Military Set To Develop Smart, Robotic Cameras 127
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."
Yuh-huh... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
So they will be wanking off to Internet porn (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Fiction and alternatives (Score:5, Interesting)
Fiction by Marshall Brain: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm [marshallbrain.com]
Alternatives by me:
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-392 [wordpress.com]
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-402 [wordpress.com]
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
Re:What starts in the war zones (Score:5, Interesting)
The vision of George Lucas' first film, THX-1138 [imdb.com] (March 1971)--and those of other sci-fi books/movies as well--are steadily becoming reality. Constant, real-time monitoring; robotic cops; a TV channel for just about every imaginable thing; lose of humanity & compassion; state-run religion ("OMM" -- "Blessings of the state, blessings of the masses."); mandatory drug sedation beginning at adolescence; etc.
If you have not seen this film then do so, please.
Sample quotes:
Chrome Robot: Everything will be all right. You are in my hands. I am here to protect you. You have nowhere to go. You have nowhere to go.
{Man opens medicine cabinet in bathroom}
Male voice (medicine cabinet has audio/video I/F): What's wrong?
Man: I need something stronger.
Male voice (medicine cabinet): Take four red capsules. In 10 minutes, take two more. Help is on the way.