AMPLab faculty member Ken Goldberg participated on a panel at the World Economic Forum at Davos last month.   The panel, which was moderated by UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, was made up entirely of Berkeley faculty, also including CS Prof. Stuart Russell.

At the panel, Goldberg dismissed the idea of the “Singularity”, i.e., the point when robots completely surpass humans, and instead proposed the very AMP-like idea of a “Multiplicity” where Machines and People (and of course, Algorithms) co-exist.   According to Goldberg:

The Multiplicity is inclusive, emphasizes diversity, and is actually practical as it applies to things like Google’s Search Engine, Wikipedia, and the Google Car. The Multiplicity builds on emerging results in Collective Intelligence (for humans) and Ensemble Learning Theory (for machines).

An interview with Ken about this topic was recently published on the Robohub blog and can be found at http://robohub.org/forget-singularity-lets-talk-multiplicity-ken-goldberg-on-ai-at-the-wef/