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?
5 days ago
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?
ReplyDelete