British stealth robot jet-copter to fire ray guns in “urban canyons”

The UK MoD’s ‘Novel Air Concept’ robot stealth jet/copter notion. Credit: Defence Science

You have to wonder just what urban areas in “defended air space” the MoD has in mind for its stealthy robot jet/chopper to penetrate.

Bids for droid tail-sitter with pop-out chopper

Register | Nov 10, 2009

UK to build robot stealth raygun jet/copter

By Lewis Page

Aerospace firms are competing for a “classified” UK MoD contract to build a robotic military stealth aircraft which would be able to hover like a helicopter or fold its rotors and fly as an aeroplane. The “novel air concept” would be able to operate “within urban canyons” and deploy radical new weapons such as microwave or laser rayguns.

News of the commercial bids comes from Aviation Week & Space Technology, which names UK-headquartered arms globocorp BAE Systems, Euro missile alliance MBDA (partly owned by BAE) and British uni spinout Cranfield Aerospace as competitors to build the Novel Air Concept prototype.

The MoD’s Defence Science organisation had already released some details on the Concept. Specifically, the military boffins would like to see:

A more cost-effective means of achieving the effects currently provided by manned aircraft and cruise missiles by using new concepts in unmanned air vehicles (UAVs)/unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs). The specific effects under consideration are the delivery of novel payloads over remote hostile territory and, specifically, within the urban environment.

Pop-chopper: Good for hovering in urban canyons as well as VTOL

This is seen as being delivered as “a flying demonstrator within 3 years” (that is by 2012), which is to have the following abilities:

A reusable uninhabited air system with a radius of action of 1000km and able to survive defended air space. Capable of being launched and recovered from land, sea and air with the emphasis on ship based operations. The vehicle is to be able to operate within the urban canyons inherent in the major city landscape.

The MoD’s graphic seems to indicate a sort of mini stealth jet able to deploy rotors from its nose and hang vertically from them, setting down perhaps on its back end like the “tail-sitter” VTOL prototypes of yesteryear. The concept of large rotors, rather than a small propellor or even narrower jetpipe, makes sense in the context of the “urban canyon” requirement. A large heli-style vertical-thrust disc is required for an aircraft which is going to hover for any length of time without burning up all its fuel and probably melting its engines to boot.

As to the “novel payloads”, again the graphic offers a clue. The mysterious green cabinets between the conventional missiles have something of the look of phased-array antennae, perhaps capable of emitting focused, directable beams of microwaves – most probably for “soft” electronic-warfare purposes, but conceivably as active weapons able to permanently fry enemy circuitry.

It’s all very shiny, but you have to wonder just what urban areas in “defended air space” the MoD has in mind for its stealthy robot jet/chopper to penetrate. And you definitely have to wonder whether it would really be more cost-effective than comparatively simple one-shot cruise missiles, whose price is now falling through the few-hundred-k$ range: and which on their own can eliminate most air-defence networks possessed by non-nuclear powers.

There’s a definite air of seed-money about this, rather than of something that will actually be much use. We’ll be hoping that Cranfield gets the pork in this case – BAE and MBDA have already had more than their share.

We asked for comment from the MoD – after all, they weren’t shy about unveiling the concept to begin with – but hadn’t heard back as of publication. If we hear any more we’ll let you know.

Intel says shape-shifting robots closer to reality

Researchers use distributed computing and robots to create programmable matter

Computerworld | Nov 12, 2009

By Sharon Gaudin

Imagine a day when you can make your cell phone smaller to fit more comfortably in your pocket, then make it larger so you can text more easily.

Now, imagine that you could make your cell phone take the shape of a headset when you want to talk on it or re-shape it like a bracelet so you can wear it while jogging.

Those scenarios could be real in the not-so-distant future, according to researchers at both Intel and Carnegie Mellon University.

Scientists are using distributed computing and robotics to make shape-shifting a reality. In essence, they’re working to take millions of millimeter-sized robots and enable them, through software and electromagnetic forces, to take on various shapes and sizes.

Nearly two years ago, Seth Goldstein, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told Computerworld that he was working with a team of scientists at Intel and the U.S. Air Force Research Lab to create programmable matter. This week, Goldstein and Jason Campbell, a senior staff research scientist at Intel’s research lab in Pittsburgh, say they now are able to demonstrate that the physics they’ve been talking about are real.

“It’s been pretty hard but we’ve made a lot of progress,” said Campbell. “Optimistically, we could see this in three to five years. It will take us longer…. We’re not there yet, but we see a path.”

The programmable matter is called claytronics and the tiny robots are called catoms. Each catom will have its own processor. Think of each catom as a tiny robot or computer that has computational power, memory and the ability to store and share power.

Expanding on the idea of distributed computing, researchers are working to program millions of catoms to work together, much like a swarm of bees or a flock of birds.

Goldstein explained that researchers hope to write one program that will engage the entire system of catoms, instead of trying to write code for each one. Developers are focused on creating software that will focus on a pattern or overall movement of the system of tiny robots. Then each robot will be smart enough to detect its own place in the pattern and respond accordingly. If, for instance, a catom, or robot, detects that it has only one other catom beside it, it will know that it’s on an end and can act according to what the end piece should be doing.

“Generally, people learn how to program a single machine,” said Goldstein. “Think of the ensemble as the system.”

Part of the scientists’ research is creating new programming languages, algorithms and debugging tools to get these massive systems to work together.

And the shape-shifting efforts go beyond being able to change the size or shape of your cell phone. Goldstein explained previously that it could mean being able to better use the space in a small apartment by being able to change a dinner table into a poker table for a party and then into a bed at the end of the day.

It also could mean that instead of looking at images on a screen, gamers could have animated figures running around their houses. And instead of calling your co-worker to discuss something, a 3D facsimile of him or her could sit in your office and discuss a new project or the next year’s budget.

Rich ‘may evolve into separate species’

The rich could all be cyborgs in the future.

“Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton.”

- Bertrand Russell, “The Impact of Science on Society”, 1953

The super-rich may evolve into a separate species entirely in the future due to enhancements in biotechnology and robotic engineering, American futurologist Paul Saffo has said.

Telegraph | Oct 25, 2009

By Amy Willis

Mr Saffo, from San Francisco, says in the future people will be able to grow their own replacement organs, take specially tailored drugs, and use genetic research tools to alert them from any possible hereditary health dangers.

He adds that tomorrow’s world will be a fusion of biology and technology, where robots do the chores, cars drive themselves and artificial limbs are better than real ones.

Mr Saffo’s comments reflect claims by American scientist Ray Kurzweil who only a few months ago said immortality was only 20 years away due to the speed of advancements in nanotechnology.

But Mr Saffo says these improvements would only be affordable to the super-rich. And because of this, he says, advancements may lead to a divide between the classes and eventually could lead to the super-rich evolving into a different species entirely, leaving his not-so-rich counterpart behind.

“In the 1980s it was the personal computer – came out of the garage, changed the world. In the 1990s it was the web. The next big device to wander into our lives is robots,” he told the Sunday Times.

“We may find we are absolutely dependent upon these electronic insects and that we don’t even know we are dependent upon them until something breaks.

“I sometimes wonder if the very rich can live, on average, 20 years longer than the poor. That’s 20 more years of earning and saving. Think about wealth and power and the advantages that you pass on to your children.”

Shape-Shifting Robot Blob Has Emerged From Your Nightmares

escapistmagazine.com | Oct 19, 2009

by Tom Goldman

iRobot’s flesh-like ChemBot will freak you out…

The ChemBot might look like something out of a bad dream, but it’s actually a multimillion dollar military project. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Army Research Office contracted iRobot, creator of vacuum-robot Roomba, to design the soft, flexible, mechanical ooze last year. This video might be a little technical at first, but if you skip to the 2 minute mark you can see the results of iRobot’s work thus far.

iRobot is not a company that just makes house cleaning robots. It has been providing military and civil defense forces with helpful robots for a while now, including the iRobot Warrior, a “large and rugged robot designed to carry 150-pound payloads”, and the iRobot PackBot which has performed “thousands of dangerous search, reconnaissance and bomb-disposal missions” according to iRobot’s website.

DARPA’s main purpose for funding the ChemBot is to create something that can “traverse soft terrain and navigate through small openings, such as tiny wall cracks, during reconnaissance and search-and-rescue missions.” The ChemBot should be able to do just that through a mechanism called “Jamming,” which allows for the transition between solid-like and liquid-like states with only a small change in volume. The first half of this video explains how “Jamming” works.

The ChemBot feels like the first step towards the creation of actual human-like robots similar to Battlestar Galactica’s new Cylons. The creepy part about the ChemBot is how it looks as if it’s alive and breathing. Wars could probably be won just by rolling out a few dozen of these things in front of opposing forces to scare the bejeezus out of them. I definitely wouldn’t want to touch a one, they look all gross and sticky.
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The Blob (1958) – Theatrical Trailer

Oozy new military robo can squeeze through tiny spaces

ANI | Oct 17, 2009

London, October 17 (ANI): A technology company has developed a new military robot that resembles an oozy blob, which has the ability to squeeze through all manner of cracks and crevices.

According to a report in The Sun, the ‘ChemBot’, made by technology company iRobot, can ooze and pulsate across the floor.

This little robot is not just a fun gimmick, as the company were in fact given military funding to build the blob.

The idea is that the palm-sized machine can assist in reconnaissance or search and rescue missions by transforming to fit through tiny spaces.

Its secret is a process called “jamming” which sees material changing between a semi-liquid and solid state by increasing and decreasing its density.

The ChemBot, short for chemical robot, features compartments filled with air and loosely packed particles within its flexible silicon skin.

When the air is removed, the decrease in pressure constricts the skin and the particles shift slightly to fill the void left by the air, resulting in the solidification of the compartment.

Beneath the skin is an incompressible fluid and an actuator that can vary its volume.

Still at an early stage of development, potential applications for ChemBots include space exploration, military operations and medical devices
that can be implanted in the human body.

They might also prove useful for rescue operations in hostile environments such as subterranean or undersea mines and caves. (ANI)

DARPA Program Brings Sci-fi Capability to Warfighters

US Dept of Defense – DARPA Program Brings Sci-fi Capability to Warfighters

ISRIA | Oct 16, 2009

Moviegoers were captivated as they watched a metallic assassin morph before their eyes in “Terminator 2.” The villain turned to liquid before assuming new forms capable of squeezing through narrow openings and transforming its arms into bladed weapons and solid metal tools.

Scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency were wowed too. Now they’re working to deliver that same kind of technology to support the good guys: warfighters on the battlefield.

Mitchell R. Zakin, program manager for DARPA’s Programmable Matter division, said he’s convinced the concept depicted for decades in blockbuster movies and comic books has real-life applications.

He’s leading up the effort to develop “programmable matter,” which he calls “the ultimate adaptable material.” It will be capable of changing size and shape and taking on new properties for one use, he explained, then adapting to a whole different form for another use.

Zakin clarified that he’s not out to change warfighters themselves, just the equipment they use, the clothing they wear and the loads they carry.

“Warfighters carry an incredible amount of stuff and they don’t have any more room to carry more,” he said. “Yet they are facing much more complicated battle spaces. They’re going into caves and working in cities. They need more sophisticated tools to deal with these environments, yet they can’t carry them.”

The logistical challenge of getting equipment to remote areas such as Afghanistan exacerbates the problem, he said.

Enter the concept of programmable matter, a convergence of the fields of chemistry, information, mathematical theory and engineering.

Zakin envisions a day when warfighters will be able to reach into their kit, pull out a lump of programmable matter and form it into whatever they need.

Think of it as carrying a paint can with a bunch of particles inside, he advises anyone struggling to understand how it all would work. The particles could be different shapes and sizes, be made up of different materials and have different functions.

Depending on the requirement, the warfighter would instruct the particles to become whatever was needed at the moment — a wrench, a hammer, a spare part. The particles would then organize themselves to form it. After using the device, the warfighter would return it to the bucket, where it once again would become a bunch of particles until instructed to become something else.

The same principle would work for uniforms, which could change their thermal insulating properties according to the climate: the deep freeze of the Afghan mountains, the blast furnace of summertime in the Middle East.

Fantastic as this all sounds, it’s on its way to becoming a reality.

Five university-led teams are participating in DARPA’s Programmable Matter program, and by the middle of next year, at least one is expected to emerge with a demonstration project. Halfway through the program’s second and final phase, all five teams are making convincing progress that it’s all possible.

The teams began the first phase of the program doing computer modeling, but got so excited by the project that they jumped headfirst into the second phase and began building actual prototypes, Zakin said.

By the end of the second phase, they’re expected to demonstrate that they can take a single set of building blocks and create five different geometric shapes with the strength of engineering plastic.

“Everyone is making progress toward meeting these goals in a very meaningful way,” Zakin said. “I’m confident that most, if not all the teams, will succeed.”

The ultimate benefit to warfighters would be mind-boggling. “Imagine the possibilities: an entire toolbox originating from a single material form, or flexible clothing or equipment that can adapt to the immediate and changing needs of the warfighter, perhaps even ’smart’ bandages embedded with diagnostic sensing capabilities,” Zakin said. “The possibilities are endless.”

In the simplest terms, programmable matter would bring warfighters “maximum capabilities with minimum carry weight,” he said. “It would give them the ability to carry a little amount of stuff and do a lot with it. It creates a whole new paradigm in flexibility for the warfighter.”

But the implications go far beyond warfighting, Zakin said. Aircraft wings built of programmable matter could change in flight to provide the best aerodynamic properties. Everything from computers to televisions to cars could be programmed to automatically update themselves with the newest features and configurations. Clothing could morph into the latest fashion styles.

In a nutshell, nothing would ever have to become obsolete.

“This is not fantasy, actually,” Zakin said. “Aspects of this already are being done in this project.”

Programmable matter also has the potential of turning the entire manufacturing process on its head. No longer would one design and one manufacturing process be needed for every single consumer product.

“Personal manufacturing” could take over. Consumers could go online, buy a blueprint for whatever they need, download the instructions, then feed them into a personal assembler that makes the product before their eyes, he said.

In some ways, Zakin said he’s been preparing for the Programmable Matter program since he first saw as a young boy the concept depicted in the 1950s sci-fi movie, “The Blob.”

“Most of my programs come out of the movies or comic books,” he said. “It’s what I do for a living.”

Decades later, he said, it’s gratifying to be at DARPA, where he’s on the leading edge of helping bring fantasy to life.

“It allows us to do something very, very important, and something no one else has ever done before,” he said. “It’s very DARPA-like.”

Calling All Transhumanists

Scene from the 1927 film Metropolis where a woman is used by a mad scientist to create a robot replica to serve his evil plans.

Forbes | Oct 2, 2009

by Courtney Boyd Myers

Technology futurists love to talk about the Singularity as the point in time when technology starts to progress so rapidly that machine intelligence melds with and surpasses human intelligence. It is to futurists what the Rapture is to fundamentalist Christians.

Those who welcome or fear this eventuality are gathering this weekend in New York City for the fourth annual Singularity Summit. Speaking at the summit are some of the better-known tech soothsayers, including author and programmer Ray Kurzweil; Steve Wolfram, the founder of the novel search engine Alpha; and Aubrey de Grey, an expert on anti-aging science. Also giving talks are Australian philosopher David Chalmers, whose idea inspired the Matrix film series, and Pay-Pal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has donated in the six figures to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the organization putting on the event. Last year, the summit drew 1,000 curious academics and entrepreneurs in San Jose, Calif. (See our story on the 2007 Summit here.)

Michael Vassar, the president of the institute, gives the Singularity just under a 25% chance of happening by 2040 and a 70% chance by 2060. When we do cross that line, Vassar says nothing will be the same. “Humans living in the post-Singularity world will be as powerless as jellyfish are in today’s world,” he says. His odds don’t take into account the chances of the world plunging into rapid technological decline due to a nuclear war or a worldwide collapse into barbarism.

Vassar’s six staffers at the Singularity Institute, including Kurzweil, publish papers with titles such as, “Uncertain Future Project,” “Global Catastrophic Risk Project” and “Economics and Machine Intelligence,” and have developed software that supposedly predicts technology’s trajectories and generates odds on the occurrences of global catastrophes like nuclear war and global warming.

Singularists fall into optimist and pessimist camps. Optimists, such as Kurzweil, look forward to living in an age in which human intelligence is enhanced by brain implants that extend our memories, enhance our senses and allow us to solve problems faster and with greater accuracy.

The pessimists, and Vassar is one of them, see threats to humanity from the rise of an unfriendly machine intelligence that will want to enslave humans (think The Matrix) and use our brain matter for endless computation, much as we’ve used computers in the past 60 years.

Vassar says he and his colleagues at the Singularity Institute are working on seeing that a Matrix-like future never happens. Institute research fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky coined the term “Friendly AI” to describe an AI that could be built to have a moral conscience. One of the institute’s chief goals is to encourage other scientists to create this Friendly AI. (Read “Vassar’s Machine Minds” in the AI Report.)

Many computer scientists and engineers remain very skeptical of the Singularity and the cargo-cult enthusiasm that surrounds it. They don’t believe in humanity’s ability to reach a point at which technology will be so complex as to render us inconsequential. It’s also likely that for economic reasons, technical progress and computer hardware performance will never accelerate at the speed required to reach the Singularity.

Will Wright, the creator of The Sims videogame series, has gone on record saying that machines will never achieve the kind of intelligence and creativity of which humans are capable. But he does believe that machines will one day be able to make themselves more intelligent, effectively reprogramming themselves until the first real AI achieves its own sort of sentience, one that is very alien to our own human cognizance.

Ariel Rabkin, a third year Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkley’s Computer Science program, doubts that many technical people take the Singularity seriously. “Human-comparable AI is really hard,” he says, “And we’re nowhere close to achieving it.” He adds, “I can tell you that nobody I work with at Berkeley or elsewhere has ever mentioned it. And just to be clear, I don’t just mean, ‘We don’t talk about it in courses.’ I mean, nobody mentions it, at all, ever. We don’t think about it.”

But the Singularity continues to pique the curiosity of the layman. Over the next 12 months, Hollywood will release several movies with trans-humanist themes, such as Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates, James Cameron’s Avatar, Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man and The Singularity is Near, with a script by Ray Kurzweil. In a time when the publishing industry is struggling, Better Humans LLC has just launched a new magazine called H+ covering the trans-humanism scene for fans of radical technological change.

It’s possible that because the Singularity is a relatively new idea, it’s embraced mostly by the youth and dismissed as a counter-cultural trend by an older generation of professors and scientists. “I’m the older side of the Singularists,” says Vassar, who is 30 years old.

The Singularity probably won’t destroy humanity in our lifetime, but it’s productive to keep asking the question of whether technology is serving us or if things are the other way around.

Real Science Sets Up Surrogates‘ Futuristic Robot Action

In Surrogates, Bruce Willis plays a cop who loses control of his robotic counterpart. Photo courtesy Disney

Wired | Sep 25, 2009

By Hugh Hart

HOLLYWOOD — Taken at face value, Bruce Willis’ new sci-fi thriller Surrogates sports a premise every bit as outlandish as the wig he wears during much of the movie. In the film’s near-future setting, humans have withdrawn from everyday life almost completely. Instead, they hole up in their homes and send robotic versions of themselves, called “surrogates,” into the real world.

The remote-control androids, which look vaguely like the robots from 1973’s Westworld, perform the operators’ jobs and interact with other surrogates. Willis stars as both a fresh-faced surrogate and its worn-out operator, who chafes at the lack of personal interaction in his life.

“In this movie, people stay at home in their underwear wired into this fantastic massagelike chair device for 16 hours at a stretch and operate this idealized version of themselves that they can control like a puppet,” said Surrogates director Jonathan Mostow as he previewed snippets of the film in his editing bay on the Disney lot last month.

During the Wired.com video interview above, Mostow expounds on surrogate technology and elaborates on the human/machine dynamic in the PG-13 film, which opens Friday. “If your brain waves say, ‘OK, raise your hand up like this,’ then that’s what the robot does,” he said.

Human-machine interfaces have been explored before in movies, from Sleep Dealer’s node workers, who jack in to a network to operate machines remotely, to The Matrix’s humans-as-batteries paradigm.

Pure sci-fi, right? Not entirely. Chad Cohen, science producer for Discovery Studio’s upcoming Discovery Channel series Curiosity, says Surrogates draws from real-world technology to sell its central concept.

“There is certainly a lot of research out there relating to neural interfaces that would help audiences make the leap and buy the premise,” he said. In fact, as the movie starts, it uses news clips citing real scientific experiments to set up its story line.

Case in point: Last May, University of Pittsburgh scientists implanted a monkey with electrodes that empowered the subject to move a mechanical arm and grab food using willpower alone.

“It’s almost like Luke Skywalker using the force to grab his lightsaber,” said Cohen. “From there, it’s not such a stretch to think that one day researchers might help paralyzed people control prosthetic arms.”

Another real-world example of brain-wave-activated robotics comes from Duke University Medical Center scientists, who wired a rhesus monkey with electrodes. When the monkey strode on a treadmill in North Carolina, its cortex prompted a 5-foot humanoid in Japan to start walking.

“We can read signals from the motor and sensory areas of the brain, decode them, and send them this bipedal robot that actually starts walking like a monkey,” Duke neuroscientist Miguel A. L. Nicolelis told Scientific American.

And not unlike Surrogates‘ humans who operate their robotic counterparts from the comfort of home, Hiroshi Ishiguro has built a neuromechanical replica of himself that lets him engage the real world by proxy. Ishiguro’s doppelgänger, dubbed Geminoid, gives lectures in venues thousands of miles from the scientist’s Osaka home office.

The type of advanced remote-control robots imagined in Surrogates likely won’t materialize in the real world for decades, if at all. Yet on a metaphorical level, Mostow, who earlier delved into big-screen robotics when he directed Terminator 3, believes people have already become overly attached to technologies that threaten to make in-person face time obsolete.

Pointing to the near-addictive quality of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, Mostow says: “What this movie is really about is what it means to live in a digital age where we’re connected to all these machines, yet we’re also so isolated from each other.”

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Futurologist: Global Warming will make us have sex with robot prostitutes

Tourism futurologist Ian Yeoman, from New Zealand’s University of Wellington, gave an preview of what the world could be like in 2050, shaped by global warming.

Future tourism may include robot sex

AAP | Aug 17, 2009

Robot "prostitutes'' would make an appearance / Reuters

IT sounds like science fiction, but robot bar staff, hotel rooms that change colour, cruise ships as big as aircraft carriers and even robot sex are part of the future for travellers, a tourism conference has been told.

Tourism futurologist Ian Yeoman, from New Zealand’s University of Wellington, gave an preview of what the world could be like in 2050, shaped by global warming, an older population, food, water and jet fuel supply problems and technological advances.

Dr Yeoman said the future may see a more controlled society with a return to mass tourism spawning a range of new indoor tourism products.

Indoor artificial ski centres, circuses, zoos, golf courses and recreated landscapes, as well as giant cruise ships, could be among the new attractions.

As costs for basics such as electricity and food increased, tourism operators could turn to robots as cheap labour, Dr Yeoman said.

Robot waiters at cocktail bars, remote-controlled camera-carrying guard dogs in hotel lobbies and self-cleaning hotel rooms were all likely, Dr Yeoman said.

“Robotics will become important, because you’re going to have labour shortages in the future,” he said.

“You’ll have some sort of interaction in terms of robots doing certain types of mundane activities.”

Even robot “prostitutes” that would not pass on diseases such as HIV could make an appearance, he said..

“But you’re talking about extreme futures,” he said.

Dr Yeoman said technology would also revolutionise hotel bedrooms, with beds that sensed a guest’s comfort needs and chemical wallpaper that could change colour to suit a guest’s mood.

Of course, special pills could override a traveller’s need for sleep.

“If you look at some of the research from the US army research centre, what they do at the moment, when soldiers go into battle, they’re given sleep deprivation tablets,” he said.

“To a certain extent you could replicate that into travel and tourism, taking a tablet to do a 24-hour experience.”

Robots learn to lie, cheat and hoard

Evolving Robots Learn To Lie To Each Other

PopSci | Aug 18, 2009

By Stuart Fox

With the development of killer drones, it seems like everyone is worrying about killer robots. Now, as if that wasn’t bad enough, we need to start worrying about lying, cheating robots as well.

In an experiment run at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne, France, robots that were designed to cooperate in searching out a beneficial resource and avoiding a poisonous one learned to lie to each other in an attempt to hoard the resource.

The experiment involved 1,000 robots divided into 10 different groups. Each robot had a sensor, a blue light, and its own 264-bit binary code “genome” that governed how it reacted to different stimuli. The first generation robots were programmed to turn the light on when they found the good resource, helping the other robots in the group find it.

The robots got higher marks for finding and sitting on the good resource, and negative points for hanging around the poisoned resource. The 200 highest-scoring genomes were then randomly “mated” and mutated to produce a new generation of programming. Within nine generations, the robots became excellent at finding the positive resource, and communicating with each other to direct other robots to the good resource.

However, there was a catch. A limited amount of access to the good resource meant that not every robot could benefit when it was found, and overcrowding could drive away the robot that originally found it.

After 500 generations, 60 percent of the robots had evolved to keep their light off when they found the good resource, hogging it all for themselves. Even more telling, a third of the robots evolved to actually look for the liars by developing an aversion to the light; the exact opposite of their original programming!

So far, the research has more application in explaining the evolution of behaviors in the natural world than in developing new programming for robots. But if you think that means I’m one step closer to trusting robots, then you’re probably the sort who’s attracted to the blue light.