Very interesting story over at GamePolitics.com about a young gamer who turned into a soldier by using the skills he developed while playing on his Xbox. The 19 year old kid was a high school drop out and wanted to be a helicopter mechanic to make his father proud. Well, he didn’t quite qualify for that kind of career but he sure qualified to be a drone pilot. Flying a pilotless aircraft about 7,000 miles away, surveying the dangerous terrain and dropping hellfire missiles when necessary. The long hours on the Xbox helped develop skills that naturally trained him to be a drone pilot. In fact, he is one of the best!
I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. But when I think about it, if I was asked if I could be a drone pilot just going off my experience with playing video games, I feel really confident that I could do it. I have an older post about robots going into the heat of the battle being controlled by a Wiimote, check it out: Future Wars to be fought by Wiibots?
It’s amazing that this is the world we live in now. This is reality. Robots are taking over the world! haha, I almost couldn’t type that.. I’m just messin‘. But seriously, the reality is now that soldiers are a completely different breed of men. Most of these drone pilots aren’t even overseas with everyone else. They drive into work each day, drop some bombs and patrol the skies over enemy territory for like 8-12 hours and then head home to their families just like you and I would do. Minus the dropping bombs part of course.
So what the hell? Are we heading towards an iRobot society? Are machines going to take over and become cleverer than humans like Google and Nasa believe? Or are we cool because we’ll be controlling them with Xbox 360 and Wii Controllers and we can just turn them off if they get all Terminator on our asses? In any case, I hope Arnold Schwarzenegger is around when it happens.
Read more at GamePolitics.com…
See interview with P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War…
The Gamer Report 