"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."

-Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)

Friday, September 11, 2009

If I Only Had A Brain...

Your handy-dandy Roomba might soon have no reason to lament its lack of brain cells - an article in New Science reports that two researchers at the University of Reading, UK, have been working on controlling simple robots with neurons - that is to say, honest-to-gosh live brain tissue. Their current work has been done with rat neurons; but they hope to upgrade to human cells in their next phase.

Scary? Awesome? What potential uses for such technology can you think of?

1 comment:

  1. Wow! While this is an interesting idea, I don't understand how a brain could be better than a program. Unless the robot's brain was human and it was capable of making choices, what would be the advantage of a robot with a worse operating system? Put simply, what is to be gained (Besides the novelty factor) from creating one of these hybrids?

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