AI as a child

I, Rodney Brooks, Am a Robot
Rodney Brooks, in "IEEE Spectrum", June 2008
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6307

The article describes the four basic capabilities any true Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) system would have to possess, described in terms of what children can do:
- The object-recognition capabilities of a 2-year-old child (observe a variety of objects, categorize them)
- The language capabilities of a 4-year-old child (engage in dialogs, handle irregularities, idiomatic expressions, noisy environments, accents, incomplete utterances, and interjections; make corrections)
- The manual dexterity of a 6-year-old child (grasp new objects, manipulate flexible objects, pick up flat and thin objects, manipulate unknown objects inside a bag)
- The social understanding of an 8-year-old child ("theory of the mind" about the self and others)

The author also stresses the importance of coupling AI systems to bodies.

A very interesting read, inside the special report about the Technological singularity.
Also check out the magazine's singularity index.