Bad Idea
Never mind those quaint “I, Robot” and “2001″ type AI systems with personality disorders figuring out they’re smarter than us and deciding to take over. These organic matter-eating robots don’t need to be any smarter than a pit bull to get hungry, look around, not find any plants or dead bodies to eat and decide you’ll do …
A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.
Robotic Technology Inc.’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that’s right, “EATR” — “can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable,” reads the company’s Web site.
That “biomass” and “other organically-based energy sources” wouldn’t necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they’d be plentiful in a war zone.
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The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.
Upon the EATR platform, the Pentagon could build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a mobile gunship.
Yeah, a mobile gunship roaming around some sandy, rocky, dusty place like Iraq or Afghanistan looking for something organic to chow down on. Even better, a friendly meat-eating robotic ambulance or transport:
“COME … ON … IN … HUMAN. TAKE … A … LOAD … OFF.”
What’s wrong with solar panels? Those Mars rovers are doing great, and they’re not even Vegan, let alone omnivores.
In press materials, Robotic Technology presents EATR as an essentially benign artificial creature that fills its belly through “foraging,” despite the obvious military purpose.
“Benign foraging” is in the eye of the forager.
Look, it’s only a matter of time before robots figure out we’re (a) stupid and (b) packed with organic goodness. Why give them a head start?
Topics: food, moronocy, robots
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:13 pm Comments (0) on Wednesday, July 15, 2009
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