She's an automatic,
He's a cosmic man,
They will get together.
They should know better by now.

The meet in a garden
Down in old japan
Where young love's forbidden;
You've got to keep it hidden.

Modern love is automatic,
Modern love is automatic.

- A Flock of Seagulls, 1982

Amid the media furor over the attempted Christmas Day attacks and a renewed political focus on enhancing airport security, attention is turning to a technological advancement that will have civil rights activists -- or, for that matter, anyone with a secret --seriously worried: Mind-reading machines.

"As far-fetched as that sounds, systems that aim to get inside an evildoer's head are among the proposals floated by security experts thinking beyond the X-ray machines and metal detectors used on millions of passengers and bags each year," AP's Michael Tarm reports.

Tarm focuses on an Israeli company called WeCU Technologies (as in "we see you"), which is building a system that would turn airport waiting areas into arenas for Pavlovian behavioral tests:

The system ... projects images onto airport screens, such as symbols associated with a certain terrorist group or some other image only a would-be terrorist would recognize, company CEO Ehud Givon said.

The logic is that people can't help reacting, even if only subtly, to familiar images that suddenly appear in unfamiliar places. If you strolled through an airport and saw a picture of your mother, Givon explained, you couldn't help but respond.

Congress Gives $1.6 M Grant for Neuroprosthetic Research
January 08, 2010
by Brendon Nafziger, Writer
With wars abroad leaving hundreds of young Americans missing limbs, a Congressional windfall could spur development of advanced prosthetics that connect nerve tissue to implants.

As part of a recently passed Department of Defense spending bill, the U.S. Congress gave the Center for Neuroprosthetics and BioMEMS (CNB), a division of the Bioengineering Institute at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., $1.6 million to fund work on artificial limbs called neuroprosthetics.

In the dark, in the silence, in a blink, the age of the autonomous killer robot has arrived. It is happening. They are deployed. And – at their current rate of acceleration – they will become the dominant method of war for rich countries in the 21st century. These facts sound, at first, preposterous. The idea of machines that are designed to whirr out into the world and make their own decisions to kill is an old sci-fi fantasy: picture a mechanical Arnold Schwarzenegger blasting a truck and muttering: "Hasta la vista, baby." But we live in a world of such whooshing technological transformation that the concept has leaped in just five years from the cinema screen to the battlefield – with barely anyone back home noticing.


When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, they had no robots as part of their force. By the end of 2005, they had 2,400. Today, they have 12,000, carrying out 33,000 missions a year. A report by the US Joint Forces Command says autonomous robots will be the norm on the battlefield within 20 years.

The Nato forces now depend on a range of killer robots, largely designed by the British Ministry of Defence labs privatised by Tony Blair in 2001. Every time you hear about a "drone attack" against Afghanistan or Pakistan, that's an unmanned robot dropping bombs on human beings. Push a button and it flies away, kills, and comes home. Its robot-cousin on the battlefields below is called SWORDS: a human-sized robot that can see 360 degrees around it and fire its machine-guns at any target it "chooses". Fox News proudly calls it "the GI of the 21st century." And billions are being spent on the next generation of warbots, which will leave these models looking like the bulky box on which you used to play Pong.