It's gonna suck ass for anyone getting sent to the great beyond by a toaster with wheels and a freakin' gat attached to it. I'm envisioning slackers with a penchant for doritos, pepsi, and doom games behind the control of those things in the future. Iraq has become a playground to test new military hardware. Isn't that nice! ------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65885-2,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1 More Robot Grunts Ready for Duty By Noah Shachtman 02:00 AM Dec. 01, 2004 PT ORLANDO, Florida -- Hunting for guerillas, handling roadside bombs, crawling across the caves and crumbling towns of Afghanistan and Iraq -- all of that was just a start. Now, the Army is prepping its squad of robotic vehicles for a new set of assignments. And this time, they'll be carrying guns. As early as March or April, 18 units of the Talon -- a model armed with automatic weapons -- are scheduled to report for duty in Iraq. Around the same time, the first prototypes of a new, unmanned ambulance should be ready for the Army to start testing. In a warren of hangar-sized hotel ballrooms in Orlando, military engineers this week showed off their next generation of robots, as they got the machines ready for the war zone. Continued...
I'm just amazed they got something so small to effectively handle the recoil of the ordinance it utilizes.
So how long until Skynet becomes self-aware and starts sending these robots to do its bidding? http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/afp/20041113/pl_afp/us_military_technology
How long before some genius gets the idea of marketing civilian versions of these to paranoid gated-community living suburbanites?
This thread as already been a treasure trove of great one-liners. I commend all of you. And let me be the first to welcome our new robot overlords... 11000010100001001011100010101001000111100101010010001001010
The manufacturer, irobot, is the company that makes the Roomba, and mini-versions of those treaded platform robots are going to be the next "modable" tech toy in the next year or two.