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Smarter than your average carbon-based life form. Photo: Stanford U.

The Sci-Fi Channel blog says that autonomous choppers developed at Standford University are teaching each other to fly better than a human pilot.

The announcement embraces two common subtexts in media coverage of robotic technologies: that robots will soon be our betters, and that they can be trustworthy as they carry out their benign missions overhead.

Stanford says “there is interest in using autonomous helicopters to search for land mines in war-torn areas or to map out the hot spots of California wildfires in real time.”

That kind of language is the military’s way of easing robot killing machines into our consciences. The choppers will follow the Predator into the killing business soon enough.

DVICE: Stanfords robotic helicopters teach each other tricks, fly better than a human
Crazily enough, the helicopters used aren’t fancy at all. They’re just store-bought RC helicopters, with the complex innards added by the Stanford students. The team includes Professor Andrew Ng, graduate students Pieter Abbeel, Adam Coates, Timothy Hunter, Morgan Quigley, and expert remote controller Garett Oku.