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Starship Troopers: Exoskeletons and Translators
naoursla writes: "Remember the DARPA research solicitation for proposals on Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation? Here is a group that is making progress on it. Right now they have a pair of legs powered by a chain saw engine. Science News has an
article about the researchers this week." And cmholm writes: "Fleshing out this earlier Slashdot story on wearable translators for the military is an article from AFCEA's June Signal magazine. Using a ViA II PC wearable running ViA's Language Translator software, the system can translate between spoken English and Korean, Thai, Chinese, Arabic, Albanian, Spanish, and other major European languages." So between the two, you can either talk to the aliens, or throw them out the airlock.
Your good civillian; I mean you do not have the harm.
What happen?
Some one set us up the bomb!
No doubt the "Where's Waldo®" people's lawyers will be sending them a nastygram first thing next week.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Finally there will be no jar that man cannot open
Just imagine what would happen if the pants suddenly "detect" that the muscleman test pilot really wants to perform movements suitable for a ballet dancer.
After a few pretty splits and bends, which all 15-year old ballerinas would envy, the pieces of the soldier's bones are collected from the suit with tweezers.
Dr. Farnsworth: This is a universal translator. Unfortunately, it translates into an obscure dead language. HELLO!
Translator: Bonjour!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Source:
Hello civillian; I mean you no harm. Please could you direct me and my men to the nearest source of fresh water. Please don't be alarmed by our huge pointy knives and lethal semi-automatic weapons.
Result:
Your good civillian; I mean you do not have the harm. Please can your directly I and my person to the fresh water most neighbor origin. Please do not report to the police by ours huge pointy knife and the lethal semi automatic weapon.
N.B. there doesn't seem to be a Chinese word for civillian or pointy.
Heh, so I guess maybe they're going to have fun working the kinks out.
Well, you have to expect that switching between a non-PIE language will cause some significant problems - there are different basic linguistic concepts between English and, say, Japanese. For example, picture the concept "with". Well, in almost all PIE languages, there is just one word. But, that word actually covers two concepts - "with" as in accompaniment, and "with" as in "by use of". In Japanese, it is two words - to and de, if I remember right. In Japanese, there are only two tenses - past, and present/future. However, they have 3 measures of distance instead of our "near/far" formed words (and they're much more regularly formed... we have "near", "here", "this", etc, vs "far", "there", "that" - no order whatsoever). In Japanese, the prefix "ko-" means "near, as in the speaker's location", "so-" means "far, as in the listener's location", and "a-", means "far, as in further than that" (there's also "do-" which makes it a question. There are just different linguistic balance issues that you really have to just take in context, and that even with a human translating, probably won't last a few back-and-forth cycles.
Oh, and just as a side note, about how few exceptions there are in Japanese compared to english... cross those prefixes with the suffixes "-ko" (location), "-re" (pronouns), "-no" (adjectives), "-chira" (direction), "-nna" (manner, kind), and vowel lengthening, there's only one exception in the 24 combinations - "asoko" instead of "ako".
-= rei =-
"This may be presumptuous..." "That's my favorite kind of 'This'."
Having used a voicemail service which relies on voice-recognition for a couple of years now, I've been regularly annoyed at the fact that the slightest background noise (i.e. the sound made by the planet revolving) throws the recognition all to hell. How this new translation system will cope with background noise along the lines of tanks/APCs, choppers, gunfire, screaming locals etc. will a real test of it's useability IMO.
"Any similarity between the hooting of a million eager monkeys and Slashdot is purely coincidental." -THEFLASHMAN
English and Korean, Thai, Chinese, Arabic, Albanian, Spanish, and other major European languages.
...
Wow. I knew the European Community was expanding, but I didn't know yet we'd come that far!
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Living is a way of life
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"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Sure, I can see the benefit to applying this sort of technology to the handicapped, but do reasonably able bodied Americans need yet another way to get lazier? People get in their cars and DRIVE three blocks to the convenience mart, now they won't even have to burn ANY calories... getting in their car, going into the convenience mart, picking up the six-pack and Chee-tos and back home while exerting no more energy that it would to use the shitter.
Well at least they can't patent this one, Wallace and Grommit have prior art.
Picture this: a walking robot exoskeleton, made as light and compact as possible, with computer compensation for weakened limbs or limited range of motion.
For that matter, consider the non-battlefield applications for this kind of technology. Suppose you could climb everest in a powered suit that provided you heat, pressurization, and cut the effort in half?
How about diving and swimming with powered legs?
This is very cool indeed.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Well, we all know this is going to be used to make super powered soldiers that can turn over tanks with their bare hands etc. (incidentally, didn't they have one of these in Dark Angel), but I've got another use for it - the ultimate home exercise machine. Just set it to oppose movement instead of helping, and you've got an all-over workout that you can do while you're doing regular stuff. Assuming you're doing something more than just watching TV all day.
Imagine a heavily armed marine striding up to you, asking you a question, and depending on a machine to translate the response. Would any us who have used babelfish want our lives to depend on this technolgy? Yikes. The only question would be, should I just keep my mouth shut, or should I run like hell?
Jacobsen says he's thinking in the opposite direction--about putting more human nature into the machines. His idea is to build an exoskeleton intelligent enough to take care of the soldier wearing it. If the human trooper is badly wounded, the machine would say to itself, in effect, "Take this guy home."
... that's right ... the world's best power drinker! Woohoo! Homer Simpson would be jealous. I could lift full-size kegs to my mouth to extract the last drops of sweet beer. I could win every bar fight. And when things get really ugly, it takes over, walks straight home, and I'm in bed before I even know it.
Wow, I see another use for these. If the exoskeleton gives me the ability to lift very heavy objects, and it can take me home when I get into trouble, then suddenly I can become
What's your damage, Heather?
How in the hell do you know what the attitude of the average American soldier is? Maybe you've been watching a few too many Vietnam War movies, and haven't been keeping up on current events.
Over the past 10 years or so, the US military has been involved in literally dozens of relief and peacekeeping operations around the world. I know, I was involved one of them, and guess what? Believe it or not, American soldiers were helping people. We didn't kill anyone. We saved hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives, and we developed close relationships with many of the local people.
As a matter of fact, our battalion had three translators, all of them local, who were invaluable. A reliable automated translator would have been very helpful as an augment to the human translators. It would have helped us save lives and keep good people from being killed by people who happened to be well-armed.
Some people are stupid and uncaring. Some are smart and sensitive to the people around them. Most are somewhere in between. While it's any easy excuse for a joke, your comment is a gross oversimplification.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
With all of these things, we should remember that the great visionaries have forseen the dangers already.In the seminal and prophetic work "The Wrong Trousers" starring Wallace and Gromit, we saw a graphic demonstration of what happens if the security of exoskeleton trousers is suborned by a 'black hat' (or in this case a red glove).
Hope the code for driving these exoskeletons is open source. I want to be able to see what it does !!
I fear that M$ may choose to implement raw sockets (eye sockets, mainly) in Skeleton XP. Crackers will take over my suit, and use it to kick random passers-by and dogs to death. Or alternately, a trapdoor in closed source suits will allow the CIA to orchestrate massed ranks of publicly owned trousers to invade Cuba or something. A new angle on conscription, clearly.....
On a positive note, clearly of interest would be a Beowulf cluster of exoskeletons, which could be used for formation dancing and even synchronised swimming and minefield clearance.
Stephen Hawking has written another book. It's about time as well.