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Robot roundup: They punch, they drive, they learn

When will these meddlesome scientists ever learn. While robots have the potential to help us in our day-to-day lives, Hollywood and science fiction has also shown us that they’re also cold, soulless machines that are bent on ruling the world. Below, three examples that the robot apocalypse is sooner than you think.

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1. They’re learning to hurt us


A scientist in Slovenia is using a robot to punch human volunteers in the arm. The goal is to figure out how hard a robot should be able to “punch” without hurting a human. The scientist says he’s just trying to figure out how robots and humans can interact without hurting each other. From the New Scientist:
Earlier this year scientists were running tests with robots to prevent them from stabbing humans

(good) but also

(not so good).

2. Driving Miss Daisy 2.0
Trust Google, the developers of the all-encompassing Google Street View, to develop a fleet of cars that drive themselves. Fortunately for us, even the tech wizards at Google say it’s almost a decade away. From Gizmodo:
The New York Times

even got to see one of these robo-cars in action.

3. They’re getting smarter
One of the advantages that we have on our potential metal rivals is that we can learn. But scientists at Carnegie-Mellon University are working on a computer that can read the internet and learn from it. iO9 has the run down and an interview with Professor Tom Mitchell and Burr Settles, two scientists working on the project. From the article:
NELL reads the Web 24 hours a day, seven days a week, learning language like a human would — cumulatively, over a long period of time. It parses text on the Internet for ontological categories, like “plants,” “music” and “sports teams,” then uses contextual clues to sort out what things belong in which categories, like “Nirvana is a grunge band” and “Peyton Manning plays for the Indianapolis Colts.” And, perhaps most Skynet-horror-inducing, “anger is an emotion.”
Fortunately for us, NELL still makes plenty of mistakes. From the Oxford University Press blog:

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