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?
10 hours 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?
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