Some scientists are hard at work making a "kill switch" to overpower a too-strong AI and protect us, if needed. Others are specifically teaching robots how to hunt prey, also to help us. Researchers at the University of Zurich's Institute of Neuroinformatics are teaching a small, truck-shaped robot to see, track, and hunt its prey (another small, truck-shaped robot). The predator robot uses an advanced "silicon retina" to see instead of a traditional camera. This "silicon retina," which is modeled after animals' eyes, uses pixels to smoothly detect changes in real time instead of slowly processing frame-by-frame images.

Google's autonomous cars may look cute, like a yuppie cross between a Little Tikes Cozy Coupe and a sheet of flypaper, but to make it in the real world they're going to have to act like calculating predators. At least, that's what a handful of scientists at the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland believe. They recently taught a robot to act like a predator and hunt its prey--which was a human-controlled robot--using a specialized camera and software that allowed the robot to essentially teach itself how to find its mark. The end goal of the work is arguably more beneficial to humanity than creating a future robot bloodsport, however. The researchers aim to design software that would allow a robot to assess its environment and find a target in real time and space.