Friday, March 27, 2009
Monday, February 9, 2009
MERCILESS ROBOTS WILL FIGHT THE WARS OF FUTURE;RESEARCHER
Peter Singer, who has authored books on the military, warned that while using robots for battle saves lives of military personnel, the move has the potential to exacerbate warfare by having heartless machines do the dirty work.
"We are at a point of revolution in war, like the invention of the atomic bomb," Singer said.
"What does it mean to go to war with US soldiers whose hardware is made in China and whose software is made in India?"
Singer predicts that US military units will be half machine, half human by 2015.
The US Army already recruits soldiers using a custom war videogame, and some real-world weapon controls copy designs of controllers for popular videogame consoles.
Attack drones and bomb-handling robots are already common in battle zones.
Robots not only have no compassion or mercy, they insulate living soldiers from horrors that humans might be moved to avoid.
"The United States is ahead in military robots, but in technology there is no such thing as a permanent advantage," Singer said. "You have Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran working on military robots."
There is a "disturbing" cross between robotics and terrorism, according to Singer, who told of a website that lets visitors detonate improvised explosive devices from home computers.
"You don't have to convince robots they are going to get 72 virgins when they die to get them to blow themselves up," Singer said.
Robots also record everything they see with built-in cameras, generating digital video that routinely gets posted online at YouTube in graphic clips that soldiers refer to as "war porn," according to Singer.
"It turns war into entertainment, sometimes set to music," Singer said. "The ability to watch more but experience less."
Robotics designer David Hanson offered hope when it comes to making robots a little more human.
Hanson builds robots that have synthetic flesh faces and read people's expressions in order to copy expressions.
"The goal here is not just to achieve sentience, but empathy," Hanson said.
"As machines are more capable of killing, implanting empathy could be the seeds of hope for our future."
Hanson demonstrated a lifelike robotic bust of late genius Albert Einstein that makes eye contact and mimics people's expressions.
"I smiled at that thing and jumped out of my skin when it smiled back," TED curator Chris Anderson quipped. "It's freaky."
Thursday, February 5, 2009
OG NINTENDO CONSOLE WITH SUPED UP CPU BRAIN
Some man in France stuffed a PC into an old NES console and packed the thing with emulators for NES, SNES, N64 and PS2. The computer has "a 1GHz CPU, 256MB of RAM and 40GB hard drive." The man claims he spent over $1,200 and 50 hours of labor on the unit. It's for sale on eBay France, and is currently at about $920 with 4 days remaining. Included in the auction are all the controllers for the various systems, along with the connectors necessary to hook them up to the PC. Pretty cool, but too rich for my blood. Although I do have a fondness for PC based emulators. They really helped pass the time in college classes, particularly Ocarina of Time. I remember a professor called on me to answer a question once when I was in the water temple and I had to scream at him for disturbing my concentration at such a critical moment. I think he failed me. What a dick.
Two more pictures and a video after the jump.
HELICOPTER WITH AUTOMATIC 12 GUAGE SHOTGUN
The AutoCopter Gunship is the toy I always wanted growing up. It's a helicopter with a freaking Auto Assault-12 Full-Auto Shotgun by Military Police Systems attached.
The AutoCopter uses patented "intelligent neural network-based flight control algorithms" for automated flight control, and "utilizes a system that reduces recoil by 90 percent, thus the helicopter doesn't go into an instant tailspin the second the gun is fired.
Hot dog! I need one in a bad, bad way. This thing is going to jack up my paintball matches several degrees. Yep, probably right up to the first degree. Murder. Because I forgot to replace the shotty with a paintball gun.
Cool video of the thing firing after the take-off.
PAC MAN LIGHT UP LED XMAS TREE
The Pac-Man Christmas Tree is stunning. It's "a fully-animated version of the classic arcade game, rendered across thousands of colored LEDs." Granted "fully-animated" in this case means the characters barely move. Allegedly it's somewhere in downtown Madrid, so if anyone goes to see it, let me know. Just looking at it really makes me understand the true meaning of Christmas. Which is, of course, video games.
A video of Pac-Man doing his best to scarf grimace proportions (and failing) after the chomp.
TV SCREENS IN YOUR TIE...
ETRI has been showing off their flexible little OLED displays lately sewn into a number of different pieces of clothing.
In the future, applications of flexible display will be expanded to our daily life ranging from a tie, a hat, a wallet and other small lifestyle products. According to ETRI, this flexible display can be available at affordable price by using ‘Roll-to-Roll’ production method. It is ultra thin and light and offers outstanding natural color reproduction. It is also claimed to consume less power.
Nice ETRI, but I've had an OLED tie for awhile now. I would download a funny clip to it every day before work and brighten my coworkers' days. It worked well -- until my roommate uploaded a video without my knowing. It turns out you can be fired for sexual harassment by wearing a porn video tie! Can you believe that? What the hell is the matter with this country? Next thing you know they'll tell me that calling your female coworkers "sugar" and playing grab-ass isn't considered a team building exercise.
HUGE TETRIS GAME PLAYED ON DORM BUILDING
Large tetris games have been seen here before, but this one is actually real. The old one was a bunch of Russian students (probably drunk on potato vodka) running around their dorm flipping lights on and off. This one was actually programmed professionally and is being played by a person on a cell phone. It's called the Mikontalo Lights Project and was "created by the students of Tampere University of Technology in Finland to gain global visibility for the university and highlight its rich student culture." Now I'm not totally sure how this is displaying a "rich student culture". I could think of better ways of displaying a rich student culture. Like, oh, I don't know, a chili eating contest.
UPDATE: It turns out the video is so damn shaky because the crazy bastard filming has it attached to his head. There's another video of Space Invaders being played after the jump.
ERAZER ERASES YOUR NAUGHTY FILES FOR GOOD
The Drive eRazer is a stand alone device (so you don't need a functioning computer to use it) capable of erasing all the files on a drive by writing a data pattern over the entire disk. It costs $100 and can clean a 250GB drive in just short of two hours. For an extra $50 you can get one that makes multiple passes on the disk and writes random characters over the whole thing. You know, I'd consider one if I my current girlfriend was any smarter and I was worried about her discovering any of the "private pictures" I have on the computer. Fortunately for me she doesn't know what the hell a computer is. Just yesterday she mistook my laptop for a waffle maker. Luckily I caught her before she poured any batter.
WiebeTech Drive eRazer [ohgizmo]
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