Kismet, the emotionally expressive robotic head built by Cynthia Breazeal at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, was driven by “a bank of some 15 computers” running its perception, analysis, and behavior software. That a single robotic head - able to do nothing but make faces, turn toward people, and respond to voices - required fifteen machines is a vivid reminder of how computationally expensive real-time social perception was around the year 2000, work that today can run on a single chip.