Future-deniers, think again - if there was ever a headline that people in the 1950s would have expected to read in 2010, this is it. It seems that the U.S. military has developed and deployed robots - known as Mobile Detection Assessment Response Systems, or MDARS - to patrol a nuclear dumping ground in Nevada. From Wired:
In the meantime, on the other side of the country, researchers at Carnegie Mellon are attempting to duplicate human learning processes in machines:
Check out this official video footage. Not quite as spine-chilling as Terminators, but getting there:
In the meantime, on the other side of the country, researchers at Carnegie Mellon are attempting to duplicate human learning processes in machines:
Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University -- supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo -- has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a sleek, silver-gray computer -- calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a week -- that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission to teach itself.(Read more here.) Bring these two together, and what do you get? Well... we'll find out. (Along these lines - check out this NPR segment, "Can Unmanned Robots Follow the Laws of War?")
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