

Pentagon drafts today’s kids to build tomorrow’s aerial killers  - kennjason
http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/115823-pentagon-drafts-todays-kids-to-build-tomorrows-aerial-killers

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Groxx
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?

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simonsarris
> 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).

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Groxx
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?

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anthonyb
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>

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baltcode
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?

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whichdan
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!"

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baltcode
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.

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Groxx
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.

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

