Technocracy = Slavery: Robots Hunt Uncooperative Humans

[blackcat]

Robots to hunt down un-cooperative humans
http://worldpressnetwork.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=303 W

Well worth visiting the link above to get full article with links to other sources.

[kbo234]

[Linda]

Pentagon Wants Packs Of Robots to Hunt Down 'Non- cooperative Humans'

'The Pentagon has put out a request to contractors to develop teams of robots that can search for, detect and track “non-cooperative” humans in “pursuit/evasion scenarios”. The request, which can be read on the Department of Defense Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program website here, calls for a “Multi-Robot Pursuit System” to be operated by one person.'

Read more...

http://www.prisonplanet.com/pentagon-wants-packs-of-robots-to-detect-n on-cooperative-humans.html

The proposal describes the need to

“…develop a software/hardware suit that would enable a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject.

The main research task will involve determining the movements of the robot team through the environment to maximize the opportunity to find the subject, while minimizing the chances of missing the subject. If the operator is an active member of the search team, the software should minimize the chance that the operator may encounter the subject.”

It is seemingly important to the Pentagon that the operator should not have to come into contact with the person being chased down by the machines.

The description continues:

“The software should maintain awareness of line-of-sight, as well as communication and sensor limits. It will be necessary to determine an appropriate sensor suite that can reliably detect human presence and is suitable for implementation on small robotic platforms.”


Paul Marks at The New Scientist points out that given the propensity to adapt this kind of military style technology for domestic purposes such as crowd control, the proposal is somewhat concerning.

“…how long before we see packs of droids hunting down pesky demonstrators with paralysing weapons? Or could the packs even be lethally armed?” Marks asks.

Marks interviewed Steve Wright, an expert on police and military technologies, from Leeds Metropolitan University, who commented:

“The giveaway here is the phrase ‘a non-cooperative human subject’.

What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed.

We can also expect such systems to be equipped with human detection and tracking devices including sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a human heart beat. These are technologies already developed.”

Indeed, noted as PHASE III on the Pentagon proposal is the desire to have the robots developed to “intelligently and autonomously search”.

Earlier this year another top robotics expert, Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield, warned listeners to the Alex Jones show that the world may be sleepwalking into a potentially lethal technocracy and has called for safeguards on such technology to be put into place.

Professor Sharkey stated:

“If you have an autonomous robot then it’s going to make decisions who to kill, when to kill and where to kill them. The scary thing is that the reason this has to happen is because of mission complexity and also so that when there’s a problem with communications you can send a robot in with no communication and it will decide who to kill, and that is really worrying to me.”

The professor also warned that such autonomous weapons could easily be used in the future by law enforcement officials in cites, pointing out that South Korean authorities are already planning to have a fully armed autonomous robot police force in their cities.

Perhaps one candidate for the Pentagon’s “Multi-Robot Pursuit System” proposal is Boston Dynamics’ rather frightening BigDog (pictured above). The latest version of this hydraulic quadruped robot can carry up to 340lb load and recovers its balance even after sliding on ice and snow:

Are we looking at the future of policing in America?

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mmVaLp8icoU&eurl=http://www.prisonplanet .com/pentagon-wants-packs-of-robots-to-detect-non-cooperative-humans.h tml

[Disco_Destroyer]

We got to worry about packs of Humans in the meantime

[TonyGosling]

Technocracy is what we're moving into - looking less like democracy, more like CCTV vs. democracy, every day. Okay this may be from the 1980s but the 'transistor is the enemy' conclusion is just as relevant today.

Beneath the City Streets.
The Secret Plans To Defend The State
Peter Laurie
Granada, 1979
ISBN 0 586 05055 8


Commenting on the Swiss Civil defence handbook - sent free to every household.
Then on the twisted logic of mass extermination.

There is a depressing and realistic preview of the Third World War. Long before it begins we must be alert and learn to keep our mouths shut. Spies are interested in every thing - railway timetables, the telephone number and habits of this or that civil servant. Railway uniforms are found hidden among grasses near a main line. A watch is kept and three spies are caught. Children at play find a wireless set buried in a wood. Alas, they bring it home and spoil a promising lead. Four spies are sentenced to death, and their appeals are refused by the Federal Assembly. .
'The beds are cold this winter. But we hold on.'
The city is attacked, is flattened. Every street becomes a battlefield, every ruin a fortress. (The owner is of course entitled to compensation for property requisitioned by the armed forces. He should be careful to get a receipt from Divisional HQ.) A thoughtful two pages on the laws of war as they affect civilians with a drawing of some who did not pay attention tied to stakes before a firing squad.
A chapter on the Resistance. 'All those who participate in the Resistance risk their lives. This is not a game, it is a pitiless war.'
But why should an enemy waste time and effort in crushing little Switzerland when he can achieve the same results by guile ? Note the fictional adventures of the wicked Party of Social Progress, the PPS. An agent of a foreign power reports: 'We have placed at its head MJ, an intelligent and active man, devoured by ambition and much in need of cash. The bourgeois parties offered him slender hopes. '
A sample of the PPS's sinister wares is a wall poster,:
'Why spend these millions on the military?
We could build homes
Pay for holidays
Raise pensions
Reduce the hours of work
Reduce our taxes.
YES to a better future!'
Here is the organization table of a revolutionary movement, its HQ abroad, its front in the homeland, its secret cells, its sleeping members, unsuspected 'by even their best friends among the gullible Swiss. Agents of the enemy unleash a terrible scandal about the finances of the Federal Council (happy the land where such scandals are only the work of enemies). The weaker citizens dispute among themselves, the stronger stand firm in their confidence! We must be constantly on our guard against calumnies on our chiefs and authorities. Absolutely.
Altogether this handbook is a work of passion and breadth which sits uneasily beside the bland nothings of our own civil service. From one point of view one can detect self-interest; from another plain barminess. But perhaps there speaks British insular complacency. After all, the Hungarian revolution and its disquieting sequels happened as far from the Swiss border as North Wales is from London. France and Italy nip Switzerland pretty close: both might have communist governments in five years or less. Not to mention the PLO raging round central Europe, seeking whom it may devour. But the possibility that he might be right never made a Calvinist tone down his rebukes. The National Director of civil defence, Hans Maurenthaler, asked about the curious absence of civil defence among the nuclear powers, comments:
. . . we live in a world of tension, of brutality and of blackmail, that is everything but peaceful and reassuring. The best proofs of this are: Disarmament conferences; non-aggression pacts; non proliferation treaties. . .To misunderstand this menace, to want to minimize it or even steadily to deny it while knowing that it exists amounts to evidence of laxity, foolishness or even depravity.
If the superpowers had not obligingly invented the H-bomb, the Swiss government would have had to invent something equally threatening.
So, simply because the H-bomb has not yet been used in anger, does not mean that it has not had a profound effect on the modern world. Without it we might have learnt to live more in amity. Or, of course, we might have torn each other apart with the weapons that were quite effective enough in the Second World War.
When might it be used? In spite of the Soviet military's obvious determination to fight and survive a nuclear war, it is difficult to believe that such a course would be in the broader interests of the civilian leaders of Russia.
I am coming to believe that there is a much more serious threat to the technological way of life than the H-bomb. It is the transistor. Over the last two or three hundred years in the West we have followed a course of development that coupled increasingly powerful machines to small pieces of human brain to produce increasingly vast quantities of goods. The airliner, the ship, the typewriter, the lathe, the sewing machine, all employ a small part of the operator's intelligence, and with it multiply his or her productivity a thousandfold.
As long as each machine needed a brain, it was profitable to make more brains and with them more profits. Industrial populations grew in all the advanced countries, and political systems became more liberal simply to get their cooperation. (You cannot safely put a bulldozer in the hands of an aggrieved slave.)
But now we are beginning to find that we do not need the brains - at least not in the huge droves that we have them. Little by little, like a calm tide creeping over flat sand, with a finger of water here, a rush of foam there, artificial intelligence is dispossessing hundreds of thousands and soon millions of workers. Because 'the computer' is seen only in large installations doing book-keeping, where it puts few out of work, this tendency goes on unnoticed. But in every job economics forces economies on management. Little gadgets here and there get rid of workers piecemeal. And so far the real thrust of artificial intelligence has not yet begun. In journalism, for instance, it is now quite unnecessary to have printers. Journalists can type straight onto a small computer that edits their work, checks spellings and punctuation, arranges it in columns, sets it in type and makes up the newspaper page. Any job that can be specified, say, a thousand rules, can now be automated by equipment that costs £200 or so. The microprocessor, which now costs in itself perhaps £20, is the heart of a computer. It has not begun to be applied: over the next 10 to 15 years millions will be installed in industry, distribution, commerce. Machinery, which has almost denuded the land, will now denude cities.
Politically, this will split the population into two sharply divided groups: those who have intelligence or complicated manual skills that cannot be imitated by computers, and those - a much larger group, who have not. In strict economic terms, the second group will not be worth employing. They can do nothing that cannot be done cheaper by machinery. They cannot contribute their own intelligence, because the machines will have enough of their own. The working population will be reduced to a relatively small core of technicians, artists, scientists, managers, surrounded by a large, unemployed, dissatisfied and expensive - mob. I would even argue that this process is much further advanced than it seems, and the political subterfuges necessary to keep it concealed, are responsible for the economic malaise of the western nations and their galloping inflation. This is not surprising: if one has to pay several million people who are in fact useless, as if they were not, this is bound to throw a strain on the economy and arouse the resentment of those who are useful, but who cannot be paid what they deserve for fear of arousing the envy of the others.
If the unemployed can be kept down to a million or so in a country like Britain, the political problem they present can be contained by paying a generous dole, and by lavish social services - even though they are beginning to crumble under' the strain. The real total of unemployed is much larger, but they are hidden in business. What happens when automation advances further and the sham can no longer be kept up? A recent report from the Manpower Commission said that Britain's 90 largest firms planned to get rid of a third of their workers when current technological improvements were brought into use. To cope with millions of unemployed and unemployable people needs - in terms of crude power greatly improved police and security services. It demands that factories and computers should be put out of cities, preferably where they are inaccessible to the mob or the saboteur. It suggests that the unemployed should be concentrated in small spaces where they can be controlled, de-educated, penned up.
And, seen from the right point of view, this is just what is happening. All over the West, police and security forces have been growing apace. Civil defence, active in Russia, being revived in America and many other countries, puts useful national industrial assets out in the country, underground. The useless masses gravitate to decaying cities like New York: one can foresee a time when the rest of America will put barbed wire across the bridges and throw enough supplies over them to keep the mob quiet.
Unless some drastic alteration occurs in economic and political thought, the developed nations are going to be faced in the next thirty years with the fact that the majority of their citizens are a dangerous, useless burden. One can see that when civil defence has moved everything useful out of the cities, there might be strong temptation on governments to solve the problem by nuclear war: the technological elite against the masses. Doubtless, to salve consciences, it would be dressed up as a war between superpowers. But it would not be surprising if the only survivors were just those who found the dead masses the most oppressive. In short, America and Russia, Britain and France, India and China, Egypt and Israel might agree to take in each other's dirty washing.
So one might guess that when Russian industry is as automated as America's, then we may look for action. Happily it lags some way behind; and because it spends so much effort preparing for war - which is very labour-intensive - it is likely to lag further behind. Crudely speaking, the longer the Russians prepare for war, the longer we can expect peace.

[TonyGosling]

Robots will take over most jobs within 30 years, experts warn
The rise of robots could lead to unemployment rates greater than 50 per cent, according to Professor Moshe Vardi
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/12155808/Robots-w ill-take-over-most-jobs-within-30-years-experts-warn.html

Sarah Knapton By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor in Washington3:15PM GMT 13 Feb 2016
Robots will have taken over most jobs within 30 years leaving humanity facing its 'biggest challenge ever' to find meaning in life when work is no longer necessary, according to experts.
Professor Moshe Vardi, of Rice University, in the US, claims that many middle-class professionals will be outsources to machines within the next few decades leaving workers with more leisure time than they have ever experienced.
Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington, Prof Moshe said the rise of robots could lead to unemployment rates greater than 50 per cent.
"We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task," said Vardi, a professor in computational engineering.

“Robots are doing more and more jobs that people used to do. Pharmacists, prison guards, boning chicken, bartending, more and more jobs we’re able to mechanise them.
“I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?
"The question I want to put forward is, 'Does the technology we are developing ultimately benefit mankind?'

Prof Vardi, said existing robotic and AI technologies were already eliminating a growing number of middle-class jobs and claims that pace of advancement in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasing.
In December, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore unveiled the most humanlike robot ever created, which will work as a receptionist on campus.
With her soft skin and flowing brunette hair, Nadine does not only meet and greet visitors, smile, make eye contact and shake hands, but she can even recognise past guests and spark up conversation based on previous chats.

Today Airbus and the Joint Robotics Laboratory at the University of Frankfurt, also announced it was developing humanoid robotic technology to perform difficult tasks in aircraft manufacturing.
The company said it would relieve workers of the most dangerous and laborious tasks, allowing them to concentrate on ‘higher value tasks.’
The robots in development can climb ladders and crawl into small spaces and are expected to join the workforce within the next decade.

But Prof Vardi is unconvinced that a workforce of humanlike robots will be good for mankind.
"A typical answer is that if machines will do all our work, we will be free to pursue leisure activities," he said.
"I do not find this a promising future, as I do not find the prospect of leisure-only life appealing. That seems to me a dystopia. I believe that work is essential to human well-being.
"We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task"
Professor Moshe Vardi
"Humanity is about to face perhaps its greatest challenge ever, which is finding meaning in life after the end of 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.
"We need to rise to the occasion and meet this challenge before human labour becomes obsolete.”
“What’s different this time is computer scientists are working on building machines that can out compete us in everything we can do. If machines can do all the work or even 50 per cent of the jobs that we used to do, what will people do?"