Is Too Much Time With Robots a Bad Thing?

I’m a sucker for military robot stories. Today, The Independent has an article about concerns from the University of Sheffield’s Professor Sharkey that, as robots are used in more and more ways, people will become more and more isolated from each other.

Professor Sharkey also calls for ethical guidelines for battlefield robots, and the article cites the US Future Combat Systems project that would allow, according to the article, “a single soldier initiating large-scale ground and aerial attacks by a robot droid army.”

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The High Cost of an Enormous Nuclear Arsenal

The United States has spent somewhere in the realm of $5.5 trillion creating its enormous nuclear arsenal, but even as they look to God-only-knows-how-much more on modernizing their warheads, a much less recognized expense, what to do with the enormous stockpile of waste from their construction looms large. Fear not, the Department of Energy has a plan to cut corners here.

Of course there’s plenty of opposition, but essentially, the plan is to hollow out a mountain near Las Vegas, and chuck all the material in there. If that sounds dangerous, don’t worry: in another hundred years the Energy Department will send an army of yet-to-be-invented robots into the facility to install some likewise yet-to-be-invented titanium shields to protect the waste from the water and the water from the waste. Win-win, at least in a hundred years.

Nevada’s Nuclear Projects Agency director Bob Loux doubts it’ll ever happen. The titanium would already cost $8-$10 billion in today’s prices, who knows what it will cost in a century. Project director Rod McCullum thinks its reasonable though, reminding us that “everything’s made out of titanium these days.”

Gary Webb Was A Great Reporter

For those interested in the tragic story of Gary Webb, the reporter who covered the Dark Alliance between the CIA and crack epidemic-supplying Contra gangsters, as told in this weekend’s viewpoint by Robert Parry, you can listen to my January 31, 2004 interview of Webb here.

You can read the entire Dark Alliance series for the San Jose Mercury News here.

And get the book here.

Where the Taliban Gets Their Money

The subcontractors responsible for moving NATO supplies from Karachi to the forces in Afghanistan have reportedly paid millions of dollars in protection money, called the “Taliban Tax” by the Times, to keep militants from attacking them.

One company reported spending 25% of its security money to the Taliban, while another company is reportedly on such good terms with the militants that they send fighters to escort their convoys.

It provides an interesting alternative explanation for the recent attacks on NATO vehicles around Peshawar, perhaps the depots fell behind on their protection fees.