5 ms·

Pentagon drafts today’s kids to build tomorrow’s aerial killers

14 points by kennjason 15y ago

baltcode 15y ago
From inspiring kids to land on the moon and explore space, it goes down to this? Surely, there can be more productive ways to harness and encourage creativity and STEM. What about, say fuel efficient passenger planes, or cataloging cancer genes?
- whichdan 15y ago
  I'm not sure what angle they'd play with advertising, but I think "build a fighter plane!" sounds a lot more exciting to a kid than "improve the fuel efficiency of passenger planes!"
  - baltcode 15y ago
    I agree. Though something like "build a personal rocket ship", like SpaceX or the lot doesn't sound too bad either. I am just disappointed that the civilian/exploration side of NASA isn't the big dream anymore.
    - Groxx 15y ago
      40 year old tech (even if it isn't, it is from the outside) probably doesn't help. NASA used to be a driving force behind more-visible tech, now they just appear to be failing to keep up. It has lost some pizazz since the Cold War.
Groxx 15y ago
An interesting idea, but to pull yet more parallels from Ender's Game: what about emotional trauma when they see something they invented / inspired used to kill people? Can they sue the government? Will there be any repercussions? As much as I'd like to believe they won't be working on projects like that, I think it's quite literally impossible to make that claim. A better armor idea may become a more-penetrating bullet idea. Is there such a thing as a purely-defensive technology?
- simonsarris 15y ago
  > Is there such a thing as a purely-defensive technology? I think that most medical technologies, at the least, can be considered purely defensive. Ie, a mobile defibrillator or penecillin. Then again, inventions like spray-on bandages increase the effectiveness of an army, which would aid in offensives. But I think the inventor of any such spray-on bandage would agree that the benefits to humanity outweigh the fact that armies can march a little longer with the invention. So I think there's probably a large class of inventions that have humanitarian uses that "outweigh" the military ones from a general conscious perspective. Spray-on banadages, canned food (which may have allowed Napolean to conduct more and greater expeditions than he would otherwise), etc. Aside, there have been many purely war-motivated or wartime-motivated inventions that have gone on to aid the public at large. (See for instance the history of the tampon, or the history of canned food).
  - Groxx 15y ago
    Spray-on bandages rely on aerosoling a drying, congealing liquid which hardens quickly. I fail to see how that core tech can't be slightly adapted to do something harmful. Penicillin isn't really an invention, nor is it a technology, but we are capable of biological warfare because we know about cellular structures and resistances. Mobile defibrillators are essentially tasers without a propellant and barbs. --- There are definitely cases where I'd argue something made for war has done more good than harm. Lots of them, even. But I didn't invent those things - how does the inventor feel about it all? If your accounting software turned out to have a unique algorithm that made it easier to keep ammo supplies available on a battlefield, resulting in a few thousand more deaths, how would you feel about it? What if it were tens of thousands? More?
- rdouble 15y ago
  I'm not sure there would be any emotional trauma. Historically, engineers have tended towards being amoral about building weapons. Even Da Vinci was designing trebuchets and selling himself as a defense technician.
  - epochwolf 15y ago
anthonyb 15y ago
Seems like a bit of a beat-up to me. The page that they link to hardly seems aimed at kids, and the only bit there about the MENTOR program (that acronym helpfully left out of the article) says this: The Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (MENTOR) portion of the FANG program focuses on engaging high school-age students in a series of collaborative design and distributed manufacturing experiments. DARPA envisions deploying up to a thousand computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) additive manufacturing machines—more commonly known as "3D printers"—to high schools nationwide. The goal is to encourage students across clusters of schools to collaborate via social networking media to jointly design and build systems of moderate complexity, such as mobile robots, go carts, etc., in response to prize challenges. For balance, here's MAKE magazine's take on it: http://press.oreilly.com/pub/pr/2962 http://press.oreilly.com/pub/pr/2962
DividesByZero 15y ago
Humanity continues to hang from Eisenhower's 'cross of iron'.

14 points by kennjason 15y ago

From inspiring kids to land on the moon and explore space, it goes down to this? Surely, there can be more productive ways to harness and encourage creativity and STEM. What about, say fuel efficient passenger planes, or cataloging cancer genes?

whichdan 15y ago
I'm not sure what angle they'd play with advertising, but I think "build a fighter plane!" sounds a lot more exciting to a kid than "improve the fuel efficiency of passenger planes!"
- baltcode 15y ago
  I agree. Though something like "build a personal rocket ship", like SpaceX or the lot doesn't sound too bad either. I am just disappointed that the civilian/exploration side of NASA isn't the big dream anymore.
  - Groxx 15y ago
    40 year old tech (even if it isn't, it is from the outside) probably doesn't help. NASA used to be a driving force behind more-visible tech, now they just appear to be failing to keep up. It has lost some pizazz since the Cold War.

Groxx 15y ago

An interesting idea, but to pull yet more parallels from Ender's Game: what about emotional trauma when they see something they invented / inspired used to kill people? Can they sue the government? Will there be any repercussions? As much as I'd like to believe they won't be working on projects like that, I think it's quite literally impossible to make that claim. A better armor idea may become a more-penetrating bullet idea. Is there such a thing as a purely-defensive technology?

simonsarris 15y ago
> Is there such a thing as a purely-defensive technology? I think that most medical technologies, at the least, can be considered purely defensive. Ie, a mobile defibrillator or penecillin. Then again, inventions like spray-on bandages increase the effectiveness of an army, which would aid in offensives. But I think the inventor of any such spray-on bandage would agree that the benefits to humanity outweigh the fact that armies can march a little longer with the invention. So I think there's probably a large class of inventions that have humanitarian uses that "outweigh" the military ones from a general conscious perspective. Spray-on banadages, canned food (which may have allowed Napolean to conduct more and greater expeditions than he would otherwise), etc. Aside, there have been many purely war-motivated or wartime-motivated inventions that have gone on to aid the public at large. (See for instance the history of the tampon, or the history of canned food).
- Groxx 15y ago
  Spray-on bandages rely on aerosoling a drying, congealing liquid which hardens quickly. I fail to see how that core tech can't be slightly adapted to do something harmful. Penicillin isn't really an invention, nor is it a technology, but we are capable of biological warfare because we know about cellular structures and resistances. Mobile defibrillators are essentially tasers without a propellant and barbs. --- There are definitely cases where I'd argue something made for war has done more good than harm. Lots of them, even. But I didn't invent those things - how does the inventor feel about it all? If your accounting software turned out to have a unique algorithm that made it easier to keep ammo supplies available on a battlefield, resulting in a few thousand more deaths, how would you feel about it? What if it were tens of thousands? More?
rdouble 15y ago
I'm not sure there would be any emotional trauma. Historically, engineers have tended towards being amoral about building weapons. Even Da Vinci was designing trebuchets and selling himself as a defense technician.
- epochwolf 15y ago

anthonyb 15y ago

Seems like a bit of a beat-up to me. The page that they link to hardly seems aimed at kids, and the only bit there about the MENTOR program (that acronym helpfully left out of the article) says this: The Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach (MENTOR) portion of the FANG program focuses on engaging high school-age students in a series of collaborative design and distributed manufacturing experiments. DARPA envisions deploying up to a thousand computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) additive manufacturing machines—more commonly known as "3D printers"—to high schools nationwide. The goal is to encourage students across clusters of schools to collaborate via social networking media to jointly design and build systems of moderate complexity, such as mobile robots, go carts, etc., in response to prize challenges. For balance, here's MAKE magazine's take on it: http://press.oreilly.com/pub/pr/2962 http://press.oreilly.com/pub/pr/2962

DividesByZero 15y ago

Humanity continues to hang from Eisenhower's 'cross of iron'.