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Soldiers Bond with Bomb-Defusing Robots
hdtv writes "Reuters is running a story that talks about the emotional bonds that US soldiers develop with the robots in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The company, most famous on the US market for its Roomba vacuum cleaner, provided '300 PackBot Tactical Mobile Robots deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan to open doors in urban combat, lay fiber-optic cable, defuse bombs and perform other hazardous duties previously done by humans alone.'"
I bought one of these Inflatable Dolls and I never gained any affection for it.
Oh goodie. Another "you may have blown $500 billion kicking the shit out a third-world country, but you DID get a better household gadget out of the deal" article.
Seriously, what's the lesson "learned" here? That there's potentially a consumer market for remote-controlled devices that feature a camera, a robotic arm and some wheels? (Aren't these things called "drones" anyway?)
...the emotional bonds of love and hate formed between generator mechanics and their boxy buddies.
"Dammit A54! Why did you have to shut down again? Wait... there's coolant... everywhere... NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
"I'm sorry son, but A54 is... beyond economical repair. We'll have to send it back to depot for major repairs."
"Why! Oh god why!"
And of course the less dramatic but far more common:
WARNING: LOTS OF OBSCENITY
"Fuck! You son of a bitch piece of shit! You monkeyfucking mothersucking dicklicking gorram crappy whorebitchfuckfuckfuck! Why won't you fucking work? Where the fucking fuck is the shit-eating fault? Oh sure, you bitch, you'll start up and make it seem like everything is all fucking wonderful, but as soon as you get up to operational RPM your goatfucking dickcheese devil-kissed overpressure relay kicks on and you shut down! Why!"
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
In the West they are given a female gender. "She is a good ship". Airplanes often are named and given nose art.
Then again it could just be all about a bunch of men with no ahem female companionship wanting any excuse to paint big titties on the plane, or to somehow not feel gay when they hump the whole in the wall in the ships galley. As usual it's overanalysed.
As for the bomb robots the less human they are the less you're going to have this sort of nonesense, but since those robots are so expensive I don't think these guy's managers' mind so much that they're cute and cuddly and not seen as quite so expendible.
Call me cynical.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
You seem to have picked me up wrong; I'm not saying that I care any more or less than the next guy. That wasn't my point. And I appreciate your point of view having been there, seriously. I do know a couple folk that have served in Iraq (and are just now), but they don't talk about it much so I would be bullshiting to try and pretend I had a clue what it all about. But onto my point:
Why do you think it took a FOIA request to get photographs of the returning dead? Body bags coming home turn war opinion more than anything else in our culture. The civilian deaths are a sidenote, if ever mentioned. Human nature I guess.
Stalin, who was a bit of an expert on the whole buisiness of killing innocent people said: "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic". To our leaders, that's what the troops are, numbers. My point is that if we start deploying robots to do more and more combat operations, we will lose the one thing that prevents a lot of war; the deaths and injury of our own troops. Ultimately that can cause leaders to fall, the same leaders who make the war.
If war becomes policially cheaper, then we will see more of it.
Oh, "flag-draped coffins" dont come in Fed-X we use DHL now. That is the dumbest remark I have ever heard. They are fly in on military planes escorted by the military.
Did you honsestly think I meant that literally? Shit, sorry, was just a figure of speach. I have seen the photos you know, you don't see many fedex planes in those colours...
9-11 was not America's fault but thanks for that once again biased history lesson.
Em, yes it was. Unless you genuinely believe the "they hate freedom" bit. Bin Ladens main personal beef was the presence of US troops on Saudi soil. This is well documented. It was a direct result of your foreign policies of the past 40 years. They aren't attacking countries like Holland or Canada. And in 2005 the first ever suicide bombing in Western Europe (a large and diverse area politically) was done by people who specificly stated the UK's involvment in Iraq as their reasoning.