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Old 10-09-2005, 10:51 AM
jseal jseal is offline
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Thumbs up They did it!

Four of the twenty three autonomous automobiles which took part in the Grand Challenge sponsored by DARPA finished! Once started on the course, the vehicles had to operate completely without any control by humans. Last year none of the entries completed even eight of the required one hundred seventy five miles.

Now that’s an amazing improvement in the technology!
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Last edited by jseal : 10-09-2005 at 11:31 AM. Reason: correction
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Old 10-09-2005, 11:41 AM
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Scarecrow Scarecrow is offline
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Wasn't Stanford U. the first to finish? Heard some of the report on the news last night.
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Old 10-09-2005, 11:54 AM
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osuche osuche is offline
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Wow! I'll have to tell Mr. Osuche.
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Old 10-09-2005, 04:54 PM
jseal jseal is offline
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Scarecrow,

Yessir! It is official, Stanford's "Stanley" won the $2 million.

A fifth vehicle, TerraMax, has also completed the course. An amazing achievment.
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Old 10-09-2005, 06:50 PM
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Sorry jseal, you've lost me on this one.

They've made the point that the ultimate aim is autonomous fighting machines, basically robot tanks.

Though it's a technically brilliant exercise, autonomous war vehicles are a bad thing.

It's a terrible thing when a human pulls the trigger on another, no matter how neccessary it is.

Just to send out machines to hunt and kill humans without conscience or moral judgement ( which is a slightly different thing) is evil.

And if one goes rogue? Could you count that as friendly fire, given that a killer machine has no friends, just allies.
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Old 10-09-2005, 08:50 PM
jseal jseal is offline
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Oldfart,

That’s DARPA’s goal.

Remember that the internet - not the Web, the internet – was created by DARPA.

Look what happened to that Pentagon funded project. This technology won’t be the first time that one of DARPA’s swords has been beaten into a ploughshare! No possible way this one stops with Uncle Sam’s Freedom Fighters!

This is an integration event – not new ideas.

The GPS technology was freed up by Clinton in 2000 (I think). The sensor integration is a function of commercial multiprocessor parallel communication. Object discrimination is a function of Hard AI. You have to love this one – the functionality of the CPUs scattered throughout these machines was a direct spin off of DARPA funded VLSI research!

While I still disagree with PalaceGuard about his more speculative projections of future computer power, I feel confident that at the current rate of improvement, the likelihood of cars driving themselves in 50 years is, as Dr. Thrun of the Stanford team said, “a no-brainer”.

To your point in re the military applications: yes, it remains a real, present, and in my opinion an increasing danger. As the “human cost” of initiating military engagements decreases with the introduction of pilotless war vehicles (air, and now land) the probability of each one being realized increases. If you want a nightmare scenario, imagine if you will, a brigade of M1A2s approaching a city – and they are unmanned. The support vehicles (fuel & munitions) could also be, but probably wouldn’t be autonomous (the fog of war, etc), but air superiority could be secured by UAVs.

In closing, the Genie is out of the bottle. We’ll never get it back in. We have all seen how difficult it has been managing proliferation of WMDs – both the successes as well as the failures. This one has NO state secrets – NONE, NADA, ZILCH. Won’t this be fun to manage?
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