Professor Luc Steels describes his recent breakthrough experiments, in which robots are programmed to play language games and come up with novel concepts, words and meanings. He explains how this triggers a process of cultural evolution that leads to more complex forms of language and what this tells us about the nature of our own intelligence and the future of artificial intelligence.

Luc Steels is ICREA Research Professor at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (CSIC-UPF) in Barcelona and Director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. The Simonyi Lecture is funded by a generous gift from the Amalur Foundation.

— University of Oxford