... or doing any of a thousand things to beguile the time ...

Back in 1992 you were probably thrilling to the magic of Aladdin or Batman Returns or warming it up with Kriss Kross, or doing any of a thousand things to beguile the time. But in that year MIT Press published, with very little rataplan, Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems, a collection of papers presented at a conference on—but let the titles speak for themselves. Among them: “Using Motor Actions for Location Recognition”; “The Application of Temporal Difference Learning to the Neural Control of Quadruped Locomotion”; “Harvesting by a Group of Robots”(!!); “Neural Networks for Visual Tracking in an Artificial Fly”(!!!).

H'm, yaas, you say, very interesting, but ...?

Well, it's all very interesting, until someone constructs an army of robots that can learn to hunt down humans and “harvest” them. Then will you be worried??

Labels: Systems