Free Republic

The US Army is considering replacing thousands of soldiers with robots as it deals with sweeping troop cuts. A senior American officer has said he is considering shrinking the size of the Army’s brigade combat teams by a quarter and replacing the lost troops with robots and remote-controlled vehicles. The American military is still far from fielding armies of Terminator-type robotic killers, though. Ideas under discussion instead include proposals to see manned trucks and transporters replaced by supply trains of robot vehicles. Generals are studying proposals as the US Army is to slim down from 540,000 to about 490,000 soldiers...

We'll be uploading our entire MINDS to computers by 2045 and our bodies will be replaced by machines within 90 years, Google expert claims Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, believes we will be able to upload our entire brains to computers within the next 32 years - an event known as singularity Our 'fragile' human body parts will be replaced by machines by the turn of the century And if these predictions comes true, it could make humans immortal In just over 30 years, humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally...

Rapid advances in technology have long represented a serious potential threat to many jobs ordinarily performed by people. A recent report (which is not online, but summarized here) from the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology attempts to quantify the extent of that threat. It concludes that 45 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers within the next two decades. The authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support. Jobs in services,...

PITTSBURGH —A Pennsylvania congressman traveled to Pittsburgh International Airport in a driverless car designed by Carnegie Mellon University. Rep. Bill Shuster, a Republican from Altoona, made the 33-mile trip at about 11 a.m. Wednesday. Shuster is the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and he was accompanied by Barry Schoch, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. A Carnegie Mellon engineer was in the driver's seat as a safety precaution, but the Cadillac SXR was driven along local roads and highways by a computer system which uses inputs from radars, lidars and infrared cameras.