Is the world ready for the self-aware robot?

What does it take for robots to be like us, to make a robot that functions like a human being?
I think the robot would have to have the capability to interact, to form meaningful relationships and to understand the value of those relationships, to understand the difference between me and other, to have empathy. Those would be the things I would describe as most crucial, and I do believe that we can build something like that. But I also do believe that if we cannot build it already ready-made, we have to build them in the way that they, like human babies, go through a process of social learning, and probably for the first critter to be built, that social process will take years and years and years, much longer than for a human baby.

At MIT, there were the robots Cog and Kismet that you wrote about in your book. Were they a first step in robots learning what it is to be like a person?
I think they were. The whole ideology behind those robots was not 'we can rebuild grown-up intelligence', but it was an acknowledgment of the fact that babies — even though obviously they are not born as blank slates, they don't have self-awareness, they don't have intentionality, they don't have all those things that we consider part of being intelligent — but they get all those capabilities through interaction with their caregivers. And so Cog and Kismet were really the first robotic models that were built in analogy to a human and learn through interaction, and I thought that was a very, very powerful approach.

The problem was, it is so hard to do it... I think what the robots could do is fascinating, but the underlying technology, as novel and as wonderful as it is, is still kind of primitive [compared to popular notions of what robots can do].

I think that for a lot of people the only thing they know about robots is what they see in the movies, whether it's "I, Robot" or R2-D2 and C-3PO, the Terminator, things like that.
And so compared to that obviously Cog and Kismet are hideously primitive. People don't know how difficult it is to build those critters, and this is why I concentrated more on our reaction toward those robots, because I thought this is a more interesting thing — for instance, the fact that Kismet really didn't learn. I think there is much more ground to build on, I think that particular research at MIT suffered from a general problem in science, and that is that highly expensive basic research is not very well funded, especially in engineering where it's so expensive to build that stuff — there always needs to be an application.