AI finally catches up to… cows?

Have you heard the news? Super-intelligent machines are plotting to take all of our jobs during breakfast before deciding over their lunchtime soup and salad whether or not they want to kill us all!

What’s that you say? You want proof - or at least a tiny shred of evidence? Well look no further than this: A "learning robot” managed to escape from it’s fenced-in training area. Surely, this is nothing less than Skynet in the making!
Well. Maybe not quite… You see, the engineer kinda forgot to close (much less lock) the gate. The robot, like any decent overgrown Roomba vacuum cleaner, eventually found it’s way out of its pen and went cavorting around the town... until its battery died while it was in the middle of a nearby street. And then to prove that it wasn’t a fluke, the robot escaped... AGAIN!  (No word on whether or not the gate was closed the second time.)

I confess that I’m being a bit facetious here. I will say that I do believe that technology/AI/automation is reaching a level of sophistication that will eliminate a lot of jobs. I could even see a very real potential for not-quite-smart-enough AI in charge of cars or anti-aircraft lasers causing a real and very serious danger to people. Even more so, it appears that AI may take over defending our skies in the not-too-distant future. 

On the other hand, before I’ll believe that Skynet is coming for me, I’d like to see evidence that robots are doing more than escaping from their pens similar to how cows, sheep, and dogs have been giving their owners the slip and even stopping traffic for millennia. There’s at least one 2,000 year old parable in The Bible of sheep performing similar feats, and I imagine there’s other similar stories in ancient literature/historical accounts. 

I’m ready to say that there’s plenty of prior art to go around on this one.