Tomas Martin @ 18-04-2008
Paul Raven @ 28-03-2008
Jamais Cascio is a sensitive soul; he doesn’t like seeing beasts of burden being abused and pushed around. Even robotic ones:
“My reaction to seeing this robot kicked paralleled what I would have had if I’d seen a video of a pack mule or a real big dog being kicked like that, and (from anecdotal conversations) I know I’m not the only one with that kind of immediate response. True, it wasn’t nearly as strong a shocked feeling for me as it would have been with a real animal, but it was definitely of the same character. It simply felt wrong.”
This throws an interesting light on the “robot rights” debates that keep surfacing. While I think we can all agree that a non-sentient machine doesn’t require the vote or union-mandated coffee breaks, this sort of psychological reaction to machines with a visual semblance of life may cause problems in early-adopter workplaces. [image by TwoBlueDay]
After all, even battle-hardened US Army colonels have been known to balk at sending machines to their doom.
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Paul Raven @ 22-07-2007
The news out of the Middle East just gets weirder by the day - often with an animal flavour to it, so it seems. Less than a fortnight after the British military had to deny deploying a crack team of attack badgers into Basra, the Iranian government has announced that they have captured a number of squirrels with GPS and other spying kit embedded in their bodies. I’m very skeptical as to how true this story will turn out to be, but it’s still one hell of a headline. [Image by Ogwen]
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Paul Raven @ 28-06-2006
Everybody wants to get on that robot bandwagon, and the military are no exception. They’ve been investing in the development of a robotic pack-animal called the BigDog, which looks kind of like a headless metal dog/horse hybrid. Ugly as it may be, it can apparently tote 120lbs over a variety of terrains.
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Paul Raven @ 01-03-2006
Robots; noisy and power hungry. Sharks? Silent and self-fueling. Just one reason the US military is investigating the potential of using neural implants to control ocean-going sharks and use them as spies.
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It seems to be a week for biological-related stories here on Futurismic. Using skin cells from the nearly extinct Northern White Rhino, scientists can reprogram them back to an embryonic state, from which they can create sperm and eggs with the animal’s genes. An animal can then be created in vitro or through a surrogate mother from the Southern species of White Rhino. There are only 3 or 4 of the Northern variety left in the wild.
