Infinite Unknown

“It sends a cold shiver down my spine. I have worked in artificial intelligence for decades, and the idea of a robot making decisions about human termination is terrifying.”
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The American military is planning to build robot soldiers that will not be able to commit war crimes like their human comrades in arms.

The Pentagon aims to develop ‘ethical’ robot soldiers, unlike the indiscriminate T-800 killers from the Terminator films

The US Army and Navy have both hired experts in the ethics of building machines to prevent the creation of an amoral Terminator-style killing machine that murders indiscriminately.

By 2010 the US will have invested $4 billion in a research programme into “autonomous systems”, the military jargon for robots, on the basis that they would not succumb to fear or the desire for vengeance that afflicts frontline soldiers.

A British robotics expert has been recruited by the US Navy to advise them on building robots that do not violate the Geneva Conventions.

Colin Allen, a scientific philosopher at Indiana University’s has just published a book summarising his views entitled Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong.

He told The Daily Telegraph: “The question they want answered is whether we can build automated weapons that would conform to the laws of war. Can we use ethical theory to help design these machines?”

Pentagon chiefs are concerned by studies of combat stress in Iraq that show high proportions of frontline troops supporting torture and retribution against enemy combatants.

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Tags: Air Force, DRONES, Geneva Conventions, Military, Pentagon, Robots, Science, soldiers, Technology, U.S., UAVs, War, war crimes

The U.S. Army plans to spend some $50 million over five years on combat video games to train soldiers, according to a report in Stars and Stripes.

To oversee this investment, the Army created a game-training unit named, as military units often are, with an acronym, PEO-STRI, for “Project Executive Office - Simulation Training and Instrumentation.” This unit will track developments in the video game industry and choose promising products that could be used or modified to train soldiers.

The report said the Army unit also “has an undisclosed additional budget” to spend on a commercial game system to be used by February.

There’s already one game - DARWARS Ambush - in use for teaching soldiers. It was set up by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA to focus mainly on the difficult problem of roadside ambushes that use explosives to hit at convoy vehicles. But that game, based on old technology, has limits, and the Army wants to upgrade to new systems.

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Tags: DARPA, Military, Politics, soldiers, Technology, U.S., Video Games

Source: EVTV

Tags: Crimes, Iraq, Military, Politics, soldiers, War

“U.S. President-elect Barack Obama says he wants to focus more on the Afghan war and plans to persuade other nations to send more soldiers.”
More ‘change’. The soldiers have been strongly supporting Ron Paul and they exactly knew why!
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A British military vehicle drives past an Afghan man in Lashkar Gah, capital of Helmand province October 20, 2008.
REUTERS/Abdul Qodus

CORNWALLIS, Nova Scotia (Reuters) - The Pentagon is considering a plan to send more than 20,000 troops to Afghanistan over the next 12 to 18 months to help safeguard elections and quell rising Taliban violence, officials said on Friday.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he and top commanders had discussed sending five brigades to Afghanistan, including four brigades of combat ground forces as well as an aviation brigade, which a defense official said would consist mainly of support troops. An Army combat brigade has about 3,500 soldiers.

Gates said much of the infusion could take place before Afghanistan holds elections by next autumn.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Government, Military, NATO, Pentagon, Robert Gates, soldiers, Taliban, U.S., War

Hours after Salon revealed evidence that two Americans were killed by a U.S. tank, not enemy fire, military officials destroyed papers on the men.
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Editor’s note: On Oct. 14, 2008, Salon published an article about the deaths of Army Pfc. Albert Nelson and Pfc. Roger Suarez. The Army attributed their deaths in Iraq in 2006 to enemy action; Salon’s investigation, which included graphic battle video and eyewitness testimony, indicated that their deaths were likely due to friendly fire.

After Salon published Benjamin’s Oct. 14 report, the Army ordered soldiers to shred documents about the men. As proof that they were ordered to destroy the paperwork, a soldier saved some examples and provided them to Salon.
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Helmet-cam footage from Ramadi, Iraq (12-min. edited version). Warning: Contains graphic violence and profanity.

Nov. 20, 2008 | FORT CARSON, Colo. — Last month, Salon published a story reporting that U.S. Army Pfc. Albert Nelson and Pfc. Roger Suarez were killed by U.S. tank fire in Ramadi, Iraq, in late 2006, in an incident partially captured on video, but that an Army investigation instead blamed their deaths on enemy action.

Now Salon has learned that documents relating to the two men were shredded hours after the story was published. Three soldiers at Fort Carson, Colo. - including two who were present in Ramadi during the friendly fire incident, one of them just feet from where Nelson and Suarez died - were ordered to shred two boxes full of documents about Nelson and Suarez. One of the soldiers preserved some of the documents as proof that the shredding occurred and provided them to Salon. All three soldiers, with the assistance of a U.S. senator’s office, have since been relocated for their safety.
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Oct. 14 was a long and eventful day at Fort Carson. The post had been in an uproar. The night before, Salon had published my article airing claims that two of the base’s soldiers, Pfc. Albert Nelson and Pfc. Roger Suarez-Gonzalez, had been killed by friendly fire in Iraq on Dec. 4, 2006, but that the Army covered up the cause of death, attributing it to enemy action.

Based on the testimony of eyewitnesses, and on video and audio recorded by a helmet-mounted camera that captured much of the action that day, my report stated that Nelson and Suarez seemed to have been killed by an American tank shell. The shell apparently struck their position on the roof of a two-story ferro-concrete building in Ramadi, Anbar province, Iraq, killing Suarez instantly, mortally wounding Nelson, and injuring several other soldiers. I included both an edited and a full-length version of the video in the article. The video shows soldiers just after the blast claiming to have watched the tank fire on them. Then a sergeant attempts to report over a radio that a U.S. tank killed his men. He seems to be promptly overruled by a superior officer who is not at the scene. An official Army investigation then found that the simultaneous impact of two enemy mortars killed the men.

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Tags: cover-up, Government, Military, Politics, soldiers, U.S., War

Army scientists want to cram this array of brain-wave reading sensors into a helmet.

Soldiers barking orders at each other is so 20th Century. That’s why the U.S. Army has just awarded a $4 million contract to begin developing “thought helmets” that would harness silent brain waves for secure communication among troops. Ultimately, the Army hopes the project will “lead to direct mental control of military systems by thought alone.”

If this sounds insane, it would have been as recently as a few years ago. But improvements in computing power and a better understanding of how the brain works have scientists busy hunting for the distinctive neural fingerprints that flash through a brain when a person is talking to himself. The Army’s initial goal is to capture those brain waves with incredibly sophisticated software that then translates the waves into audible radio messages for other troops in the field. “It’d be radio without a microphone, ” says Dr. Elmar Schmeisser, the Army neuroscientist overseeing the program. “Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way.”

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Tags: Brain, EEG, Military, mind-control, Neuroscience, Science, soldiers, Technology, U.S.

KEY corps commanders of Pakistan’s 600,000-strong army issued orders last night to retaliate against “invading” US forces that enter the country to attack militant targets.

The move has plunged relations between Islamabad and Washington into deep crisis over how to deal with al-Qa’ida and the Taliban

What amounts to a dramatic order to “kill the invaders”, as one senior officer put it last night, was disclosed after the commanders - who control the army’s deployments at divisional level - met at their headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi under the chairmanship of army chief and former ISI spy agency boss Ashfaq Kayani.

Leading English-language newspaper The News warned in an editorial that the US determination to attack targets inside Pakistan was likely to be “the best recruiting sergeant that the extremists ever had”, with even “moderates” outraged by it.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, George Bush, Military, NATO, Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan, Politics, soldiers, Taliban, U.S., War

DOD Official Set to Testify Today at Hearing, Despite Not Showing Up in July

“You serve your country and then destroy your life because the guy in the next bunk or the next foxhole becomes a sexual predator,” said Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) of the females who have been sexually assaulted or raped while serving the country.

A House subcommittee is set to shed new light on the problem of sexual assault in the military today, when it will hear testimony on sexual assault numbers, prevention and response as part of its ongoing investigation into the issue.

“A woman who signs up to protect her country is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire,” said Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), who introduced a bill this summer to increase and encourage the investigation of prosecution of sexual assault and rape cases in the military and is attending today’s hearing.

It will be the second such hearing this summer but is highly anticipated because Dr. Kaye Whitley, the director of the defense department’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, will testify. Whitley was a no-show at the session July 31, even though the committee had subpoenaed her to attend.

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Tags: Government, Military, Politics, rape, soldiers, U.S.

President Sarkozy’s resolve to remain steadfast in Afghanistan was tested yesterday as a poll indicated that a majority of French voters want him to pull troops out after the deaths this week of ten soldiers in a Taleban ambush.

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Tags: Afghanistan, France, Nicolas Sarkozy, soldiers, Taliban, War

Drugs that make soldiers want to fight. Robots linked directly to their controllers’ brains. Lie-detecting scans administered to terrorist suspects as they cross U.S. borders.

These are just a few of the military uses imagined for cognitive science — and if it’s not yet certain whether the technologies will work, the military is certainly taking them very seriously.

“It’s way too early to know which — if any — of these technologies is going to be practical,” said Jonathan Moreno, a Center for American Progress bioethicist and author of Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense. “But it’s important for us to get ahead of the curve. Soldiers are always on the cutting edge of new technologies.”

Moreno is part of a National Research Council committee convened by the Department of Defense to evaluate the military potential of brain science. Their report, “Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies,” was released today. It charts a range of cognitive technologies that are potentially powerful — and, perhaps, powerfully troubling.

Here are the report’s main areas of focus: Continue reading »

Tags: Brain, Drugs, Military, mind reading, mind-control, Neurons, Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, New World Order, Science, soldiers, Technology