Berkeley Talks

Sep 18, 2026 — When W. Kamau Bell was a child, his mother bought the family a Commodore VIC-20, a popular home computer of the early 1980s. He also had Pong, a ColecoVision and, later, a MiniDisc player. Today, he is still the person his family calls when the TV...

Aug 21, 2026 — When Aravind Srinivas arrived at UC Berkeley in 2020 hoping to join Pieter Abbeel’s robotics lab, he encountered an immediate obstacle: The lab was already full. Undeterred, Srinivas proposed that he and Abeel work together for six months so he could...

Aug 07, 2026 — In the early hours of November 2007, Amadou Cisse, a 29-year-old University of Chicago chemistry graduate student, was walking home when Demetrius Warren, then 17, and Benjamin Williams, 21, approached him. According to trial testimony, Warren pointed...

Jul 24, 2026 — In 1957, a terrified 17-year-old girl lay on a Harlem kitchen table undergoing an illegal, backstreet abortion. Nearly dying from complications, she was rushed to a hospital ward where nurses badgered her and demanded to know what she had done. That...

Jul 10, 2026 — In the early days of personal computing, people imagined artificial intelligence as a single, self-contained system — a kind of digital brain with a fixed identity. Talking to AI meant asking questions to a clearly defined machine. That picture no...