US Military Gears Up For Cyborg Soldiers With New DARPA Project

Cyborg soldiers could be part of the U.S. military soon as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on creating an implantable chip that can connect a human brain to a computer to facilitate data delivery.Cyborg soldiers could be part of the U.S. military soon as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on creating an implantable chip that can connect a human brain to a computer to facilitate data delivery.

In the case of the U.S. military, this could mean faster information acquisition on enemy position and swifter relay of instructions on the field.

DARPA formed the Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) program to come up with a neural interface, a system that connects biological nervous systems with digital devices, creating "unprecedented signal resolution and data-transfer bandwidth" between the two.

NESD program manager Phillip Alvelda pointed out that the best of today's brain-computer interface systems are similar to two supercomputers trying to communicate with each other through an old 300-baud modem. Currently, approved neural interfaces have just 100 channels, each responsible for compiling signals from thousands of neurons at the same time, resulting in not just imprecision but noise as well.

"Imagine what will become possible when we upgrade our tools to really open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics," he said.

Think of the neural interface DARPA is developing as a translator that could turn electrochemical language from the brain into digital signals that a device can understand, and vice versa. The NESD is looking at developing a system capable of communication so efficient that it can handle signals from up to a million neurons within any part of the brain.

Given what it is trying to accomplish, the NESD program will require the expertise of scientists from different fields, such as medical device packaging, low-power electronics, synthetic biology, photonics and neuroscience. To translate biological signals into digital ones, scientists will have to use advanced neuro-computation and mathematical techniques.

The U.S. military is hopeful that industry leaders will partner with DARPA to further research for the NESD program through manufacturing and prototyping services, as well as intellectual property.

DARPA will be hosting a meeting from Feb. 2 to 3 in Arlington, Virginia to gather potential participants in the NESD program. Over the course of four years, the agency anticipates that its investment in the NESD program will reach up to $60 million.

Machine revolution to snatch away 5 million jobs from humans

Robots are waiting to takeover your job.

The "Fourth Industrial Evolution" is already happening, according to a report from the World Economic Forum, which focuses on how technological change is influences the workplace and global economies at its meeting this week in Davos, Switzerland. Advancement in fields such as robotics, big data, and artificial intelligence will alter workplaces and the necessary new skills from workers in the years to come, according to "The Future of Jobs" report.

Not everyone will be affected the same way, with the report confirming that the jobs at high risks are office and administrative roles. Other industries with negative job forcast includes manufacturing and production, the arts and entertainment, construction and extraction, and installation and maintenance. In all, automation and robotics will result in 5.1 million job losses over the next five years, the researchers found.

"As all industries adjust,all occupations are moving through a fundamental change," wrote World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab and managing board member Richard Samans in the report. "While certain jobs are under threat by redundancy and others emerge rapidly, existing jobs are also passing through a change in the skill sets needed to do them."

The findings are based on a survey of 371 global companies with more than 13 million employees in 15 major advanced and emerging economies.

Office and administrative jobs will face what the report calls "a perfect storm of technological trends." Mobile internet and cloud technology will make some jobs redundant, while big data analytics and the Internet of things will also reduce the need for workers in these roles, the research found.

Around 7.1 million jobs will be cut down, with two-thirds of those losses centered on office and administrative categories. That will be somewhat offset by the gain of 2 million new jobs in areas such as business and financial operations. The net result? About 5.1 million fewer jobs overall by 2020, the report noted.

While that might seem frightening, especially to office managers, the World Economic Forum's forecast is hardly predicting the kind of doom that Oxford researchers predicted last year. According to that report, almost half of U.S. jobs are at risk, with household service robots and automation projected to sharply reduce the need for workers.

The job market is already changing rapidly in response to the Fourth Industrial Evolution, with employers seeking workers with STEM-related skills and experience. But almost four out of 10 employers report having difficulties finding qualified workers, which suggests that the education system isn't retooling quickly enough to provide students with the skills they'll need to survive in the labor market.

"It is simply not possible to weather the current technological revolution by waiting for the next generation's workforce to become better prepared," the report noted. "Instead it is critical that businesses take a commanding role in supporting their current workforces through re-training, that individuals take a proactive approach to their own lifelong learning."

While "The Future of Work" doesn't delve into economic inequality, their forecast has troubling implications for how the robotics revolution may aggravate already widening gaps between the haves and have-nots, based on issues ranging from gender to geographic location.

Any industrial revolution comes with growing pains, and among those most likely to feel the brunt of it are women, given that some of the fields with the highest projected growth -- such as in computers and math -- have the lowest rates of female workforce participation. That underscores the need to reexamine why women aren't pursuing so-called STEM fields, or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Because STEM-related jobs tend to pay higher salaries than other industries, it means fewer women may reach earnings parity with their male cohorts in the coming years.

And then there is the widening gap between rich and poor countries. The Fourth Industrial Revolution could make that worse, with poor countries losing jobs to automation, increasing the jobless rates there and creating even bigger refugee waves. The Middle East and North Africa have the highest youth unemployment rate in the world, and many of the countries in those regions are failing to equip their youths with the skills necessarily to thrive in a world driven by AIs, robots, and automation, the report noted.

"The region runs the risk of worsening unemployment and talent shortages if skills gaps are exacerbated due to technological changes that further disrupt business models and labour markets," it warned.

Space Bots & Android Waste Collectors: What's Next for Robotics

It was a good year to be a robot.

In 2015, researchers in Korea launched a robotic exoskeleton which users can control with their minds, a four-legged bot in China set a new world record by walking 83.28 miles (134.03 km) without stopping and 3D-printing robots in Amsterdam started work on a new steel footbridge.

But these smart machines are able to do more. Researchers around the world are now designing and building robots that will do more noteworthy tasks in 2016 and beyond. From venturing into planets to putting out fires at sea, here are a few skills that bots could pick up in the new year. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

Travel to Mars

Space robots already exist. Robotic arms and hands on the outside of the International Space Station (ISS) assist astronauts during spacewalks,move equipment and perform other duties. A humanoid robot named Robonaut 2 also helps out around the orbiting laboratory, doing simple and sometimes perilous tasks so that human astronauts do other things. And there goes the Mars rovers, Opportunity and Curiosity, which serve as rolling robotic laboratories, exploring the surface of the Red Planet, collecting samples and relaying data back to Earth.

NASA plans to send a different type of robot to Mars in the nearest future. The space agency's Valkyrie robot, or R5, is an upscaled Robonaut built originally to perform search and rescue operations as part of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Robotics Challenge.Even NASA's bot did not fair better in the competition, not qualifying for the last round, which was held in June 2015. Yet the machine's makers think there's hope for the humanoid robot.

NASA recently asked two universities, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Northeastern University in Boston, to work on further development of the R5 robot. Researchers at these institutions will get funding and support from the space agency to create software that will allow the bot more useful in space. The ultimate goal of this new Space Robotics Challenge is to develop a humanoid bot that could help humans explore Mars, NASA said.

Trash collecting

Future robots could be more useful in space, but there also a few tasks these machines could perform to make them indispensable right here on Earth. For example, they could move garbage. Researchers in Sweden and the United States are working on the development of such trash-chucking robots.

Spearheaded by Swedish automaker Volvo, the project is known as Robot-based Autonomous Refuse handling, or ROAR, and the goal is to develop remote-controlled bots that could be deployed from a garbage truck to the curb outside your home. The bots will lift heavy refuse bins, empty the trash into the garbage truck and then roll along to the next house to do the same, sparing sanitation workers from any heavy lifting.

Swedish waste-management company Renova is also developing a garbage truck that will accommodate the automated system needed to control the bots and, presumably, carry the helpful machines around when they're not hauling trash. The project is expected to be ready for testing by June 2016.

Fighting fires

The middle of the ocean might be the last place you'd expect to find firefighting robots, but that's precisely where the U.S. Navy would like to send these flame-quelling machines. In February 2015, the Navy unveiled its firefighting bot, SAFFiR (short for Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot), which the Navay hopes to employ in the near future aboard ships at sea.

Developed by researchers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, the humanoid bot stands nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall and is equipped with thermal-imaging technologies that enable the robot to detect heat and see through smoke. It also has a laser range-finder that allows the machine to map out the distance between itself and an object. The bot can hold a fire hose, too, which means it can not only detect fires or potential sources of fires, but also put out flames should the need arise.

The bot isn't meant to replace human firefighters, but could assist them, said the researchers who developed the machine. Before the bot sees any real action, the researchers must improve its intelligence, communications capabilities, speed, computing power and battery life, they said. Considering that it took four years to get the bot ready for its first public demonstration, chances are slim that SAFFiR will be deployed in 2016. But keep an eye out for this firefighting robot in the years to come.

Running wild

Lots of bots can run; there are even superfast cheetah bots and trotting, doglike bots. But getting a two-legged, humanoid robot to move at a jog is something that researchers have struggled to do, until fairly recently. And getting a bipedal robot to run outside of a lab, over rough terrain, has proven to be an even more difficult challenge. [Robots on the Run! 5 Bots That Can Really Move]

But in August 2015, robotics company Boston Dynamics released a YouTube video showing its humanoid robot, Atlas, jogging through the woods. The robot even climbed down a steep embankment and stepped over a log. This video terrified a lot of people, but it also raised hopes about the utility of bipedal bots, which gained a reputation for being slow and clumsy after the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) final last June (all of the bots fell down while on the competition course, and by the end of contest, the lot of them were in various states of repair). Atlas was one of several bots to compete in the DARPA competition.

Atlas still has a way to go before it will be ready to run through the forest at a full sprint, and before it accomplishes that goal, it will have to overcome another obstacle — its tether. The bot's movements are currently powered by a hydraulic system that is in turn powered by an electric cord that plugs into the robot's back. Before Atlas can really take off, Boston Dynamics scientists need to figure out a better way to power the bot, whose onboard lithium-ion battery pack currently lasts for only about an hour even when the bot isn't moving at full tilt. It's a design challenge the company said it will likely be working on in the new year.