Ancient Wisdom: Exploring the Intersection of AI, Art, and Nature
The cover of the winter 2025 edition of Berkeley IEOR Magazine showcases artwork from Ancient Wisdom: Trees, Time, and Technology, an exhibition by Ken Goldberg and Tiffany Shlain currently on view at the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles through March 2, 2025. Part of the Getty Museum’s city-wide Pacific Standard Time quadrennial, the exhibit examines the intersection of art and science. The cover image, Abstract Expressions, features a six-foot cross-section of a fallen redwood engraved with a timeline of over 30 significant scientific equations, curated by Goldberg and Shlain with contributions from ChatGPT and UC Berkeley faculty.
As Walter Benjamin observed about photography in 1935, technologies cannot replace art—but they can profoundly change how we think about it. The astonishingly rapid advancements in generative AI mirror photography’s transformative potential, introducing entirely new ways for artists and the public to create original texts, images, and videos. At the same time, generative AI raises significant ethical and societal questions: How do corporations exploit copyrighted material to train AI systems? How reliable is AI when prone to “hallucinations?” How can we mitigate the dangers of AI-created deepfakes used for political and economic manipulation? What is the impact on jobs in creative fields like illustration, graphic design, and filmmaking? Perhaps most pressing of all, what existential risks could arise if AI’s goals diverge from humanity’s?
UC Berkeley IEOR Professor Ken Goldberg and his wife Tiffany Shlain have independently explored the intersection of art and technology for decades. Both are acclaimed artists with exhibitions at the Whitney Museum and NY MoMA, as well as technologists with significant contributions in their fields. At UC Berkeley, Goldberg leads a robotics research lab and chairs the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) steering committee. He has published over 300 papers on robotics and frequently speaks at universities and corporate events on AI and robotics. Shlain’s engagement with media technology began in high school when she served as a student ambassador to the Soviet Union, discussing the potential of networked personal computers. In the 1990s, she founded the Webby Awards and pioneered the integration of cutting-edge technologies into filmmaking and live events. Together, they bring a critical lens to technology, as evidenced in their Emmy-nominated series The Future Starts Here, with episodes like Why We Love Robots and Robots, Botox, and Google Glass (watch at tiffanyshlain.com/ futurestartshere).
Artificial intelligence and its physical counterpart, robotics, have roots stretching back to ancient civilizations, including the Egyptians. The modern era of AI began with Alan Turing’s seminal 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, which introduced the Turing Test—a measure of whether a machine can mimic human intelligence convincingly. While ChatGPT arguably passes the Turing Test, questions persist about whether it exhibits true intelligence. Goldberg and Shlain’s Tree of Knowledge explores this ambiguity, posing philosophical questions like “What is knowledge?”, “What is intelligence?” and “Can machines think?” By linking these queries to the biblical story of Adam and Eve, the work situates the quest for AI within a broader philosophical and ethical framework.
In Abstract Expressions, a six-foot cross-section of a redwood is etched with 39 pivotal scientific equations tracing the trajectory of scientific discovery (the complete list of equations found at bit.ly/AbstractExpressions-Equations). The timeline includes milestones such as Bayes’ 1763 Artificial Intelligence in the Ancient Wisdom Exhibit 10 UC Berkeley IEOR theorem on statistical inference, Shannon’s 1949 definition of information theory, and the 2017 development of the transformer network that underpins modern generative AI. It also highlights Goldberg’s own contribution: a 1993 equation proving the completeness of robot part orienting. The sculpture serves as a powerful reminder of AI’s deep roots in centuries of scientific inquiry.
Another installation, If We Lose Ourselves, reflects on humanity’s efforts to preserve knowledge for future generations. The artwork evokes a hypothetical scenario where society must rebuild, emphasizing the critical role of archives and information repositories.
The exhibit’s video art piece, Speculation, Like Nature, Abhors a Vacuum, is a tribute to Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Goldberg and Shlain collaborated with researchers at UC Berkeley, MIT, and Google DeepMind to create a geographically and biologically precise portrayal of LA treescapes using advanced AI. They combined aerial and Street View imagery data, the Los Angeles tree census, and manual data collection, analyzing it with innovative AI techniques that integrate graph neural networks. The result is a stunning visualization of the city’s urban ecology along four major thoroughfares.
The final component, Seeing the Forest, is an interactive online platform where participants can create personalized “Tree Tributes” using GPT-4o, OpenAI’s latest generative AI system. With prompts developed by Goldberg, Shlain, and Berkeley students, each tribute weaves together unique details about a tree’s genus, age, location, and history. The diverse outputs generated by the platform highlight both the positive and the negative potentials of AI, echoing the exhibit’s invitation for viewers to reflect on the promise and complexities of our evolving relationship with technology.
Ancient Wisdom: Trees, Time, and Technology is on view at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, through March 2, 2025.
Please note that as a result of the Palisades Fire the Skirball is currently closed without a firm date for reopening. For the most current information on the Skirball Cultural Center’s status, you can visit their official website, www.skirball.org.
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Berkeley IEOR Magazine | Winter 2025