Rodney Brooks forecasts the future

Show a two-year-old child a key, a shoe, a cup, a book or any of hundreds of other objects, and they can reliably name its class – even when they have never before seen something that looks exactly like that particular key, shoe, cup or book. Our computers and robots still cannot do this task with any reliability. We have been working on this problem for a while. Forty years ago the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology appointed an undergraduate to solve it over the summer. He failed, and I failed on the same problem in…