Sword, Foster-Miller’s machine-gun-equipped robot.

“Robocop” will soon be upon us, and it’s going to be nasty.

The battefield may soon be swarming with remote-controlled machines — and later, autonomous ones — that will quickly demonstrate how a thrilling human endeavor like war could become an arcade game: robots for the rich, bow and arrow/AK-47s for the poor. Guess who wins?

For a glimpse of the “real” future, New Scientist proudly presents:

Robots have already shown their mettle in defensive roles, detonating improvised bombs in the UK, Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan. Foster-Miller’s Talon robot and its rival PackBot, from the Massachusetts-based company iRobot, are the lightweight robots now used for these tasks. These tracked machines, controlled by an operator sitting in an armoured vehicle, are capable of being driven at high speed and use manipulator arms and grippers to place a small explosive charge to disable a suspected bomb.

…More complex machines may soon be on the drawing board. A research request issued in August by the Pentagon’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) shows that military robots are one day going to be asked to make some important decisions on their own. The ONR wants to engineer mobile robots to “understand cooperative and uncooperative” people, and inform their operator if they seem a threat. It hopes to do this using artificial intelligence software fed with data from a “remote physiological stress monitoring” system, and by using speech, face and gesture recognition. From this it would draw inferences about the threat that person poses.

19Sep posts a blow-by-blow, man-on-the-street account of the military coup in Thailand, which fairly serves your recommended daily allowance of good ol’ schadenfreude.

For things to see, here’s a Flickr photo set that plunks you right in the middle of all that shit.

Bold future projections of where this is headed, blogwise: executions and purges of oppositionists available in real time in stunning, high-resolution digital photos, with General Sonthi Boonyaratglin blogging his innermost thoughts on a Xanga account, matched only by Thaksin Shinawatra’s newly-acquired penchant for super-depressive poetry written around the heartwarmingly sappy theme of, “Why must good things end?

Coup Pics

Unveiled by Korea’s Golden Zone at a fashion show in Seoul, Korea, this brassiere is solid gold, encrusted with diamonds, and is very, very expensive.

So compelled by those figures, I stared at this bra for hours, I made important calculations, and I cupped with my two hands the breasts of the first woman I found on the road in the clever scientific pretext that I just had to ask her about how it might feel when you put something hard and solid (and slightly trembling) on your succulent breasts. And in the end, there’s only one desire this wonderful golden underwear stimulated in my heart:

The desire to beat the pulpy shit out of whoever neanderthal designed this.