Can you “teach” an artificial hand to automatically open as you move your arm toward a table where a mug of tea is sitting? By using a branch of AI called reinforcement learning, Pilarski believes the answer is yes.

“There’s a lot of things we hope our bionic parts would do—and it’s really, really hard for a person to control the system to do it. By allowing the machine to learn what the person wants, when they want it and when they need it, it can fill in the gaps,” he said, adding that the machine intelligence can be the “glue that connects the person with the machine.”