Secretive Canadian Company Teaches Robots to Be More Like People

You've ordered a robot online and are booting it up at home. At first the bot doesn't do much of anything; it simply follows you around and observes your daily routine: walking the dog, making lasagna, washing the dishes. But before long the bot has learned to be your surrogate, shouldering quotidian tasks so you can focus on more interesting ones. That's the world envisioned by Suzanne Gildert and Geordie Rose. They run Kindred, an ultra-secretive artificial intelligence company based in Vancouver and funded in part by Google's venture capital arm.