DARPA Researches Avatar Surrogates 159
kgeiger writes "Feeling blue? DARPA is funding a program to investigate the feasibility of battlefield cyborg-surrogates: 'In its 2012 budget, DARPA has decided to pour US $7 million into the 'Avatar Project,' whose goal is the following: "develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier's surrogate."' Power and bandwidth constraints aside, what could go wrong? Chinese hackers swooping in and commandeering one's army?"
Jaming and lag (Score:2, Interesting)
1. any kind of lag or areas with a poor signal may not work to well even more so if the link need to go over a few Satellites.
2. You don't need to hack them just jam them and they can be come useless
Not just WAR but also SPACE (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a submission I sent a few days ago about humanoid television-robots making the first handshake in space (on the ISS).
wisebabo writes
"As long as we are still in debt to the Chinese and can't afford an ambitious space program, we should be developing THESE (humanoid telerobots). Just get the astronaut NEAR the Moon or Mars (or someday Titan!) and operate these without that stupid speed-of-light time delay. A huge proportion of the weight and complexity of going to these places is that last 100 miles so while times are lean this is the way to go.
Maybe James Cameron can be persuaded to do a pre-quel of Avatar, unfortunately I don't think he'll find a planet full of sexy tele-robots!"
Link to Original Source
What can go wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that I am advocating soldiers dying per se, but if a cause is not worth dying for, then why is it worth going to war for in the first place? If one is prepared to kill their fellow man for whatever cause they might believe in, however true, and however noble, and however right, but they themselves are not prepared to die in the name of that same cause, then their so-called virtuous beliefs are nothing but hollow claims.
Nothing of any real worth or value has ever been achieved without making some sacrifice... and it is the virtue of the people who *have* made such sacrifices that gives us that much more a profound appreciation for the victory that was gained by it.
Take that away, and war becomes just a pointless exercise in killing... without purpose, and maybe even without end.
This is a bad idea.