“There are four research topics that, as we make progress on each one, will enable our robots to do a lot more,” says Rodney Brooks is the Panasonic professor of robotics at MIT and the director of its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

“And so I have set these goals: the object recognition capabilities of a 2-year-old child, the language understanding of a 4-year-old, the manual dexterity of a 6-year-old, and The social understanding of an 8-year-old child.”