March 28, 2005
Robotic Chicken vs. Egg?
In my morning Yahoo! news reading, I came across a really cool story about the Pentagon starting research into “trauma pods”, a new unmanned mobile surgical unit that could eventually perform battlefield surgery on wounded soldiers, before evacuating them from the battle:
The Pentagon is awarding $12 million in grants on Monday to develop an unmanned “trauma pod” designed to use robots to perform full scalpel-and-stitch surgeries on wounded soldiers in battlefield conditions.
The researchers who pitched the Defense Department on the idea have prepared a futuristic “concept video” that seems straight out of a teen fantasy game, showing with full color and sound effects the notion that robots in unmanned vehicles can operate on soldiers under enemy fire and then evacuate them.
My first reaction was, like Keanu Reaves in The Matrix, “Whoa.”
But then I realized something. The other direction the defense department is going is to try to involve robots in the fighting of wars, supplementing or replacing infantry where possible:
Ultimately, the vision is that the grunts themselves become geeks, or perhaps more likely, are transformed into callcentre grunts, sitting in a control room coordinating multiple fighting, scouting and UN peace-keeping (wonder if they’re doing these?) robots.
Billings refers to a US National Academy of Sciences report which defines four classes of robot: Searcher, which does reconnaissance; Donkey, which humps stuff (no, not like that); Wingman, which seems to be some kind of remote-controlled light tank; and Hunter-Killer, a platoon of ten unmanned vehicles which themselves contain up to five small observation vehicles apiece. Hunter-Killer’s ability to strike deep into enemy territory, no matter how dangerous, should allow the US military to dispense entirely with Europeans, except maybe for sweeping up afterwards.
Again, pretty darn cool. Anything that gets more of our soldiers out of harms way, and more of our enemies into harms way, is cool with me.
But I’m struck by an interesting thought with these two developments… If we’re moving to a robotic fighting force, won’t the trauma pods then be made obsolete?
Or are they to help the human soldiers when the robotic ones try to take over?
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As long as we don’t start naming them T-1s, aerial HKs, or name the controlling system Skynet…
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