Northrop scoops DARPA mindreader-helmet threat visor cash American armaments goliath Northrop Grumman announced another huge technology coup this week. The company has won a Pentagon contract to develop a mindreading hat which will allow US soldiers to identify threats with unparalleled range and speed. The military requirement was actually called Cognitive Technology Threat Warning …
Ah, the American obsession with useless gadgets,
How about this, just select better quality troops and train them better?
Won't happen though, mainly because it’s not sufficiently sexy enough to enable the arms corporations to wring big bucks out of defence departments, plus the lo tech option requires some risk taking.
I have to laugh when I hear about heat rays, (frickin) lasers, sniper scopes that can see through walls, body armour, orbital weapons, yet all it takes is a few motivated ex peasants armed with 1940's assault rifles plus a few dead troops to make all the so called developed countries shit.
I'm talking about the politicians here, when their nice little fantasies about being able to wage war at arm’s length with no risk to themselves go down the toilet, they quite rightly crap themselves with fear at being called to account for their incompetence. Why do you think you’re not allowed to protest anymore unless you do it nicely so you don’t disturb the scum that inhabit the Houses of Parliament? It’s not because of any terrorist threat.
> The idea is that the primitive parts of the human brain can spot threats which the conscious mind will miss.
I thought grunts were not allowed to have brains, and that that was all the square-bashing, boot spitting, flag-saluting, bum-numbing, side-splitting stuff was all about. Clearly "the idea" has validity - in med school it is taught as the 3F's (sometimes the 4F's) of stress response. However, the limbic system is not well understood, and while upward progress thru the ranks correlates with the return of frontal brain function (magic!) in the military, the functional status of grunts' brains is not something one should bet money on in a combat zone: shooting civilians perceived as threats is far too common. The same would seem to apply to PC Plod who is given a gun. As usual, cause and effect seem to be somewhat confused.
As some one has already mentioned this can be used( if it ever works ) to prod along the grunts. If you take it to a logical conclusion even training will become redundant, conscript as many healthy gun fodder types as you need for the situation and then you need just a code for each lid and run the relevant program for each grunt. With realtime updating the program will be able to adjust to the situation accordingly, an army of hi-tech killer zombies for us to take over your planet.
"brought to you by DARPA, the famed Pentagon wingnut hothouse"
DARPA and now IARPA are great places where seemingly far-fetched ideas with a high probability of failure can be explored (with considerable and unpredictable knowledge gained along the way). I'm sure we only hear about a tiny fraction of the projects they initiate. The dull-minded only-if-we're-sure-it's-gonna-work crowd probably have considerable difficulty understanding the concept.
It's very funny watching the literal-minded plodders go crazy with assumptions that some wild idea literally represents tomorrow's reality.
I sometimes think they only release information when they want some entertainment - that is, watching the civilian fruitcakes go bananas... er, if you know what I mean.
As one of the developers for said "American armaments goliath", I can't see why they would not like the CT2WS acronym. I can however, report a disturbing trend for renaming projects midstream with all new acronyms. Don't be surprised if some of your suggestions come into actual use.
Says someone currently working on JCRV, formerly C2PC, related to C2CE, somewhat connected to F2CB2 and UTDL, who used to work on JSF CNI, F22 CNI2010, CLIP, JxF, ROBE, and BACN all in C4ISR domain. WTF man?
It's the one with the NG logo on the pocket.
You said it man.
Big tech doesn't cut it when you're dealing with the real world (i.e. the housewife who will cut you to ribbons because "you" were responsible for the death of her brother).
More grunts = More wins. We don't need soldiers with fancy gear. We need people that believe in the "cause". Unfortunately to do that we need to be involved in conflicts soldiers can believe in - and that can't be bought. It has to be voted for...
Hat is going top "see" what your subconscious detected.
Um good. How is this useful? Perhaps with eye tracking it *might* be able to tell that you saw something that your subconscious thought was interesting, and *might* be able to indicate that on the virtual HUD (Assuming of course that you haven't moved your head much in the meantime). So the first question is what does the subconscious of a typical grunt find interesting? Pretty girl walking down the street, random donkey cart wandering down the road, something that happened to move.
Does any of this actually mean that what you are identifying is actually useful (militarily speaking). With an e3xpected typical reaction of "my hat went beep so I shot it" - this can't be pretty.
Look at what happened last time the Pentagon screwed around with target recognition (search for Tank Detection + Neural Networks).
Seems to me that they are desparately trying to find ways of validating their penchant for blasting everything they see into matchwood before sifting through it to see if it was actually what they thought it was.
I can see it now.
"so soldier, why did you engage your weapons on the unarmed UN peacekeepers?"
"Sir, one of them must have moved funny, Sir. I hear a beep and a target presented itself. Sir"
"Good work troop!"
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