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DARPA Researches Avatar Surrogates
kgeiger writes "Feeling blue? DARPA is funding a program to investigate the feasibility of battlefield cyborg-surrogates: 'In its 2012 budget, DARPA has decided to pour US $7 million into the 'Avatar Project,' whose goal is the following: "develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier's surrogate."' Power and bandwidth constraints aside, what could go wrong? Chinese hackers swooping in and commandeering one's army?"
The government doesn't pour $7 million. They dish it out with an eyedropper.
Not that $7 million isn't a lot of money for you and me, but for the US government it is a rounding error.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
He will set the country on the path to freedom from religious persecution and return us to our rightful place in God's plan. Eliminate the government and all those who stand in the way of worship of our rightful, true Ruler. The crimes that are performed in the name of our current governmental system, including but not limited to murder of innocent children, forcing citizens to pay for products they don't want, driving our society into unrecoverable debt that our children (if they aren't aborted) will never be able to repay, placing women in harms' way and outside of the role evolution has trained them for as mother and caregiver, stifling business under the guise and heavy hand of global warming, raising taxes on those of us who are successful, teaching our precious children ridiculous theories that men were once apes and spontaneously changed into what we are today, and attempting to diverge from the Christian principles that our forefathers observed and that this country was founded upon. We need to return to His holy way, and remove the heathens from our path, if necessary, by force. It's time to stopping giving away our children's inheritance to lazy jobless people and Godless welfare cases. It's time we took back our economy and this country.
Surrogates. Bruce Willis does more than just destroy asteroids!
Avatar had live sentient animals being grown and controlled by humans. In Surrogates, they're robots, and surrogacy starts on the battlefield.
Good SF movie, I don't know why it's so unknown.
Free Martian Whores!
1. any kind of lag or areas with a poor signal may not work to well even more so if the link need to go over a few Satellites.
2. You don't need to hack them just jam them and they can be come useless
We have loads of people on /. screaming that China is not cracking systems and would not go aggressively after other nations (say Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Phillipines, thailand, or even India) or even USA. Surely all of these ACs on the site combined with Chinese Political and Military leaders could NOT be wrong.
You've got millions of people ages 10-whatever that can play fps games. How about a computer screen, keyboard and mouse interface. I'll happily take a portion of that 7 million now. Just forget that the bipedal robot part doesn't actually work yet.
And halfway in between is Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace. In the novel, soldiers use mechanical body surrogates which have the bizarre side effect of linking all senses of the team members as if it were a single organism. It's a good read. We can already see, hear and launch weapons from drone platforms and this is just the early stage of remote piloting.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
What a massive waste of money. We have people starving in the world (yes even in the US) and they throw 7M at this crap?
How could this possibly backfire?
I am John Hurt.
Here's a submission I sent a few days ago about humanoid television-robots making the first handshake in space (on the ISS).
wisebabo writes
"As long as we are still in debt to the Chinese and can't afford an ambitious space program, we should be developing THESE (humanoid telerobots). Just get the astronaut NEAR the Moon or Mars (or someday Titan!) and operate these without that stupid speed-of-light time delay. A huge proportion of the weight and complexity of going to these places is that last 100 miles so while times are lean this is the way to go.
Maybe James Cameron can be persuaded to do a pre-quel of Avatar, unfortunately I don't think he'll find a planet full of sexy tele-robots!"
Link to Original Source
Not that I am advocating soldiers dying per se, but if a cause is not worth dying for, then why is it worth going to war for in the first place? If one is prepared to kill their fellow man for whatever cause they might believe in, however true, and however noble, and however right, but they themselves are not prepared to die in the name of that same cause, then their so-called virtuous beliefs are nothing but hollow claims.
Nothing of any real worth or value has ever been achieved without making some sacrifice... and it is the virtue of the people who *have* made such sacrifices that gives us that much more a profound appreciation for the victory that was gained by it.
Take that away, and war becomes just a pointless exercise in killing... without purpose, and maybe even without end.
This is a bad idea.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Why limit ourself to China, or any other country. Terrorist groups, drug cartels, anybody who is intelligent enough (or has money to hire someone who is) can try to take control. Why fly a plane into a building when you can just use "the surrogat army" to do it for you with.
"Power and bandwidth constraints aside, what could go wrong?"
Nothing that I can see. We should be able to create vast numbers of semi-autonomous fighting machines in large automated factories who will take orders from anyone with the right codes with very little requirement for human interaction at all.
And then we could call the central command system that we're going to use to direct them 'SKYNET'.....
with the kind of presidents the USA churns out, is "it could be hacked" *really* the first thing that comes to mind when you ponder what could go wrong? how about this, it might NOT get hacked, and offer even more potential to murder and maim even more people with even less inhibitions, politically as well as on the level of individual soldiers? we had nintendo pilots for a long time. now there'll be nintendo grunts. fucking great. and the princess is STILL in another castle.
but oh noes, the chinese. you are so lost.
It's easier to turn a machine against its original purposes by fooling it, hacking it, or other such methods. It's harder to turn entire swaths of human soldiers.
Twinstiq, game news
That dash in bipedal was really confusing. Made me think of a robot with two pedals. Also why have a robot with legs?? Why not treads or flight? It doesn't need to do everything a person does. It just needs to kill things.
If they continue down this path they will mostly just turn war into a big video game. All the real people will be locked up in a bunker somewhere controlling their avatars and such.
So, then the question becomes this: Why not just settle disputes by actually playing video games. You lose at starcraft, you lose your country. Seems like the natural progression...
yvan eht nioj
I meant "telepresence" not television!
Also the sub-poster makes a good point. While an astronaut in orbit around the MOON (not earth) would be much closer, he would still have to go through a lunar relay at least half the time. In any case, compared with the cost of just running it from a nice beach resort (okay lab) on earth, the 1-1/2 second time delay seems acceptable.
It's helped out by the moons 1/6 gee. So if you drop something, you have six times longer to react!
If they continue down this path they will mostly just turn war into a big video game. All the real people will be locked up in a bunker somewhere controlling their avatars and such. So, then the question becomes this: Why not just settle disputes by actually playing video games. You lose at starcraft, you lose your country. Seems like the natural progression.
As foreshadowed by a ST:TOS episode.
What the frack could possibly go wrong? Let's just pray for a cute Short Circuit type meltdown, and not the other way around.
Can't defy the laws of physics people--this will never work from a remote aspect (think latency).
The Gundam approach is the way to go.
star trek tos had a episode like that that with computers running a VR war with real death chambers that people just went into and they did that as it's was better then useing real weapons.
the name seems a hypocritical outcry. the ultimate advanced research project in defense is to eliminate the need for war entirely. since its inception darpa has done nothing but develop ever more sophisticated tools to perpetuate wars by different means. we dont want surrogates for our defense, we want them so that during the next incursion into the middle east, we dont have to impose a press blackout on returning c130 transports laden with bodybags.
we still want war, just as europe still wanted war at the turn of the century. we want it in lines, drumming along with fresh pressed suits of armor and a proud puritanical face forward.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The Cylons are coming .....
I have seen this movie. Or maybe this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woxgr_GtFnU
The party's over
one EMF and BAM! no communication to any of your bipedal droids.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Troll fail - like Santorum would concede anything to evolution.
We are becoming smart enough to control our natural selection process so that the only selection process that remains is one in which humans to kill each other. It is a catch 22. We're getting smart enough to survive anything the nature can throw at us so we only have ourselves to limit our growth. There are other ways that seem more logical but survival of the best killer has always been the dominate method. We want to think that we've evolved past it but our wars indicate otherwise. As mentioned before, Islam and Judaism share a common origin. Our conflicts are silly. It reminds me of when Nixon escalated the bombing into Cambodia because he didn't want to be the first American president to lose war. Several million people died because one person didn't want a sentence written in a book that one day no one will read.
"You're monthly usage cap has been exceeded. Please dial *611 to speak with a representative. Press 1 if you speak english. 2 por hable espanol."
see subject.
True indeed! War would be cheaper for highly developed nations where the
tech will get cheaper, and manual labour is expensive. That will make war
more expensive for the developing nations, whether they try to use the
tech which, for them, is more expensive than human labour, or their
human soldiers are butchered more efficiently by resilient, easily
replceable, surrogates. Corollary: its now easier for the devloped to
threaten / impose on the developing. And that, I fear, is a *good idea*
for the developed nations.
Of course, we can argue that if its tech that decides the fate of a
battle, why bother with the physical expenses? Fight it in a virtual
arena. I think not. Humanity thinkin at that level woul dnot permit war
of any nature. Where we live, Gulf Watr happens, just as much as Pearl
Harbour & Hiroshima.
This won't end well.
Take one Apple Fanboi Cyborg Surrogate and stick a frickin' laser beam on his head - voila!
Two problems solved - instant Battlefield Cyborg Surrogate and an annoying percentage of the population blown away as cannon fodder.