Retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson says the decentralization and advancements of 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology are the future of warfare, and may enable the rise of modernized private robotic armies. Wilkerson's statements were made during an exclusive interview with Rick Wiles of TRUNEWS on Thursday, while discussing the possibility that billionaires like George Soros could bring rise to a modern version of the East India Company. "As were developing these new technologies particularly 3-D printing, nanotechnology, nano engineering, artificial intelligence and robotics, as were developing these now, we are reducing enormously the costs for some of the most sophisticated weapons to be in the world," Wilkerson said. These advancements, Wilkerson noted, are already being placed into conceptual practice. "With 3-D printing we have recently produced, in less than 16 hours, a drone that underwater went to the coast of France and back to the Eastern coast of the United States, underwater. You produce this drone with 3-D printing almost overnight, you hang some smart weapons on it like submarine killing torpedoes or smart mines, you take it out there and you kill a 4 billion Ohio class submarine. This is the future and if you make these kinds of weapons available to almost anyone in the world, at a reasonable price, I mean you can make this drone for about 100,000, its going to kill a 4 billion submarine, thats quite a price exchange there."

As cool as those handheld 3D printing pens are, you have to have some amount of talent (or at least practice) in order to make anything that's much more recognizable than a mangled three-dimensional squiggle. A proper 3D printer is basically one of those 3D printing pens stapled to a robot that can move it in three axes and do a much better job making things that look nice and function well, but it doesn't allow for much artistic participation from you. For some people, that's the point, but if you'd like to be more directly involved, Yeliz Karadayi's thesis project, called "Guided Hand," is a 3D printing pen with a haptic interface that helps keep you from screwing things up too badly. These haptic interfaces are basically little robot arms, although you can produce the same effect with robot arms of any size). It's hard to explain how it feels to use one of these things, and the experience doesn't come through very well on video, but basically, the end of the arm (being a robot) knows exactly where it is in 3D space, which means it can tell whether it is about to intersect a virtual 3D object or not.

As robotics and 3-D printing technologies become more accessible to home tinkerers, men are (of course) building robots of beautiful women. Anyone who's turned on a TV in the past decade shouldn't be surprised to learn that one of the first--and creepiest--examples of this development involves movie star Scarlett Johansson. News broke on Friday about a Hong Kong designer who made a robot that looks just like the award-winning actress--although Ricky Ma, the robot's creator, wouldn't name the actress he modeled the bot on, choosing instead to call it Mark 1. It took Ma eighteen months and over 50,000 to complete the project, which he constructed on his patio with a 3-D printer and software that he taught himself how to use. The question, however, is one of precedent.

Google has received tons of gushy press for its bubble-shaped self-driving car, though it's still years from the showroom floor. But for years John Deere has been selling tractors that practically drive themselves for use on farms in America's heartland, where there are few pesky pedestrians or federal rules to get in the way. For a glimpse at the future, meet Jason Poole, a 34-year-old crop consultant from Kansas. After a long day of meetings earlier this month and driving five hours across the state to watch his little girl's softball game, he was still able to run his John Deere tractor until 2 a.m. The land is hilly on Poole's family farm, so he drives the first curved row manually to teach the layout to his tractor's guidance system and handles the turns himself.

MIT researchers just made a giant leap for robot-kind, by creating a working robot using 3D-printing. The breakthrough could lead to a world of ready-made machines that come off the production line needing only a motor and a battery. The initial prototype is tiny, but it demonstrates that a 3D printer with inkjet nozzles can print both liquid and solids, with a little help from UV light. MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) is pioneering the field of "printable hydraulics," which involves building liquid-filled pumps during the manufacturing process. Researchers used a commercially available 3D printer to create a robot made of both solids and liquids, for the first time in history.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your fluid-filled Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. MIT has developed a 3D printer that can mix solids and liquids. With "printable hydraulics," an inkjet printer deposits individual droplets of material that are each 20 to 30 microns in diameter, or less than half the width of a human hair.

Rembrandt's genius died with him. His last painting, Simeon's Song of Praise, was an unfinished work that signalled the end of the career of the world's most famous painters ever. A team of people from organisations including ING and Microsoft have gotten together to keep the Rembrandts flowing. Using detailed scans of all of his paintings, deep learning to research bodies of work, AI to work it all out and 3D printing to execute a finale, they have created what they consider a suitable follow-up to Rembrandt van Rijn's 346 known paintings. Researching all previous paintings, there were some incredibly common themes that cropped up.

There's already plenty of angst out there about the prospect of jobs lost to artificial intelligence, but this week, artists got a fresh reason to be concerned. A new "Rembrandt" painting unveiled in Amsterdam is not the work of the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn at all, but rather the creation of a combination of technologies including facial recognition, AI, and 3D printing. Essentially, a deep-learning algorithm was trained on Rembrandt's 346 known paintings and then asked to produce a brand-new one replicating the artist's subject matter and style. Dubbed "The Next Rembrandt," the result is a portrait of a caucasian male, and it looks uncannily like the real thing. One particularly interesting detail about The Next Rembrandt project, which was a collaboration among several organizations including Dutch bank ING and Microsoft, is how the algorithm chose the subject for its painting, since it had to be entirely new.

There's already plenty of angst out there about the prospect of jobs lost to artificial intelligence, but this week, artists got a fresh reason to be concerned. A new "Rembrandt" painting unveiled in Amsterdam is not the work of the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn at all, but rather the creation of a combination of technologies including facial recognition, AI, and 3D printing. Essentially, a deep-learning algorithm was trained on Rembrandt's 346 known paintings and then asked to produce a brand-new one replicating the artist's subject matter and style. Dubbed "The Next Rembrandt," the result is a portrait of a caucasian male, and it looks uncannily like the real thing. One particularly interesting detail about The Next Rembrandt project, which was a collaboration among several organizations including Dutch bank ING and Microsoft, is how the algorithm chose the subject for its painting, since it had to be entirely new.

A team of experts from MIT have employed a novel 3D printing technique to combine solids and liquids in order to create a hydraulic six legged robot. MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers reveal the first-ever technique for 3-D printing robots, that involves printing solid and liquid materials at the same time, in a new paper. This interesting bot was created using a 3D printer that had commercial value. A series of bellows provided traction force to the mechanical legs and they were filled with liquid during the period of printing. This is a progressive step in 3D printing since instead of creating individual components, whole active systems can be manufactured.