Smart bullets, the latest terrifying way the US can kill you (video)

28 Apr 2015

It’s time to get terrified – the US military appears to have developed bullets that follow their targets, ‘smart bullets’ if you will. It’s so happy with this that you can watch it shoot things on YouTube.

The US Department of Defence’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is forever looking at innovative ways to use the latest technologies across a raft of its services.

Last summer it was working on a can that could save a soldier’s life – by putting the can in a wall that the soldier was hiding behind, the device would expand and offer protection. It was called the Block Access to Deny Entry (BlockADE).

In February this year the organisation went all robotic when it started developing a prosthetic arm with a sense of touch.

It’s working on a deep web search engine, to monitor all those evil people who refuse to use Google. Having developed a program called Memex, DARPA have licensed the program out to 17 different developers for the last year, and it will eventually allow the military, and organisations like the NSA, better find specific results for illegal activity, according to Wired.

It wants to turn the inside of the human eye into an advanced display powered by the spine, as well as working on a new, more accurate, location-tracking technology to improve on existing GPS.

So, it’s a varied and intriguing mix of projects, all geared to greater empower the defence arm of the US government, and its latest trick is to shoot a moving target, and have the bullet do all the work.

In a video released on YouTube, DARPA shows off a self-steering bullet to increase hit rates for difficult, long-distance shots.

Developed by its Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) program, it has completed its “most successful round of live-fire tests to date”.

The video shows shooters (experienced and amateur) consistently hitting a moving target. But it’s grand, because that target is the bad guy. And we hate bad guys. Go science.

Of course we’re all safe now that ‘smart guns’ exist. You can only shoot the gun if it’s yours, as it’s linked to your watch or  fingerprints. But no one is buying them because of gun lobbies. Go politics.

Bullet image, via Shutterstock

Gordon Hunt was a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com