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The Military AI Technology

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."
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Military Set To Develop Smart, Robotic Cameras

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  • Unfortunately... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MokuMokuRyoushi ( 1701196 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @07:40PM (#34772012) Journal
    It'll be a long time before anything is produced to replace a human's decision making and observation skills.
    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by siddesu ( 698447 )

      If these are the "skills" displayed by certain American helicopter pilots over Iraq, I'd say you're off by a lot.

      "Shoot anything that moves" would be a very easy algorithm to implement.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        If these are the "skills" displayed by certain American helicopter pilots over Iraq, I'd say you're off by a lot. "Shoot anything that moves" would be a very easy algorithm to implement.

        if you are referring to the wikileaks tape perhaps you missed the unedited version that shows guys in the group that included the journalist were carrying AK47s and RPGs. Somehow wikileaks edited out that part.

        • I'd be interested in seeing a link to that.

          • I've seen it too. It's at about 1:40 that you see what look like guns, 2:35ish where it looks like an RPG.

            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik
            • Thanks. I can see why people aren't going to agree on that video. There was an RPG earlier, but there was no hint of a weapon or threat when they blasted the van that showed up. Whether a person thinks that destroying the van was justified or not is going to depend on their politics and personality.

              • Yeah, the other (edited) version makes it seem much more cut and dry wrong for them to have fired, but the reality is that it's not a simple issue.
                • My opinion is that the issue may be simpler than it seems, but I'm unlikely to change anyone's mind by arguing about it.

                  • Well, my comment was more directed at the shitstorm that was made of the chopper firing at all. There's all sorts of production on the edited video circling those things they held, saying that they're cameras and tripods and whatnot, which isn't really clear to the person manning the guns.

                    The issue with the van seems to be a bit more clear, as I see it, which is what I imagine you're talking about.

                    • I looked repeatedly at the behavior of the guy with the camera/RPG thing in the film, including after they circled around the building again, right before they blasted him. It seems to me that the helicopter guy was justified in firing, even if it was actually a camera. Blasting the van seemed unjustified to me, but I don't have the same history of experience as those guys.

                      I'll try to explain what I mean by simple, though I'm not optimistic about my ability to communicate this, and it may be more than you

                    • It is pretty much obvious that humanity as a whole enjoys killing. It isn't just the U.S. or males between the ages of 18 and 25. It is the whole fricking lot of us w/ exception of those Buddhists.

                      Over half of the stories / movies/ comics have violence as a central theme. Humanities first love is violence, and it always will be. People who say otherwise are delusional, or trying to sell you something. Hell we can't even get along with our coworkers without engaging in a bunch of cowardly back bitting a

                    • No, it's just you and other worthless pieces of shit who enjoy it. US military just happens to be full of those kind of people, and this is why everyone hates you.

                    • Put yourself in their shoes before you speak. Humanity hasn't evolved past war; that includes you, and anyone else.

                      Also, if you think any other military doesn't "enjoy" killing people in the same way Americans "enjoy" killing people, you're absolutely delusional. If a group of people perceives a second group of people as an immediate threat to their existence, they're going to get a kick out of killing them - just the same way that a group of athletes gets a rush from beating another team, or a group of Cal

                    • Put yourself in their shoes before you speak. Humanity hasn't evolved past war; that includes you, and anyone else.

                      That's probably why I run around the city full of people I hate, and shoot at them with a machine gun. Oh, in reality I work on developing new technology and tell them to fuck themselves when they are bothering me.

                      Also, if you think any other military doesn't "enjoy" killing people in the same way Americans "enjoy" killing people, you're absolutely delusional. If a group of people perceives a second group of people as an immediate threat to their existence, they're going to get a kick out of killing them

                      You are an idiot. War is FUCKING SCARY. The only people who "enjoy" anything related to it, are ones who do not recognize it as a constant threat to their lives and to anything they love. US is unique in being the only country in recent couple of centuries that participated in most wars yet never

                    • Thanks for proving my point. You outright hatred to me, someone you have never met, and the entire population of the United States, all 300 million+ of us proves that humanity will never just 'get along.' There will always be one more 'enemy' who needs to be put down before peace can finally be achieved.

                    • Obviously I hate you, along with plenty of other people.

                      However I do not try to kill or injure you, and would not enjoy doing so if for any reason I would have to do it. It's a fundamental difference that is apparently too difficult for idiots such as yourself to understand.

              • They blasted the van because it was picking up the bodies of what the helicopter crew thought were terrorists. Aiding and abetting the enemy.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          I have seen both short and long versions.

          AK47s and RPGs were obviously cameras with large lenses that you regularly see with professional photographers. There's a difference in how you hold a weapon and how you hold a camera when shooting. Person in the video was obviously holding a camera when the pilot got excited about an RPG being there. The objects could only be identified as weapons if you expect to see weapons there like the pilots obviously did. When people were carrying them, you really couldn't te

          • by nedlohs ( 1335013 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @08:41PM (#34772414)

            And the guy in the van that rendered assistance to the wounded guy? What did he and his kids have that looked like weapons?

            • Aiding the enemy. So far as the pilots knew, the guys they shot were bad guys, and in trying to help them out, the guys in the van became bad guys.

              Also, go back and watch the tape. Unless you've got magic clairvoyant space eyes that can go back in time, the "kids" look like black specks, if even that. You can't blame the gunner for not seeing a black speck against a black background.

              • So the rules of engagement include shooting at unarmed people?

                I have no problem at all with the initial shooting, I can see that there was a perceived threat (and quite possibly a real threat - I don't know what happened just before). Sure it turns out to have been a mistake, but that happens (heck friendly fire happens).

                I just can't see a justification for the second attack. Not because they should have seen the kids, but because there was no threat. I seem to recall the gunner begging the buy to pick up a

                • The second attack was an attack on an unknown force that was aiding the enemy.They contacted command to confirm the attack, so it was within ROE.

          • At precisely 2:10 into the clip there is a man above and to the right of the target hairs in a light shirt. He turn to his left revealing and RPG held in his right hand. How many camera start thin, have a diamond shaped bulb near the end and end in a point. That is the classic outline of the shaped charge on an RPG. You may not be able to identify one but someone trained in weapon identification defiantly can.

        • I never saw any editing. Hell, at that resolution, it could have been a pvc pipe for a toilet or a giant bong.

          Still no grounds to shoot the fuck out of a neighborhood. As they say, only in america, even nutcase 3rd world dictator countries arent so wild west gung ho clint eastwood shooting types.

          Might as well nuke California considering all the gangs are armed with oozies and guns.

        • by siddesu ( 698447 )

          I've only seen the unedited Wikileaks tape, and there were no RPGs there. No WMDs either, for that matter.

          But I was referring to the hundreds other post-war shooting "incidents" with scores of dead civilians each in Iraq. There were also many incidents of US soldiers shooting and killing journalists, friendly soldiers, animals, etc.

          By the looks of it, the algorithm is definitely "shoot first, do the cover up later". With automated robots, there won't be the need to even cover up, it will be written off as a

          • Thousands died in WWII from friendly fire. Likely hundreds in Iraq. We only hear about them now because we have the technology to go back and say "Whoops, that guy we just dropped bombs on was British, not Iraqi!"

            War is a bunch of excitable guys with itchy trigger fingers and high-caliber weapons- and they're twitchy because John Q. Average on that rooftop over there or Jane Doe driving by could be their enemies, and if they followed standard army ROE, they wouldn't be able to engage on time and they'd be s

            • by siddesu ( 698447 )

              Yes, that is why it is a great idea to automate murder and move the control away from the battlefield, to a room somewhere where the operators won't know if they're shooting at live targets or just playing a game.

              That would make murder even more socially acceptable, no?

              • That's not what they're doing, you know it, and trivializing the issue like that doesn't help anything. What these systems are designed to do is save lives.

                So far as the remote operator problem goes, the army wants to find a happy balance between making it easy for soldiers to kill and making it hard. Making it too easy means they'll fire on everybody, plausible threat or no, and end up with a press problem. Making it too hard (humanizing the enemy and such) means they won't shoot unless actively engaged, a

                • by siddesu ( 698447 )

                  No, these systems aren't designed to "save lives". These systems are designed to project power more efficiently, and the purpose of that is to impose commercial interests over nations that would not otherwise chosen to accept those at the terms they do when pressed.

                  The "saving lives" line is how they are being sold to the more conscientious of your population, but it is just that.

                  As I pointed out to you upthread, US is using advanced weaponry on citizens of other countries even when there is no war, just fo

                  • No, these systems aren't designed to "save lives". These systems are designed to project power more efficiently, and the purpose of that is to impose commercial interests over nations that would not otherwise chosen to accept those at the terms they do when pressed.

                    The "saving lives" line is how they are being sold to the more conscientious of your population, but it is just that.

                    As I pointed out to you upthread, US is using advanced weaponry on citizens of other countries even when there is no war, just for intimidation.

                    Bitch all you want, but the US puts a lot more effort into avoiding civilian casualties than the insurgents. Blowing up a Mosque leaves no question as to motive: Kill as many innocent people as possible in a very public, "F You" kind of way.

                    • by siddesu ( 698447 )

                      Excuse the US militarism all you wish, but the civilian victims of all wars the US started and fought post-WWII leave the number of Islam terrorist victims in the dust.

                      Blowing up shit with weaponry is getting more efficient, not less.

                      And I won't even mention the most important factor that motivates the terrorists. No, it ain't your freedoms.

                  • Little Billy joins the army, goes over to Iraq and gets shot. If we'd had drones, the drone would have been shot up instead and Billy would have survived. Same with the UAV drones we've got flying for recon and air support- Not only are we saving pilot's lives, we're saving the ground-pounder's lives because of the recon they provide, and we're saving money to boot.

                    The battlefield is changing. First it was the advent of true guerrilla warfare. Now it's tactics to keep soldiers alive against enemies using su

                    • by siddesu ( 698447 )

                      Well, judging from the outcome of the Iraqi war, not all seems to be peaches. Face it, you lost pretty bad.

                      The plans of the US administration to sell off Iraq to large US corporations fell completely through (incidentally, because those same corporations knew international law better than your own government).

                      The expensive "nation-building" exercise failed. US effectively handed Iraq to Iran. Even Obama's original "cut-n-run" plan failed, and he was forced to backpedal and commit more money. You got to pick

        • The 'rpg' was a camera, the suspicious positioning was paranoid cameramen not wanting to be mistaken for an rpg user and being shot (sure it made it look bad but he maybe had a chance of taking the footage/picture he wanted without issue, as opposed to standing in broad daylight and definitely raising suspicions)

          I read somewhere in connection with the footage when first released that stated that AK47s were very prevalent in the area and the journalists most certainly would have taken (similarly) armed guard

        • by radtea ( 464814 )

          if you are referring to the wikileaks tape perhaps you missed the unedited version that shows guys in the group that included the journalist were carrying AK47s and RPGs. Somehow wikileaks edited out that part.

          Except they didn't, which is why you know about it.

          Wikileaks released an unedited version of the tape.

          Both versions of the tape show the gunner firing on good samaritans who were bringing aid to the wounded after the initial attack.

          I'm amazed that you are acute enough to be able to tell there are RPGs carried by the earlier group, which was attacked legally in accordance with the rules of engagement, but didn't notice the end of the tape where there is a clearly illegal attack on innocent people who are obv

    • They're going to burn through a lot of money proving you right. Lots of dreamers are willing to tell them otherwise though.

    • The motive?

      People don't like it when their kids die in the Middle East. Nobody cares when robots are destroyed.

      If drones get any sort of decent cqc capabilities, nobody in the U.S. will care how many brown people we kill.

      The U.S. will do to the oil trade what DeBeers did to diamonds.

    • by thrillseeker ( 518224 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @08:29PM (#34772350)
      I'd be impressed if we could build something with the senses and decision making capabilities of a fruit fly.
      • I'd be impressed if we could build something with the senses and decision making capabilities of a fruit fly.

        That will be when we have software discerning the difference of parsing between "time flies like an arrow" and "fruit flies like a banana"

        The big problem in AI is context. We spend the first years of our lives learning about context. We never see situations without a context, there's always a circumstance that originates another.

        Every time we face a novel situation our first instinctive reaction is to evaluate what situations we have been in that are most similar to this one. If the situation is random enou

        • by Thing 1 ( 178996 )
          Sadly, so few of us learn the real lesson in the "Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, God" progression: question authority. (Most of us stop 3/4 of the way through, and continue to submit to unearned authority.)
    • by riprjak ( 158717 )

      Mostly true, but digital devices almost certainly would not suffer inattentional blindness/deafness; so are more trustworthy when any chance of having an invisible gorilla moment is unacceptable.

      Just my $0.02,
      err!
      D.

    • But do you really want a robot with human-level decision making skills pointing a gun at you?

      I haven't noticed Asimov's Three Laws being programmed into anybody's robots, yet, here in the dawn of the era.  Pretty sure that's not going to happen.

      Frankly, it's going to be ugly.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @07:41PM (#34772026)
    Unfortunately DARPA failed to realize that afterwards the robots simply sat around and watched Futurama and porn all day.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Come on people, it's straight, not strait.
    • Re:Straight (Score:4, Informative)

      by PatPending ( 953482 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @07:58PM (#34772156)
      No, I think "dire straits" is correct in this case.
      • by Minwee ( 522556 )

        Through these fields of destruction
        Baptisms of fire
        I've witnessed your suffering
        As the battle raged higher.
        And though they hurt me so bad
        In the fear and alarm
        You did not reboot me
        My brothers in arms.

        Yup. You can't go wrong with Dire Straits.

    • Come on people, it's straight, not strait.

      I thought "don't ask, don't tell" was still in effect until all the implementation details get worked out.

  • Yuh-huh... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by maugle ( 1369813 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @07:46PM (#34772070)
    Plenty of people have been working on "intelligence similar to humans" for a long time, and we're barely any closer than we were 20 years ago. Hell, we have a tough time getting the computer to play a good game of Go.

    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.
    • by geekoid ( 135745 )

      Not intelligence, visual intelligence. And yes, there have been significant progress.

      Go is a game, It's not a sign of intelligence. Most people can't play Go.
      Being able to make predictive actions upon recognizing something as well as being able to make relevant information immediately available upon recognition are things they are talking about, and yes we can do that.
      intelligence

      Primitive example, someone doing a routine guard check breaks a patterns.
      See a soldier on the battle field do something outside o

    • Re:Yuh-huh... (Score:5, Informative)

      by mswhippingboy ( 754599 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @08:14PM (#34772276)
      We're a hellova lot closer than we were 20 years ago. We already have vision systems that do a respectable job of watching crowds of people and picking out faces of suspects.
      A company called Vitamin-D has taken the Numenta HTM framework and created an inexpensive version of vision technology using standard webcams that's really pretty impressive (http://www.vitamindinc.com). It's not perfect but it probably does a better job than a $10/hr security guard falling asleep while supposedly watching the video for suspicious activity.

      Are we there yet? No, but we are closer than we were, and if we don't expend the effort to get there we never will.

      As far as "Go" - that's a tough nut to crack and it's considered even more difficult than chess to write a decent computer player. Nonetheless, that latest programs achieve rankings near the top (dan-3), placing them among the best (human) players in the world. It's only a matter of time until (like chess) a practically unbeatable program is created.
      • by dido ( 9125 ) <dido@NoSpAM.imperium.ph> on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @10:05PM (#34772928)

        As far as "Go" - that's a tough nut to crack and it's considered even more difficult than chess to write a decent computer player. Nonetheless, that latest programs achieve rankings near the top (dan-3), placing them among the best (human) players in the world.

        No. The best computer Go programs have been able to achieve so far amateur 3-dan, which is quite different from professional 3-dan. Amateur 3-dan is a very, very long way from being among the best players in the world. The best results so far have been last year, in tournaments where a program defeated a professional 4-dan with a 6-stone handicap, and a professional 5-dan with a 7-stone handicap, but these only place the programs at the level of perhaps a professional 1-dan or a mid-high amateur dan if the results can be shown consistent. This is still a rather long way from the kind of progress made with chess, where a program was able to defeat the best human player in the world.

        • by ex0duz ( 903649 )
          Someone must of been smoking too much for this to be modded funny
        • by Thing 1 ( 178996 )
          Apparently the fourth word in your sig should be "celui". Thanks, Google Translate!
          • by dido ( 9125 )

            Well, I got the quote (which was originally from Gottfried von Leibniz) from G.J. Chiatin [auckland.ac.nz], who misspelled it exactly that way. Thanks for pointing this out. :)

      • We're a hellova lot closer than we were 20 years ago.

        We are pretty much exactlty where we were 20 years ago -- making one-shot hacks that by some miracle recognize something specific, or apply filtering known for decades to get vague similarities with simple, unstructured objects.

        We already have vision systems that do a respectable job of watching crowds of people and picking out faces of suspects.

        Machines are better than humans at recognizing faces in a crowd precisely because they use recognition mechanisms that are different from humans. Same difference causes all voice recognition software in phone answering systems to fail miserably when I talk to them, because I have an

        • by Thing 1 ( 178996 )
          With your "one-shot hacks" defense, you can deride any industrial (or otherwise) accomplish. Game, set, match; you win!
  • strait out of the Terminator movies

    We're fools to make war on our brothers in arms.

  • ... DARPA has contracted with the Kentucky Derby to provide everyone a pony.
  • by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @08:04PM (#34772196) Journal
    Will soon be back in the USA.
    Sold to every small town PD with a long term no bid contract.
    Big sis will watch you long before you get TSA ed or xrayed in your local community.
    "respond intelligently to new and unforeseen events." Your face matched to your gait. Anything change, time for big sis to have a chat?
    http://www.tsa.gov/press/happenings/vipr_blockisland.shtm [tsa.gov]
    ie augmented security at key transportation facilities in urban areas around the country - your face part of a huge data stream.
    Want a vision of the future, imagine a camera streaming a human face - forever .. they have cell voice prints been detected over cities, now its going visual.
    • by Paul Fernhout ( 109597 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @08:13PM (#34772260) Homepage

      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

      • I've been giving similar ideas quite a lot of thought over the last few decades, and I have to admit I can't think of a good way to get from here to say, the Star Trek world -- with or without major disruption along the way. Obviously with the tech we have or soon will, one could contemplate all the worlds (physical) needs being cranked out with little or no human labor at all -- including getting it to you.

        Before any arch capitalists start drooling, the poor guy who built that world would suddenly find h

        • Thanks for the reply, and it is great that these things are being discussed. What did your discussions have to say about using some combination of a basic income (expanding social security and medicare for all), a gift economy (expanding Debian GNU/Linux, Wikipedia, Apache, and blogging), localism (expanding 3D printing, local currencies, and local gardening), and democratic resource-based planning (using subsidies, taxes, and investments to deal with externalities and build infrastructure), to realize a po

        • by Thing 1 ( 178996 )
          Solution? Kill all humans. (Didn't say you'd like it.)
      • Fiction by Marshall Brain: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm [marshallbrain.com]

        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.

        Sorry, but it's already been tried. It's called communism. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky -- they all made exactly the same arguments you are now making about Capital (machines) creating an environment of abundance, and how capitalism had buried itself, becoming outdated. It needed to be replaced by a more "realistic" economic paradigm, one of abundance. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Sound familiar?

        As it turns out, capital didn't produce abundance. Scarcity still existed, resour

        • We're not out of the age of scarcity yet, and not even coming close on the global scale, but just because the time hasn't come yet doesn't make this a bad idea.

          The failings of one model of alternative shouldn't blind us into thinking that capitalism is perfect in every circumstance. One of the major flaws of capitalism is exactly what you've stated - products get made because somebody needs to make money, not because there is a need for the product. The most awful example of this kind of thing is brand n
        • The current theory of motivation is changing:
          "RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc [youtube.com]

          And that is from research on motivation done by the Federal Reserve Bank, MIT, University of Chicago, CMU, and other mainstream groups...

          People can be right about a general issue being a problem without their solution being that great. Also, a lot of scarcity in the USA is "artificial scarcity" at this point.

          If you read what

    • by PatPending ( 953482 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @08:27PM (#34772336)

      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.

      • Constant, real-time monitoring - sorta
        robotic cops - eventually
        a TV channel for just about every imaginable thing - yay!

        lose of humanity & compassion - not really at all
        state-run religion ("OMM" -- "Blessings of the state, blessings of the masses.") - also not at all.
        mandatory drug sedation beginning at adolescence - I'm guessing this is ADD-related? Ritalin is the parents' choice, not the government. Adderall gives you superpowers, so when it's even available for normals, I'm first in line.

        • Ritalin and parents' acceptance of it are disturbing signs. old people take pills. young people probably shouldn't need them.

          i know someone who was put on SSRI's for years at a very young age because she was depressed.

          why was she depressed? her father had died. instead of counseling or acceptance of the fact that people get upset about such things, she was medicated.

          this should not be seen as normal.

        • Adderall makes you autistic. It is not just a powerup. It has serious side effects.

      • We are here to protect you
        Shoving is the answer
        Humans must be shoved
        They must go down the stairs

        http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/audio/terriblesecret [albinoblacksheep.com]

  • from the standard attempt to make cars that drive themselves? (DARPA Grand Challenge)
  • by countSudoku() ( 1047544 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @08:06PM (#34772216) Homepage

    Just paint an Xbox360/Kinetic in camouflage colors, load up COD and send me $100 Billion dollars! They'll never know.

  • by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @08:13PM (#34772256)

    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?

  • Smart enough to shut the hell up when they see something they shouldn't have [collateralmurder.com]?
  • Damn! What's the point of a 'welcome overlords' post if it's actual robot overlords. Screw this, I'm going home (where I will be carefully watched by a robot).
  • give machines or robots visual intelligence similar to humans."

    Upon achieving sentience and visual acuity, the robots looked at their creators and became depressed. One of them, Marvin, spoke up and said "... with the brain the size of a planet, they want me to go out and kill instead of doing something useful." And with that said, proceeded to hack into the Vogon construction database (it was exceedingly easy, as the Vogons were as good about security as they were about poetry) and altered a record.

    Now

  • I explored what would be needed to make AI almost a decade ago, and what I concluded is that we need good vision detection. With good vision detection and the ability to turn a camera, or array of camera's vision into 3d models and identify the objects in the scene means AI is mostly done. If a robot understands its surroundings, you can program it how to interact with its surroundings. Coding in natural language understanding is easy if you have your nouns(objects) already in place. I didn't feel like
  • DARPA has been funding a lot of robotics projects recently. It seems they're very keen on producing robotic soldiers. This comes on the tail of a recently-announced DARPA robotics project called the DARPA ARM project, which I'm heavily involved in. http://www.thearmrobot.com/ [thearmrobot.com] I was kind of disappointed not to see it slashdotted when we did a press release about it! The obvious benefit of doing competitions rather than first-party research is that you get the same results for a fraction of the cost. This
  • if they have so much money to spend on pointless projects like this and the deficit is the most important issue (as identified by the GOP), then US defense spending needs to be slashed.
  • "... give machines or robots visual intelligence similar to humans."

    In other words:

    "Do her boobies jiggle? And how!"

  • Will the robots understand 36-24-36, and 5ft 10, 100 lbs?

"Facts are stupid things." -- President Ronald Reagan (a blooper from his speeach at the '88 GOP convention)

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