How does Lucy compare with other robots, like Cog?
Cog (at MIT’s AI Lab) and Lucy are physically similar, in that they are upper torso, humanoid (primatoid?) robots with multiple sensory systems, virtual muscles and so forth. Cog is a good deal bigger and heavier, and is much more professionally engineered. Lucy meanwhile is taking much less time to build and is several orders of magnitude cheaper! The main distinctions between Cog (including its baby sibling Kismet) and Lucy are ideological. In relation to the field of AI as a whole, Cog and Lucy are very much “on the same side”, but there are important differences. Cog’s intelligence is meant to arise from the interactions of a collection of “behavioural modules”. Each module is designed explicitly and there’s an implied sense that most of what people normally call intelligence can be explained (and perhaps therefore is explained) solely in terms of these modules – that intelligent behaviour arises from a hierarchy of simple unintelligent behaviours. Lucy is based on a belief that, a
