Christian Davenport

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“We’re Establishing A Cargo Route To Mars”

June 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

marssettlement

Elon Musk, the self-appointed governor of Mars, may or may not be deceiving himself about the timeframe for settling our neighboring planet, as he has sometimes with his schedule for Tesla deliveries, but he isn’t oblivious to the perils involved in rushing people headlong into space. “It’s dangerous and probably people will die—and they’ll know that,” he tells the Washington Post, in an article by Christian Davenport that provides deeper details about the twin missions of establishing a cargo route and a permanent colony.

What’s amazing is that regardless of Musk’s success in creating Martians, it only seems somewhat audacious that a recently founded private company can compete with governments in Space Race 2.0. That speaks to so much about our era: technological innovation, the moonshot mentality and, of course, wealth inequality.

An excerpt:

In an interview with The Post this week, Musk laid out additional details for the first time, equating the spirit of the missions with the settlement of the New World by the colonists who crossed the Atlantic Ocean centuries ago. And he acknowledged the immense difficulties of getting to a planet that is, on average, 140 million miles from Earth.

The months-long journey is sure to be “hard, risky, dangerous, difficult,” Musk said, but he was confident people would sign up to go because “just as with the establishment of the English colonies, there are people who love that. They want to be the pioneers.”

Before those pioneers board a rocket, though, Musk said the unmanned flights would carry science experiments and rovers to the planet. The equipment would be built either by SpaceX, or others. The early flights also would serve to better understand interplanetary navigation and allow the company to test its ability to safely land craft on Mars.

“Essentially what we’re saying is we’re establishing a cargo route to Mars,” he said. “It’s a regular cargo route. You can count on it. It’s going to happen every 26 months. Like a train leaving the station. And if scientists around the world know that they can count on that, and it’s going to be inexpensive, relatively speaking compared to anything in the past, then they will plan accordingly and come up with a lot of great experiments.”

The mission is all the more audacious in that SpaceX is a private company without the resources of a government agency.•

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“We Want Assurances That A Human Is In The Loop”

May 18, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

The driverless cars in 2004’s inaugural DARPA Grand Challenge were largely a joke, a debacle in the desert, but no one was laughing five years later when Google began testing autonomous vehicles on American roads. Almost every technologist now believes they’ll be a permanent part of the traffic within two or three decades. 

The machines competing in June’s DARPA Robotics Challenge will likely be awkward and jerky, but we’re really just in the prelude stage. These humanoids won’t necessarily follow the rapid trajectory of robocars, but they’ll certainly improve greatly over time–and maybe not so much time.

And that’s cause for some worry. Presently, the Pentagon is judging only rescue robots to be utilized as part of humanitarian missions, but the military isn’t in the peace business, and every industrialized nation will see its defense department be increasingly robotized. Not all of these machines will be jaws of life.

From Christian Davenport at the Washington Post: 

The competition comes at a time when weapons technology is advancing quickly and, with lasers that can shoot small planes out of the sky and drones that can land on aircraft carriers, piercing the realm of science fiction.

But some fear that the technological advancements in weapons systems are outpacing the policy that should guide their use. At a meeting last month, the U.N. Office at Geneva sponsored a multi-nation discussion on the development of the “Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems,” the legal questions they raise and the implications for human rights.

While those details are being hashed out, Christof Heyns, the U.N.’s special rapporteur, called in 2013 for a ban on the development of what he called “lethal autonomous robots,” saying that “in addition to being physically removed from the kinetic action, humans would also become more detached from decisions to kill — and their execution.”

Mary Wareham, the global coordinator for the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a consortium of human rights groups, said the international community needs to ensure that when it comes to decisions of life and death on the battlefield, the humans are still in charge.

“We want to talk to the governments about how [the robots] function and understand the human control of the targeting and attack decisions,” she said. “We want assurances that a human is in the loop.”

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