The highly annoying C3-PO was fluent in more than 6 million forms of communication. Some Australian researchers are developing techniques for robots to learn language from each other. Very much like humans pointing and grunting, the robots are imaginatively “lost” and come up with a random term to describe their surroundings. When they encounter one another, they exchange their terms and indications of where they think that term belongs. As the robots continue to interact, they develop a correlation for one another’s assigned names for similar locations.

Soon they’ll be able to exchange information on humans as targets so that a swarm of robots can efficiently descend upon us and end our existence.