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Military Set To Develop Smart, Robotic Cameras
coondoggie writes "In a move seemingly straight out of the Terminator movies, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week said it has contracted with 15 companies or universities to begin building software and hardware that will give machines or robots visual intelligence similar to humans."
It'll be a long time before anything is produced to replace a human's decision making and observation skills.
Humans are terrible replicators of Godly things.
Unfortunately DARPA failed to realize that afterwards the robots simply sat around and watched Futurama and porn all day.
Plenty of people have been working on "intelligence similar to humans" for a long time, and we're barely any closer than we were 20 years ago. Hell, we have a tough time getting the computer to play a good game of Go.
So, when I hear something like 'DARPA said the program, known as Mind's Eye, should generate the ability for machines to have the "perceptual and cognitive abilities for recognizing and reasoning about the actions it sees and report or act upon it."', my eyes roll involuntarily.
If these are the "skills" displayed by certain American helicopter pilots over Iraq, I'd say you're off by a lot. "Shoot anything that moves" would be a very easy algorithm to implement.
if you are referring to the wikileaks tape perhaps you missed the unedited version that shows guys in the group that included the journalist were carrying AK47s and RPGs. Somehow wikileaks edited out that part.
No, I think "dire straits" is correct in this case.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Will soon be back in the USA. .. they have cell voice prints been detected over cities, now its going visual.
Sold to every small town PD with a long term no bid contract.
Big sis will watch you long before you get TSA ed or xrayed in your local community.
"respond intelligently to new and unforeseen events." Your face matched to your gait. Anything change, time for big sis to have a chat?
http://www.tsa.gov/press/happenings/vipr_blockisland.shtm
ie augmented security at key transportation facilities in urban areas around the country - your face part of a huge data stream.
Want a vision of the future, imagine a camera streaming a human face - forever
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Just paint an Xbox360/Kinetic in camouflage colors, load up COD and send me $100 Billion dollars! They'll never know.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
give machines or robots visual intelligence similar to humans
Sounds like a grand idea. What we need are robots that have more intelligence to humans. It might sound like a bad idea, but we already have enough idiots running around, we don't need to reinforce them with piles of robots.
Hell, look at it this way, maybe humans will be doing outsourcing for robots in the future?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Fiction by Marshall Brain: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Alternatives by me:
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-392
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-402
From there:
In brief, a combination of robotics and other automation, better design, and voluntary social networks are decreasing the value of most paid human labor (by the law of supply and demand). At the same time, demand for stuff and services is limited for a variety of reasons — some classical, like a cyclical credit crunch or a concentration of wealth (aided by automation and intellectual monopolies) and some novel like people finally getting too much stuff as they move up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or a growing environmental consciousness. In order to move past this, our society needs to emphasize a gift economy (like Wikipedia or Debian GNU/Linux or blogging), a basic income (social security for all regardless of age), democratic resource-based planning (with taxes, subsidies, investments, and regulation), and stronger local economies that can produce more of their own stuff (with organic gardens, solar panels, green homes, and 3D printers). There are some bad “make work” alternatives too that are best avoided, like endless war, endless schooling, endless bureaucracy, endless sickness, and endless prisons.
Simple attempts to prop things up, like requiring higher wages in the face of declining demand for human labor and more competition for jobs, will only accelerate the replacement process for jobs as higher wage requirements would just be more incentive to automate, redesign, and push more work to volunteer social networks. We are seeing the death spiral of current mainstream economics based primarily on a link between the right to consume and the need to have a job (even as there may remain some link for higher-than-typical consumption rates in some situations, even with a basic income, a gift economy, etc).
So, that’s the broader picture as I see it right now.
People are not making the obvious connections, because they still believe in an essentially a “religious dogma” of an economic ideology of endless growth that will produce endless paid employment for endless people (on a finite planet — even if a space program could help with that). This fundamentally ignores that the value of most new services is that they reduce the need for labor in industry or at home (once we are satiated for basic needs and even fairly high wants). So, we get, say, the recent push for government grants to push along more robotics in the USA as a White House priority without much though presumably given to the socio-economic implications of more automation.
I think more automation of the right sorts can be a good thing, but our society needs to move beyond a scarcity economics paradigm to an abundance paradigm for that to work out well for most people.
But, beyond the economics side, it is the military side of all this that is really problematical and ironic. People have long been using all these advanced technologies of abundance (robotics, biotech, advanced materials, advanced energy sources) from a scarcity perspective of creating weapons to fight over the very scarcity that, ironically, these technologies could alleviate if created and used differently. So, we ironically get, say, military robots (drones) whose primary role is essentially to enforce a social order based on people working and acting like robots, rather that engineers just building robots to do the robot-like work and let people be people. The same is true for the misuse of nuclear energy, nanotech, rockets, and biotech all from a scarcity paradigm to
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Smart enough to shut the hell up when they see something they shouldn't have?
Through these fields of destruction
Baptisms of fire
I've witnessed your suffering
As the battle raged higher.
And though they hurt me so bad
In the fear and alarm
You did not reboot me
My brothers in arms.
Yup. You can't go wrong with Dire Straits.
Damn! What's the point of a 'welcome overlords' post if it's actual robot overlords. Screw this, I'm going home (where I will be carefully watched by a robot).
Come on people, it's straight, not strait.
I thought "don't ask, don't tell" was still in effect until all the implementation details get worked out.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
DARPA has been funding a lot of robotics projects recently. It seems they're very keen on producing robotic soldiers. This comes on the tail of a recently-announced DARPA robotics project called the DARPA ARM project, which I'm heavily involved in. http://www.thearmrobot.com/ I was kind of disappointed not to see it slashdotted when we did a press release about it! The obvious benefit of doing competitions rather than first-party research is that you get the same results for a fraction of the cost. This is especially true of competitions like this, where the goal is to produce software or a procedure, rather than a physical robot, since the winning entry can be copied for free!