Scientist Confident That Robot Internet Will Not Lead to Destruction of Mankind

Biomorphic Robots

Scientist Confident That Robot Internet Will Not Lead to Destruction of Mankind

Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures

by By Dan Amira | New York Magazine

European scientists at RoboEarth have created the first Internet for robots, called Rapyuta. Not because robots need a place to look at porn and tweet their bad pope jokes, but to help robots get along in this strange, confusing world in which they play an increasingly prominent role. "Instead of every robot building up its own idiosyncratic catalogue of how to deal with the objects and situations it encounters," BBC reports, "Rapyuta would be the place they ask for help when confronted with a novel situation, place or thing."

But for those convinced that providing robots with a common brain will only hasten the arrival of the robot uprising against mankind, then Rapyuta is more like a dark harbinger of the apocalypse. We happen to be one of those people, so we reached out to Dr. Heico Sandee, RoboEarth's program manager at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, to reassure us that Rapyuta will not lead to our destruction. "That is indeed an important point to be addressed," Sandee acknowledged in an-email. But he assured us that robots will use Rapyuta for no such thing.

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