I, Rodney Brooks, Am a Robot

Jan 18, 2011 04:36 PM

What children can do  (page 1 of IEEE 2008 article by Brooks:  I, Rodney Brooks, Am a Robot))

The object-recognition capabilities of a 2-year-old child. A 2-year-old can observe a variety of objects of some type--different kinds of shoes, say--and successfully categorize them as shoes, even if he or she has never seen soccer cleats or suede oxfords. Today's best computer vision systems still make mistakes--both false positives and false negatives--that no child makes.

The language capabilities of a 4 year old child. By age 4, children can engage in a dialogue using complete clauses and can handle irregularities, idiomatic expressions, a vast array of accents, noisy environments, incomplete utterances, and interjections, and they can even correct nonnative speakers, inferring what was really meant in an ungrammatical utterance and reformatting it. Most of these capabilities are still hard or impossible for computers.

The manual dexterity of a 6 year old  child. At 6 years old, children can grasp objects they have not seen before; manipulate flexible objects in tasks like tying shoelaces; pick up flat, thin objects like playing cards or pieces of paper from a tabletop; and manipulate unknown objects in their pockets or in a bag into which they can't see. Today's robots can at most do any one of these things for some very particular object.

The social understanding of an 8 year old child. By the age of 8, a child can understand the difference between what he or she knows about a situation and what another person could have observed and therefore could know. The child has what is called a ”theory of the mind” of the other person. For example, suppose a child sees her mother placing a chocolate bar inside a drawer. The mother walks away, and the child's brother comes and takes the chocolate. The child knows that in her mother's mind the chocolate is still in the drawer. This ability requires a level of perception across many domains that no AI system has at the moment.

I, Rodney Brooks, Am a Robot

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