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Robotic Scorpions?
Mike Wilson writes: "New Scientist has an article about a 'dim-witted' robot which may survive in circumstances where smarter devices would fail." Hope you're not paranoid about a 50cm metal scorpion sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I know I'm not, those are good folks with good intentions and robot slaves.
Is one of those remote controlled dragonflies like they had in The 5th Element, so I could spy on people and know what my boss is saying about me in that meeting. I'd build in some kinda compressor/limiter on the audio end tho, so when it gets smashed my eardrums don't get blown out.
The project is sponsored by DARPA, the same people that brought you the Internet.
The military is interested in these little scorpions for recon, not weapons deployment.
On the lighter side of things, they'd make excellent lawn mowers. Since the scorpion will use a sensor to determine if an object can be scaled or should be avoided based on it's height, you could use one of these robots to crawl around the yard and clip grass that measures above a certian point.
This would be much nicer if it was NASA trying to build a robot to crawl around Mars and take pictures rather than the Defense Department trying to create another weapon.
In the game Wasteland - man, Las Vegas was crawling with 'bots, but this one scorpion bot was just jasty - had to practically use all my LAW rockets before it finally died...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
I keep getting the feeling that the little robotic scorpion is going to get halfway across the desert where it will get picked up by a bird attracted by the movement. Maybe they plan to mass saturate the desert with these things cause there's a hell of a lot more that can go wrong besides getting lost.
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
Chinese Glorious People's Fly-by-Wire Cactus Wren!
--Blair
When New Scientist was read by intelligent people, they wrote about intelligent robots. Now they write about dim-witted robots.
ObNotFlamingNS: This has been one of my pet peeves for a long time. We threw all this time and effort at creating AI, when we didn't even know how to create Artificial Stupidity. Humans did not walk fully-formed from the primordial slime. It took evolution a lot of trial and error to get from slime to scorpions to us. We should use the benefit of hindsight to avoid errors like the dinosaurs, but that doesn't mean we can skip all the steps on the way. We might miss an important lesson.
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Yes, the nick is flamebait