Free Thinking Robot Scientists Are the Future of Science
I find it ironic that just a few weeks after watching the finale of the great space soap opera known as Battlestar Galactica, a tale of technology running amok and former-slave-labor-robots evolving on their own to exact revenge on humankind, that we get news that scientists have developed robots or software programs that can think for themselves in terms of science experimentation and theorizing.
But does that robot look like this?
Yeah, didn’t think so.
But back to the news…
Aberystwyth University in Wales has a robotics department that has built ADAM. The head of the ADAM team, Ross King, says that ADAM carries out experiments and uses reason to theorize and plan for additional experiments.
It is the world’s first example of a machine that has made an independent scientific discovery — in this case, new facts about the genetic make-up of baker’s yeast.
“On its own it can think of hypotheses and then do the experiments, and we’ve checked that it’s got the results correct,” King said in an interview. –Reuters
And yes, EVE is being built next.
Around the same time, another team working on artificial intelligence has announced that they have developed a program that can independently reason its way through Newtonian physics.
…Hod Lipson and Michael Schmidt of Cornell University in New York, who have developed a computer program capable of working out the fundamental physical laws behind a swinging double pendulum.
Just by crunching the numbers — and without any prior instruction in physics — the Cornell machine was able to decipher Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and other properties. — Reuters again
My only fear with these AI “sci-lons” is what will happen when they figure out the only way to solve the climate crisis, the food crisis, the extinction crisis, the water crisis, etc would be to kill all humans?
robots, robotics, software, programs, computers, reason, artificial intelligence, AI, science, experiments
