MIT work raises a question: Can robots be teammates with humans rather than slaves? ZDNet

The image that most of society has of robots is that of slaves -- creations that can be forced do what humans want. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have formed an interesting take on the robot question that is less about slavery, more about cooperation. They observed that language is a function of humans cooperating on tasks, and imagined how robots might use language when working with humans to achieve some result. The word "team" is a word used prominently way up top in the paper, "Decision-Making for Bidirectional Communication in Sequential Human-Robot Collaborative Tasks," written by scientists Vaibhav V. Unhelkar, Shen Li, and Julie A. Shah of the Computer Science and AI Laboratories at MIT and posted on the MIT Web site on March 31st. The use of the word "team" is significant given the structure of the experiment the scientists designed.