DARPA Researches Avatar Surrogates

The argument could be made that this is already the case, with "expendable" soldiers acting as the avatars for politicians or other unscrupulous sorts.

To a certain extent, yes. But human lives still have value, if not to the politicians, to the military leaders calling the shots, and to the people who have to read about it in the paper.

Consider: a little shy of 4,500 US soldiers have died in Iraq since hostilities began in 2003, and nearly 33,000 have been wounded. Stalin wrote that 1,000 deaths is a tragedy, 1,000,000 is a statistic, and the same holds true for this conflict: 4,500 dead is a *lot*, but it's a number most of us can wrap our heads around,

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/v85qy08N7VQ/darpa-researches-avatar-surrogates

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