Ty Shelerin, he invited them to come to his school and work for two years. So they basically got over there and there was no running water and no electricity when they got there. So it was very rough and they lived kind of under these circumstances. My dad taught physics and my mom taught English.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
They were graduate students at Penn or undergrad?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yes, good point. It was starting. Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, has a lot of integration, great history there. And so they were starting there. But that was also around the time of Nigerian independence. There was a real movement across Africa. I was very proud of them. I'm still proud of them for doing that. Were you delivered at a hospital? Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
So I always thought it must have been an accident because like, why would you do that? Who would plan?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And so I never asked because it was like that elephant in the room. I just didn't want to know. But a couple of years ago, my mom said we wanted to have a baby because we had all this time together and we knew it would be a time to focus on you. So I was born in a hospital nearby called Abaddon, which is about an hour from this village. But I have a really big vaccination mark from that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
I think you're right. I don't know what it is, but yes, exactly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
I looked into that, too, because I thought it would be nice to have a dual citizenship.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
You need to believe the country. No, but apparently you can't have both. They don't allow it. They're like, fuck you. We're not a side dish. You can't have both. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Right, Bethlehem Steel. Yeah. So my parents come back there because my dad was a metallurgist. Oh, this is fascinating.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah, well, physics was what he could teach as a, he was an engineering undergrad. So then he went back and he actually got his PhD at Ohio State. And then we moved to Bethlehem. Bethlehem was known for where the time and motion studies were done. There's a whole history of scientific management. You know about this, Frederick Taylor?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Okay, tell us. All right, so this is fascinating. You've heard of time and motion studies, you know, where they have a stopwatch and they would time people doing their work? I hadn't heard of that. Oh.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
This was very big in the early part of this 20th century. Datifying. Yes, making work scientific by quantifying it. So what they would do is they had all these things, mostly stopwatches back then, but they would time how long it took you to, say, carry a shovel of ore from one end of this lot to another.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And then they would clock people, and then they would try and get them to increase their speeds. And so this guy wrote this book called The Scientific Management. something like that. And it was very influential on Stalin. Oh, really? Yes. But workers hated it. Sure. For obvious reasons, right? You're getting enough efficiency out of me. Exactly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
And that was this whole thing was that you could increase the productivity of the average worker by a factor of two or more if you followed these methods, but it would squeeze the workers to the breaking point. So they didn't like it, but it became popular until unions came and pushed back.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
But this whole wave was still around in the form of industrial engineering, which is actually the department I'm in at Berkeley, which used to do these kind of studies where it was sort of how do you arrange your office to be the most efficient or the assembly line to be most efficient for workers and now machines?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yeah, so energy efficient. So they could lower the amount of electricity it used, which is really undeniably a good thing. That's good for the environment and everything else. Yeah. Okay, so you're growing up in Bethlehem. Yeah. Your mom and dad didn't teach in your childhood? No, he was working at the research lab. Actually, she did. She taught at the elementary school. We were very close.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
She was a great mom. I was lucky. It was a good town to grow up in, but a little rough and tumble because you had to fight.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Yes. So it's interesting you say the pride thing. I didn't know about that, but the pecking order was all about fighting. And kids would call you out and say, I'll see you after school. And you had to do it. Everyone would go watch.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Ken Goldberg (roboticist)
Another fight would break out. I mean, I had both my front teeth knocked out. You did? In what grade? Like 10th grade. In school? Okay, so the story is that I was at a party and a girl asked me to take her home because she was having a fight with her boyfriend. Oh, okay. And I was being a nice guy, I thought.