• 253 Posts
  • 52 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: December 9th, 2023

help-circle










  • This is the most important question. The context of Hawaii cannot be ignored when talking about agriculture, it is inherently charged with politics.

    The second most important question is how the hell did we reduce the collective intelligence of our society to think that we could beat dogs at being dogs?

    longer point on this

    I can see a robot dog being useful for walking into a radioactive waste zone or trying to defuse a bomb, sure… I am fascinated by cool uses of unmanned vehicles I run a fediverse community about them because I enjoy learning about it so much…

    …but replacing a farm dog with a robot dog is probably one of the most naive things I can possibly think of trying to do. Why? If you can’t figure out a way to use dogs to do this I think that says more about you than it says about dogs… have you ever watched skilled sheep herding dogs???

    https://caherconnell.com/sheepdog-demonstrations/

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tUMxcaCym0

    It is the height of techbro ignorance to look at a Border Collie and think “yeah I can design a better robot version of that”… like… what??

    For the record, so long as you treat the dogs reasonably, dogs love this kind of thing, it is what they live for.

    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12042896/

    Herding dogs exhibit a distinct constellation of behaviors marked by inherent instinct and motor skills that manipulate and guide livestock in response to instructive commands and cues. Comparison of the whole-genome sequences of herding and nonherding breeds reveals signatures of positive selection associated with pathways underlying social interaction and cognitive functions. Of the strong selective sweep signals, haplotypes within ephrin type-B receptor 1 (EPHB1), which is linked to locomotor hyperactivity and spatial memory, show evidence of segregation within breed lineages for the conformation versus working lines of border collies and introgression with a genetically and geographically distant herding breed of Entlebucher mountain dogs. We show that a working line–specific haplotype of EPHB1 is associated with elevated levels of chase-bite motor patterns based on a well-validated behavior survey. These findings indicate that functional selection has shaped the genetic architecture of herding breeds, which may relate to their proficiency in addressing diverse tasks and challenges in maintaining control over the herd.

    We literally genetically engineered dogs to enjoy herding and chasing behaviors, why are we just throwing that in the trash? Why not focus on making a robot/smart infrastructure that helps take care of dogs in a humane way with less human crews?

    Ughhh this is a perfect example of why techbros are so insufferable. They can only see what they understand as the future.

    I mean I guess it is also a product of how much we love dogs, their use in war is extensive but far more limited than it would be if we were more comfortable as an international community with media about violence against dogs (big generalization I know). In other words, we use robot dogs for war not because robot dogs are superior to dogs but because using dogs for war is a mass wave style is similarly repulsive to people as using human soldiers that way (though it still happens). As a result we assume that in civil contexts that robot dogs useful in war are going to be wayyyy more advanced than what civilians have access too… but a civilian can adopt a border collie and have a way more advanced “machine” than any technology company can hope to build.

    I think there is far more of a future in UAVs that keep a tally on farm dogs so humans can make sure the dogs are safe than there is for robot dogs straight up replacing dogs… but I think it might take awhile for people to realize that who aren’t people using dogs to get work done every day.

    Watch some random videos of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race and watch the behavior of the dogs. These are animals that just finished a 1,510 km race… do they look alive or beaten down?

    https://iditarod.com/videos/featured/

    Humans aren’t going to be able to make a superior robot dog to an actual dog for a very long time.


    TL;DR Don’t try to beat Dogs at being Dogs with Robots, make Dogs more useful with Robot Helpers. Dogs are already extremely advanced and institutional groups of humans can reasonably care for a dog and tell when it is being seriously neglected or mistreated.













  • Definitely valid I was trying to emphasize I was I shared the article because of the category of technology, less so the specific “product”. An underappreciated aspect of “Drone Warfare” is a high degree of data sharing between different elements on the battlefield.

    It is necessary to emphasize the architecture shaping these conflicts on the back end and what makes them too decisive to ignore.

    For example this forward looking article about Link16 speculates pretty accurately what warfare would look like 20 years later.

    https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/1204warfare/

    With data links still being fielded and Internet protocols wide open to debate, much remains to be done before the future architectures become familiar tactical tools. But the Air Force is on the right path. “I’m really optimistic about where we’re going,” said Hobbins. “I do believe that technology will get us to where we want to go, which I believe is the self-forming, self-healing global information grid in the long term. Quite frankly, you could look out to the 2020 time frame and say hopefully we’ll be there by then, and I believe technology will move us even faster, and we’ll have great elements of this airborne network by the 2014 time frame.”

    Never believe armchair observers when they say war has made a clean break with the past.














  • Yeah, the issue is Europe hasn’t really invested in heavy helicopter design. Many of the major military powers in Europe seem to have been convinced attack helicopters were obsolete in a near-peer military conflict for decades, and I think it has created a large blindspot that is only now being addressed by the AW249 and acquisitions like the UK and Poland adopting a large numbers of AH64s.

    The AW149 can do a lot of things, but I am skeptical somebody can make a better Chinook or Apache. They were both extremely forward looking designs when they appeared ~60 years ago and all of that time up until now has only given these airframes time to be iterated and improved. The leap to making these platforms unmanned capable is already happening with significant milestones achieved with the Chinook recently.

    I mean, yeah I get it though the US is out of control right now but the US understood the way helicopters fundamentally changed warfare a long time ago and Europe can’t magically make up for all that lost time in working a design to maturity that was spent denying the decisiveness of rotarywing/VTOL Close Air Support while the US invested in it.

    Can Europe even produce a heavy lift helicopter in the class that the Chinook is?