6 Shocking Ways Robots Are Already Becoming Human

In case you're thinking it was all a wry joke on the soldiers' part, and they don't really respect and revere their robot brothers-in-arms, think again: Sgt. Talon, a bomb disposal robot with the 737th Ordinance Company, has been awarded no less than three honorary Purple Hearts and a battlefield promotion to staff sergeant by the soldiers. It now holds a higher rank than the average soldier. If so inclined, it could give human beings orders that may put their lives at risk, and technically, they would have to obey.

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Robots are hard-wired. A robot's actions are purely the sum of its programming. It is literally impossible for a robot to go against its code. A robot is, by its very essence, the direct and polar opposite of creative.

Or at least it used to be.

Robots are now not only expressing themselves in a variety of ways, but they're also doing it so well that their creative works are standing alongside those of professionals. Emily Howell (yes, the robots have people names now) was fed the works of every single classical composer in existence and told to analyze the music for patterns. She dutifully examined each piece with the cold, metallic and joyless disposition of a music history professor. Then, when she was finished, she composed her own music, presumably while one of the researchers worked the turntables with ruthless and scientific efficiency.

Whether or not you think her results are any good is beside the point: The point is that we have programmed the ability to create art -- wholly original pieces, not remixes or covers -- into a machine.

And by adding this addendum, you're probably thinking we're going to say Emily's music is an awkward flailing mess of failure.

They're not. These are her jams:

Her compositions aren't just coherent, they're actually considered on the same level as the works of many professional composers ... to the extent that those same composers have publicly expressed worries that "Emily may one day overtake in field." By which we assume they meant to say they feared she would "overtake us in a field, where nobody might hear our screams."

The cruel, merciless domination of creativity isn't limited to music. While most art programs take a picture and filter it through pastels, pencils and paints, the Painting Fool has been taught how different painting styles and colors can stimulate moods and emotions. When the time finally came for the machine to create some original paintings of its own, one would assume it malfunctioned and printed out some photographs of circuit boards, followed by two pages of questions marks and one page left blank, save for the words "What is ... love?" printed in tiny text at the bottom. But it actually did this cityscape:

And this flower:

So OK, maybe the Fool isn't exactly on the level of Jackson Pollock. Hell, it's not even on the level of Kevin Pollak ... 's niece, Penny Pollak, who once gave a stirring Vagina Monologue at an open-mic night, but mostly just coasts off the meager family name.

But again, that's not the point: The point is that this program did not go the expected route and paint realistic landscapes or still lifes. It skipped past millennia of art history and leapfrogged right to the Modern Art phase. If it keeps up its artistic progression at this accelerated pace, it will revolutionize the art world in two months, become a tired parody of itself in three and burn out and succumb to a drug addiction in four. Six months from now it will be dead from auto-erotic asphyxiation, and all of its former critics will be writing tearful odes to The New Yorker saying that they don't know about everybody else, but they thought the Fool's later work was actually the best.

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Swiss scientists conducted an experiment with robots where the machines were simply tasked with collecting discs that represented food. At the end, the individuals that collected the most "food" were allowed to "reproduce" via hot metal-on-metal bonin'. (OK, so "reproducing" just meant their instructions were mixed together and copied onto the next generation of robots, but our way sounds way more fun). Now, if you're a Swiss robot inexplicably programmed to feel hunger, you've got two options: As you go about looking for resources, you can either opt to hoard what you find (selfish behavior) or share with the rest of the group (altruistic behavior).

Faced with this same dilemma, nature mostly responds by inventing new and horrible ways to murder. But astonishingly, the robots learned to cooperate and share resources, thus ensuring a greater chance to procreate for all, despite reducing their own individual chances to reproduce. The primitive AI put the good of the whole above its programming, and by doing so, has shown machines to be capable of altruism -- arguably the most complex and rare trait found in any society.

Hell, we actually are human beings -- the creatures who defined the word "altruism" -- and come lunchtime, we'll step on the neck of an old lady if she's between us and the last burrito. These robots are practically saints in our book.

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Also, added bonus: Charles comes in the form of a terrifyingly inhuman head modeled after English inventor Charles Babbage ... if somebody drowned him in doughnut glaze and left his sugary corpse to rot in the sun for a month. So sure, go ahead and mount that to your dashboard and ask it give you directions; you'll soon find every destination is a psychiatric hospital.

Incorporating 24 motors, Charles' head moves, talks and just generally orchestrates an intricate mockery of human expression. As you're driving, it will calmly offer directions while cameras in its eyes watch you to figure out exactly what you're feeling at the moment, and presumably also your greatest fears and weaknesses. Professor Robinson asserts that Charles represents the "future of how people are going to interact with machines."

And he's right, in the sense that they will be giving us orders and telling us where to go. And there will be a lot of severed human heads rolling around.

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Scientists keep inventing robots to take our jobs, but now it's their turn: A robot named Adam is a scientist in its own right. It collects data and finds explanations in the patterns it detects, then performs experiments to confirm or repudiate those patterns. It carries out this entire process without any input from a human being. The scientific method, maybe the single most important concept in the advancement of human civilization, has been mastered to a "T" by a computer.

Robots used to just do the legwork that backed up human thought, but Adam builds a hypothesis, tests it and proves or discards it, entirely without human interaction. Now, we don't want to come off as fear mongers here, but how long until it decides to test the "human beings look better stabbed" hypothesis?

It's not just a novelty act, either (like those displays where humans play chess against a computer). Adam is actually producing usable results. Human scientists plan on using its findings in future experiments. Do you know what that means? It means that a robot, a thing created by man, has come to an entirely original conclusion and contributed, meaningfully, to the sum total of human knowledge.

H ... have you guys done that lately? Because we totally have not ever done that. So Adam, a robot, has -- purely in terms of value to the race -- surpassed most human beings, whose greatest contribution is that one time they farted and it sounded kind of like Elvis.

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"I think, therefore I am," is perhaps the most compelling self-definition ever written. We are intelligent because we are aware of ourselves and our own thoughts. That may not encompass every nuance of what it is to be a thinking, feeling creature, but it's a good, solid start.

And now, the phrase applies to robots as well.

The simplest test for self-awareness is the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror. It sounds basic, but only a handful of animals have ever passed it. A handful of animals, and a robot named Nico.

A robot recognizing itself is unsettling enough, but Hod Lipson disagrees with that statement, so he made this:

Lipson and his team have created a self-aware robot called Starfish, which taught itself basically everything with no outside assistance -- to walk, navigate difficult obstacles and even adjust to injury (when scientists shortened a leg of the robot, it changed its gait to compensate). But it's the method by which it makes these decisions that's so worrying: Starfish doesn't just blindly follow schematics. It judges what actually needs to be done by constructing a conception of itself in its "brain," then makes structural decisions based on what it thinks it is, fundamentally, as a robot. The scientists say it's not exactly conscious yet, in that it is not "thinking about itself thinking," but it is independently moving "in the direction of consciousness, like a cat -- that kind of level."

Lipson claims that he's not worried, because if these self-aware, self-replicating, evolving robots ever get out of hand, "we just pull the plug out of the robot. That's all."

Jesus.

That's the exact line you give a character named Dead Scientist No. 1 in a sci-fi apocalypse movie, right before the special effects really start kicking in.

When Eric Axt isn't manufacturing EMP grenades for the coming war, he helps his brother run the web comic Donuts for Sharks. Check out Dennis's musings on life and love here. Or take shots at some bad metaphors here. Karl normally selfishly links to his own work; show him you think this is totally not cool by buying this awesome book written by other, more handsome Cracked writers. That will teach him.

For more on robots that probably want to destroy us, check out The 7 Robots Most Likely to Rise Up Against Humanity. Or learn about some machines that should've already done that in The 6 Most Badass Robots (Invented Before Electricity).

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