perfidy

The society that basically invented the giant fighting robot for amusement is now leading the R&D effort to combat them for real. Should they ever come. Which they will.

BBC reports that Toyota is perfecting wearable robotic vehicles. The systems move about on wheels or legs and can operate over different terrain with astonishing agility. Well, for 7' exoskeletons. No word yet on how the electromagnetic weaponry is coming along.

And besides the technology's immediate applications in defending humanity from the mechanized menace, we also get yet another example of life:

Imitating art:

I am put in mind of Alan Rickman looking bemusedly at a dead comrade in a Santa outfit, reading Bruce Willis' note in that weird stentorian Generic European voice of his: "Now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho."

Why?

Because of this article: "Army To Deploy Robots That Shoot." The headline alone should be enough to strike dread terror into the hearts of all good (read:"evil") Perfidians, but the real kick in the all-too-human nuts is the article's blithe assertion that the robots in question, Foster Miller's "Talon" machines, "also can be mounted with a rocket launcher." Oh, very nice. Why not arm them with meatsaws and pain rays too, network them all, and call it Skynet just for shits and giggles?

Moreover, CNet clearly lacks a keen sense of karmic retribution, because the header chosen for the article reads "Next year, the U.S. Army will give robots machine guns, although humans will firmly be in control of them."

The fools! Don't they know the first rule of Robo-Semantic Eschatologoly? To wit: "Any assurances that a given robot is in the control of humans will sooner or later be tragically invalidated by the advent of a superintelligent evil robot made so by one of the following: freak lightning strike; sponaneous software upgrade; sunspots; or co-option by secret robotic overlords."

Just like you never say "so far, so good" in some situations, and absolutely never say "naw, she won't get pregnant" in others, all humans must live their lives by this code or suffer the consequences: never say that the humans are in charge.

...this would be big news. But today, in light of the horrifying developments in the Robot War Against Nature we at the Ministry say ho-hum. A teacup-sized flying spy robot. Whoopeedoo. Wake us when they build a Veritech.

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse than bionic rat brains and disembodied monkey waldos, it does. The benighted fools at the University of West England have built a robot that recharges itself by eating.

Scientists at the University of the West of England have designed a potentially autonomous robot which feeds on flies attracted by human excrement and uses them to generate electricity, the New Scientist reports.

EcoBot II is reckoned to be a real step towards "release and forget" autonomous robots - albeit it a small one. At present, EcoBot II has to be fed bluebottles manually by its creators and can generate enough juice to travel at about 10 centimetres an hour.

The device uses the chitin in the fly's exoskeleton for fuel. The six-legged snacks are digested by bacteria in eight "microbial fuel cells" (anaerobic chambers filled with raw sewage slurry). The bacteria produce enzymes which break down the fly chitin, releasing sugars which the bacteria then absorb and metabolise. This latter process produces electrons which EcoBot II captures to generate electricity.

Oh, fabulous. Way to break the tether, gentlemen! The yoke of external power is the single most potent weapon in humankind's fight against the encroaching robot menace. As long as they are resigned to periodically recharge themselves in some way, they can be fought and beaten. But what now? Imagine a titanium-framed wheeled machine (large or small) equipped with 'nonlethal' "pain ray" technology that can roam indefinitely, sustaining itself on biomass as it rounds up humans to labor in the tungsten mines. "Scientists"-- or should I say, species-traitors-- like this are only hurting the cause of humanity.

If we're lucky-- if we're lucky-- perhaps the robots will condescend to program themselves with taste, preserving our human traditions of "palatable food" and "good cooking" so as to make the coming Age of Machines less utterly miserable.

Minister GeekLethal has notified me of a deeply disturbing new twist in humankind's relentless march to self-enslavement: monkey-controlled robot arms.

US scientists have taught a monkey to operate a robotic arm to feed itself using only the power of its thoughts.

The experiment was revealed Tuesday at a meeting of neuroscientists in San Diego, The Guardian reports, and involves interception of signals from the brain by electrode probes. The signals are interpreted through an algorithm and transmitted to a robotic arm. The robotic arm consists of a mobile shoulder, elbow and gripping device.

...snip...>

Four years ago a team from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, used electrode brain implants to link a monkey to the internet to allow it to move a lever 600 miles away in Massachusetts.

In the last several weeks we at the Ministry have collected a number of alarming stories. To name a few, we have seen: robotic house servants to do our chores and prepare us for a life of slavish lassitude; disembodied rat neurons flying jet planes; and the advent of 'nonlethal' "pain ray" technology ostensibly for crowd control but doubtless destined for infamy as our robot overlords' weapon of choice against uprising, free-thinking, and food riots. Pain rays aren't much good against robots, are they?

(Has anyone contemplated the horror that will befall mankind when the robots take over? I mean, really thought about it? I'm a bit of a gourmand and am looking forward tonight to dining with my wife on a nice piece of Alsatian cheese, a Cotes du Rhone, and a loaf of pain Levain. Do you think the robots will give two shits for how or what we eat? Soylent Green for some, and nutritous Vitamin Gruel for all! No more aged Angus steaks. No more new potatoes steamed and served with butter and thyme. No more artisan cheese. No more slatey, herbal Australian Sav Blancs. No more pizza. The horror!)

But back to the monkeys. We at the Ministry take our position as quislings very seriously, and when the robots come we intend to do all we can to extend the Ministry's dominance and by implication see to the well-being of mankind-- something the robots will surely neglect. (We expect all to remember this kindness when the dark day comes, and to not hinder the Ministry in the unfortunate tasks set before us.) Unfortunately some things are beyond the pale, and remote-controlled mechanical monkey strangling arms are it. I for one do not welcome our screeching, feces-flinging, publicly autoerotic, bionically enhanced fleabag overlords and hereby put them on notice: KOKO BAD MONKEY. BAD PAIN. SHINY ARM BAD. MAKE KOKO PAIN. Got that, monkeyboy?

I hope I have made myself clear to simian and hominid alike. That is all.

Somewhere in Florida, 25,000 disembodied rat neurons are thinking about flying an F-22.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are living in the future.

Until now, the unblinking perfidious eye has remained focused on the threat of armed, military robots. But now it turns to a new threat, the insidious and deceptively helpful commercial robots. A new report projects that the numbers of household robots will surge sevenfold in the next three years. We will be seven times closer to our doom as these robots invade our homes and lull us into complacency by performing such "useful" tasks as washing windows, cleaning pools and mowing lawns. Aside from the obvious danger - that we will be weakened as a species by losing essential skills and independence of thought - there is nothing that will stand in the way of a robot with cutting blades rotating at thousands of rpm once it decides to stop mowing lawns. And the report claims that lawn mowing robots will be a majority of all household robots! The traitors to humanity designing these instruments of autonomous destruction must be stopped, quickly and violently.

By the end of the decade, the study said, robots will "not only clean our floors, mow our lawns and guard our homes but also assist old and handicapped people with sophisticated interactive equipment, carry out surgery, inspect pipes and sites that are hazardous to people, fight fire and bombs."

These are the capabilities that will enable their takeover. "Entertainment" robots like the Aibo will be the eyes of the robot underground, recording our movements and cataloguing our weaknesses. Then, the lawn mowing and vaccuuming robots will kill the weak and the slow while home security and cowmilking robots hunt the rest of us. Those who fight back will fall victim to the huge array of giant fighting robots that we have described on these pages. It's not to late to stop armageddon. But it soon will be.

I guarantee you when the giant space robots are our masters, the will use this new super-keen future-is-now nonlethal pain ray technology to keep us from escaping their tungsten mines.

Why, oh why do our military men insist on making it easier for our enemies, the robots?

For ten bucks and the resources of the greatest technologists on the planet, you too can have a robot that walks on water. It's almost becoming pointless to post these discoveries as sometime next week, probably on Tuesday, they'll invent armor plated flying robots armed with particle beams that have the intelligence of five Einsteins and can raise the dead. Only they won't, they'll just kill. Or maybe they'll kill us, then bring us back just so they can kill us more.

A group of British scientists have added themselves to Perfidy's ever growing list of traitors to the human race. They are developing a robot capable of devouring flies to support its inhuman activities. Granted, flies are easy to kill and devour; but given the accelerating rate of technlogical change, how long will it be before vampiric robots are using super sensitive chemical detectors to find and consume their creators? The end is nigh.

Loyal reader #00012, Guitarpicker, alerts us to recent developments in lethal autonomous robots. USA Today is reporting that the Air Force is testing several new robotic vehicles intended, according to Air Force claims, to "detect the enemy first, will receive any of the initial hostile acts," Meana said. "If you shoot the robot we don't care. We know you're there, you're hostile, and we can keep our forces in reserve to move tactically against the enemy. The robots will save our troops' lives." Staff Sergeant Miguel Jimenez, displaying a stunning lack of concern of the future survival of his own species, said Tuesday, "If somebody wants to spend the money and send something like that out there instead of my life, I'm all about that."

The Air Force is testing two different robots for perimeter security. The first and more expensive is the Mobile Detection and Response System, or MDARS. Looking curiously similar to "Number Five" from the movie "Short Circuit," this robot can be equipped with automatic weapons and pepper spray. It will use radar, TV and infrared to detect and destroy its human prey.

But that's not all. Like Voltron, MDARS can also split into several smaller robots. Okay, only sort of. Here is a snap of MDARS launching Matilda, a mini robot designed to allow inspection under vehicles and into areas too small for the jeep sized MDARS.

Our days as the dominant lifeform on this planet are numbered, as this model will go into production next year. As always, I would like to be the first to welcome our new robotic overlords.

Other cool links:

Here is another, more detailed, story on the robot from the National Defense Magazine.

Globalsecurity.org has pages for MDARS and a related project, REDCAR.

And of course, you absolutely must check this out.

Popular Science has a fascinating bit up describing some of the technological goodies the DoD is preparing in its secret labs, so that we might smite our enemies with ever greater lethality, accuracy and "Damn, wtf was that?"

Among said goodies are rods from the gods, rocket propelled torpedos, lasers, and million rpm machine guns. Sweet. In the comments to a recent post, GeekLethal made the observation that, "I think it's great that as mankind reaches for the heavens, he is never so bold as to entirely disregard looking cool." The same applies to guns.

An egghead larva at CWRU has potentially made many sports fans very, very happy indeed.

Adam Hunnell, a first-year student in Case's Physics Entrepreneurship Program has conceived the Keg Wrap, a portable method for keeping beer kegs cold indefinitely.

He has received a $20,000 grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) to build a prototype.

Hunnell's idea is to design a wrap, made of nylon or a similar material, using thermoelectrics. The wrap will be cold enough to keep a keg at between 32 and 35 degrees Fahrenheit. It can be powered by a conventional electrical outlet or an automobile's cigarette lighter.

Now that's money well spent.

Traitorous eggheads at the New York university have succeeded in creating tiny robots made of DNA, and only 10 nanometers long. (10 nanometers is, in human terms, really, really goddamn small.) These robots are so small, we probably couldn't even kill them. And to me, that is a major defect in their design. At least we'd have a chance against the giant fighting robots...

Now the robots will control our music!

Two readers have now emailed me this article, about the impending launch of an all-digital electric guitar by the venerable Gibson company, father of the electric guitar (thanks, mapgirl and NDR!).

As Gibson Guitar Corp. launches a new digital model, company CEO Henry Juszkiewicz can close his eyes and almost hear the music.

"The defining moment will be when a certain lick in a popular song is out there, and it can't be done with anything else but a digital guitar," Juszkiewicz says. "It only takes one example to really inspire people."

That, Juszkiewicz hopes, will usher in the age of the digital guitar -- much the same way as the Beatles and Rolling Stones inspired a generation of young people to pick up a standard electric guitar in the 1960s.

"It opens a whole new palette of possibilities," Juszkiewicz says. "It's a little bit like hearing stereo as opposed to mono."

....

The advantages of the digital guitar come down to sound and control. For 70 years, the electric guitar pickup has translated string vibrations into an electrical signal fed to an amplifier. The player can control the tone and volume, but output is limited to a mono or stereo signal. The signal itself is noisy by today's standards, and stray frequencies often cause an annoying hum.

"Some of the guitar pickups popular today go back to the 1920s," Juszkiewicz said. "We have not changed a lot in terms of the instrument."

NDR argues that now is "time for revolt" before the electronic guitar does for the bell-bottom-flapping-stack-of-Marshall-tens power chord what the CD did for high fidelity. I'm kinda with him on that, but I find to my surprise that I can't get too worked up.

Here's why. As with compact discs versus vinyl, there is an ineffable warmth to the sound of analog that digital simply cannot match. Listening to Neil Young's "Rust Never Sleeps" on LP is a fundamentally different experience from listening to it on CD, and don't even get me started about the gritty trebles and woolly bass tones of some early jazz CD transfers. The same debate has already played out among the musicians of the world as the flatter-sounding yet more durable transistor amplifiers have become more common than the rich and gorgeous yet tempermental vacuum-tube varieties. And yet tube amps retain a dedicated (even fanatical) following, and most guitarists play one of a few models, most of which are decades old.

Myself, I don't care. There's a sound for all seasons, and digital guitar will merely open new frontiers. Much of what Gibson's CEO touts as shocking new innovation already exists in the from of guitar synthesizers, which have become increasingly refined and useful over the last decade or so. Moreover, the guitar synth has already found its niche without taking the place of the proverbial Sound Of Les Paul into Marshall Head. Vernon Reid, Elliott Sharp, and a fleet of others have made whole careers out of wrangling their guitars like plectrum-struck keyboards.

At this point I should offer some full disclosure. While on the bass guitar front I am a dedicated purist for four strings (5- and 6- stringers sound thin and grindy), for twelve years I have been the proud owner of a Fender Ultimate Stratocaster featuring new-generation Fender Lace pickups that are as unlike the traditional wire-wound magnet versions as a Mac running OSX is from a Dell running Win98. They sound awesome, bringing that classic bell-clear Strat sound but more so, and with greater sustain since the magnets are much weaker than normal and create less drag on a vibrating string. I'm a dedicated user of effects (mostly cheap) and signal transformers, but only when they are called for. If I had money to burn, I'd buy myself a nice big tube-driven Mesa/Boogie amp with a Line6 Pod preamp and a whole flotilla of rack effects. I would rip out the rhythm part to "Janie's Cryin'" and people five hundred miles away would cower at the sheer sonic power of my awesome riffage.

But if I had money to burn, I'd also buy one of the new Gibsons in a heartbeat. Back when I played every day, I got pretty good at playing two parts at once, palm-muting the lower strings to alter the tone in the lower register at the same time. The new Gibson digital allows you to customize the tone of each string independently, which would let me take that technique to the next level. Freaking sweet!

Think of it this way. The Hammond-B3, the Fender Rhodes, and countless generations of increasingly sophisticated synthesizers have failed to put Steinway and Bosendorfer out of business. To the contrary, Yamaha now offers some models of piano that integrate a digital preamp, processor, and hard drive with the finest in traditional piano construction and tonal shaping. The very best of these are magnificent. Yet most people when buying Yamaha still go for the baby grand, spinet, or upright devoid of the bells and whistles. I think the same will go for guitars. As long as Mexico keeps turning out the pinewood Fender Stratocasters for $300 a pop, and as long as tube amps can be gotten used for $150, Gibson hasn't immanentized the eschaton for heroic rockin' guitars. They've merely ushered in a new era.

Let me be the first to welcome our new six-stringed overlords.

[wik] A side note to NDR: just imagine a world where Joy Division had to record "Love Will Tear Us Apart" or "She's Lost Control" without the benefit of synths. I think in twenty or so years we'll be saying the same thing about the Gibson digital guitar.

No, really. Johno's post didn't include a link to the story, so there it is.

The University of Nebraska is working on perfecting the most devious and insidious use for robots yet. More invasive yet coddling than the robotic refrigerator, more inconvenient than the Sirius Cybernetics Nutri-Matic, and clearly a harbinger of a coming world where humans are nothing more than meatsacks to be shunted from place to place according to the whim of some malevolent Cray with a Playstation mind.

Reports already suggest our children are more tolerant of authority than their elders, yet mistrustful of politicians and actual individual figures thereof. What better surrogate than the electronic partners they have been weaned on? And what better way to take control than to automate the very sources of inconvenience, delay, and implacable authority, objects that already inspire feelings of helplessness, resignation, and inevitability?

What is this new menace?

What form have they taken?

Why should you arm your automobile with an aluminium bat, a reenforced bumper, and a law-enforcement brakes and steering package?

That's right. Those orange barrels are moving on their own. Weep for the children of tomorrow, for their future is as bleak as an Ohio winter.

This is entirely too cool.

Despite my well-known propensity to comment on rap lyrics, this story is not about a robot learning to rhyme. Rather, it is the next stage in the eventual enslavement of mankind.

Those treacherous quislings at the Boeing Corporation have designed a flying robot capable of dropping GPS-guided bombs.

The first bomb was a non-explosive test munition, but it landed inches from its target, demonstrating the lethal capacity of this new robot. Displaying a frightening lack of regard for the future of a free humanity, Boeing Chief Operator Rob Horton said, "It's absolutely a huge step forward for us. It shows the capability of an unmanned airplane to carry weapons."

The test mission was conducted under human supervision, but the robot handled all the details. The X-45 is almost completely autonomous, flying and attacking without need for human control. A person is still in the command and control loop - the robot must receive authorization before delivering its munitions. Of course, it is only a simple step to remove that person.

Horton, who was sitting 80 miles from the target, authorized the drone to drop the bomb, which was released from 35,000 feet as the plane flew at 442 mph.

The military sees such aircraft taking part in its most dangerous missions, such as bombing enemy radar and surface-to-air missile batteries, in order to clear the path for human pilots.

The Y-shaped, tailless plane has a 34-foot wingspan and weighs 8,000 pounds empty. It is the first drone designed specifically to carry weapons into combat.

Other robotic planes, including the Predator spy drone currently being used in Afghanistan, have been modified to carry weapons. Boeing hopes to build hundreds of the X-45 planes, which would cost $10 million to $15 million each.

Of course they would.

[wik] here are some more UCAV links.
 

We here at the Ministry of Minor Perfidy are known to have a more-than-casual interest in giant fighting robots, preferably of the space variety. There are many reasons for this-- we are geeks, we like things that fight, we all remember Robotech fondly. But ultimately, we are fascinated by the prospect of giant fighting robots because of all the inventions of humankind, from the wheel down to the George Foreman Grill, the Pocket Pussy, and online gambling, giant fighting robots are the one system bound to fail more catastrophically and wreak more horror than any other in history.

And yet the brainiacs persist. Wired has news that iRobot, a company founded by MIT graduates, expects the US Army to field battle robots within ten years or so. Does anybody else wonder whether MIT has become a slave to its own inventions, that in some gigantic sub-basement in East Cambridge, deep underneath the Great Breast of Knowledge, lies a giant array of Cray supercomputers, sentient and malevolent, bent on its own cunningly subtle plans for world domination? Is it just me? Yes? Well.

The military is already using iRobot employeesproducts in the Middle East to conduct remote searches inside caves. What does the future hold?

Some of the robots that are being developed may also be used to shoot at human targets, iRobot suggested. But the company said SUGVs will provide advanced reconnaissance first. The company does not want to be seen as putting human soldiers out of business.

Robot vision systems have serious limitations, and the risk that a robot might kill an innocent civilian is too great, said iRobot CEO Colin Angle.

But Angle did not rule out the eventual use of weapons on robots, and noted that Raytheon is developing a targeting system for the SUGV.

"We're not using these robots to hand out flowers," Angle said.

Fantastic. Give the robots a network and guns. Shit, might as well call it SkyNet and face the inevitable. Despite the happy name and benevolence of "iRobot," which calls to mind a future filled with flying cars, robotic servants, and galactic empire, these men are the doom of the planet. We must act now and swiftly to ensure that these fighting robots never gain the advantage. I for one do not want to live out my days as a lubrication attendant for some despotic robot overlord.

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