Re: erm... power armour (just about)

 ---- los wrote: 
> tom.anderson@altavista.net wrote:
> > los wrote:
> > > The neural net is a great idea for anyone operating a piece of
military
> > > equipment
> > >  It should strive to reduce our actions in combat back down to
"stick
> > > and rudder" or "seat of the pants", which is how humans were
designed to
> > > operate.
> > i cannot disagree more. the human being is an unrivalled thinking
machine, and will be so for a long time (i count aliens as human). i
don't think Jon Postel or Tim Berners-Lee used the seats of their
trousers much in developing the internet and web. i don't think Monty or
Eisenhower, or Beatty or Nimitz, used theirs when they won their
campaigns. the neural net, a simple simalcrum at best but with immense
computing speed behind it, is used to take over some of the low-level,
gut-instinct, trouser-seat stuff.

this discussion is certainly getting a bit off the rails here; i find
myself arguing that the suppression of emotion in soldiers is
good/necessary,when i don't really think that at all. i'm not wholly
sure how we got here ...
 
> You are using all the wrong examples.

true. no examples of front-line soldiers really sprang to mind, i'm
afraid.

> We are talking about fighting and dying here, FEAR and Panic
competition and hate all happening at the same time,

so we use a neural net and neuroelectronics/chemicals to make fewer
things happen at once. cut out fear and panic from your mixture and you
are left with only fighting and dying, hopefully less of the latter.

> Information overload,

so we use a neural net to handle things like image-processing, so that
rather than spending time and effort thinking 'is that a soldier in that
bush, or a rubbish bin?' you get an input (visual or neural, like a
sudden realisation) that there is in fact an enemy hiding in that bush
armed with a rocket launcher. it frees up time for decision-making and
cuts down on information overload. in particular, it overcomes the
visual bottleneck by going direct to the cortex.

> not somone who exist in a sterile lab environment

if tim berners-lee's lab is anything like the computer labs i've been
in, it's anything but sterile :-)

> Just take fear for instance. Management of this emotion is a primary
requirement for success in combat. Lest you say we will isolate that
emotion and remove it, absence of fear is alao a sure sign that you will
be killing yourslef and otehrs as soon as the shit hits the fan.

there are two sorts of absence from fear. there is the gung-ho no-fear
soldier convinced of his own immortality, who is a danger to his
section. and then there is the calm, fear-free soldier who will not
recklessly risk his, and others', life to prove how brave he is, and
will also not sit in a foxhole panicking and get killed because he was
unable to fight when he was needed.

> This one emotion is a double edged sword, vital to the success of one
man fighting another.

i have no first-hand experience of armed combat (thank god), so i cannot
be certain here, but from the rest of my experience as a human, i find
it hard to believe that fear per se helps in combat. i can believe that
the sharpened awareness brough on by fear helps enormously, but i think
it can be achieved without fear. it's a question of training,
neurochemistry and electronics.

> Seriously though, you still haven't shown me why this is at all
superior to standard Power Armor. What does short circuiting 90% of teh
human body buy you over a "regular" (We're talking SF here so i use the
term loosely <g>) power armor kit? To me it's anti-intuitive.

erm... ok, i give up. i started off with this idea that the suit should
be controlled by a computer, so that it could do some things
automatically (both physical and mental), and then the need arose to
shut down the parts of the human which did the same things, and it all
got out of hand. the suppression of the emotions, glands, etc, is a
somewhat far-out idea, and probably not a good one. maybe we will come
back to this one day, but for now, i agree with you: soldiers should
keep their fear. hang on, sf conspiracy interlude:

"i need my pain; it's what makes me human" - kirk, ST:V (199?)
"i need my pain; it's what makes me human" (or words to that effect, i
wrote them down somewhere) - koenig, space:1999 (1975)

the prospect of drugged-up cyborg emotionless inhuman troops does not
fill me with glee, but if they prove more effective in battle - and it
is still a pretty big if - then i think that's the way it will go.

i suppose that i'm not convinced that a 'regular' PA suit would even
work. i still think that the user's muscles should be worked by the
computer that works the suit, but certainly in cooperation with the
brain. otherwise injury may result. if we go the 'hardwired' route, then
the question is moot, as the machine becomes part of the man.

to recap your muscle memory statement, i would add that i have 'java
memory'. some bits of a program - 'main' methods, some sorts of i/o
operations, gui setup - are second nature; i don't need to think when i
write them, just type. i think that the brain's ability to adapt to new
extensions to its domain - tools, guitars, programming languages and
power armour - is tremendous.

Tom

ps that was pretty much my closing argument.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Get your free email from AltaVista at http://altavista.iname.com