We're in the Ames Street media laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology talking about how a robot could acquire a sense of self, a sense of me and mine -- the recrafting of Pinocchio in a cybernetic workshop -- when Kai-yuh Hsiao slips into the room.

He puts on a headset with attached microphone, sits in front of a monitor and flicks switches. "Ripley, wake up," he says quietly. No response. "Ripley, wake up."

My attention slides away from the conversation about robotic inner life. "Did I hear you say, 'Ripley, wake up?' " I ask.

"Yes, but he's not talking just yet." Mr. Hsiao makes adjustments on his console and repeats: "Ripley, wake up."

A pleasant male voice at my elbow replies, "I'm awake." And swiftly, muscularly, gracefully, Ripley lifts his -- its (the pronouns are used interchangeably here) -- head, and looks at Mr. Hsiao.

Here he is: Robotry's leading edge, the product of philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, physics, linguistics and child- development research.

Psychopathic HAL shaped the world's image of artificial intelligence 35 years ago in 2001: A Space Odyssey. R2D2 was tin-can cuddly in Star Wars. David was the boy-android-with-a heart in AI: Artificial Intelligence. Lieut.-Commander Data achieved consciousness with an electronic-matrix brain in Star Trek.

AI's avant-garde reality in 2003 is Ripley, rather resembling the head of an amiable mechanical Airedale. He's the creation of 34-year- old Deb Roy, founder and director of the cognitive-machines group at MIT's famed media lab, who has been building robots since his Winnipeg childhood.

Ripley cannot play chess. He cannot digest massive mathematical computations. He cannot guide spacecraft, build SUVs, assess your creditworthiness, hunt al-Qaeda in Afghan caves or make himself available for adoption by childless couples.

Ripley can find beanbags.

"Ripley, find the blue beanbag."

"Which one?"

"The top one."

Ripley flops his muzzle down on the top blue beanbag on the table in front of him.

Kid stuff, right? No sci-fi fan worth his Asimov would give Ripley a second glance. When Isaac Asimov published his fictional I, Robot and the Three Laws of Robotics more than half a century ago, the human imagination of AI took mass flight from reality.

Vanguard robots, the public assumes, don't flop their muzzles on beanbags.

In fact, what looks to humans to be difficult for robots, like playing chess, is in fact mindlessly easy. And what looks easy -- because it's easy for humans to do -- is mind-numblingly complex. Like learning language.

Ripley is not being programmed with scripted speech. He is being taught the meanings of words and how to speak, the way a human child would be.

Ripley himself does not look very human. He has a head and a neck with two video cameras for eyes, a microphone for ears, touch-sensors in his gums, and wires and pulleys that enable him to lift, lower and turn his head.

Still, he is a machine-child of AI's New Age, a hoped-for new springtime after 50 hard years of extravagant promises and dashed expectations. Deb Roy and his graduate-student research assistants are among the handful of roboticists who are borrowing from the stuff of life and looking into the minds of children for answers to the mysteries of intelligence and consciousness.

They have created a machine to operate on a new kind of software, as The Economist has noted, "working from the bottom up and organizing itself, like life does, into greater and greater complexity."

They have turned robotics upside down from the so-called First Age of AI when computer scientists -- still thinking there was some pilot in the cockpit of the brain directing mind and body -- set out to create top-down, brilliant machines -- peerless, awesome HALs -- and wound up instead with stupid robots who couldn't reason themselves across a room.

Dr. Roy, who graduated from the University of Waterloo in Ontario before coming to MIT, is on the quest for robotry's Holy Grail -- the creation of a truly conversational robot, a machine capable of complex abstract thought, an artificial intelligence that embraces something that can be called consciousness. If not a cyborg Pinocchio, something close.

They plan before long to give Ripley a verbal-comprehension test administered to children. They expect that, as he is taught increasingly abstract words, he will increasingly develop the capacity for abstract reasoning.

Philosophers, cognitive psychologists and, indeed, theologians are deeply interested in this developmental model of robotry. So is corporate and public enterprise. Dr. Roy's lab has 150 funders, from McDonald's to the U.S. Defence Department.

Influential U.S. philosopher Daniel Dennett, director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in Massachusetts, has been to see Ripley. "We're closing in on the mind," he says.

Prof. Dennett says the work being done by Deb Roy and like-minded computer engineers will lead to robots able to analyze humanity's greatest philosophical questions, such as what consciousness is. He says they are on track toward creating conscious machines and finding the "juice" of robotic cognition.

MIT cognitive psychologist Lera Boroditsky, who studies how the human brain perceives time and motion, says robots built on the principles of Ripley, and unencumbered by whatever baggage clouds human perceptions, may one day re-examine Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

"Ripley, how heavy is this?"

"How heavy is what?"

A metal block is placed in Ripley's mouth. He flexes his neck up and down, hefting the block, as a human would flex his arm to test the weight of an object.

"It is very heavy."

"It's perfectly aware and capable of knowing how heavy things are," says Kai-yuh Hsiao, 25. "I simply haven't programmed it to feel pain [when it lifts something too heavy]. The same way as a human, its motors heat -- its muscles get sore -- and I think there's a very great analogue there, but we haven't chosen to make use of it yet."

Like a first-grader being developmentally ready for reading but not for subtraction, Ripley is ready to understand beanbags, but he's not yet ready to understand pain.

Ripley learns language by looking at an object, touching it and hearing the word for it. In the media lab it is called "grounding." The sight and touch of an object is linked -- grounded -- to the sound of thespoken word. It is exactly how a human infant learns her first words.

The cognitive-machines group brought prelinguistic infants and their mothers into the laboratory and studied how the mothers talked to their babies about toy objects while the babies played with them.They then let a robot, one of Ripley's predecessors, look at and touch the objects while listening to a recording of the mothers. The robot failed to connect "ruff ruff" to "dog." Otherwise, it did okay.

But while the infants seem effortlessly able to break out of themselves and embrace their environment, it is incredibly difficult for a robot to do.

"You have to understand everything that is implicated in language," Dr. Roy says. "We're forced to break it down to understand it, which is what a child does so easily and quickly. It's easy to forget what hard work it is to get access to that physical world."

Ripley is about to have his few fragments of canned, programmed speech deleted -- the equivalent of George W. Bush losing his Teleprompter. Thereafter, Ripley will speak to humans only with the language he has learned from his environment. If it isn't out there for Ripley to experience somehow, he won't have a word for it.

Beanbag is the beginning. Blue and heavy were, comparatively speaking, not too difficult. What about because or now? And here, mine and yours? How does Ripley physically experience those words? How does he learn the? The answer seems to be: Only in context with something else.

"Bruce, in the other building, he builds virtual dogs that people can walk up to and train. These are not the best learning systems ever. But the cool thing about them is that people can walk up to them and within 10 minutes they can train the dog. It's just amazing. You can't easily train Ripley." -- Peter Gorniak, a researcher originally from Vancouver.

Creating higher Ripley from basic Ripley is going to be a tough slog.

"It's all very well knowing about sensory grounding," says Mr. Gorniak, 27, a University of B.C. graduate who is considering doing his doctorate at MIT on how robots think. "But when you start talking about something like 'value' or something like 'justice,' you know you can't go out and lift up 'justice' and see what it is.

"And so those notions must be communicated completely relative to other mental constructs . . . and that gets us into higher things. For example, a system might learn to relate 'justice' to things like 'deception' or even 'pain' that are more concrete to it."

It sounds like imagination.

"Well, you could call it imagination. Yes, I think so."

Dr. Roy is optimistic. "The framework [in which Ripley is being taught language] leads naturally to higher levels of conceptual and linguistic learning," he says.

Even the grammar of language helps. "By virtue of Ripley's perceptual system," Dr. Roy says, "the world is parsed into objects -- bean bags, balls, etc. -- that have properties: Blue. Large. Heavy. This representation of the world as objects with properties forms the basis for nouns and adjectives.

"This is an important point -- that the perceptual system provides a starting point for the language system to create parts of speech, which in turn is the basis for learning syntax. Over time, the learner can use this starting point . . . [to] understand that nouns reach beyond objects. Think of 'the heat,' 'the flight.' "

Many anthropologists and linguists think language developed to enhance human survival. It then became a mechanism for communicating and structuring ideas. It is cemented to consciousness, whatever that is.

Language, these theorists think, is the product of a human being's total sensory experience of the world. It comes from the awareness of having a body and of the body's movements -- which is why the constraints of human physiology have been imposed on Ripley: He could see more with four camera-eyes, but he's been limited to two.

And just as language is likely present in every nook, cranny and neural connection of the brain, so has every wire, pulley and tidbit of Ripley's sensory circuitry been designed with the aim of giving him language.

Dr. Roy cites research by University of Rochester linguist Michael Tanenhaus into the role of vision in processing language: When a researcher named one object among several on a table, people's eyes would shift to that object before the researcher could finish saying the word. Once he had said "cand --" the person would be looking at the candle.

"By the time you have traced all connections from language to non- linguistic aspects of the human -- perception, motor control, planning, visual imagery, and so on -- there will be no aspect of a human left disconnected from language," says Dr. Roy. "The human genome is the language genome."

And so, if you teach language to a robot, what does it become?

Dr. Roy, who recalls building "robot-like contraptions" when he was 8 or 9 and his first recognizable robot at 14, talks of deepening Ripley's curiosity. He talks about instilling in Ripley a "purposeful initiative" to learn and seek information. Parents of teenagers might like to know his methods.

"I would like to build the first robot that you can really sit down and have a conversation with. Although I'm not sure I will ever get there, that goal raises great questions that will keep us busy for years."

The virtual simulator with which Ripley is now being equipped, says graduate student Nick Mavridis, 29, from Greece, will enable the robot to see himself bend down to muzzle a beanbag, giving him an experience of his body. The simulator also will allow Ripley to retain an image of objects he saw a moment ago but which are now, for example, behind him.

If he is told to find a green beanbag that is behind him, he will know where to locate it by "looking" into his simulator. In linguistics terms, it is the third side of what is known as the semiotic triangle: There's the real object (the green beanbag), the label (the name of the beanbag) and the thought (the image of the beanbag the simulator provides).

Likewise, if a ball rolls past him, the simulator will enable Ripley to predict where it is rolling to. Which means Ripley will have to understand the laws of physics. Eventually, he will distinguish between animate and inanimate objects -- a distinction, Mr. Mavridis notes, that language doesn't always make. "We say, 'The car is coming,' when it is the driver of the car making it come."

The team is about to teach Ripley to understand the idea of point of view. When the researcher talking to Ripley describes a beanbag as being on his own left, it will be on Ripley's right. In effect, Mr. Mavridis says, it will allow Ripley to step outside himself and grasp the notion of "other."

Add it all together: Bodily experience (the notion that "too heavy" will mean a hot motor, for which the word is "pain"); thoughts, from the virtual simulator; point of view; the sense of "other." They are providing Ripley with a vestigial -- very vestigial -- sense of self. Although Dr. Roy's eyes will roll upward at the sound of the word. "The nature of 'self' for a creature whose only task is to touch a beanbag when you tell him to is very thin," he says. Nevertheless, it just may be there.

The annual student-built autonomous robot competition at MIT this year is accompanied by a protest demonstration by robots demanding the repeal of Asimov's Second Law of Robotry, "A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings." Robots carry placards reading "No Disassemble -- Stop Anti-Robot Violence" and "Roboticide is a Crime."

From higherRipley to metaphysicalRipley is not a big jump. Philosopher Daniel Dennett says roboticists are exploring "the fundamental requirements, the minimal conditions, under which various necessary components of cognition can be obtained." He calls it cognition -- the philosopher's word for a state of knowing, perceiving, conceiving, intuiting -- in a word, thinking.

The big question is, does it also mean consciousness?

To Prof. Dennett, modern discoveries of neuroscience and cognitive psychology mean that consciousness is an illusion, the discredited notion of the pilot in the brain's cockpit. Whatever it is -- the soul, the "I," the awareness of self, the mind overlooking itself -- it is scattered through the brain's apartments, office towers and suburbs, a chemical-electrical product of 100 billion neurons.

Which is sort of like Ripley's structure -- every bit doing its part, but no central authority. Could Ripley therefore arrive at consciousness?

U.S. philosopher Thomas Nagel, in a famous 1974 essay called What Is It Like to be a Bat?,asked whether anything other than humans could be called conscious, which he described as the subjective sense of "being" something. Only a bat could experience being something called a bat, Dr. Nagel said; humans, he concluded, are incapable of defining consciousness in anything but themselves.

A U.S. biologist named Marc Bekoff disputed that idea by collecting samples of yellow snow for five years from his dog Jethro and from other dogs. Jethro, he pointed out, consistently urinated on the other samples, but not his own -- indicating that he had a sense of self.

Anne Foerst teaches both theology and computer science at New York's St. Boniface University, a Catholic institution. Before that, she was a research scientist at MIT's AI lab, and taught a course about God and computers to MIT student engineers.

Robots, Prof. Foerst says, will never be humans. But they could be somebodies -- individual selves. Once they acquire a point of view,she says, they will acquire empathy, and empathy "is not possible without emotions."

And once robots acquire a sense of self, she says, they will ask what young selves have always asked: "Where do I come from?"

Michael Valpy writes on spiritual matters for The Globe and Mail.