The U.S. Navy has retired the world’s first nuclear-power aircraft carrier after 51 years, and the first unmanned carrier-launched military drone is getting ready to enlist. Awesome technologies – glad we can do that. Sooo… where’s my goddamn spaceship?
Considerably deeper than Gee Whiz Techno-Fetishism or Alarmist Technological Conservatism, Al-Jazeera correspondants and producers are probably providing the most unbiased and uneditorialized WarBot coverage out there.
In many ways, technological utopianism is the heart and soul of the United States; it has driven our hyper-speed development and rise to global prominence. But, is the US rising or declining? Technologically speaking, does America still have “it?”
Reapers and Predators and the like aren’t robots, they’re super-tech R/C planes with some nice autopilot and guns & missiles, right? Right? Well, since the domestic drone market is heating up now as well, it might be a good idea to figure this out.
People loved the Space Shuttle because even though it was just a fancy orbiter in space, and a hitchhiking glider in atmosphere, it looked like a ship. We’ve been at the whole space thing for nearly 60 years, and still we have rockets and capsules, but no spaceships.
We’ve all heard about DARPA’s grand robot challenge, but seems like Boston Dynamics already has this one in the bag. I mean come on, these guys have developed what are effectively artificial autonomic responses in machines – recognize, yo!
Predators and Packbots already function as primitive avatars for pilots and bomb squads, and DARPA’s new Avatar project aims to turn up the resolution. Delineating the consciousness container could get trickier…