This “Mother” Robot Learns How To Make Robot Babies, All By Herself

In just the latest news of our inevitable subjugation to malevolent robot overlords, a group of Cambridge scientists have created a "mother robot," which "independently build[s] its own children and test[s] which one does best; and then use[s] the results to inform the design of the next generation, so that preferential traits are passed down from one generation to the next."

Uh, guys? Isn't that exactly the plot of the Terminator series? Have we learned nothing from Arnold?

 

via GIPHY

After conducting five separate experiments in which the mother robot built ten generations of "children," the group posted their results to PLOS One. They found that the  ‘fittest’ children in the tenth generation performed a set task twice as quickly as the fittest children in the first generation. These types of experiments are categorized as "evolutionary robotics," aka the field of science most likely to make humans obsolete. 

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YouTube/Cambridge University

According to head researcher Dr. Fumiya Iida of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, "It’s still a long way to go before we’ll have robots that look, act and think like us, but what we do have are a lot of enabling technologies that will help us import some aspects of biology to the engineering world.”

Let's just hope those "enabling technologies" don't end up enabling the machines to have the power to decide that the best path to their survival includes trapping us all in the Matrix.


Brett Williams is an editorial assistant at Supercompressor. He wishes we could just have cool robot sidekicks without worrying about humanity's eventual demise.

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