YouSaid · the spoken record

Ken Goldberg

lines on the record: 71
first: 2025-12-24
most recent: 2025-12-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yes. Because he is fascinating. You know, he's a very, very original thinker and very, I would say, very much an unsung hero around chatbots. People don't know. He was really a pioneer in doing this very early. And he still has a lot of great, really interesting insights and ideas. So you'll appreciate.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I'll send you some links because I have a bunch of things online I can link to that follow up on this in various ways. And no, I think it's great. Thanks for doing this. I'm really glad you're also going to connect with my good friend Rich Wallace.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Making coffee or folding boxes. That's really exciting. And I think that is actually going to be important. Rather than trying to do general robotic to everything in a home, which is, I think, going to take a long, long time. But if you get it to do certain tasks like folding, laundry, or maybe making coffee, certain things like that, that's a way sort of bottom up from certain tasks, learn other tasks rather than top down. I think that's going to be a path to getting progress. But again, it's going to take longer than most people think.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're going to be a great customer for this. But you know, you have high standards, right? Because you want the things just right. And that's where it gets tricky, right? But the Dyna Robotics guys, it's Jason and Lyndon, who are the leaders of this company. They really are pulling something off that I think is very interesting to keep an eye on. And a lot of the other robotics companies are now trying to emulate that, which is to show one task, one special task, doing it very reliably.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was fantastic. Even you could bring your own t-shirt and it would fold it. So that to me, that's very exciting. That shows, and again, it's a specific task. I do think we're going to make progress there. And by the way, everyone wants to have something full their clothes.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right? No head, but it has cameras, but there are two grippers, basically holding a stack of napkins over and over again. And they did it for 24 hours and they showed you the whole process. Now that, to me, as a roboticist, is a big deal because they were able to do it fairly fast, reliably. The napkins were often get tangled up and it would figure out how to untangle them and keep going. And the filter were actually pretty nice. So that's impressive. And then I got to see a live demo of the new version of that, which can now fold shirts. And it worked really well. I saw this in a, they had a booth in a conference in Korea in September, and it was folding shirts as it just round the clock.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so actually I have a good answer for that. And I'm friends with the founders. So I'm maybe slightly biased, but I have to tell you, they demonstrated folding napkins with a robot. And they did it for 24 hours. So they just had the camera set up and they had, now this is, by the way, just two grippers.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm not a naysayer. I'm not saying that all this is going to fail. I just say that be patient. It's going to take longer. The real science fiction stuff is going to take longer than we think.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh no, I'm not going to share those. I said, okay, how about all the research proposals that you're working on? Oh, no. All kinds of stuff that you don't want to share. It's not that you're hiding, you know, it's not you're doing something criminal or embarrassing, but you just, there's a lot of stuff you don't care to share because it's important and it's confidential. So same thing in your home. It's not that I'm going to, you know, it's going to catch me naked, but in the morning, I have a bad hair day and I don't necessarily want that to be transmitted widely. So it's all kinds of things like that. So I'm not opposed to humanoid robot. I think it's going to be interesting to see what happens in the next few years, that we will probably start to see these. It'll be very interesting to see that roll out and figure. And Bernd is very, you know, he's a very compelling businessman like Ilan. He has a lot of optimism, a lot of confidence, and he's definitely building something that's working to some degree. So it'll be interesting to see.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right. I mean, well, the privacy issues are huge. And that's something also a lot of engineers don't appreciate that. I faced this at Berkeley a few years ago where I was talking about privacy and I made an art project about privacy and we had cameras, surveillance cameras. We did a whole installation about this. And some of my friends were like, I don't care about privacy. I have nothing to hide. I said, oh, really? I said, okay, can I see all the letters of recommendation you brought for the last 10 years?”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could be useful for security. Also, maybe in some form of companionship somewhere down the road. Or as you get older, and I can appreciate this more and more, that I might want to have a robot that might help me shower or get changed or help me get out of bed in the morning. I think that would be nice. I'd rather have that than a stranger in my house. Let me put it that way I just not relate.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you're a young parent, you have a lot of kids, or if you have a teenager, there's like, can you clean your room? You know, I mean, great to have a robot go in and just clean off, pick up all the clothes. We call that the teenagers problem, by the way. We have a paper on this. Okay, okay, which is how to get a robot to efficiently pick up clothes. And it's not the obvious thing because if you just program a robot and go in, pick up, go pick up one sock, take it to the bin, pick up the next sock, take it to the bin. You actually need to be able to pick up lots of socks together. And so how do you do that? That's called multi-object rasping. It's a very complex and nuanced topic. And so we're studying that in the lab. So just coming back to your bigger point, I think that robots will do something that's useful in the house. I think that's possible.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We would all like that. We have Roomba, you mentioned earlier, the vacuum cleaners. But the next step is to be able to actually pick things up and put them away And that, I think we can get there. I do. I actually think that's going to happen in the next decade. And it's very valuable because, by the way, if you're a senior citizen, you really want things off the floor.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just feel it. You know, I look around, but I'm always watching. That's why it's tricky to teach online. But all these things are very nuanced. Body language can tell you a lot of what's going on. And just interpreting what's the dog doing and what's the dog, you know, how's the dog feeling, right? There's a lot of nuance there. So all that is you're going to have to be in real homes to be able to do that. And I think that's actually, that makes sense. I'm not opposed to having, let's say, a humanoid in a home that might be helpful for doing certain things like maybe fetching water or being able to pick up things around the house. Remember grasping, I said, that is actually something I think robots can do. So if you said, hey, pick up all the things that are on the floor.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're complex. We pick up on it in myriad of ways we don't even recognize, right? Like I can pick up one thing I always notice is when I'm teaching, I can pick up if students are starting to lose interest or get tired or bored.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that is helpful and certainly understanding the dynamics of human interaction, especially in a home, is the social dynamics are very, very subtle. And as you said, very, very important. Just understanding tone of voice, gestures, like my daughter will say, you know, does this, right? Which is don't bother the teenager, okay.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Super exciting. So, I'm not negative about AI at all. I love it. I use it. I advocate for it. My daughters, my wife, everyone uses it. And so I'm 100% for it. I do think it's going to help with robotics, but the question is, is it going to do everything that people are hoping? And that's where I hope that this conversation, Preston, will put things into context for your audience.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I give this example where I asked ChatGPT in the early days, hey, give me 100 uses for a guitar pick. I just thought it would get, you know, it would start repeating the same thing over and over again. And it started with a screwdriver to scrape ice off a windshield, things like that, which are all made sense. But then it started listing these as fast as I could read them or faster. And then it came up with one that I was like, it was at a miniature sale for a toy boat. And when I saw that, I was like, oh my God, that is a genius idea. And I would not have thought of it. And immediately when you see something that's original and creative like that, you spot it and you say, ah, why didn't I think of”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this is a big passion of mine. And it's using technology like AI and robots to ask questions about technology And I'm very interested in this contrast between the digital and the natural world. When they seem very symmetric and similar, but there's very profound differences between them. So that's what I think about or I try to express in my artwork. And so your question about the creativity. I always said AI won't be creative in the sense that it will, you can ask it questions, but it's not going to actually come up with original ideas. But I actually have shifted my view on that.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“24 hours a day, people could come in and explore this garden and plant seeds and water them. So it was a very interesting, it was an artistic project, but it was also an engineering proof of concept. And it had to work reliably. And so it really pushed us. I sometimes say people think doing engineering is hard. Try art. It's really art. Because you have to deal with the public and they're going to interact and do all kinds of crazy things. So we had to really spend a lot of time designing that system. But continue an interest in art. And I have a new show coming up. It's a joint project with my wife, Tiffany Schlain, who's an artist. And she and I are collaborating on a exhibition that's going to open in San Francisco in January 22nd.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, well, on a very different note, I have been working as an artist in parallel with my work as a researcher and engineer. You know, I like to say my day job is teaching at Berkeley and running a lab there, but I have another passion, which is making art. And I've worked on this for almost the same amount of time. And I make installations and projects. We did a project called the Telegarden where we had a robot that was controlled by people over the internet and the robot could tend a garden, a living garden. We put this online in 1995, which was the very early days of the internet. And I'm very proud of that project because it stayed online for nine years.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then tying shoes and doing things around a home, by the way, or in a factory where you're actually trying to put together electronic parts or car bodies or installing upholstery and wiring inside a car, these are extremely difficult, by the way. And even in Detroit or anywhere in the world, they're still humans doing those jobs because they're very, very hard. So those are hard to simulate. And I do think it's pointing toward this deformation is a key obstacle to doing it. And I've talked with people who are physicists and experts in deformation, and they agree. This is very, very hard problem. If we don't even understand the physics of friction and deformation very well.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very different than tying the shoe that we talked about earlier. There, it turns out that we can't simulate that so well. As I mentioned, we don't know how to model and simulate the deformations. minute forces that are going on in the process of interacting with that object. So that's a challenge. This is a little nuanced, and I know that your audience might say, what is Goldberg talking about? He said, this couldn't be solved. Now he says it can be solved. Well, it depends. There are certain categories of problems that can be addressed. And I think that picking objects out of a bin is something we've made enormous amount of progress in the last five years. So I'm very optimistic about that. I think we're getting faster, more reliable, and those systems are, you know, that's the cutting edge of robotics. And it's real.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good. So for grasping, it turns out simulation works pretty well because there you just need to know the geometry of the environment fairly accurately. And then the geometry of the object and the gripper. And then you can actually model that fairly well. Now grasping is just lifting an object off a table, okay? Or out of a bin.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a gold standard for data. And so we're now using that to refine our systems and that make them better and more higher performing, more reliable, but also allowing us to now branch out into new related types of product. So we now have, we introduce a new product called Ambi Stack that stacks boxes very efficiently, very densely.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We use that so that we can immediately tell when the performance, let's say the picks per hour performance, that's how it's often measured, drops, we can spot that early and say, and we call the company and we say, what's going on? Did something change? Did a camera get knocked? Is the suction cup getting worn? And so we're constantly on top of it. Part of it is that that's a source of big pride for us. We really customer focused and we want to make sure our machines work completely reliably. But the nice amazing side effect of this is that we've been able to collect data from all this real systems and real environments over the last four years. And we now have elapsed on 22 years of robot data. So remember I talked about the 100,000 years?”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we started collecting data as we started putting these robots to work. So as our customers, we're putting these systems into production at Ambi, right? We also had an agreement that we would maintain these systems at high performance levels because we were constantly monitoring them. So we have a dashboard at the central headquarters in Berkeley where the team keeps an eye on every machine that's in operation out there. And so what we do is we get data on every single pick operation, what happens, how long it takes, whether it dropped the object, whether it was classified correctly, all kinds of things like that, right?”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And bags are extremely common in shipping. You probably, if you know this, if you receive bags from e-commerce, from Amazon or others, you get bags of all kinds of forms. Now, bags often plastic or paper, but the issue with bags is they're loose. And so they have objects in them, but there's a lot of slack. And they tend to fold in interesting ways. We weren't testing those really in the lab Wasn't something we would have thought about too much, but that's so much more common in real shipping. So my point is we had to adapt all of our systems to the reality of the consumer market. Which in this case is bags. And that was something we didn't have a lot of data on. So we had to adapt our systems to work on data on real bags. And real bags are very difficult to actually even simulate and model because they”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we were dropping all kinds of objects in there. In fact, when people would come to the lab, they would visit and I'd say, well, you have your car keys, drop them in here. I said, if the robot will pick it out, we'll keep the car. But it would always do that. It was no problem picking out someone's car keys, right? And we tried it on all kinds of things, again, toys. We made 3D printed weirdly shaped objects, all kinds of things we could think of. We tried to basically consider everything, and we were just trying to push the envelope, right? Well, the envelope was the keyword because it turned out that one thing we didn't ever really experiment with was bags.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he was buffeted by things way behind his control, like recession of the 70s actually really hurt his business very badly. So he struggled. So there's a lot of factors and it has to do with competition and timing. What I would also say in industry is that, and this is going to come back to the data aspect, which is that you can do things in a lab that you think are, you've really explored the full range of a problem. So let me give you this example. We are addressing the bin picking problem, remember?”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How about that? One grandfather was very successful in electronics and my other grandfather was in the housing business, building homes. But my father struggled. He was a metallurgist and he had a company doing chrome plating. And it was very, very difficult.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lots. I would tell you, one of the things that is very interesting is that you think, okay, I have this great new technology that's the breakthrough that really solves an important problem. Therefore, I can rush out into commercial world and build a company around it. Well, it turns out that technology is only a very small core part. It enables, but then there's all these things that have to come around it that are equally, if not more important. And actually, when you go to customers and you say, hey, we have this new AI thing, they're like, wait a second, I don't care about that. How much money is it going to save me? That's all they care about. And that's. That's business. That's business. Both my grandfathers are business. We're entrepreneurs, and so was my father So I grew up in these kind of environments and it's tough.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“then there might be a big backlash and that's going to hurt companies like AMBI who are not trying to do that. Ambi is trying to solve a real practical problem and do it efficiently and cost effectively and actually something that's very valuable for everyone who shops at Amazon or any of the online companies. We've sorted 100 million packages. And I'm very proud of that because these machines, as we're talking, are out there sorting packages and they're very reliable. They're not featured in the videos about there's no humanoids doing this. By the way, although some have said that we'll have a humanoid doing that, but humanoid with hands, it's going to be a long time before that's. Even close to the efficiency of the systems that we have with section cups.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At Berkeley and all the major universities, we teach the engineering principles. And my point is let's not forget about those. Those are still extremely valuable for engineering and for robots and getting them to actually work in practice. And anyone working at Robots, I think, will acknowledge that. Although the public perception is, oh, it's just now, you know, we're using AI. And that's solving everything. It's not. It's solving certain little pieces of it. And as I said, there's certain pieces that are very, very difficult that still remain very difficult. So this comes back to what I was saying earlier, Preston, about my fear, which is that because there's so much expectation around humanoids right now, that if the companies can't deliver on that ability.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we started using that technique, DexNet, when we evolved it and made it commercialized it. And then we can make it work very fast. And then all kinds of other elements had to come in. We had another Gantry system that would drop it into pick it out of bins, pick an object out of bin, had to be scanned for a zip code, figure out which bin to go into, then put it into the right bin, avoid jamming the whole time, make the system reliable, safe, and easy to use, right? All of this is what I call good old-fashioned engineering. And so I become a big advocate for this because after all, this is a body of research and ideas and insights that have been developed over 400, 500 years in engineering. It's still what we teach.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this was a little bit, we didn't go in with this plan, but what we saw very quickly was that e-commerce was growing and we needed, there's a huge demand for sorting packages, right? It's just very challenging to get packages out to the customer fast.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Students who are involved. Matt Mattel was another computer scientist working closely with Jeff Mahler. And then I also had two other PhD students from mechanical engineering. And one of them, Steve McKinley and David Geeley. Brilliant. All four of these guys, extremely, extremely brilliant engineering students. And so they really knew, they were very good friends. They remain good friends. They all worked very closely and spent a huge amount of time camping and hanging out together too. But they were perfectly complementary because we had the computing skills and the mechanical skills. Mechanical guys knew how to design machines that could work reliably over a great period of time. And that's when we moved into building the Ambi sort system. Which sorts packages for e-commerce”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, good. Well, that was, okay, it's a great example. That was a case where data really did surprise us. We were able to generate 6 million example graphs over So that was a data-driven approach. But I will tell you that when you take that and you have to move that into an experimental system or into a commercial system, then you need a huge amount of what I call good old-fashioned engineering. And this is where you have to really sweat the details. You have to make sure that the sensors are calibrated correctly, that your robot arms are calibrated and accurate. You have to be able to do the computation to move the arms very quickly. You have to control the surfaces of the grippers, the suction cups, myriad of details like that, the lighting. We had a little scale underneath the system that would recognize when an object was removed from the bin, a digital scale. It was just another piece of engineering that had to go in there. So lots of all that. That was just our demonstration system in the lab, experimental system. But then when we moved into ambient robotic, and by the way, I want to give credit also to the other.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dexterity Net And it was based on collecting data, lots of examples. And it was analogous in many ways to image net. a breakthrough for computer images. So we did something similar. We synthesized this data set. We added noise in a very specific way. But the system started working remarkably well. And so it could pick up almost any object that you put into a bin, it would just pull it out. And you would throw in a whole pile of objects. We were digging around in our garages and closets and throwing everything we could into it. And it was consistently just being able to pull these things out. And so that was a very exciting moment for us. We got some publicity. It was in the New York Times and other places. And then we were approached by a number of companies and we decided to form our own company.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's not manipulating doing surgery, but it's just picking things out of a bit. That was a very old problem. It's been known as the bin picking problem, and people have been looking at that for decades. But we had it, we made an event, and this was especially the work of Jeff Mahler, who was the PhD student of mine, who was the lead researcher on this. And we can go into more details on the technical aspects of this, but the system was called Dexnet.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. So this started about seven years ago. We had a breakthrough in robot grasping, and that was just simply the ability to pick things out of a bin.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you can do incredible things with them. So it's not necessarily the hardware, but it's the software, it's a control of this nuanced interaction that is very, very challenging. I think many of the other aspects are addressable The ability to tell a robot, go pick up the orange jumper off the table, we can solve that now. Computer vision systems are good enough to know that a jumper is a sweater and there's an orange one and it will pull that up. No problem. But it's being able to actually pick it up and maybe put it on you and then button it up for you. That's where it's difficult.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because by the way, I do have another thing to say here, another opinion, which is that we will get much more out of very simple grippers than we will out of hands that look like human hands. Again, if you look at surgery, the tools that surgeons used perform an appendectomy are very simple grippers like this. And they can do immensely complicated things. So I believe you don't need complex hands. So I'm not saying that's the path to go. I believe you can do simple grippers. In fact, my company, Ambiorobotics, uses an even simpler gripper, which is a suction cup.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's it. That's it, exactly. And that's where I line up with Rod Brooks, because for very similar reasons, we have experience. We've both been working in this field for like 40, he's been working slightly longer than me 60, 50 years. But, you know, we have a lot of experience with trying to solve these problems, and they're much more nuanced than they seem on the surface, especially because a child can pick things up and manipulate it. It seems obvious why can't robots? It's very counterintuitive. But when you work with these things and you really see their limitations, you start to understand that this is a very, very complex problem”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It seems like robotics is like that. We don't know. And listen, I'd be the first to celebrate if someone wakes up, I wake up and I read, someone has solved it, right? It could happen. And then you'll look back on this podcast and say, Goldberg was completely wrong. No. Totally happened. But I want to be a voice to say, hey, it might not happen. And let's just think about that and be a little bit realistic because I know how a lot of people are thinking that it's inevitable it's going to happen and any, you know, hopefully by next year, according to Elon and many of his followers, but they have to be ready for that maybe not to happen. And I'm worried about a backlash that people will say, hey, this whole robotics thing is hocus pocus. you know we're gonna move out of this field in droves”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Makes a lot of sense. Sort of the technology is pretty obvious, but you have to contain this plasma. It seems like a technical issue. We can figure that out. Well, 50 years later, we're still working on it, and it's hard. It's one of these very, very nuanced problems. Another one is curing cancer. When I was a kid, they used to say, we're going to have a war on cancer just like we got to the moon. 10 years will solve cancer. We haven't solved it. So there are problems that are extremely difficult and they take much longer than anyone expects.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So again, I'm sort of exaggerating and to make a point, which is certainly there's a number of ways to accelerate that. And I think we can eventually get there. By the way, I'm not saying this will never happen. Please don't get me wrong. I believe it will happen, but my big question is when. I think it's really important to be prepared for the reality. There's a lot of people who say, hey, this makes sense. I want this. We should have this soon. But remember, there's a lot of cases where people have talked about that in the past. Fusion energy, nuclear fusion.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“minute, right? You can do the math and you end up with a hundred thousand years. So you could sit down and read everything that's used and be 100,000 years later, you'd be done. Now, we don't have such data for robot manipulation. It doesn't exist. It's not like we can just find it on the internet. It's the data is very different. There we want to start with vision images and then end with control signals to the robots. Don't exist, so we have to start and basically generate this data. But what we're up against is it's 100,000 years. We're 100,000 years behind the language models.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk that. Yeah, let's talk this okay. All right. Well, there's a way of quantifying all this. And this is something that I call the robot data gap. And it's a following, that if you put together all of the data that was used to train language models, now it's vast, but it's hard to wrap your head around how much data is that. Well, my students and I were able to calculate that if you actually look at it, and actually there's another Kevin Black, who's a researcher at physical intelligence, very, very smart guy. had the first insight about this. And then we've been taking it a little further, but basically it's that if you added up all the hours, it would take you to read human, average human, to read all the text that's available to train the language models, right? So it's all the books that are out there. It's all Wikipedia. It's all everything that's on the internet. If you add up all those tokens, if you will, and then to figure out, well, a human can read at the average speed of 238 words.”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what I mean, yeah. And here's the thing, we don't have good language for describing this, right? We're trying to, because it's all intuitive for us. If you ask me, tell me how to tie a shoelace, right? I'd be like, you know, it's not easy, right? We don't have language. And that's part of the reason, by the way, this is the other issue, and I'll come to is the data gap, the gap between the amount of data we have for language versus robots. Maybe this is a good time to...”
2025-12-24 · We Study Billionaires · TECH010: The Real Robotics Timeline w/ Ken Goldberg (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT