RoboEarth is up to Speed

In the midst of my series on the possible future of the Internet, an article from BBC falls in my lap, that really brings reality up to speed. As it turns out parts of my article about the future of robots are very much present.

Scientists at the Eindhoven University, the Netherlands, have created the first ever World Wide Web for robots. Sadly not dubbed "SkyNet" these doom bringers decided to call the system "RoboEarth". Playing straight into the fate of the Termintor series they did however decide to set off the robots by run a hospital room. No better way to take over the earth than to start by killing our the weak and discrepant.

I am exaggerating naturally, but I do find the timing comical. The four robots currently working in the mocked-up (I might ad) hospital are designed to serve drinks, dish out pills, or alert to emergencies. At the core of it all is one central system controlling all the robots.

As I discussed previously, a central problem with artificial intelligence is the inability to come up with new solutions to new problems. A computer will be bound to the strict confinements of its programming, resulting in an inability to learn “new” things. This specific problem is something they are now trying to circumvent by having the central computer learn everything. The aim of the system is to create a kind of ever-changing common brain for robots.

"The problem right now is that robots are often developed specifically for one task," said Rene van de Molengraft, the RoboEarth project leader. "Everyday changes that happen all the time in our environment make all the programmed actions unusable. A task like opening a box of pills can be shared on RoboEarth, so other robots can also do it without having to be programmed for that specific type of box."

The system is cloud-based, which in turn means that a lot of the memory capacity can be off-loaded from the individual robots to the central core, allowing for much smaller storage space, and faster processing. A single robot would simply download the script for solving the problem at hand, and then delete said script when the task is completed.

Using this approach, robots are becoming increasingly cheaper to manufacture, something that may result in us having servant robots in our homes in as little as 10 years, experts say. All controlled by the central hive-mind.

I hate to be an “I told you” so but - World, I told you so.

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What do you think? Are robots taking over the world, and if so are they going to let us have a place? Find out my thoughts in the upcoming conclusion of my series “the Conscious Internet”. And as always; please comment below.