In the Works

	"Pino" is a humanoid robot learning to walk - a task more complicated than we may realize.

It might seem as though A.I. research has fallen behind the ambitious schedule set by Arthur C. Clarke, who imagined something as sophisticated as the HAL 9000 would be possible by the 1990s. But A.I. is in fact slowly insinuating itself into our everyday lives. In addition to groundbreaking projects like Veloso's soccer players and Scassellati's social robots, intelligent software programs already create air traffic schedules, scan crowds for the faces of known criminals, even calculate the best spot to open a new pub. NASA is working on a robot to do routine maintenance on the International Space Station, and the U.S. military just allocated funds towards developing "smart" uniforms that could track soldiers, administer medicines and even spontaneously harden into casts around injuries.

Even still, if machines like HAL seem a long way off, they are. "As a kid, I watched things like "Star Wars" with all the androids," says Scassellati. "Where are they today? Why can't we build something that's like a person? The answer to that, I think, is really simple. We don't really understand what it is like to be a person."

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