Tell your gun's tracker what your target it. Your rifle does the tracking, and fires automatically when your aim hits the sweet spot. Guerrilla fighters, snipers, and assassins alike will love this mix of real-time processing with image recognition technology. Where we go from there – automated weapons with facial recognition, perhaps? – could indeed be more scary than (semi-)manually operated weapons.
It's quite hard to find any information about TrackingPoint, the Texas-based company behind this surreal demonstration. It seems that they haven't launched their product series yet, so if you are interested in what's in planning, here's one of the better descriptions on the upcoming product lineup:
/via +David Kokua
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Some insurgent groups resort to child soldiers, so biometrics would be insufficient to distinguish combatants from children. I suspect facial recognition equipment would be too bulky for covert assassination, as well as complicated by body doubles (decoys).
+Jim Lai Facial recognition is good for political assassinations, not guerrilla warfare. Killing enemy fighters instead of the children they put at the front of the barricade, on the other hand, is a potential use of lock-and-fire technology. But neither of those options are ones that a peaceful civilization should even consider in the first place.
Facial recognition isn't that useful for guerrillas. They'd have to gather timely and accurate intel if they wanted to tag all enemies in the region; anyone they miss could be the one who has enough time to fire back and kill them. Putting in their own faces as a failsafe would be an intelligence gold mine if it fell into enemy hands.
Besides, if facial recognition combat equipment becomes a common technology for some reason, it's easy enough to come up with camouflage patterns that would stymie facial recognition.
http://ahprojects.com/archives/cv-dazzle-visualizations
If they need a Tag / Track system to hit a target at 300 yards, that is disgraceful. Disgraceful I say!
+Boris Borcic for that, we would need +Eric Pouhier 's proposal (Asimov's first law of robotics) enshrined in law and in R&D ethics.
+Sophie Wrobel in any case, pissing contests aren't justification to develop high tech lethality.
+John Lipscomb to be fair: their site doesn't show any gunning down of fellow man. Their target audience, based on their material, seems to be deer hunters, sharp shooting clubs, and other hunting / shooting sport themed topics. That said… the similarity to sniper games is very close, and at least for me, the obvious connection is that this technology will likely end up in man-hunting as well as the more acceptable game hunting.
Crap like this represents the WORST of American ingenuity. How sad that a bunch of assholes can sit around dreaming up "new and improved" ways to kill their fellow man. Pathetic.
I saw this coming a long time ago – our weapons getting smarter and our bombs getting smaller. We all need to learn to get along!
+Sophie Wrobel It looks like we are heading towards dark times !
This will be combined with smart bullets Bullets that can either steer in to follow a laser reflection or with image software that can hit the center of a designated image.
A interesting book to read is "Kill Decision" by +Daniel Suarez of what is likely to happen. 🙁
+Eric Pouhier I suspect the politician's answer will be 'dream on'. Which is a very sad state of current affairs.
With devices like this one and drones, it is time to create new laws . Asimov first Law of Robotics should urgently be voted worldwide:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Game Mod coming to real life.
Maybe "texan" will end up a synonym of "obscene".