The next big leap in AI could come from warehouse robots

Ask Geordie Rose and Suzanne Gildert, co-founders of the startup Kindred, about their company's philosophy, and they'll describe a bold vision of the future: machines with human-level intelligence. Rose says these will be perhaps the most transformative inventions in history -- and they aren't far away. More intriguing than this prediction is Kindred's proposed path for achieving it. Unlike some of the most cash-flush corporations in Silicon Valley, Kindred is focusing not on chatbots or game-playing programs, but on automating physical robots. Gildert, a physicist who conceived Kindred in 2013 while working with Rose at quantum computing company D-Wave, thinks giving AI a physical body is the only way to make real progress toward a true thinking machine.