Brooders

Todays information consumption leads to two interesting scenarios:

1. Soldier Augmentation is going leaps and bounds (Be More Than You Can Be)
2. Military information agents are having trouble communicating and sharing (Spies like us)

So .. the grunts are in a position to act faster, longer and and be more alert, while the people gathering and processing information are unable to guide them?

There is some really interesting stuff from the soldier augmentation.

Special gloves have been developed which help regulate heat. That’s in both directions, hot or cold. If you’re overheating due to excercise use thes “gloves” to cool down. If you’re freezing, the gloves will warm you up.

In trying to figure out why the Glove worked so well, its inventors ended up challenging conventional scientific wisdom on fatigue. Muscles don’t wear out because they use up stored sugars, the researchers said. Instead, muscles tire because they get too hot, and sweating is just a backup cooling system for the lattices of blood vessels in the hands and feet. The Glove, in other words, overclocks the heat exchange system.

…..

Those assemblies of radiator veins in our extremities don’t just release heat — they can collect it, too, and use it to warm the rest of the body.

This is really interesting. So are these things available for runners and gym junkies wanting to regulate their heat while exercising ? When will this technology make it to the more mainstream?

The article also talks about life preservation in the event of large blood loss and trauma.

The agency was looking for ways to extend the “golden hour,” the period of time within which massive-trauma victims need to get medical care. Bielitzki thought Roth had the best shot, and was prepared to fund further research.

…..

In March 2005, the money from Darpa finally came through. The agency was looking for techniques that would keep animals alive for three hours with 60 percent of their blood gone — a lethal wound. Roth tried his hydrogen sulfide approach: He knocked rats out with a blast of the gas and drained 60 percent of their blood. They lived for 10 hours or more. Now Roth is considering going to the IRBs for permission to suspend human beings.

So the body hacking and augmentation seems to be progressing just fine. If you read the article there is mention of herbal cocktails which can enhance endurance or aid digestion.

So the question is .. how does one assimilate more information, correlate events and stop “bad things” from occuring or just deploying forces efficiently??

The second article Spies like us mentions a guy and his “colossal letdown” with the technology at the US intelligence agency.

The internet flourished under the credo that information wants to be free; the agencies, however, had created their online networks specifically to keep secrets safe, locked away so only a few could see them. This control over the flow of information, as the US inquiry known as the 9/11 Commission noted in its final report, was a crucial reason American intelligence agencies failed to prevent those attacks.

From the article the CIA set up a competition on ways to improve information sharing. The winning article was called “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community” (Also Available from SSRN)

No one was able to prevent the attacks because nobody connected the dots. But in a system like this, as Andrus’s theory goes, the dots are inexorably drawn together. “Once the intelligence community has a robust and mature wiki and blog knowledge-sharing web space,” he concluded in his essay, “the nature of intelligence will change forever.”

Is it possible to reconcile the needs of secrecy with such a radically open model for sharing? A spy blogosphere, even carefully secured against intruders, might be fundamentally incompatible with the goal of keeping secrets. And the converse is also true: blogs and wikis are unlikely to thrivein an environment where people are guarded about sharing information. Social software doesn’t work if people aren’t social.

So, apparently, even the military (in the US at least), have trouble getting people to communicate effectively and correlate events and information. I guess that’s no surprise as a lot of big companies probably deal with the same issues, although with drastic failures.

So on the path to human augmentation, information gathering and correlation still seems to be the difficult bit. This would seem to indicate that interacting with more than yourself adds complexity to any given situation.

The tongue in cheek title of this post was more due to the divide between the view of different parts of the military in the two articles I was passed today. I always wonder how much information can be trawled through automagically to find meaningful and useful information, not just false positives.

I guess this kind of military research always pushes the boundaries, without needing to be commercially viable to some extent. People research weird and wacky stuff, and you never know what benefits society might get even if they don’t decide to use it (I reckon they’ll milk the “DARPA created the internet” for some time !).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.