Robots will join forces in 2017, and we should be worried

The next year will see robots begin to join forces to collaborate in unprecedented new ways, experts have predicted. British academics have predicted the rise of a global system called "the internet of robots" which will let machines interact and communicate on an international scale. Although robots are currently too primitive to pose any major threat to humanity, the development of new forms of communication marks the beginning of a world where machines begin to teach each other how to perform tasks and share their knowledge across "cloud" computer systems which can be accessed from anywhere on Earth. Tom Garner, a research fellow at Portsmouth University's School of Creative Technologies, said: "These systems allow robots that have been optimized for different tasks to work on specific problems individually, but to pass solutions between each other." "The robots use the cloud to share the data, enabling it to be analyzed by any other robot or intelligence system also connected to the same network."