TheAgitator.com
You Can’t Hug a Hologram
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009Crikey, this is creepy:
The announcement, from the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, requests “a highly interactive PC or web-based application to allow family members to verbally interact with virtual renditions of deployed Service Members.” The application must “produce compelling interactive dialogue between a Service member and their families … using video footage or high-resolution 3-D rendering. The child should be able to have a simulated conversation with a parent about generic, everyday topics. For instance, a child may get a response from saying ‘I love you’, or ‘I miss you’, or ‘Good night mommy/daddy.’ “
Disturbing.
Get one for Will Smith to investigate
I’ll throw out the first star wars quote:
‘Luke, I am your FAAAATHER.’
eeeewwwwww!
Sounds like a very stupid idea. Somebody’s got too much time on their hands.
http://rightklik.net
Isn’t it also way beyond the capabilities of current technology to do well enough so it won’t just scare the kid senseless?
You can’t hug the hologram, but are you sure that having the hologram is worse that not having it?
The political question of whether to deploy soldiers has nothing to do with the problem of helping the families of those that deploy. Moreover, this kind of interactive technology could have many other applications.
The possibilities are endless. “Not tonight, dear — I have a memory leak.”
“Help us Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope.”
There. I did it.
Lior,
1. The hardship for the families of those that deploy absolutely bears on the question of whether to deploy soldiers. It’s one of the hidden costs that’s hard to measure but can have a huge impact down the road. With that in mind, efforts by the military to reduce that hardship have the primary goal of making it easier to deploy the military. This might not be something we want to encourage. See Sun Tzu on this.
3. I’d love to see how this would go over with the families of, say, prisoners killed in Abu Ghraib. “Kids, we hung your father from the ceiling until his lungs ruptured and then posed for pictures with his corpse. Here’s a hologram of him, so that you can look at him and say ‘I miss you, daddy’ every day until you’re old enough to pick up a rifle and kill some American scum.”
4. Other applications, i.e. porn, porn, and…did I mention porn? (”I love you, daddy” indeed.) Researching toward a useless and dangerous application in the hope of developing a technology that has better uses is moronic. Can we really not think of a better project to fund? If not, I suggest porn.
Straight outta Max Headroom.
It’s a rudimentary version of what Rudy Rucker calls the “Lifebox.”
My prediction: The government will spend billions on this technology, then it will be wholly rejected by the children of servicemen, the company will then license the tech to porn kings. American men everywhere will become hopelessly addicted to the 24/7 virtual sex machine. The government will prohibit the technology and appoint a Cybersex Czar. Criminals will make millions and lives will be destroyed and everyone will forget that the government came up with this scheme.
Wow, I guess the soldiers will be in Iraq, or some other shit box for the rest of their lives.
Here, have a hologram kid.
Mark: the hardship to the families is an important issue. When the country decides to go to war it must weight the potential benefits against the costs. However, technology for mitigating the hardship can hardly be said to be a bad idea, just because it will make it easier to deploy the troops. In theory, the chances for deployment go up, but the total costs remain the same.
The real problem you are wrestling with is that the government deploys troops far too easily. The solution to this is to fix the government, not to take out your frustrations on the families of deployed troops.
OK, now we have proof that the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury is just fucking us.
Well played, Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury. Well played.
Lior: My problem with this is not the use of technology to ameliorate the stresses on armed service families, but rather the use of profoundly creepy and disturbing technology that could well produce more problems than it solves. A computer generated, holographic replacement for a parent is profoundly wrong, and any children exposed to such a technology unwillingly could only be consider as being a subjects of a deeply unethical psychological experiment. I know that our military seems to think that they can perform unethical human experiments on the troops, but since when did this exemption from ethics extend to their children as well? What if the children developed an emotional attachment to these avatars? How will they then react to their father or mother coming back with emotional problems? Will they want to turn off the happy daddy and get held by the one who is crying all the time? What if the masters of the avatars take advantage of the emotional weakness of children in relation to their parents to fill their heads with stupid ideas?
“And don’t forget honey, if you love daddy, you’ll have a happy meal for me today!”
As a human being, I am appalled, and as a scientist, I am outraged.
After virtual sex how could you not expect virtual parents?