The great minds behind Harvard's Ivy League walls have taken another big step—actually, many thousands of tiny steps—towards advanced artificial intelligence. Using 1024 tiny robots, called Kilobots, which are basically a vibrating motor, "legs," and infrared sensors, they managed to get each individual bot to work together, forming complex two-dimensional patterns.
With behavior inspired by large flocks of birds, the Kilobots use basic computations to work together and overcome traffic jams, essentially seeking their own creative solutions to problems. And while the basic shapes they make aren't perfect, as you may expect from a computer, that's actually due to the "individuality" of each 'bot—and the level of accuracy and imperfection stayed the same.
Don't worry: there's no legion of robot overlords plotting diabolically to take over mankind. For the time being, the process is rudimentary and slow going; nearly 12 hours for a single shape. But it's the software and execution that matter.
Teaching large groups of robots to work together and yet be autonomous has, up until now, only been accomplished in groups ten times smaller than this. Using squads of creatively capable bots will ultimately enable them to do everything from design and build skyscrapers and roads, navigate those roads as driverless cars, to, yes, eventually challenge us in our position as Earth's alpha species. No, really.