I was just catching up on some of my technical reading. There’s a lot of exciting and original work going on at DARPA. There always has been but the stuff coming down the pike now is just off in the realms of Science Fiction, as you can see from these words of the current DARPA Director, Tony Tether:
“Now that is terrific, but that is not the chilling part. We took the joystick away from the monkey at Duke. The light came on. Who knows what the monkey really thought, but it knew what it had to do. But it had no joystick. However, the mechanical arm at MIT moved the joystick just like it did before. It was thought at first that the motor signal was being transmitted to MIT, but it turned out that the probes had tapped into the monkey’s thoughts for moving the joystick. In other words, the monkey thought about moving the joystick, and the joystick at MIT moved. “
Fascinating in and of itself. But it leads to ever wilder things in the future, as he says in a later paragraph:
“Imagine 25 years from now where old guys like me put on a pair of glasses or a helmet and open our eyes. Somewhere there will be a robot that will open its eyes and we will be able to see what the robot sees. We will be able to remotely look down on a cave and think to ourselves, “Let’s go down there and kick some butt.” And the robots will respond, controlled by our thoughts. It’s coming. Imagine a warrior–with the intellect of a human and the immortality of a machine–controlled by our thoughts. “
I’ll go one further. Imagine a whole bunch of these as semi-autonomous robots slaved to master robots “inhabited” by Marines. Let them shift their viewpoint and control moment by moment from one to another of the uninhabited warbots as needed… If you ever played the old PC game, “Hulk” you’ll know he origins of the idea and how it works.
I don’t really think you are going to go into battle with just Remotely Piloted Soldiers, but I can see the idea as an absolutely huge force multiplier for the troops on the spot.
It’s getting really spooky out here near the singularity.
How about that LA-Vegas robot race?
Could we geta link to this story, please?
LA to Vega challenge race is also a DARPA project.
As to a link: the paragraphs I placed here are from their proceedings and are the only reference I have so far. I’ve got a stack of other unread DARPA papers and if I run into more I will post it.
here’s a link
http://www.darpa.mil/body/newsitems/pdf/directorspeechdt2002.pdf
Before this tech gets applied to humanoid robot warriors, it’ll find its way into third- or fourth-generation UAVs, especially fighter-interceptor varieties. Want a fighter jet that can pull more than 9gs? Use a remote-operated thought-controlled jet. Firefox here we come.