Multiplicity Not Singularity: Ken Goldberg on the Future of Work - Blum Center

Robotics Professor Ken Goldberg is the first to acknowledge the public anxiety about what automation and AI might mean for future jobs. Singularity--the hypothesis that AI will become increasingly powerful, decimating professions and remaking civilization--is becoming a mainstream concept. All one has to do is read news headlines about robot-driven factories, watch movies like "Ex Machina," and listen to public figures like Elon Musk stating that AI poses our greatest existential threat. Yet at a recent Blum Center Faculty Salon on the Digital Transformation of Development, Goldberg, UC Berkeley's Department Chair of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and the William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering, argued that such fears are exaggerated. He is among computer scientists and roboticists who believe there is inadequate evidence to support the mass unemployment theories, such as the often cited Oxford University study that estimated 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of computerization.