Robots will, one day, replace us. This goes without question. I know that sounds like a science fiction thing, but it’s real life for sure. I’m talking Terminator. I’m talking I, Robot. I’m talking Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Don’t believe me? Here are some of the creepiest developments in artificial intelligence that scientists made and will surely destroy us all.
1. CB2: The Robot That Will Replace Your Kids.
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Professor Ishiguro at the Science and Technology Department of Japan’s Osaka University created (for whatever reason) a 4-foot tall robot with the same intellect and personality as a 2-year-old. This robot has no practical purpose, unless you feel like hanging out with a terrifying droid toddler.
2. WD-2: The Robot That Can Mimic Your Face.
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The “Face-Bot” uses 17 key points of mobility to shape-shift into any human face and expression smoothly. If others can harness this technology, it will be hard for us to tell the difference between humans and Cylons.
3. The Nautilus: The Robot That Can Predict The Future.
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The Nautilus scans through news stories and finds patterns to predict when and where things will happen. It predicted the location of Osama Bin Laden just by perusing articles written about the terrorist. Nautilus narrowed him down to Abbottobad, Pakistan, the exact location of Bin Laden’s compound. The Nautilus also accurately predicted when uprisings in the Middle East will occur.
4. Robots Who Evolved To Evolve: Real Life Deceit-icons.
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The Laboratory of Intelligent Systems created an experiment presenting robots with a choice between a food source and poison. It didn’t take long for the robots to realize that you could just follow blue lights of other robots to find the food source. So most of the robots, to get more points in the experiment, turned off the blue lights to fool other robots. Some would even lead the other robots away from the source with their blue light, and kept the food source to themselves.
5. IBM Watson: Master Of Jeopardy.
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Watson is a supercomputer designed to answer questions in real speech using it’s database of 200 million content pages, including all of Wikipedia. It didn’t even break a sweat when challenging Jeopardy finalists Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Jennings famously wrote in his final answer, “I for one welcome our robot overlords,” allowing him to survive the new world order… at least for a while.
6. Schizophrenic Robots: Now We REALLY Want Robots To Murder Us.
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Some awful scientists at the University of Texas-Austin decided to purposefully make their robots schizophrenic, presumably because artificial intelligence needed a little spice. They achieved this by telling the robot a bunch of stories, and instead of programming it to store only the relevant information, they had it retail ALL information, leading the robot to sound like your local park hobo. One robot even proclaimed that it had “a bomb”. Scientists are in a lab creating robot terrorists.
7. Albert Hubo: Relativity Creepy.
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Built to commemorate the 100th anniversary for the iconic scientists’s theory of relativity, the Albert Hubo is essentially a bionic Albert Einstein head attached to an anime-stylized robot body. It’s like they took the Futurama jar-heads one step further. Not cool at all, guys.
8. Kodomoroid: The Robot That Will Read The Robot News.
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Hiroshi Ishiguro of the University of Osaka created a robot that can read the news more efficiently than a human with perfect articulation. This will seem like a natural progression for those of us who always thought Tom Brokaw to be some sort of android, but still… I fear the day that one of these reporterbots appears on Nightly News to announce the collapse of human society.
9. Google Brain: Creepily Like Your Brain.
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Google’s newest article intelligence project surfs the web to its heart’s content. Like most normal human beings, it spends the day looking at cat videos. It seems that robots will not only take our jobs, but also take our wasted time.
Maybe Jennings has it right and we should welcome these inevitable robo-lords. Or we could disguise ourselves as robots by wearing cardboard boxes with aluminum foil taped to the sides. Either way, I now know what my Halloween costume is going to be this year.
