Sunday, February 19, 2012

More Sci-Fi Becoming Militarily Real

DARPA Wants to Give Soldiers Robot Surrogates, Avatar Style - IEEE Spectrum

In the movie Avatar, humans hooked themselves up to brain-machine-interface pods with which they could control giant genetically engineered human-alien hybrids. It's just a movie, but DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, doesn't care: It wants this kind of system to be real, just replace "giant genetically engineered human-alien hybrids" with "robots..."

The first clear memory of this I have is circa 1969 and a short story named "Gottlos" by Colin Kapp. It remains active in my memory, a testament to its vision and clarity. I think it was illustrated in Analog by Virgil Finley.

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