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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!
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.
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!"
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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'
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.
This is DARPA. They don't even raise the question of "practicality" when they do projects like this, they just ask "can it be done at all?" These are the same people who build flying tanks. Is it practical? Almost certainly no. Is it cool and possibly practical in the future? Maybe, but we won't know until we try.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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