Why Build a Human-like Robot?
In thinking about human level intelligence, there are two sets of reasons one might build a robot with humanoid form. If one takes seriously the arguments of Johnson and Lakoff, then the form of our bodies is critical to the representations that we develop and use for both our internal thought (whatever that might mean…) and our language. If we are to build a robot with human like intelligence then it must have a human like body in order to be able to develop similar sorts of representations. However, there is a large cautionary note to accompany this particular line of reasoning. Since we can only build a very crude approximation to a human body there is a danger that the essential aspects of the human body will be totally missed. There is thus a danger of engaging in cargo-cult science, where only the broad outline form is mimicked, but none of the internal essentials are there at all. A second reason for building a humanoid form robot stands on firmer ground. An important aspect o
