It's one of science fiction's most familiar ideas: computers that can, when hooked up to other computers, become self-aware and exhibit human characteristics. The results are often sinister, as the machines perceive humanity as a threat and defend themselves to the death.
Star Trek had its Ultimate Computer, among many others; 2001: A Space Odyssey had HAL 9000. Heroes of the Terminator films fought against Skynet, a group of networked military computers that triggered a nuclear holocaust, then aggressively tried to put what was left of humanity out with the trash.
Now RoboEarth -- a World Wide Web for robots: a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behavior and their environment, in the project's words -- has put a mirror up to those fictional tropes. Artificial intelligence and robotics experts -- and a brief history of our darker interactions with subpersonified silicon -- tell us we should take a look in.
RoboEarth's debut made headlines a few weeks ago, most cheering the innovation as a logical next step in the evolution of computers. But, beyond the benign notion of jacking up a robotic riveter in a Detroit car factory to a cybernetic welder in Nagoya, is something darker lurking?
