"Self-aware" robot spells doom for us all

So we've just inched that much closer to the terrifying but inevitable SKYNET-style of robotic domination that we've been warning you about, as Japanese researchers have recently developed a bot that is able to distinguish "itself" from "others" with a high degree of accuracy. We'll leave the heavy philosophical questions of what constiutes consciousness/self-awareness for discussion in comments, but the facts are these: Junichi Takeno and his team at Meiji University built a robot whom we'll call "Egobot" with an artificial nerve cell in it's computer that screens input from its sensors to determine if it is interacting with a doppelganger or a mirror image of itself. In Takeno's tests, Egobot was able to identify a mirror image of itself using a series of blinking LEDs with 70% accuracy, a number the team is working on perfecting. This is truly an exciting day for humankind, when the list of countless blunders that we've made throughout history culminates with this puzzling worldwide effort to build and program machines that will probably wipe us out for good.

[Via The Raw Feed]