DARPA may not be ready to make a full-scale robot army just yet, so they’re now working on a way to make unpredictable, flawed human soldiers more like robots. Instead of therapy and medication, they’re creating a system to treat soldier’s psychological issues with brain implants that fix the problem and keep feeble humans working.
According to a recent study, rates of mental illness in soldiers run much higher than they do in the general population, so a new method for dealing with the problem was in order. That’s where the SUBNETS program comes in, which stands for Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies. I’m not entirely sold that you can get that acronym from those words, but I’m sure some SUBNETS can fix my mental deficiency.
The program works with electronic implants that are placed in patients’ brains, and they will monitor and map brain activity to pinpoint where malfunction originates with more precision than we’ve ever had. Then, they can help correct the behavior.
If that sounds a bit like mind control, well… that’s because it pretty much is. Aside from just mapping the brain’s behavior in unprecedented ways to help accurately target treatment as the brain changes, the implants will fix bad brain behavior by directly stimulating different parts of the brain. We already knew DARPA wanted to invade brains with tiny robots to fix people’s memories, so it wasn’t a far leap for them to get to full mind control.
It will be great if this helps traumatized members of the military return to normal life. Or, they could take it a step further, delete pesky “emotions” entirely, and create an army of Cybermen instead. Your call, Cyber-Controller DARPA.
(via The Daily Dot, images via DARPA)
- DARPA’s warrior web suit will lighten the soldiers’ load a bit, too
- Here’s the lowdown on the BRAIN initiative that SUBNETS is a part of
- DARPA also wants to scan the brains of dogs
