Cognitive Robotics: For Never Was a Story of More Woe than This

Abstract

We are now on the verge of the next technical revolution—robots are going to invade our lives. However, to interact with humans or to be incorporated into a human “collective” robots have to be provided with some human-like cognitive abilities. What does it mean?—Nobody knows. But, robotics research communities are trying hard to find out a way to cope with this problem. Meanwhile, despite abundant funding these efforts did not lead to any meaningful result (only in Europe, only in the past ten years, Cognitive Robotics research funding has reached a ceiling of 1.39 billion euros). In the next ten years, a similar budget is going to be spent to tackle the Cognitive Robotics problems in the frame of the Human Brain Project. There is no reason to expect that this time the result will be different. We would like to try to explain why we are so unhappy about this.