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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."
So far, robots are pretty dumb. While I agree in our modern capitalist world 'bots will continue to chip away at a large number of jobs, these jobs are usually the ones that don't require an education. Get an education and plenty of doors will open up that robots can't touch. If you don't like that don't blame tech, blame capitalism. Your argument about lessening the horrors of war was made by (Mr?) Gatling back in the 1860's. Don't know if you noticed, but the horrible bloodshed his invention allowed didn't scare people away from war. War will happen anyways. A Commander in Chief who never sees the battlefield will be "desensitized" anyways, irrelevant of if he's sending in men with bayonets to kill each other face to face or ordering a tomahawk to be launched. While technology certainly plays a roll in war, it's not the one to blame. If you *had* to kill, wouldn't you prefer just pressing a button? Or would you prefer the PTSD?
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
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).
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
And it's already going on. Cruise missiles take out unseen targets daily. Now how does an enemy respond to that? Can anyone say terrorism? Can anyone say anti-Americanism? If you see thousands of your people destroyed by an unseen, elitist enemy that you cannot direct your anger at due to their superiority, wouldn't it make sense to support someone going carrying a suitcase-nuke to downtown NYC as payback?
I'm not saying it's right in any way, just that maybe terror can't be forced back by causing more reason for grievance?
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.When you retire a generation of workers by robots (somehow a development I suspect is being delayed by something called "outsourcing to the developing world") there will of course be a gap in which a generation of workers need to reeducate. Now, most of those in question will be quite old (as they didn't see the change coming, and thought the job had a future), so obviously there will be problems like this.
It doesn't mean it's not worth it. After some time, people won't educate to the job that are now replaced by robots. In the future, I suspect the only jobs out there will be engineering, sciences and art. That's not to bad, is it?
(Personally I do however have a more bleak view of the future related to overpopulation, but that is off-topic)
While robot marines and autonomous machines such as the ones displayed will help the army maintain technological strength over the long-term, I can't help but wonder if they are wasting A LOT of our money. If you look at the hundreds of billions which has been spent on Stealth technology over the past couple of decades, it is pretty impossible to claim even a fraction of that amount has transferred into actual military value.
The fact of the matter is that that in most situtations (the Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam wars being good examples) that Stealth technology is all but pointless because there is no need for it (i.e. enemy anti-air infrastructure has already been destroyed). Even the few of occasions it has been used though (e.g. the Bosnian war and exercises) the stealth technology has only worked part of the time. If you remember in the Bosnian war, stealth aircraft were still able to be shot down, and that was using cold-war era Russian equipment not even designed to combat stealth aircraft.
It isn't difficult to envisage in 10 years time the army neglecting their robotics as almost useless, in the same way most of the hundreds of billions spent on stealth technology is being disregarded as almost useless in "the war on terror".
I bet Lockhead Martin and the other defense contractors aren't complaining though, our tax dollars keep their industry a highly paid one!
and I couldn't help but think of the other bot they've got for evacuating injured soldiers from the battlefield (the one with a bears head)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06
why not combine the two?
to wake up and find your being operated on by a robot with a giant bear head
"Please state the nature of the medical emergency."
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