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DARPA Uses Preteen Gamers To Beta Test Tomorrow's Military Software
Daniel_Stuckey writes with a story about an interesting (or, you might think, creepy) institution at the University of Washington's Seattle campus. It's the Center for Game Science, a research lab that makes educational video games for children, and that received the bulk of its funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the wing of the U.S. Department of Defense that supports research into experimental military technology. Why is DARPA the original primary funder of the CGS? According to written and recorded statements from current and former DARPA program managers, as well as other government documents, the DARPA-funded educational video games developed at the CGS have a purpose beyond the pretense of teaching elementary school children STEM skills.
I knew it was real.
Watch the skies for the Bugs.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Looks like the military picked up a copy of Ender's Game and assumed it was some kind of manual for how they should do things. Let's just hope they never find a copy of Neuromancer.
The average boot can't even tie his own shoelaces, much less add two plus two.
It looks like someone at DARPA just couldn't turn down the chance to be the next Centauri.
The only way this could've been closer is if the game they were developing was Starcraft, but they missed that window by about 16 years.
boots don't have hands or fine motor skills.
Because the pentagon/darpa are completely ran by pedophiles
global thermonuclear war
One of Robin's more somber serious ones.
Are we just trying to make reference to Robin Williams all week?
This is just yet another sign that the military saw the movie 'Toys' ... as if the whole drone program wasn't an obvious enough sign:
http://kotaku.com/5891256/wtpt...
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
NSF has been shifting its funding away from CS research, and DARPA has been moving a bigger proportion of its funding from basic research to near-term applied research. As a result, there are more and more strings attached to research-grant money. Some kind of "dual-use" thing where you're doing the research you want to do, which DARPA also happens to be able to repurpose for its own uses, is if anything the best case. It's not that uncommon to just straight be working on whatever DARPA wants done.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
if you're going to increasingly recruit military from an under-class who have been left behind by the education system (and so have few other career options but to act as the enforcers of the state) you need to make sure the tech is comfortably within their technical grasp.
This isn't some sort of military indoctrination, or child-warrior program.
They're evaluating adaptive learning software, doing UI/UX evaluations, and so on. Yes, DARPA's goals focus on future military application, but despite the comments above, they're not making this some sort of Ender's game scenario with 8 year old kids flying drones. These kids are playing games that are trying to teach them STEM skills, and doing so with a sort of machine-learning backing. So the kids are learning, they get to use cutting-edge software backed by a hefty financial contribution, and the end result could be a new way to provide computer-aided teaching.
So there's no need to cry, "Think of the children!" - they're doing fine.
It's also good to note that these concepts are not restricted to military applications. Take a quick look over DARPA's history - much less the history of military science in general - and you'll see a bunch of amazing creations that we use in our day to day lives. Like the internet, GPS or the continued funding and support for self-driving cars and autonomous robotics.
One caveat: I'm not saying that military funding, DARPA or otherwise, shouldn't be transparent and examined, but in this case, there's no problem other than people who can't demux 'military' with 'automatically bad'.
Gouge out the Giant's eyes...
You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada
Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute!
A common reference tool from which to examine the neural activity associated with planning and sequencing by means of radio-based BCI...
Nice to see you guys are still experimenting on US kids...
...because this is basically just the movie Toys (also starring Joan Cusack and LL Cool J. Yeah, now I've got your interest.) where military bigwigs hijack a toy company to make games where real kids pilot drone copters and tanks that really blow stuff up. The movie wasn't even really science fiction, but now it's real science sans the fiction.
where children fight wars for adults like it was some kind of video game..... I think it was called Star Wars - Episode I.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
Starship Troopers (The book - not that shitty movie) is also on the Navy's (which the Marines are a part.) reading list.
Let's see what Gary Larson has to say about this.
Wasn't this the major plot line of the movie Toys?
A while back DARPA had the Adaptive Vehicle Make(AVM) project which was to combat the exponentially growing cost of military hardware development by implementing an opensource hardware hackerspace/fablab style model(with more buzzwords than I desire to recall).
Part of this project was MENTOR(another huge acronym), which was going to set up schools with their own makerspaces and have students "compete against one another in the development of cyber-electro-mechanical systems of moderate complexity such as go carts, mobile robots, small unmanned aircraft, etc."
However, the official goal of the program really was to "to teach the principles of model-based design and distributed foundry-style manufacturing to build a next-generation cadre of manufacturing innovators."
Which is a laudable goal and probably does more to defend our country than designing a new tank or fighter jet.
And honestly, how awesome would it be to bring back shop class and modernize it?
Unfortunately, it was never moved beyond a pilot program when AVM got cancelled for it being redundant with Obama's manufacturing initiative.
throw kids in front of some machines and see if they can run the war...
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The first part of the linked article basically seems to imply that the military is developing games that covertly brainwash kids into soldiers. DARPA has no reason to fund anything like that. We're Americans, our culture does that for free!
Two thirds of the way through, it dispenses with that unstated pretext and makes itself about the military and Federal government's overreach into American educational institutions, which is an excellent point that I can get behind. I wish the author had dispensed with the conspiracy theory undertones and gotten to the point from the get-go.
DARPA wants a better way to train soldiers, so it went to this CGS place to develop advanced tutoring algorithms. Since these algorithms have a wide variety of use-cases and CGS is more used to working with kids than soldiers, they developed them around teaching STEM skills to kids. That's dubious in a "this should be funded by a different branch of the government" kind of way, but it's not Ender's Game, it's not the SPARTAN program, and it's not Polybius. I'm not saying our government would never, ever do anything like that, but that's not what's happening here.
Wow... that's so close to something else at first I thought the name was a joke... given the context where "Sieg Heil" was popularly used...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEPYr6Pxbfg
"The US Army is looking to design things based on thousands of soldiers playing video games and lego-blocking up designs. When they figure out what works best in the game, they 3d print the thing. http://www.dau.mil/publication...