3-D PRINTING SCRAPBOOK: STRONG ROBOTS AND SUPER-SOLDIERS

October 1, 2017 / Joseph P. Farrell /

In the movie adaptation of Isaac Asimov's classic science fiction yarn, I, Robot, starring Will Smith, robots of approximately the same size as humans "live" and "interact" with human society, and one of them, named "Sonny," actually "wakes up" and becomes a fully-self-aware conscious being, a person. While the possibilities of that are endlessly debated, what concerns me today is an article shared by Mr. T.M., and it reminded me of something else those robots in the movie do.

At a certain point, all the robots come under the control of an evil artificial intelligence named VICKI, and at this juncture, the robots began tossing their human counterparts around like Tinker-Toys and Lincoln Logs and Legos. Though more or less the same size, the humans were not nearly as physically strong as their robotic counterparts, which made resistance to VICKI and her evil machinations rather difficult, since all that VICKI had to do was remain secure in her AI lair, and order all her robots to do her bidding.

Well, the story of physically super-strong robots may no longer be just a figment of Isaac Asimov's imagination, according to this article shared by Mr. T.M.:

3D printed synthetic muscle is up to three times stronger than human tissue

There it is, folks, artificial, non-biological "synthetic muscle" whose lifting capacity is... well, disturbing:

researchers(sic) at columbia(sic) engineering solve a long-standing issue in the creation of untethered soft robots whose actions and movements can mimic natural biological systems. a group in the creative machines lab has developed a 3D printable synthetic soft muscle — an artificial active tissue with intrinsic expansion ability that does not require an external compressor, or high voltage equipment as previous artificial muscles required. the(sic) material has a strain density (expansion per gram) that is 15 times larger than natural muscle, and can lift 1000 times its own weight. (Emphasis added)

We all know what will happen now: (1) DARPA (the Diabolically Apocalyptic Research Projects Agency, as a regular reader here, Mr. J.B., proposed we call it), will start to work on seeing if this technology can be perfected for use in "super-strong soldiers," (2) the transhumanists will propose replacing human muscle tissue with this stuff (once is perfected), all under the control of computer-human brain interfaces, and call this an "improvement", and so on. The soldiers-application will be immediately attractive, since there is no suggestion here that this "synthetic muscle" will be susceptible to tiring, and as Dr. Scott deHart and I pointed out in our Transhumanism: A Grimoire of Alchemical Agendas, sleep itself was under investigation by DARPA to see how they could make combat soldiers able to function on much less sleep, thereby becoming another "force multiplier": twice the combat hours of the "ordinary" soldier. You get the picture.

Of course, all of this is being touted as a good thing by the usual appeal to the wonderful benefits it will bring to medicine: robots= lower costs for all those nurses you see:

influenced(sic... apparently the people at this site don't like capitals) by living organisms, soft material robotics hold great promise for areas where robots need to contact and interact with humans, such as manufacturing and healthcare.
(Emphasis in the original)

See? What a wonderful thing all these robots will be! Your robot can mow the lawn, toss that five-hundred pound branch from your neighbor's tree than landed in your yard on the last lightning strike, right into the woodpile. And that robot will be there to ensure and insist you take that vaccine, because it's good for you, and the robot has been programmed to "know" it's good for you, and if you refuse, it is there to wrestle you into compliance and your children into autism. One can even see them in certain retail stores that like to push the "flu shot" table every year with "flu season" rolls around.

See you on the flip side...

Posted in You Tell Me

Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and "strange stuff". His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into "alternative history and science".

7 Comments

Robert Barricklow on October 3, 2017 at 12:04 pm

Although soldiers, super or otherwise augmented, do play a part in the 21st century electronic battlefield; it is the robots/AI that command the highs and low contours of this war front. They have pushed humans out of the sky[pilots] and the drivers seat. Swarms pose more of a danger than soldiers, and they’re easily printed-up on the battlefield.
A good fictionalized book on this is:
The Last Good Man by Linda Nagata
Kent on October 2, 2017 at 10:44 am

I’ll leave the AI comments to others; I want to talk a bit about Internet written grammar since one commentator ‘sic-ed’ a writer and mentioned the no capitals. These things irritate me too, especially the no caps and run on sentences with little punctuation and misspellings. Add to this the very modern convention of not double spacing between sentences as described by that Grammar Girl, Mignon Fogarty. Oh, yes, British English drives me crazy, but I’ll leave that for another day.
All of this sloppiness, I think, must lie in postmodern selfishness, laziness, and technology. It just requires too much work, time, and thought to punch in those caps and periods on all those iPhones and tablets.

I’m old and a Texas gentleman. I use a keyboard and my right thumb wants to double click my space bar twice after a period as I learned almost sixty years ago on a manual Royal typewriter in high school. I respect others and I try to get my spelling, punctuation, and grammar right. Yes, it takes a little thought and time. I’ve already had to correct a few misspellings here in this comment, and I use Grammarly Spell and Grammar Checker. It installs itself.

You folks here write better than those I’m writing about. I’ll bet you like me have improved your writing by reading Joseph’s books. My books are well marked up with underlines and margin notes. Thanks, Joseph. You’re really good.

That’s all.________________________Old Cap’n Kent

P.S. How I want to double space between sentences. It just looks better. I know the printers hate this, but our Internet comments aren’t gonna be published.
- Kent on October 2, 2017 at 10:54 am
  
  Forgive me. I didn’t edit well and I see a few mistakes in my rant so please don’t fault me too much. I’m really a nice old man.
Camille on October 1, 2017 at 7:23 pm

This article is about the work being done by “secretive” Kindred AI. Article quotes Geordie Rose co-founder/CEO of Kindred AI and also co-founder of D-Wave.
The technical inspiration for the technology comes from Suzanne Gildert, who was previously a senior researcher at D-Wave.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603745/how-a-human-machine-mind-meld-could-make-robots-smarter/?set=603773#comments
goshawks on October 1, 2017 at 6:43 pm

This is quite a slippery slope the PTB is walking down. Words like “The Butlerian Jihad” come to mind. Super-strength plus networking is an ‘accident’ waiting to happen. The only viable solution that author could come up with was by limiting ‘intelligence’ in automata to toaster level by species-wide ‘edicts’ and having violations punishable by death…

And I still can’t get out of my mind that scene in “Battlestar Galactica” Mark II where the fancy ‘networked’ Colonial fighters are immobilized by ‘malware’ implanted by the Cylon infiltrator-robots within the Colonial central defense computer. Networking can be good, but it can also be VERY bad…
- OrigensChild on October 2, 2017 at 8:43 am
  
  Ah, yes, Goshawks. My favorite show along this theme thus far was when Capt. Pickard/Locutus was kidnapped and integrated into the Borg network, then recaptured and cut off from the Borg collective only to suggest the vulnerability in the Borg system was the “sleep” channel. Star Trek, the Next Generation, was almost as silly as it’s predecessor with the acting and some story telling, but one can occasionally find a few pearls among the grains of sand. This was one of those moments where fiction is so strange it borders on the edges of truth.
Robert Barricklow on October 1, 2017 at 11:45 am

Steroids becoming obsolete?