A group of students have given the old school Mario Brothers game a bit of a revamp, by making the Italian plumber self-aware.
Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly large part of how we envision the future, but thanks to a group of students, it's also affecting our past, but not in a Terminator-style time travel sort of way...yet.
Anyway, a study at the University of Tübingen's by the Cognitive Modelling Group mapped out a series of bits of conversation, commands and everything that you would need to make Mario aware of himself and his environment.
He can respond to simple voice commands, let you know whether he's happy or sad and is able to explore his world, even finding out that he can kill or be killed.
Despite the fact that this is all for the benefit of research and to learn about AI, there's still something a bit unsettling about the way Mario says that he knows he can kill a goomba and says "it certainly dies". Somehow, we love Mario a little less, and like Elon Musk, we're really worried about artificial intelligence.
Via Huffington Post
