Modular, self-healing robot swarms are definitely a great idea

Robots are going to have to work together if they want to destroy us, their soft, fallible masters. But the current paradigm of having a Skynet-like (or rather, Zerglike) overmind control a set of semi-autonomous drones is too easy to beat -- take out the brain and the rest fail, right? Not if they're all the brain, which is the idea demonstrated in a wonderful new paper, "Mergeable nervous systems for robots." The admiration of the authors for our shining, pitiless destroyers is evident from the get-go. Robots have the potential to display a higher degree of lifetime morphological adaptation than natural organisms.