Sentimental Machines -  Unfamiliar Intelligence: Art, Exoticism, Robots, and AI by Ken Goldberg
Channel: Robotic Art
Date: 2021-07-08

Sentimental Machines - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation - June 4, 2021 – Online
Workshop Details: https://roboticart.org/icra2021/

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, amid rising economic inequality and xenophobia, we are immersed in a new global pandemic.

In parallel, emerging advances in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, fueled by governments, corporations, and venture capital,
disrupt labor, trade, and political stability. As claims are made about “superintelligence” and existential threats to humanity, new
questions arise about the distinctions between humans and machines.

Asserting that “humanity still has a few good years left,” Goldberg draws on art and literature from Ovid’s Pygmalian to the Golem,
through Von Kempelen’s “Mechanical Turk” (1770), E.T.A. Hoffman’s Sandman (1816), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Sigmund Freud’s
Uncanny (1919) and Masahiro Mori’s Uncanny Valley (1970), to contextualize our contemporary fear and fascination with AI.

Goldberg will also describe his own artwork that explores the boundary between the natural and the artificial, such as the Telegarden
(1995-2004), a living garden tended by 100,000 visitors operating a robot over the Internet, and his new project, AlphaGarden (2020-),
that challenges AI to a game with nature.

Bio:

Ken Goldberg is an artist and William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering, UC Berkeley. His artwork, exploring the intersection of the digital and the natural world, includes a living garden tended by a robot via the internet and the award-winning film “Why We Love Robots”. Goldberg’s has shown at the Whitney Biennial, Venice Biennale, Pompidou Center, Walker Art Center, Ars Electronica, ZKM, ICC Biennale, Kwangju Biennale, Artists Space, and the Kitchen. He is Founding Director of Berkeley’s Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium and named IEEE Fellow in 2005. His work is in several permanent collections including the Whitney Museum in NYC.