Is it possible for an empire to stupid itself to death?
Unbefuckinglievable. Still, there it is. The touch-screen interface is much nicer and more together looking than the 1980s style version that the real “Iraqi Freedom Fighters” use, safe in their offices in Nevada.
It’d be like shooting thunderbolts out of your fingers. Everything’s a simulation. Nothing is real.
It was never going to be enough that the only people who got to play with these were the military – and this is this the closest thing I’ve seen to the thing I described back when I claimed I wanted to be a bird, although I did say that I want to crap on cars rather than fire rockets.
A home-made UAV that can fire rockets, with proper 1st-personism. Marvelous.
There does seem to be this Agincourt-Effect – where highly disruptive technologies do so because they make people, cheaper.
So you go from knights in armour to longbows to crossbows to guns… each successive one of these facing concerted efforts by the great and good (ie: The Aristocracy and The Pope) to be outlawed so as to preserve the prevailing order… but they’re all rapidly normalised. Now we have predators replacing jet fighters, and games-players replacing pilots and so on and so on. It’s tempting to see suicide bombers within this, but I think that’s a different process entirely.
I seem to recall a while back someone having some sort of blowing-up-the-planet Artificial Intelligence competition… I can’t help these feeling that a large section of humanity is devotedly devoting all of their energy into creating a robotic race of super-fight-bots that will massacre us, just like Terminator 4 etc. It’s not just insane people from the military, it’s kids… backyard tinkerers… all heading towards the same point.
Apparently what they do is pay people to plant beacons outside the houses of AQ suspects (or anyone else the payees happen not to like) and in go the rockets… the beacons looking like this:
Which is fairly low-tech by the looks, and I’m guessing the “intelligence” created thereby is every bit as bad as the intelligence that got us into these wars in the first place. It’s a self-perpetuating, self-serving machine.
That machine at the top isn’t one of the drones btw. It’s a nice photo though, so there it is.
The purple bacteria look like a type of solar organic battery, which while not as efficient as silicon, costs a about a quarter as much.
“So far, the Air Force has spent $450,000 on the project, and expect to power an UAV with the mock bacterial dye within three to five years. But the cells could be used in other projects before that. The military is considering a bacteria-inspired solar “power shade” that would fit over Army tents to keep the electricity flowing inside.”
Here’s some insane person’s fantasy about using robotic bugs to spy on and kill people. The voice-over is flirting with that whole hollywood macho tone – an indication that they’re living in movie-land rather than the real world. Just like Ronald Reagan – who had an alarming habit of telling anecdotes about his life which were actually from movies, and they named a battleship after him. I’m talking about The US Air Force.
1) they’re all little flying robots that look a bit like bugs
2) they all employ first-personism
3) they’re all evil. Either for spying or killing people – apart from the last one maybe. Or any of the other ones.
4) they’re all a bit rubbish.
I mean no offence etc, they’re a lot better than I could do – I can barely tie my shoelaces, but if you compare them to an actual insect… they’re crap. Take a proper hornet for example. It can :
fly : really accurately. Straight through holes the same size that it is without hesitation.
walk : like the clappers, up walls, upside down on the ceiling, all limbs individually sensored and controlled.
3D print using locally sourced materials (their nests are 3d printed)
self-fuel using locally sourced materials.
reproduce itself from locally sourced materials, with sexual selection and variation so evolution happens.
work/live/fight/build communally.
Now that, my friends is quite a feat of engineering. Think of the best flying machine we have today… a stealth bomber? It doesn’t come close to what a simple wasp can achieve.
So I’m guessing that we’re going to learn to make “brains” that learn how to use alien systems faster than we’re going to learn how to build robots that actually manage to do what mad-scientists want them to. I’m guessing that the biotech revolution is going to merge with and eclipse all the others – robotics, nanotech etc… they’re not going to be like they are in sci-fi movies because it’s easier (and a lot more potent) to program/adapt existing creatures than it is to make them from scratch.
But as a piece of amateur film making, it’s actually pretty good. It isn’t just some kid goofing off in front of a web-cam. They care about what they’re doing.
So um… does this make them stars in a community largely comprising 10 year old kids? There are a lot of these things on youtube…
…and instructables, this one having a follow up flame war in which hockyhere exclaims “i hate u!!!!!”, to which Darth Gecko Man replies “I hate you too.”
Which seems fair enough, but they made friends again further down the thread.
Still, enough about that, how about this:
A compilation of Robots with guns, including CG footage of a nimble little stair-climby-wheely thing shooting cardboard cutouts of people (erm… if it’s digital, why not just shoot the actual people? Rather than simulacra of simulacra?) and a CG superimpostion of some 21st American Roman Centurion patrolling some place filled with brown people living in poverty.
I’m not sure if what’s happening here is “not exposing (our) people to danger” or “not exposing (our) people to the face to face reality of killing”. People don’t like it you see. Killing I mean – they deliberately fire over the enemy’s heads. US/UK soldiers need to be specifically trained to kill reflexively (which is why the Brit fire/kill ration was so much higher in the Falklands war) but they don’t train them to deal with the aftermath, which is why when I was going through my crack phase, about 1/4 of the addicts on the streets were ex-military, and apparently more UK soldiers have committed suicide after the war than actually died in the war.
And there are these weird stories that keep bubbling up… where stay-at-home UAV operaters in Nevada have higher incidences of post-traumatic-stress-disorder than those actually on the ground, and programs to give warbots ethics. There was also an incident where someone invented a multi-legged mine-sweeper… every time it stood on a mine, a leg blew off, but it could keep struggling on… until it was down to two legs, whereupon it just lay there kicking until its batteries ran out. The General (or whatever) considering the purchase rejected it on the grounds that it was “inhumane”.
So on the one hand, we’ve got this massive reluctance in people to kill other people when faced with the reality of it, and coming from the other end, this massive attraction to killing in a fantasy context.
I mean have you heard soldiers talking on the TV recently? There’s this whole language that’s developed that’s based around euphemism… separating them inside their own heads from the reality of what’s happening. It’s fucking surreal… and it doesn’t work – well, not forever. Reality wins.
We need to be careful – eg: that Republican Party Debate which included a massive wankfest where they competed to see who could be the most torturey… and Jack Bauer was actually cited at one point. People think this shit is real… which is to say, they know it’s not real, but the underlying patterns still make up their emotional “moral” decision making. And it all goes swimmingly, but then soldiers keep coming back with their minds in pieces.
The whole premise for the wars that we’ve gotten into in the last 10 years has been fictional. It’s all been a game.
Chris Anderson who has a NASA hat, talking about UAVs that he makes.
This is almost exactly what I was on about before, when I said I wanted to be a bird. It’s creeping closer. One tiny step at a time, towards Bethlehem to be born.
I thought it was mildly amusing how he emphasised (and then emphasised again) the safety angles when we all know that what we really want to do is attach a chainsaw to the front and chase sheep or whatever.
These things were born to be weapons. They’ve got “weapon” written all over their faces – there’s no getting away from it. They’d also be really cool as entertainment, and really useful for umpteen dozen other entirely non-violent and legitimate reasons.
Everyone dreams of flying. Flying is part of the human condition, weirdly enough, because God did not in fact, give us wings.
Looks to me like the toy end of things is evolving slightly faster than the weapons end of things… the latest example of which is this
traditionally ugly looking offering from the military etc – it basically being the bottom 1/2 of the also ugly Big Dog which to me looks like some sort of giant motorised flea-creature that’s dying for a piss. Still – at least with this picture we get to see what the muscles are made out of – actuators rather than motors by the looks. I always have thought this was the way to go rather than servos.
All this is sort of semi inspired by the news that “A Georgia professor is writing ‘ethical governor’ for combat ‘bots”, which is wishful thinking if ever I saw it… because it instantly creates an imago-like jigsaw-puzzle-piece-fit sister-document “the rules for engaging military robots, exploiting their ethical no-go areas”.
Suicide Bomber Children in other words.
Robots always were going to be made to fight. First. You can see it in the way the toys we’re making are doing just this… what’s the first thing we do with vacuum-cleaner robots, after they’ve finished tidying up, and we’ve put the cat on them? We get them to fight obviously:
The video for this is down a bit
Vacuum Cleaner Fights in Tallinn (which I love) (It’s my home away from home) (There’s free wifi everywhere)
It’s utterly inevitable.
And at one point I thought it might be quite fun – I mean they look pretty easy to beat don’t they?
Well they did at one point. Now not so much.
Warbots. Machine-Generations. FFS. Are we vacuuming ourselves into a corner here? I’m starting to get a bad feeling about this.
programming these machines to perform complex aerobatics is a formidable challenge – unless of course they teach themselves. This example developed by Stanford computer scientists does just that, learning to fly by watching other RC helicopters in the air. Not only does this artificial intelligence system produce a spectacular flying exhibition, it’s seen as an important demonstration of robotic learning through observation.
As maneuvers are repeated several times, the trajectory of the helicopter inevitably varied slightly with each flight. But the learning algorithms created by Ng’s team were able to discern the ideal trajectory the pilot was seeking. Thus the autonomous helicopter learned to fly the routine better and more consistently than the experts themselves. – gizmodo
Well that would be one straight out of the “Holy Crap” department then – although I’m not entirely sure that I wasn’t just watching helicopter that wasn’t just completely insane and which was incapable of flying like a sensible grown up helicopter.
I think this approach will be how robots learn to move etc though – once the mechanics get past a certain level of complexity.
“From the producers that brought you MYTHBUSTERS comes an explosive new series, WEAPONIZERS (3 x 60 min) premiering on Discovery Channel US, May 11, 2009 at 9pm.
This new program combines creativity, military-like strategy and engineering as two teams of master builders — dubbed “Weaponizers” — turn ordinary vehicles into remote-controlled machines of destruction. With the pace and intensity of a video game, the vehicles are completed with live-ammunition machine guns and other seemingly ordinary objects that are transformed into powerful weapons. Building on the teams’ expertise — hot rod restoration, pyrotechnics, special effects, crash engineering and military weaponry — the opponents harness their ingenuity in a competition face off where the goal is to achieve victory by creating an indestructible vehicle.
In each episode, the teams convert regular rides such as a shuttle bus, an ice cream van and muscle cars into vicious vehicles. Using science, special effects, engineering, metal fabrication and a bit of fantasy, they construct and test their vehicles to ensure that they pack the biggest punch and are fully remote-controlled. Once all testing is complete, each team descends into respective underground control bunkers to command their vehicles for the two-round competition.
In round one, the teams undertake a challenge-based phase where the vehicles race to destroy or defend exploding targets such as medieval castles or Mad Max style fuel depots. Then in round two, the “Weaponizers” are thrown into a Carmageddon Round — the rules are… there are no rules. It’s a gloves off test of what expertise these teams can draw on to achieve victory, which in WEAPONIZERS’ terms means there is only one vehicle left standing!”
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The blurring of the line between toys and weapons continues apace, and I think it’s a public service in some ways – saving the lives of would-be suicide-bombers by teaching them how to make cars remotely controllable and as strong as hell.
It had to happen though – sooner or later there had to be a “no rules” version of robot-wars.
traditionally ugly looking offering from the military etc – it basically being the bottom 1/2 of the also ugly 
