Forget AI; it’s programmed by humans and even if Elon Musk makes 10,000 Tesla robots annually (I forget where I saw the headline, so the number might be off).
But this gives me the willies:
Engineers Gave a Mushroom a Robot Body And Let It Run Wild
Nobody knows what sleeping mushrooms dream of when their vast mycelial networks flicker and pulse with electrochemical responses akin to those of our own brain cells.
But given a chance, what might this web of impulses do if granted a moment of freedom?
An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Cornell University in the US and the University of Florence in Italy took steps to find out, putting a culture of the edible mushroom species Pleurotus eryngii (also known as the king oyster mushroom) in control of a pair of vehicles, which can twitch and roll across a flat surface.
I have read enough Lovecraft and science headlines to know that fungi (or just a mastermind, single worldwide organism) are not human, and giving them the ability to move about in the physical world is a bad, bad idea. I already suspect, sometimes, that they (it) are (is) farming us and all of nature for their (its) own ends.
(Link via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
