About Jan Van Den Bergh

Why we should work with robots

In 2014, Stephen Hawking warned us about a dystopian future where intelligent devices could ‘spell the end of the human race’. With this warning of one of world’s leading scientists in mind, movies like iRobot and The Terminator don’t seem to be fiction after all. While we hopefully are still far away from robots threatening our lives, intelligent machines are increasingly being portrayed as steel creatures threatening our jobs. Do we need to be scared? Informatician dr. Jan Van Den Bergh, researching user interactive applications and collaborative interactive software at Hasselt University, is not a believer of this theory. He argues that, instead of speculating what can be the worst outcome of these machines, we should just accept that they are different and exploit their strengths to our advantage. But how can this be achieved? In his talk “Will you be working with robots?”, Jan answers this question by means of his research focussing on the human-robot interaction in a manufacturing environment. Will we ever live in harmony with our artificially intelligent friends or is there a reason to be afraid? Apply for a ticket for TEDxUHasselt 2018 and check out this talk and take a look into the robotic future.