For robots to really become useful to humans on a day to day basis, they’re going to have to learn to do some thinking on their own. They’ll have to go beyond their programming to some extent, with the ability not just to learn, but also to draw on past experiences to predict how to accomplish unfamiliar goals, both independently and cooperatively. Researchers from the European Joint Action Science and Technology project are working on an artificial intelligence system that not only allows robots to learn tasks from humans (we’ve seen that before, both directly and indirectly), but also to predict how to assist a human with an unfamiliar task.