Thursday, January 7, 2010
Will A Louisiana University Make Human Soldiers Obsolete
Tip of the the Hat to the Dead Pelican on this.
First the article
By the end of this week hundreds of citizen soldiers from Acadiana will join other members of 256th Infantry Brigade and ship out for convoy duty in Iraq.
Thanks in no small part to the efforts of a small group of professors and students at UL Lafayette, there will come a day in the not to distant future when there will be no need for our loved ones to risk their lives overseas when autonomous vehicles can perform the same tasks by taking humans out of the equation.
The last time the 256th was sent into Iraq it was to fight. Now that the fighting is over their mission will be much different.
Brigadier General Glenn Curtis: "This time our job will be to man convoys of equipment that are moving through the country."
Thanks to the ground breaking work being done at UL Lafayette, there will come a time in the not too distant future when our men and women will not be needed for convoy duty.
Thanks to the development of autonomous vehicles like the Cajunbot. One of 20 autonomous vehicles who have spent the last 4 years competing in a contest established by the US Defense Department for the development of autonomous vehicles capable of performing convoy duty without any humans behind the wheel.
The military is already in the process of testing autonomous vehicles so it is just a matter of time for robots to replace humans so our citizen soldiers can stay home and stay safe.
Good stuff. Though I am hesitant to say we are anywhere close to replacing humans as citzen soldiers. In fact I think there are a ton of moral and ethical questions that we really want too.
No comments:
Post a Comment