This is a TED video of Dennis Hong discussing the seven “species” of robot his lab is currently working on. Many of the robots are designed to mimic humans, in the way we walk, stand up, and interact with different environments. Hong is combining robotics with artificial intelligence and is so convinced of its promise that he has set a rather ambitious goal for his lab … to create a team of autonomous, robot, soccer players that will be able to defeat the World Cup champions by 2050. Sounds crazy, right? Maybe.  There’s already an international competition named RoboCup where labs from all over the world place their robots into a competition similar to the World Cup. The future is becoming uncomfortably intertwined with the present …