Robot Roll-Call

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For decades, we’ve all known that we had to guard against the day when robots would rise up against us and destroy all humans. If Sam Waterston has taught us anything, it’s that robots are everywhere, and they eat old peoples’ medicine for fuel.

Well, it looks like things are getting worse, ’cause there are now robots that can conduct their own scientific experiments. No, not just as tools for human scientists — they can actually come up with new experiments based on previous experiments they’ve performed.

Two teams of human scientists Thursday unveiled their work with robots that not only perform experiments, but also come up with new ones. The prototypes tackled physics and biology problems that require simple, repetitive experiments, proceeding by trial and error to uncover knowledge, according to studies published in the journal Science.

These robots don’t look like R2-D2 and C-3PO from Star Wars. They look like van-size computers, but with robotic arms to do tasks that would otherwise be done by human assistants.

“The prospect of using automated systems as assistants holds vast promise,” David Waltz of Columbia University and Bruce Buchanan of the University of Pittsburgh say in a journal commentary. Robot scientists could “increase the rate of scientific progress dramatically, (and) in the process, revolutionize the practice of science,” they write.

“Scientists should be using their brains rather than their hands,” says computational biologist Ross King of the United Kingdom’s Aberystwyth University, who led one robot effort. Adam, the team’s $1 million prototype robot scientist, reports new findings about yeast genes in one of the studies. The robot can start more than 1,000 biology experiments a day over a five-day period.

King’s team manually confirmed the biochemistry results that explained the genetic workings of yeasts, which have eluded researchers for decades. “There is a lot of work to do, even in creatures we think are well-understood,” King says.

Sure, sure, it sounds great. They’re performing repetitive experiments so humans don’t have to do them. They’re helping to advance science. They’re discovering stuff about yeast, which could lead to better-tasting bread. But dangit, once you start teaching ’em science, it’s only a matter of time before they’re building new bodies made out of adamantium and trying to kill off the Avengers.

No Comments

  1. VoodooBen Said,

    April 6, 2009 @ 11:26 pm

    “[O]nce you start teaching ‘em science, it’s only a matter of time before they’re building new bodies made out of adamantium and trying to kill off the Avengers.”

    Too true, my friend. Too true.