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Over the summer of 1966, Marvin Minsky, who co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and was a consultant on the film, decided to get this pesky problem solved once and for all. An undergraduate student was assigned to the task. Needless to say, AI researchers are still working on that little summer project.
Classical AI champions like Minsky saw intelligence as a purely mental phenomenon - playing chess, proving mathematical theorems, manipulating logical symbols, these were the hallmarks of cognitive sophistication. Or so they thought. Rodney Brooks begged to differ and, as a young researcher, he set out to forge a new path. Unlike Minsky, Brooks believed that talking and walking were truly tough activities. Rather than trying to mimic formal capabilities such as chess playing, Brooks determined to focus his energy on basic locomotion.
Consider an insect, let us say an ant. It cannot speak and it certainly doesn't know the queen's gambit, yet it can scurry rapidly across uneven ground and find its way to and from its nest. An ant cannot have a mental map of its world - it doesn't have enough brain cells to hold one - and yet it can navigate through complex terrain, something robots of the 1970s and 1980s were manifestly incapable of doing. How does such a "dumb" critter achieve this?
Whatever "intelligence" is - and this is far from easy to define - Brooks came to believe it could not be imposed from above. As he saw it, high-level cognitive functions must emerge from simpler, low-level ones. Thus progress lay not with the fantasy of disembodied superminds like HAL, but in simple scuttling creatures.
Putting into practice this heretical philosophy, Brooks assembled a team whose achievements culminated in Genghis and a fleet of robotic insectoid siblings. Though running only simple code, these ersatz creatures appeared to display extraordinarily lifelike behaviour. Brooks says Genghis had a "wasp-like personality" and it scrambled and chased according to its own internal whims, not at the dictate of any human controller. He summarised this radical approach in a landmark paper, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, a slogan that would later be adapted by NASA and which would inspire the development of its new generation of space-faring robots, such as the Mars Sojourner.
But, like most AI folk, Brooks dreamt of humans. Could a robot engage in human-like interactions? Could it elicit from actual humans an emotional response? Could it, in turn, display emotion? From Genghis and its siblings, Brooks learnt an important lesson: appearance is a huge part of the equation - if something appears to be alive, then we are far more likely to mentally accord it that status. At least for a while. During the 1990s, Brooks and his team turned their attention to these problems, building first Cog, then Kismet.
I have "met" Cog - and that does seem the appropriate word. Modelled on a human body, Cog has a torso, a head and two arms. There are no legs. Its head has two eyes and two ears so it can see and hear, though it does not speak. Responding to what it sees and hears, Cog can turn its head to "look" at things. One of the things it has been trained to recognise is the human face. When Cog looks at you there is an uncanny sense of presence: I found myself wanting to get its attention, wanting to be "acknowledged" by this heap of electronics.
Kismet, which is just a head, has been specifically designed to elicit emotional response. Built by Brooks' student Cynthia Breazeal, it looks a bit like a refugee from the set of Gremlins, yet many people find themselves surprisingly engaged. Kismet cannot actually talk but, in response to human speech, it burbles back rather like a baby. Most cleverly, Kismet responds to the prosody of its human companion - that is, the tone rather than the content of what is being said - and, in turn, modulates the pitch and tone of its own voice. During conversation Kismet raises its eyebrows up and down, opens its eyes wider and demonstrates other emotional signifiers. The results are amazingly effective.
Surely Kismet is not really happy, or sad, or surprised, as many people insist, Brooks tells me. What, then, does it mean to really have emotions, rather than the mere facsimile? What, in short, does it mean to really be alive? Brooks has become obsessed by the issue: "In some sense, this is the ultimate question," he says.
As someone who has spent his entire professional life trying to animate metal and silicon, Brooks knows how hard that is to achieve. He suspects there is something fundamental about living things that robotics and AI researchers have been missing - "the juice", he calls it, quickly insisting he does not mean by this any ethereal or spiritual addition to the fundamental stuff of matter. We are missing, he thinks, some basic way of seeing or understanding; what we need is a biological Einstein, someone who can come in with a radically new perspective. Short of that, Brooks says, AI researchers will continue to make slow and steady progress but, if you are dreaming of androids, don't hold your breath. In his view, we are nowhere near to anything humanoid and, short of "the juice", we are unlikely to be for the foreseeable future.
Rodney Brooks' book Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us will be published in July by Penguin/Allen Lane.
The Loebner Prize home page is at www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html
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