Sony ScientistsTeach Robots to Create Their Own Language

Sony scientists along with Italy and the European Commission's Emerging Technologies Initiative are working on a project to give robots language and cognitive skills that change and grow over time, without human intervention or rules. The experiments are being carried out on a pack of Aibo's and they are already able to communicate to each other about the location of a ball and its movement.

The canine cyborgs were placed in a room with other objects, some of which would respond to sounds. A stuffed elephant and other objects would not respond. The dogs ultimately spent more time "barking" at the responsive objects, and they learned that particular bark patterns elicited certain responses.

The project is called EC (embedded and communicating) Agents and the goal is to have machines that grow and evolve without human interaction.

Other groups are working on this technlogy to let MP3 players, and the like, talk to each other about your playing preferences, and to create swarms of robots that do search and rescue.

But, of course any time someone mentiones "learning robots" and "evolution" all the scifi junkies start to get weak in the knees. When the robots learn to talk to each other without us knowing, then we're in trouble. Robot overlords, anyone?