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DARPATech Shows off Robot Doc and Cancer Breathalyzer
mattnyc99 writes "DARPATech, the Pentagon research arm's annual R&D free-for-all, has some pretty groundbreaking stuff on display this year: the first portable, self-contained robotic surgeon (which a Defense Dept. scientist said would be deployed by 2009), plus a breath-testing gadget that can scan for multiple diseases (including breast cancer) and three new autonomous 'bots that reflect the Pentagon's increasing need for autonomous machinery as the IED-filled Iraq war continues."
When I was a little guy, I was taught that technology will be used to free workers from tedious and dangerous tasks by allowing unfeeling robots to take our places. This would lead to better jobs for those displaced. Instead of welding safety glass to car doors, we'd be building the robots who would do that. Automation, it was said, leads to a better quality of life for humans. Imagine! No more lost fingers from defective bandsaws. No more horrific scarification from spilled chemicals. Let the robots take those jobs, and let us humans reap the benefits.
But what we got instead was robots taking our jobs without a safety net for the displaced workers. Humans, it seems, don't fit in the future. Oh, they are necessary insofar as they are active consumers, and we can't let those displaced people starve to death or watch only broadcast TV or drive a 5 year old car. No, those displaced workers ceased to be humans and became consumers, feeders of the machines. The machines work to produce stuff which the humans don't have enough money to buy. So the solution, obviously, is to create more robots to bring the prices down. The solution begets the problem.
When it is as easy to kill your enemy as it is to press the yellow button on your XBox control pad, you've eliminated 50% of the horrors of war. When it is no longer difficult to kill another human being because the killer is so far removed from the killed, neither human has any more value than the rapidly blinking pixels on the viewscreen.
We fight wars so that we don't have to fight them again. The horror of war, the firsthand experience of pulling the trigger and ending another human life, the trauma of hitting and being hit, the pain of a friend falling next to you. These are all deterrents to war. The pain that each soldier goes through is a powerful reminder that war is not something to be entered into lightly.
Automate the killing, and the workers will be out of their jobs. It is precisely those workers that we need to be there to tell us to try one more time at diplomacy, to evaluate one more time our priorities, to stand there and be living and dead proof that the thing on the other side of the gun barrel is a human.
In order for something to be "dead" it needs to be "alive" first, then lose that quality.
Human doctors can make such "minute mistakes" too, that wouldn't show up on a "dummy test".
Personally, right now, I'd rather put my life on the line to a human than an experimental robot, because I know that a human is less likely to be "buggy".
However, if a "robot doctor" can prove it won't have any "programming bugs", and once it's endowed with sufficient (and correct) "knowledge", I'd rather take the robot than the human medic, because (unlike humans), machines are less prone to errors in judgement.
The problem is in deciding WHEN the robot is sufficiently "bug free", and when it has "enough knowledge" (and how accurate that knowledge actually is).
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And yet people whose lives are lucky enough to be touched by technology have, at least on average, a better standard of living than their ancestors, live longer etc etc
Somehow your horror story doesn't add up.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
From the responses here, it sounds like people are expecting this thing to perform triple bypass surgery all on it's lonesome. It's not designed to replace surgeons. It's designed to augment them. If it replaces anyone currently, it would be nurses and anesthesiologists. Surgeons will have better visual display than the naked eye can manage and the machine will allow them to cut more precisely.
What this really does is get treatment to trauma cases sooner and without endangering the medical staff by putting them closer to the battle. As a side benefit, it may allow surgeons with nerve damage or simple age-related problems to continue to operate when they could not do so manually.
A couple of 30-somethings embark on the ultimate roadtrip