https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a18574/enhanced-human-operations/ I'm not sure that's right (namely "it scares the crap out of us"). It might scare the crap out of Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work and others somehow involved in the United States defense sector in one way or another but "us" is too broadly defined. Currently a lot, maybe even most of the funding and research for "enhanced human operations" is being spent and done here in the US, not in Russia or the PRC. Anyway, this sort of thing is about the most fascinating thing happening on this planet today. My favorite part of the entire article: Looking back in time, during the 20th century and the current century up to now, every major US military action was, rightly or wrongly, predicated on the idea of preserving >muh freedoms. Now, on the other hand, we are apparently heading in the distinctly opposite direction of "FREEDOM IS IRRELEVANT. SELF-DETERMINATION IS IRRELEVANT." And I'm not complaining because I always liked that kind of thing anyway but I'm inclined to think that, soon, conservatives here in the States will have to choose between "supporting the military" and "traditional values", because the territory we are heading into is far from traditional or, even, human.
During WW ll the Germans used meth and during the Vietnam War if you were close friends with the corpsman you could get some little black capsules, go-go pills. Flyboys always had access to uppers and the U.S. Air Force pretty much had everything else covered.
"Go pills", yes, an exemplar of all such technologies that came before. Like Maximilian armor, the absolute height of present science. Both of those two technologies were essentially transhuman, the first, from humans sleeping too much, the latter, from humans having skin not hard enough and going looking for magnificent steel armor as a result.
LSD was created for the U.S. Army. DARPA has come up with a lot of cool stuff. But the guys at DARPA who invented the internet for the U.S. military said in hindsight it was probably the biggest mistake DARPA ever made. It actually dumbed down society and today we have the most misinformed people in history. Already hundreds of thousands of kids are graduating from high school unable to read and write in cursive and in another couple of generations you're going to have people who will not be able to write their signature on a document.
The first synthesis and use of LSD was by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938, its psychedelic properties entirely unexpected. He was trying to discover new, but more or less traditional pharmaceuticals and found a powerful, mind-bending substance instead and later used it throughout his life. It is true that the US Army and the British Army (maybe among others?) experimented with LSD as an incapacitating agent but both eventually gave up that ambition. From what I know, it was because the effects of LSD are too unpredictable when administered to a wide swath of different people. In any case, LSD was not developed at the behest of the US Army, though they considered its application in earlier years. That would surprise me, especially as DARPA research projects now seem to be aiming for a sort of "neural Internet", an "Internet 2.0". I really want to see evidence and quotes for this. And it is entirely true that there is a lot of bullshit on the Internet but, even before the Internet came into being, there were a majority of people who didn't care much about being well-informed and a minority of people who did care. Before the advent of the Internet, the former were still full of **** and the latter were hobbled, relative to now. For that latter group, the Internet is a cornucopia, a godsend. So I would say the Internet has, on balance, made Earth a much more knowledgeable place. I'm 30 and I learned cursive in grade school but my cursive now sucks. Even when I was a kid and learning that stuff, I remember adults talking about not using cursive the "right" way. For my own part, I don't have very good fine motor skills because of a persistent hand tremor and, because of this, I have to hold a soldering iron almost like a flashlight, instead of like a pencil, and use an apparatus with clamps to expose the board I'm working on to me advantageously. That's a much worse outcome than sucking at cursive and, in either case, not having that ability doesn't make me an idiot. Cursive, in particular, is essentially an irrelevant skill now and we should just let it go, with exceptions only for historians who want to read earlier texts. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. When the dying Alex Murphy is cyborgified he retains the traits that made him a good cop when he was merely human and gains a bunch of other positive traits. He is a high-minded, impartial and fearless upholder of the law and is utterly lacking in corruption or selfishness, in addition to having a much tougher body and much greater mental and physical abilities than an ordinary human. I would gladly trade many ordinary human cops for Robocop (especially in certain parts of this county that I live in, which are full of egotistical dickhead mall cops with guns). Anyhow, the analogy you should be drawing here, with research aiming to give warfighters the ability to communicate by thought alone, is with the Borg from Star Trek. And the Borg only ever lose because of artistic license, because the Federation has to win. Here on Earth, John de Lancie can't just snap his fingers and remove you from a terrible situation that you find yourself in. In fact, you should spend more time contemplating what bad things might come to you if you and the country you live in don't embrace these changes. If superhuman others decide that the patch of land you are standing on is now theirs, what would you intend to do about it exactly?
What, you mean my 'Robocop' reference? Don't lose any sleep over it, it was just a joke which obviously rolled off the table. ( )
Seems to me that full robots would be a better option, whether autonomous or remotely controlled or both.
We ignore this kind of thing because it is most likely unworkable, and many decades away even at best. The US has some of the best and brightest when it comes to such research. But even after decades, it is still largely used as a form of "thought experiment", to give the foundations for the foundations of future technologies. Not the actual technologies themselves. Yes, we have had "super suits" for decades. I even had a chance to play with the Hughes Aerospace "Soldier of the Future" concept in 1995. It was interesting, having a helmet with a visor with a HUD, and GPS and integrated communications built into a backpack. Along with Kevlar covering almost all of the body. The geeks who were making it up laughed when I told them it was a joke. But they took me a bit more seriously when I told them I had been a grunt for 10 years, and there was no way I was going to hump that 80 pound monstrosity anywhere, with a visor that was detrimental at best to my vision. Filled with data that I could not hope to even use (and would likely distract) in a firefight. Plus carry a dozen or mor pounds of batteries to power the thing. A few decades ago, we even developed a "smart rifle", that could shoot grenades that would explode in pre-determined locations, even behind enemies. Also scrapped. While what the OP said is interesting, we have not even developed the precursors for the precursors for that technology as of yet. DARPA has been working on various "Exo-skeleton" designs for decades now, and at most they go to the field for a limited test, then go right back into the lab because they simply do not work. After a decade Warrior Web is still in Phase A, and have yet to move to Phase B. https://www.darpa.mil/program/warrior-web
