The Evolutionary Path Towards Sentient Robots

For over fifty years, engineers have attempted to achieve machine intelligence that rivals human performance, but with only limited success in some specialized arenas such as chess. I will discuss what I believe is the central reason behind this failure, and how using the biological process of evolution can overcome that problem. I show that evolved brains that can learn can be transplanted onto physical robots, who then learn about our world by interacting with it. Such robots do not present a threat to humans, as their brains develop at the same speed as people's, and begin their life as naive as an infant.