baxter, according to rod brooks, works for about $4 an hour and a bunch of simple tasks like this, people all over the world, people in massachusetts and throughout the world are doing tasks like this. machines have made huge advances in language which used to be a uniquely human capability. these days, if you see somebody talking on their phone, there's a good chance they're actually talking to a machine, not to another human, and expecting the machine to understand. of course, they're not real good yet. we're in the middle, i think, of a 10-year period where we went from machines not being able to understand what we're saying to us being expecting the machines to understand what we're telling them and answer our questions and carry out instructions. by any measure that's a remarkable milestone. machines are translating between languages. skype will let you speak in english and speak in some version of german or french and chinese to other people. they're writing simple stories. a story about apple and a byline written by somebody with the name narrative science. that's a machine, and th