An anonymous author once mused that “AI is the science of making computers act like the ones in the movies”. Assuming they meant something like the computer on the starship Enterprise or Rosie, the household robot from “The Jetsons”, what would be required to achieve this dream? And where do we stand?
A modest version of a household robot should be able to understand and respond to simple spoken instructions in natural language (any language spoken by people, such as English, Spanish or Chinese). It should be able to run errands and perform basic chores, and its responses should be reasonable. That is, we can’t expect robots to be correct all the time, but in order to be trustworthy, a robot’s responses should make sense.
For our household robot to react reasonably to requests such as “get the blue mug on the table”, it should be able to deal with several issues, such as perceptual homonymy (words that mean different things under different perceptual conditions), syntactic ambiguity, and user vagueness and inaccuracy. It should also be able to recognise users’ intentions, the potential risks of actions and adapt to different users.
