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US Army To Push X-Files Tech Development
An anonymous reader writes "The US Army is ramping up the development of technology right out of the X-Files; 'making science fiction into reality' as Dr. John Parmentola — Director of their Research and Laboratory Management — puts it. The list of things currently in the works is amazing: regenerating body parts on 'nano-scaffolding,' telepathy through electronic impulses in the scalp, and self-aware virtual photorealistic soldiers that can be deployed in the battlefield through 'quantum ghost imaging.' To test these they want to use them into a massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft or Eve online."
I'll only believe it when I see it.
*whistles the X-Files theme*
How can a virtual photorealistic soldier also be self-aware?
Wow, a 7 digit ID - let that be a lesson in the perils of procrastination.
I believe the director of DARPA typically leaves with a change in administration, and it wouldn't surprise me if that was the case in other such agencies. Then there's the whole change in funding thing that may happen.
I know a lot of people in the defense research community are a bit nervous now. Be interesting to see what happens after January.
Step 1: Read theoretical physics journal
Step 2: Claim principles could be adapted to military uses in unrealistic time frames
Step 3: Profit!
No ??? even needed.
Doesn't that violate the TOS?
I'm sure Blizzard would love to have a higher level of AI for its npcs. It would give the players something to aspire to.
technology-enabled telepathy, techlepathy, or whatever you want to call it, is still manipulating objects with your mind. and there are many instances where directly transmitting commands with neural impulses would be preferable over verbal commands. for instance, if you were trying to control a UAV drone it would be far more intuitive to be able to make the plane turn via thoughts than with clumsy voice commands. you'd have a much wider range of control that's both, more natural and also quicker, than voice commands.
i'm more disturbed by this:
--yea, that and carrying out cover ups.
Quantum ghost imaging is a real effect that is potentially useful, but there is skepticism that it's an "entangled photon" quantum effect and not just an effect that is due to the ordinary interference of light waves (which is also ultimately quantum of course but can be predicted with classical physics).
Faced with cuts in military funding by the upcoming Obama administration, this is deigned to convince people that the defense department comes up with a lot of gee-whiz things they really shouldn't let their representatives eliminate.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
From what I read it should be possible to create images from paired photons over any distance. If we can read a photon a meter distant by observing its entangled twin, can't we just as easily do the same trick with photons from the edge of the visible universe?
-Joe
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Hadn't encountered "Quantum Ghost Imaging" before. (If it provides a practical system for imaging a objects without exposing that an observer exists and/or without the observer having a clear line-of-sight for ordinary optics, the military applications would be obvious.)
But building replacement body parts and organs on nano-scaffolding is working fine in the laboratory. It's just a little engineering development and regulatory approval from deployment. The military knows how to fund and direct practical engineering development, can fast-track or sidestep regulatory approval, and has a continuing supply of people who need replacement body parts or substitutes to recover function. It makes perfect sense for the military to drive the final development and deployment of this technology, bringing their wounded back to full health rather than giving them a prosthetic and a pension.
The military is already flying and driving vehicles and aiming and firing weapons in difficult environments using "mechanical telepathy" - magnetic sensors in a helmet detecting the fields from the currents from the firing of nerves in - guess where - the speech center (among others). (While you're strapped into a fighter plane doing a 5-G maneuver or a helicopter shaking from flack: Look at a target and/or point a finger at it. When the targeting marker in the heads-up goggles is on it, think "BANG!". Just for one example.) Meanwhile the same technology is doing a very good job of speech recognition on subvocalization. So why not use it to drive a radio to "think-talk" to another guy in the unit?
Since at least the Vietnam era the US military has been a consumer and designer of role-playing game system products and video games, for good reason and with very good results. After noting that the soldiers who played the most on the video games in the PX were also some of the best shots, pilots, tank drivers and gunners, etc. they commissioned videogames with realistic weapon characteristics as training aids: Fun and effective, and a LOT cheaper than full-blown simulators. Role-playing game systems, meanwhile, greatly improved "war games" strategy practice and military planning, and they stay current with developments in the field (and are a major customer of some of the companies as well). Using a MMORG to do a Turing test, along with further development, on a computer-simulation of a soldier (in preparation for deploying AI weapon systems) fits right in and makes perfect sense to me.
So it looks to me like somebody is "pulling a Proxmire" - finding some government research that SOUNDS screwy and characterizing it to make it sound as ridiculous as possible in the public press.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Can someone please exlplain how it is that a bunch of irregulars with poorly maintained AK-47 rifles and surplus Katyusha rockets that date back to the cold war can keep us on our toes in Afghanistan when we have all of this high tech and expensive army gear? Heck, the amount that we spend to equip and train one US soldier would probably equip a whole company of Taliban. If the army wants more and better soldiers then how about doing simple things like raising base salaries for our military, improving the quality of our training programs, and taking back control of supply and logistics from Halliburton and KBR who seem to be much more interested in how much they can possibly bill the government and much less interested in actually helping our fighting men and women.