Young soldiers—weened on a steady diet of video games—are already controlling drones over Iraq and Afghanistan from the comfort of command-and-control stations 6,000 miles away from actual combat. Therefore, it is too much to think that within a decade’s time the soldiers of tomorrow—weened on a generation of brain-interface gaming technology—might similarly be controlling robots from afar to do our fighting for us?
I don’t believe so. Here’s why. Earlier today, there was a report about a robot in Japan being controlled by the brain activity of a monkey in the United States. Obviously, we can’t have monkeys do our fighting for us; but I have written before the exponential pace of progress in both brain-machine interface technology and robotics. If you put the progress of the two technologies together and “jump the curve,” I don’t see any reason why soldiers in 2015 (when, by the way, the U.S. Army hopes to have one-third of our fighting force consist of robots) won’t be able to control a robot’s action in Iraq for some other location by thought alone. Imagine, for example, if instead of sending a living soldier into a terrorist hideout we could instead send a human-assisted robot to do the job.
Such a scenario is not yet possible, but it soon will.
Related Posts
Jump the Curve by Following Japan’s Battling Bots
Robots & Exponential Evolution: A Second Opinion
Robot’s Friendly-Fire Problem
An Eye—and a Brain—in the Sky
Can You Fall in Love with a Robot?
Planes, Trains, Automobiles … and Robots
Robots Jump the Curve and leap Straight into the Gutter
Jack Uldrich still prefers the more innocent violence of his generation’s Rock’ em, Sock’ em robots to, say, this generation’s Grand Theft Auto. He is also a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. Jack is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
