The robotic apocalypse its coming! Hurry run and hide; the robot is tightening its own screw! OK…maybe it is not an apocalypse yet, but it is an achievement in technology and a show of how far we have come and could go. Most people have read at least one sci-fi “technology controls everything” type of book. For example, we read Neuromancer, but of all the multiple millions of sci-fi books, a lot of them start by having an artificial intelligence or a self-replicating robot. And now in real life we now have a robot that can repair itself.
In an article from IEEE Spectrum it states that in Japan, researchers are teaching robots how to repair themselves. They taught it how to tighten its own screws and from there it learned how to augment itself, like adding hooks to carry things. If that does not sound like the start of the robot apocalypse, then I do not know what does. Although the system is not perfect and the robot still needs to be told where the problematic screw is, it still shows the speed and efficiency of recent technology. And helps create an idea of the speed it could advance in the future.
Personally I do not think that the robot apocalypse is coming anytime soon, if at all, however seeing technologies like this that keep improving the abilities of robots…well after reading so much about what technology could do to destroy us, it is hard not to see the possible repercussions in the future from self-fixing robots. On the other hand, self-fixing robots might be a good help to those that need technology to survive, like medical technology. If we implement the self-fixing capabilities to a medicinal robot and make it so it can figure out if something is wrong with itself and either fix it or call a person to help, then that would be efficient and helpful to humanity. For not it seems that the technology has only reached the act of tightening screws and mounting a hook, so there does not seem to be anything to worry about…yet.
Source: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/japanese-researchers-teaching-robots-to-repair-themselves