Unveiling The Robot That Dreams: Dreams, no longer meant for only humans (hail robotics!!!)

I have always believed that dreams are absolute prerogatives of humans and humans alone. I wouldn’t even believe if I was told that animals can dream. But science has just made a mess of my belief. Should I say “thank you” or “what the heck?”

The feats in Artificial Intelligence have not failed to amaze me. Before now, we were just talking about the advances in humanoid robots; now we’ve moved a step further. This is the era where robots can be thought to dream.

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What occurs during your sleep?

There are more things to sleeping than just lying down. I won’t be delving much into the aspect of sleep, but I’ll show us one this that happens: this is Dreaming. This is a very vital aspect of sleeping, where the brain collates fragments of recently acquired memories with the older ones, so as to maintain a solidified long term memory.

Dreams; not exclusively preserved for humans

A team of scientists from DeepMind, Blizard, and Google went on a research which was led partly by professor Irina Higgin (Neuroscientist) to find a way to create an algorithm that will make robots to dream. Now, this may sound weird; but let’s look at it like this: Dreams, among other things in humans, help our mind to relax, increase learning process, and make us better at decisions.

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In the same way; since we have “learning robots”, what stops it from being made to dream? That is the idea behind the research, and they came up with “DeepMind AI”. This will simulate the process of dreaming in the robot. No doubt, this is an advancement in the neural network of robots.

Will be dream be monitored?

The dream will be processed and used to monitor the learning process of the robot. But the dream is not to be pre-programmed into the robot. It is purely from the robot’s neural network.

Science is really getting scarier by the day, but there’s a question I humorously asked myself about this subject of robot dreaming:

“What if these dreaming robots start watching movies rated 18+, will they have wet dreams?”

Well, I guess I’ve figured out the answer already; I could be wrong though

Thanks for reading

References for further reading: Ref1, Ref2