Legit Reviews

David Utter | Staff Writer

Researchers at Cornell take a baby step forward by creating robots capable of self-replication.

Let's hope the esteemed scientists remembered to program in Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics while performing their experiments.

The capabilities of the robots, comprised of 4 inch blocks, were listed in the science journal Nature. They include electromagnets to attach and detach blocks to each other, and a computer program for replication.

"Although the machines we have created are still simple compared with biological self-reproduction, they demonstrate that mechanical self-reproduction is possible and not unique to biology," Cornell Dr. Hod Lipson said.

Potential uses for the robots include deep space travel and extravehicular repairs. With a sufficient repository of raw material, self-replicating robots could venture into space and rebuild themselves continually. Missions could extend for decades.

How will society react to the news of this development? Apathy? Fear? Hope? Will visions of robots and humans forging a bridge to the cosmos fill the human collective consciousness? Or will people see a future where robots coolly gun down their human inferiors as they create a new world in their image?

Or perhaps, they'll just see the experiment for what it is: little robots stacking blocks to make new robots, which then help stack blocks to make new robots, until they run out of blocks.

The real trick will be when the robots learn to make their own blocks.