REMEMBER the basic income grant South African labour unions, churches and NGOs campaigned for back in the 1990s and early "noughties", but on which Trevor Manuel's Treasury frowned on as a fiscal nonstarter? Silicon Valley A-lister Sam Altman thinks the US will have to adopt something like it within the next generation or two -- and he's not alone. Altman is founder and president of Y Combinator, the seed-stage tech investor that helped launch Airbnb and Dropbox. As co-chairman of OpenAI, he is working with Elon Musk to see that artificial intelligence, as it approaches and perhaps surpasses the human variety, benefits mankind. He believes that while technology will generate vast new wealth, it will in the process destroy much traditional employment without replacing it.

This paper gives a brief retrospective of a research project begun in 1987 and continuing to the present on the topic of language acquisition by an autonomous humanoid robot. We recount the motivations for, theoretical bases of and experimental results on this subject. Important results include novel models and algorithms resulting in interesting linguistic function of our robots.