BBC News SCI/TECH Time for real intelligence?

It is time to start building machines which can learn and be raised in the same way as humans, the authors of an article in the journal Science say. But computer scientist Professor Juyang Weng, of Michigan State University, US, says it is time to work on systems which "live" autonomously, have bodies suited to their working environment and learn in a general sense. "According to this paradigm, robots should be designed to go through a long period of autonomous mental development, from'infancy' to'adulthood'. "The essence of mental development is to enable robots to autonomously live in the world and to become smart on their own, with some supervision by humans," he writes. Making computers copy the way humans learn should not be as difficult as it sounds if scientists can uncover the underlying principles of mental development.