Cyborg Soldiers in the Near Future
Wired reports that within three years Darpa plans to prototype binoculars that are directly wired into soldiers’ brains:
U.S. Special Forces may soon have a strange and powerful new weapon in their arsenal: a pair of high-tech binoculars 10 times more powerful than anything available today, augmented by an alerting system that literally taps the wearer’s prefrontal cortex to warn of furtive threats detected by the soldier’s subconscious.
In a new effort dubbed “Luke’s Binoculars” — after the high-tech binoculars Luke Skywalker uses in Star Wars — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is setting out to create its own version of this science-fiction hardware. And while the Pentagon’s R&D arm often focuses on technologies 20 years out, this new effort is dramatically different — Darpa says it expects to have prototypes in the hands of soldiers in three years. [Read more.]
Update: I see the story has also been blogged by Neurophilosophy, which also provides a link to an earlier Neurophilosophy article on Augmented Cognition. Here’s a snippet:
Whereas brain-computer interfaces enable people to control various aspects of their environment, the goal of augmented cognition is to determine peoples’ cognitive state in order to enhance it. Augmented cognition has many potential military applications, and its proponents promise that it will also greatly improve productivity in the workplace.
Comments
No Responses to “Cyborg Soldiers in the Near Future”
Leave a Reply
Twitter Feed- Visited Arbor Day Farm in Nebraska City yesterday, which is where Arbor Day was started. I should remember to take pictures.
- A good start to what I hope to be a good day.
- Trying to get this week on the right track.
thomas pynchon saw it all coming. in Gravity’s Rainbow, where intelligence officers infiltrate other peoples’ dreams. fabulous.
I was thinking more along the lines of cyberpunk, but yes, it’s all over science fiction. But, then, we can find the desire to hack ourselves in myth and legend, such as the story of Icarus. Stories of magic, too, I’d suggest, are often rooted in the desire to hack ourselves, which shouldn’t be that much of a surprise if we consider Arthur C. Clarke’s “Third Law“: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”