Fingertip: The US Air Force unveiled insect-sized spies 'as tiny as bumblebees' that could not be detected and would be able to fly into buildings
Washington Post: Military pushes for emergency robots as skeptics worry about lethal uses
It’s 6-foot-2, with laser eyes and vise-grip hands. It can walk over a mess of jagged cinder blocks, cut a hole in a wall, even drive a car. And soon, Leo, Lockheed Martin’s humanoid robot, will move from the development lab to a boot camp for robots, where a platoon’s worth of the semiautonomous mechanical species will be tested to see if they can be all they can be.
Next month, the Pentagon is hosting a $3.5 million, international competition that will pit robot against robot in an obstacle course designed to test their physical prowess, agility, and even their awareness and cognition.
Galvanized by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power disaster in 2011, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — the Pentagon’s band of mad scientists that have developed the “artificial spleen,” bullets that can change course midair and the Internet — has invested nearly $100 million into developing robots that could head into disaster zones off limits to humans.
WNU Editor: Those who are concerned on where all of this is heading are too late .... the genie is already out of the bottle.
3 comments:
Robots and the technology never concern me.
Their controllers do however.
I listened to someone answer the question "is there much future for technology given all we have today?". He gave a dissertation on the reward asked for by the inventor of the game of Chess. You know one grain of rice doubled on each square and so forth. By the time they would have reached the mid point, the 32nd square, the rice needed for that square would have been the country's entire yearly rice production. By the 64th it would have been a pile as high as Mt Everest.
Since the early 50s industry has been doubling down its investment in technology every 18 months and at this point we are at the 32nd square so to speak.
There is much, much more to come and sci-fi, no matter how wild it may seem at times, only provides the high level functional specifications for that development.
You're right Bob, but at least for the moment this stuff uses something in the electro-magnetic spectrum for propulsion, sensors, and communication. All of that can be counter measured, but when they get away from using em, then we've really got a problem.
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