Philosophy of Cognitive Science ( 06 - 02483 )

Many people working in AI see the construction of an android with human-like abilities as the main goal of AI. For example, Charniak and McDermott write [4, p. 7]: The ultimate goal of AI research (which we are very far from achieving) is to build a person, or, more humbly, an animal. Those working on the MIT Cog Project are more explicit [3]: Building an android, an autonomous robot with humanoid form and humanlike abilities, has been both a recurring theme in science fiction and a “Holy Grail” for the Artificial Intelligence community. In recent years considerable progress has been made towards achieving this goal. Here are some ongoing projects: • robotic kitten (Starbrain Project, Starlab, Belgium) • Lucy the robotic orangutan (Cyberlife Research, England) • Cog the humanoid robot platform (Cog Project, AI Lab, MIT) • humanoid robot (Kawato Dynamic Brain Project, ATR Labs, Kyoto, and the University of Southern California in LA) • P3 the humanoid robot (Honda Motor Company and Carnegie Mellon University) • Elvis the humanoid robot (Chalmers University, Gothenberg, Sweden) More information about these projects can be found on the ArtificialBrains.com website where we also find the following statements: Many artificial intelligence scientists now believe that true artificial intelligence will only emerge through the evolutionary development of autonomous mobile robots. And in order to create human-like intelligence, the robotic body too needs to be humanoid.