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DARPATech Shows off Robot Doc and Cancer Breathalyzer

Posted by samzenpus on from the cyborg-monkey-still-a-dream dept.

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."

1 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Automation and the devaluation of humans by Knutsi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    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)