The first, planned commercial products will be bots capable of operating within online networked environments such as MSN Messenger and role-playing games.

Things to teach BabyRobot AI Systems:

00 - RO-BIOE (R) Theory: Recognition of Boundaries - Identification of Entities

This is one of the most unique skills of the human mind - recognition of situations, context, the end of one thing, the start of the next.  It is what, for example, allows us to answer a general knowledge quiz question correctly in regard of the context

Absence of RO-BIOE is a major reason why no computer that can answer natural language "quiz-show" type questions has, as yet been developed.

The proposition for RO-BIOE is the generation of a "Simulated Awareness Field" (SAF) within the operating system / environment of a BabyRobot - giving the CPU a sense of "what's happening right now" within the SAF created inside the machine.

01 - ITARO-BAE: Identification, Tracking and Recogniton of Boundaries and Entities

An alternative acronym describing the RO-BIOE capability, based on the principle of Validation During Education - VDE - whereby the BabyRobot system will constantly report on its SAF (Simulated Awareness Field), and confirm its understanding to human operators through the generation of an LEL  - Learning Event Log.  This log will be the subject of constant inspection by the BDT - BabyRobot Development Team to ensure that understandings and demarcation of entities, boundaries and contexts are being selected "correctly" by the BabyRobot AI System.  The definition of "correct" will no doubt be subject to much controversy, for herein lies the intrinsic possibility of introducing bias and prejudiced beliefs, erroneous suggestions, and things that are JPS - Just Plain Stupid.

The BDT will comprise a consortiuum of recognized experts in each field of human endeavour, who will serve to guide and shape the thinking of BabyRobot AI Systems to ensure pure (distortion or misconception free) understanding, so that BabyRobot is constructed on a firm foundation from the get-go.

BabyRobot.Net will focus its objectives by clearly defining the scope of what is deemed possible, viable and achievable within the limits of current and upcoming technologies through the creation of 3 Lists:

• List 1 - Things Computers Can or Soon Will Be Able to Do...
• List 2 - Things Computers Cannot Do Now and Maybe Never...
• List 3 - Things Computers Can Do Now or in the Future, that Humans Cannot or Will Not Be Able to Do ("Computers are Better than Humans At...")

As technology advances, we anticipate the shifting of items from List 2 "Computers Can't" to List 1 "Computers Can".

LIST 1 - COMPUTERS & ROBOTS CAN OR WILL SOON BE ABLE TO...

Currently and Presently...

1 - Respond to simple voice instructions

2 - Recognize Hand-written input from a touch-screen

3 -Optically Character-Recognize Printed and Hand-printed writing via document scanning

4 - Keyword search- and index- electronically-scanned-and-stored documents

5 - Recognize and Match Human-Faces Against a Database of Photographs

Imminently...

1 - Translate spoken words from one language to another in real-time

2 - Have actual-language dialogue with humans via Messaging Systems or Voice Recognition and Speech-Synthesis

LIST 2 - COMPUTERS CANNOT NOW OR MAY NEVER BE ABLE TO...

1 - Appreciate Art and deliver a critique on it

2 - Appreciate Music

LIST 3 - COMPUTERS ARE BETTER THAN HUMANS AT...

Currently and Presently...

1 - Storing billions of database records, Giga, Tera- and Peta-Bytes of Data with instant access

2 - Cataloguing Vast Quantities of Electronically-Stored Data

3 - Monitoring and automatically maintaining Chemical-Plants and other complex machinery within safe operating conditions (if configured and programmed correctly by humans)

Imminently...

1 - Building new computers and robots (with Human Assistance)