Secretive Canadian Company Teaches Robots to Be More Like People

You’ve ordered a robot online and are booting it up at home. At first the bot doesn’t do much of anything; it simply follows you around and observes your daily routine: walking the dog, making lasagna, washing the dishes. But before long the bot has learned to be your surrogate, shouldering quotidian tasks so you can focus on more interesting ones.

That’s the world envisioned by Suzanne Gildert and Geordie Rose. They run Kindred, an ultra-secretive artificial intelligence company based in Vancouver and funded in part by Google’s venture capital arm. Gildert and Rose started Kindred on the principle that the best way to make robots as smart as humans, is to put them in our shoes, and teach them to learn the same way we do. With the help of an all-star advisory board of AI experts, Kindred is already making progress toward that audacious goal.