I no longer feel the need to preface anything about robots with the phrase “it’s my belief that,” because it’s now a mathematical certainty that humans are slowly but surely engineering our violent and imminent overthrow by continuing to make smarter, faster robots.

Google’s busy making spider robots, some scientist with a death wish is teaching them how to learn from prior actions. Other are making sure they can perform like SEAL Team Six – it’s insanity.

But the one thought that has allowed me to sleep at night was the hope that during the violent robot uprising, I could simply swim out into the ocean and await my fate at the hands of a shark or something.

Apparently no, I won’t even have that option.

Japanese engineers (surprise) have developed Swumanoid, the prototype swimming robot.

The robot overall has a special-purpose drive using four struts, and the force the robot receives from the water can be measured. Because the robot is currently at the prototype stage, its swimming speed, corrected for size, is 0.64 m/s or approximately three times slower than the current world record for the 100m freestyle. From now on, the researchers are planning improvements to make it faster.

Yes, let’s make it faster…

Zombies? Hah! You’re looking at the end right here folks.

[via Geekologie]