CYNTHIA BREAZEAL HAS NO TIME for me, but she's still going to show me her robot. As we pass through the halls of MIT's Artificial Intelligence lab, now spearheaded by the robotics guru Rodney Brooks, Breazeal -- a youngish Korean-American  snowboarding fanatic -- explains how urgently she needs to complete her Ph.D. thesis. This is her way of telling me that she does not have the half hour or so to boot up Kismet, the robot that's consumed her research days for the last three years. Bummer.

Then we round a corner and I glimpse her pride and joy, anchored to a mundane workbench. Even asleep, Kismet is fascinating. You might expect the latest anthropomorphic robot of one of the most prestigious engineering universities in the world to strike the eye with formidable force, like an android Iron Man, or a Barishnikov of articulated motion. But despite his exposed armature, Kismet seems sweet and approachable, like a robot raised by a kindly woodsman or a prototype prop from Teletubbies 2. With his big doe eyes, donkey-like ears, and absence of limbs, Kismet looks like a Furby who has clamored a few more rungs up the Lamarkian ladder of technological evolution, shedding his fur and becoming even more disturbingly cute.

The cuteness, at least, was intentional. After all, if robots are to eventually move out of the assembly plant and into ordinary people's lives, they must develop social interfaces that can attract and sustain the attention of humans. One of the easiest ways to achieve this feat is to program machines to look and behave like humans or mammals. "Our goal with Kismet is to make the robot as readable and intuitive and natural as possible," Breazeal says, explaining Kismet's childlike appearance. But the goal Breazeal set for herself went far beyond Kismet's armature and programming, and into the social relationship that includes both robot and human being. "We wanted to create an infant-caregiver-like interaction," Breazeal explains. "People evolved to be socially intelligent, and we think robots can benefit from this kind of intelligence."

Kismet's goofy ears and Walter Keane eyes are already enough to trigger gooey feelings inside human beings, but the machine's resemblance to a budding mammal is more than cosmetic. Besides keeping his sensors and servos up and running, Kismet's fifteen computers -- including a Linux box, Macs, various home-brewed boards, and nine four hundred megahertz computers for vision alone -- run a variety of behavioral and emotional models based on early human development. These models give Kismet specific drives, similar to our own genetic drives for comfort, contact, and communication. At the same time, the robot's appearance is also designed to trigger the human impulse to nurture young mammals. After all, there are good Darwinian reasons for finding big eyes cute, whether on puppies or Japanese manga babes.

By tricking humans into feeling like proud mamas and dadas, Breazeal hopes they will be drawn to nurture the robot, enabling the machine to actually learn from us the way we learn from our caregivers. Specifically, Breazeal hopes people will perform the same slow, repetitive and patient games that help young children to understand the world around them. "People treat infants as being more intelligent and consistent than they are," Breazeal explains. "They model their own mind on the child. We want them to do the same thing with Kismet."