The Department of Defense has apparently grown a conscience. After nearly six years of deploying troops to Iraq, many of them parents, the DOD is acknowledging that kids are spending years without a mother or father around. And, given that mental health issues are already taking a severe toll on Iraq vets, putting stress on marriages and disrupting lives, it’s only logical that children are getting caught in the crossfire, so to speak.

So, rather than oh, say, ban repeated deployments or lift stop-loss orders, the government has decided to nip the absent-parent problem in the bud by creating… computerized parents. According to a proposal solicitation (via InformationWeek) on the Department of Defense Small Business Innovation Web site, the DOD is looking for a “highly interactive PC- or Web-based application to allow family members to verbally interact with ‘virtual’ renditions of deployed Service Members.”(Insert “Hello, DAD”—”Hello, Little Dave” joke here.)

The proposal outlines the idea as follows:

The child should be able to have a simulated conversation with a parent about generic, everyday topics. For instance, a child may get a response from saying “I love you”, [sic] or “I miss you”, [sic] or “Good night mommy/daddy.” This is a technologically challenging application because it relies on the ability to have convincing voice-recognition, artificial intelligence, and the ability to easily and inexpensively develop a customized application tailored to a specific parent.

In other words, we should make computers that lie to small children by pretending to be their parents.

The DOD argues that this “simulated mommy” program would work for/appeal to kids because “[o]ver 80 percent of American children between the ages of three and five regularly use computers, and 83 percent of families have a computer in their home.” Of course, that’s really the rub now, isn’t it: Kids today are remarkably computer-savvy, and are thus more able to tell the difference between an AI simulation and their dad. And we won’t even touch the potential for disaster this idea has should the actual parent never wind up coming home. 

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Image: iStockPhoto

Earlier this year, the American Psychological Association voted (at last) to ban its members from participating in interrogations at U.S. detention centers, including the notorious Guantanamo Bay. This marked a major shift from its previous stance, which permitted work with interrogation (some of which is known in certain circles as “torture”) despite the fact that both the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have banned any affiliation with the practice for years.

So what’s different about psychologists, that it took them this long to decide that participation in torture wasn’t something the field should strive for? Stanley Fish at the New York Times blog “Think Again” offers the following explanation:

One answer can be found in the A.M.A.’s explanation of its prohibition: “Physicians must not conduct, directly participate in, or monitor an interrogation with an intent to intervene, because this undermines the physician’s role as healer.” The American Psychiatric Association is even more explicit: “Psychiatrists . . . owe their primary obligation to the well being of their patients.”

Psychology, on the other hand, is not exclusively a healing profession. To be sure, there are psychologists who provide counseling, therapy and other services to patients; but there are many psychologists who think of themselves as behavioral scientists.

It is their task to figure out how the mind processes and responds to stimuli, or how the emotions color and even create reality, or how reasoning and other cognitive activities are affected by changes in the environment. Their product is not mental health, but knowledge; their skills are not diagnostic, but analytic.

Fair point, though it doesn’t really weigh the fact that ethical considerations govern all scientists, psychologists or no. From the Stanford experiment to the controversy surrounding self-experimentation, scientific discovery has never operated on a separate, removed level from human rights. Certain behaviors—such as torture—could very well provide valuable data for psychologists, and maybe even lead to breakthroughs in the field. But do the potential benefits outweigh the ethical landmines of participation (at least through silent concession) in human rights violations? Put another way: Do we really have to condone torture to learn about the human psyche?

Related:
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• Just in time for winter: A complete history of the flu through the ages.

• The military fought the whales… and won.

• What, “Global Warming Poobah” was already taken? Gore offered (but turned down) job as White House “Climate Czar.”

• We can’t decide if this is heartening (drivers are being safe!) or mortally depressing: California air pollution kills more people per year than car crashes.

• A soldier-blogger gets his moment in the spotlight—though the real question is, what does he think of Trooptube?

As they so often do, things got litigious when both the California Coastal Commission and the Natural Resources Defense Council sued the Navy in separate lawsuits to stop its use of sonar during 14 training exercises off the Southern California coast. Lucky for the whale-savers, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (which is known for siding on the path of the less mighty) agreed with them, and smacked the Navy with restrictions on its sub exercises.

Now enter the Supreme Court, which this week heard the case on appeal. As with just about every human endeavor that harms the environment, the sonar use necessitates a balancing act between our needs—in this case, for a military that’s sharp and ready for, say, a second Pearl Harbor—and the needs of everything else.

Unfortunately for the NRDC (and the whales), it looks like the scales are leaning towards us: At least three justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, have said they’ll overturn the limits in the interests of national security.

The problem is that while we know sonar causes harm to whales, we really have no clue how much. And without clear evidence that Navy missions are causing each and every whale in the sea to throw itself on the beach in a ritual mass suicide, the Court won’t be inclined to put the kibosh on training missions that could strengthen our coastal defenses.

Still, Justice Breyer may be teetering on the brink of scary hyperbole with statements like this:

“The whole point of the armed forces is to hurt the environment,” he said. “You go on a bombing mission — do they have to prepare an environmental impact statement first?”

Just wait ’til Greenpeace hears about that one.

Image: iStockphoto

Irony, meet paradox. The U.S. military, that paragon of technology-aided destruction, is setting its sights on environmental sustainability. Which isn’t a bad idea, given that the Defense Department alone uses a whopping 1.5 percent of all energy consumed in the U.S. (which, until recently, was the world’s single biggest emitter of greenhouse gases).

The Environmental News Network reports that the Army has begun working to reduce the carbon footprint at its bases, and is taking measures to cut its CO₂ emissions by 30 percent by 2015. Its efforts include spraying troops’ tents with foam insulation to reduce energy used for air conditioning (which, in places like Djibouti, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan, can be a significant power-drain) and building combat training ranges out of recycled shipping containers.

Alternative energy is also invading the ranks, with researchers at Fort Irwin in California working on a portable solar and wind power station. Still at issue is the huge environmental cost of moving all those tanks and Humvees—which presents a dilemma, since reducing weight to save fuel also means removing armor that protects the troops inside. Which in turn brings up an interesting moral question: At what point do we sacrifice environmental sustainability for immediate safety—and vice versa? No doubt we’ll see more on this question as we proceed into Green Movement 2.0.