First of all, what I mean by sad is not'pitiful', but I mean actually literally I am sad that it is this way. Every business could be helped by using AI. I think a lot of business owners know this: they contact me often and ask me about helping them use AI in their businesses. I charge them a consulting fee, but the vast majority of the time, their business just cannot afford to implement a full AI program. All this will require a team of software engineers working for months to deliver a single piece of software that can use AI to do one thing, like forecast sales.

Until we can design a mind that's superhuman and flawless, we'll have to settle for instilling plain old human values into artificial intelligence. But how to do this in a world where values are constantly evolving? Many of our life choices today would be considered immoral by people in the Middle Ages -- or even the 1970s, says Ben Goertzel, whose family personally experienced the sad state of LGBTQ acceptance in Southern New Jersey 50 years ago. Raising an A.I. is a lot like raising kids, says Goertzel. Kids don't learn best from a list of rules, but from lived experience – watching and imitating their parents. A.I.s and humans will have to play and learn side by side, and evolve together as values adapt toward an increasingly technological future.

A Bedford company is introducing the Scooba 230, a robot that can clean bathrooms -- it's a cousin of the Roomba (and made by the same company), but smaller and therefore able to get at tighter spots. While the Scooba 230 may be a useful addition to certain households, it's also a depressing reflection of just how far from where we need to be, robotics-wise. It's 2011, after all, and we're still decades from the sorts of robots we have been promised by science fiction, whether they be of the sass-talking or psychotic killing varieties. It turns out that it's very hard to get robots to act and move like humans, but easy to give them simple instructions based on navigation and physics. So, in a somewhat strange twist the sci-fi authors of the past couldn't have anticipated, we've relegated robots to cleaning floors and bombing distant countries -- but not much in between.