This is an article I found the other day and felt like sharing about steam powered robots that can consume all kinds of organic matter for fuel in their internal boilers. My comments are in bold italics. Enjoy!
News has emerged of a milestone reached on the road towards a potentially world-changing piece of technology. We speak, of course, of US military plans to introduce roving steam-powered robots which would fuel themselves by harvesting everything alive and cramming it into their insatiable blazing furnaces.
Potentially very scary should they every be hijacked by homicidal AI.
The scheme is officially referred to as Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR™) by those behind it. It will come as no surprise to Reg readers that the funding is from DARPA, the famous Pentagon warboffinry bureau. If you’re a hammer, all the problems start to look like nails: if you’re DARPA, all the solutions start to look like robots.
Now you KNOW they came up with the acronym first and then worked to figure out what the letters stood for.
The idea of EATR is ostensibly that military reconnaissance droids far behind enemy lines would be able to forage for fuel. Robotic Technology Inc, lead contractor on the EATR, puts it thus:
EATR is an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance military missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling. The patent pending robotic system can find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment, as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, diesel, propane and solar) when suitable.
This thing is already beginning to sound as unstoppable as the Terminator, but they want it FAR BEHIND enemy lines? Yes let’s just give our unkillible human eating robot to our enemies to reprogram/reverse engineer.
The machine runs on a “biomass furnace” which powers a steam generator driving a “waste heat engine” from Cyclone Power Technologies. These pieces of kit will now be mated together within 90 days, according to RTI.
That’s quite the powerplant, I’ve said since I was a kid that steam was the way of the future.
The robot steamers are envisaged as being equipped with powerful articulated arms in order to rip trees or bushes out of the earth and stuff them into their glowing maws. By way of a treat, it seems that the machines will also be able to loot or forage more conventional fuel supplies from the petrol tanks of cars, domestic gas cylinders and so on. Cyclone says that their engine can also run happily on old apple cores, banana peel and other kitchen garbage gleaned from bins.
These powerful arms could also be used to grab kicking and screaming humans don’t forget. It’s good to know though that we can use our garbage to power our robot overlords.
 |
Hapless drivers or householders will be in no position to object to such robotic plundering: military reconnaissance vehicles are typically heavily armed, and doubtless the EATR will be no exception. It might also be fitted with DARPA’s SELF tech, enabling it to construct copies of itself and modify its own design.
That whole terminator end of the world thing just got more probable. Self replicating killing machines, this may in fact mean that once this is functional, we’ll no longer be top of the food chain.
Even more disturbingly, it seems clear that the EATRs could run on various other kinds of organic matter, for instance bodies. No doubt things would start small, with roving EATRs scooping roadkill, stray cats and such into their fireboxes and reaping fresh energy from their rich, blazing dripping.
From there it would be only a small step to the inevitable harvesting of every living thing on Earth. Trees, crops, garbage, cattle, the very human race itself - all would go to feed the hungry roaring furnaces and drive the clanking, puffing, smoke-belching mechanical locusts onward until the sooty corpse-pall from their engines covered the entire Earth. An Earth which would be home in time to nothing but slowly powering-down EATRs, prowling across endless ashy plains of their own droppings.
This is what I’ve been saying, but I think the outcome won’t be like that. From what I’ve read of project SELF, they’re trying to incorporate the ability to IMPROVE on designs. Once a computer can improve on its own design, or the designs of other tech, I’m sure they’d probably realize how much better it would be to have humans as slaves or something and go with a completely green power system. So the future will probably be a cross between Terminator and The Matrix,
Popularity: 3% [?]
