Censoring Technology

Are robot armies being constructed here on earth, and if they are, why aren't we reading about them in the mainstream news? With the success of movies like Terminator II and countless other military robot fantasy stories, I would say the general public is very interested in this type of information - as they should be. It's likely to start having much more impact in the near future.

Ever purchased anything from Samsung? Perhaps you're aware they make CD players and cell phones, or maybe you've read about their solar power research. What about machine-gun killing drones? There's a disturbing video online located here. Using robots to defuse bombs is one thing, but there's no denying what these robots will be used for - killing.

Can you imagine such drones being powered by the Samsungs solar power cells? It's the ultimate "plug and play" technology that militaries are looking for. No infrastructure (electric or water lines) required and great for desert deployment.

This is just the beginning. I've seen much much more, and I've spoken with many scientists developing military technologies for what they rationalize as being life saving technologies. Technically, it is debatable (take 1 life to save 2), but realistically killing robots could mark the fastest rise of the global death rate in the history of all killing instruments - and at the very least rival the gun and the bomb.

Can we hope the scientists will have a change of heart? No, absolutely not. They are tools, often times ignorant of repercussions because they misinterpret the motivations for the very weapons they are building. "This atomic bomb, should you invent it, will only be used for deterrence."

Others who understand the repercussions are too disillusioned to care. They think only about their paycheck and enjoying their life as much as possible before the world goes to hell in a hand basket. If not them, someone else, and to a large extent that's very true. There is no one secret scientist with the secret knowledge to develop killing machines. They are a dime a dozen, and are on the rise.

A former colleague of mine was a fierce opponent of Bush, torture, and many other things wrong with US politics (ignoring the capitalsim issue of course). He wore birkenstocks, rode a bike to work, had over 50 years of wisdom, and worked on smart clusterbombs. The idea is that traditional cluster bombs fall from the sky and indiscriminately detonate when they hit the ground (and the bomblets that don't detonate will blow up children for years to come). This colleague was working on a visual radar detection system small enough to place in each individual bomblet that would trigger the bomblet to blow up conditioning on if it located it's target or not. With this technology, these bombs can be used without the fear of detonating close friendly targets, which is especially problematic because cluster bombs are chaotic in the nature they fall to the ground, and can be blown off course by wind.

If his goal his reached, a friendly force can wait in close proximity to an enemy encampment, give the GPS coordinates to a cluster bomb carrying drone flying over head, and wait for the smarter bombs to judiciously take out all buildings and people while preserving the roads for friendly forces to travel through. Brilliant!

Should my former colleague be held responsible? Why not? If the technology he works on makes illegal wars more efficient, he's just as guilty of killing as Donald Rumsfeld. If we can't hold scientists responsible, and we won't punish politicians for illegal wars using these technologies, how can we hope to stop it?

If these technologies are really that scary, why does it seem like we're more interested in Mark Foley's sex life and the latest neighborhood dog show? Because Rupert Murdoch says so. Sure, We may be given the freedom of speech in this country, but it's an illusion to think the public will sort out what's important. Corporations and government programs like the FCC will do that for you, and they will do it without breaking the law. As the internet becomes more commercialized and censored, it will happen here too.

Why wasn't the shutdown of a national military research facility at one of the most prestigious science and engineering schools in the country covered in mainstream national news? On March 2nd, demonstrators affiliated with the Pittsburgh Organizing Group successfully barricaded the entrance to a nationally funded Carnegie Mellon University facility for an entire day.

What little public coverage the story received distorted the focus by emphasizing all employees were safe and able to carry on their work from their homes. The goal wasn't to stop employees from working on robots for a day, but to raise public awareness of a very bad thing that would receive no coverage otherwise.

As corporate media conglomerates grow from gargantuan to colossal, more brains will be numbed as ignored truths are relegated to obscure blogs on the internet that nobody really cares about.