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Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

For discussions of events and conditions not necessarily related to Peak Oil.

Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Thu 02 Mar 2017, 14:04:47

AI Scientists Gather to Plot Doomsday Scenarios (and Solutions)

Artificial intelligence boosters predict a brave new world of flying cars and cancer cures. Detractors worry about a future where humans are enslaved to an evil race of robot overlords. Veteran AI scientist Eric Horvitz and Doomsday Clock guru Lawrence Krauss, seeking a middle ground, gathered a group of experts in the Arizona desert to discuss the worst that could possibly happen -- and how to stop it.

Officially dubbed "Envisioning and Addressing Adverse AI Outcomes," it was a kind of AI doomsday games that organized some 40 scientists, cyber-security experts and policy wonks into groups of attackers -- the red team -- and defenders -- blue team -- playing out AI-gone-very-wrong scenarios, ranging from stock-market manipulation to global warfare.

Participants were given "homework" to submit entries for worst-case scenarios. They had to be realistic -- based on current technologies or those that appear possible -- and five to 25 years in the future. The entrants with the "winning" nightmares were chosen to lead the panels, which featured about four experts on each of the two teams to discuss the attack and how to prevent it.
`To maximally gain from the upside we also have to think through possible adverse outcomes in more detail than we have before and think about how we’d deal with them."

Turns out many of these researchers can match science-fiction writers Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick for dystopian visions. In many cases, little imagination was required -- scenarios like technology being used to sway elections or new cyber attacks using AI are being seen in the real world, or are at least technically possible. Horvitz cited research that shows how to alter the way a self-driving car sees traffic signs so that the vehicle misreads a "stop" sign as "yield.''

The possibility of intelligent, automated cyber attacks is the one that most worries John Launchbury, who directs one of the offices at the U.S.'s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Kathleen Fisher, chairwoman of the computer science department at Tufts University, who led that session. What happens if someone constructs a cyber weapon designed to hide itself and evade all attempts to dismantle it? Now imagine it spreads beyond its intended target to the broader internet. Think Stuxnet, the computer virus created to attack the Iranian nuclear program that got out in the wild, but stealthier and more autonomous.

"We're talking about malware on steroids that is AI-enabled," said Fisher, who is an expert in programming languages. Fisher presented her scenario under a slide bearing the words "What could possibly go wrong?" which could have also served as a tagline for the whole event.

How did the defending blue team fare on that one? Not well, said Launchbury.

Krauss, chairman of the board of sponsors of the group behind the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic measure of how close we are to global catastrophe, said some of what he saw at the workshop "informed" his thinking on whether the clock ought to shift even closer to midnight.

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What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

The Origins Project plans to make public materials from the closed-door sessions and may design further workshops around a specific scenario or two, Krauss said.


Robots Won't Just Take Our Jobs – They'll Make the Rich Even Richer

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The good news is that the robot apocalypse hasn’t arrived just yet. Despite a steady stream of alarming headlines about clever computers gobbling up our jobs, the economic data suggests that automation isn’t happening on a large scale. The bad news is that if it does, it will produce a level of inequality that will make present-day America look like an egalitarian utopia by comparison.

The real threat posed by robots isn’t that they will become evil and kill us all, which is what keeps Elon Musk up at night – it’s that they will amplify economic disparities to such an extreme that life will become, quite literally, unlivable for the vast majority. A robot tax may or may not be a useful policy tool for averting this scenario. But it’s a good starting point for an important conversation. Mass automation presents a serious political problem – one that demands a serious political solution.

What’s different this time is the possibility that technology will become so sophisticated that there won’t be anything left for humans to do. Instead of merely transforming work, technology might begin to eliminate it. Instead of making it possible to create more wealth with less labor, automation might make it possible to create more wealth without labor.

What’s so bad about wealth without labor? It depends on who owns the wealth. Technology has made workers more productive, but the profits have trickled up, not down. Productivity increased by 80.4% between 1973 and 2011, but the real hourly compensation of the median worker went up by only 10.7%.

As bad as this is, mass automation threatens to make it much worse. If you think inequality is a problem now, imagine a world where the rich can get richer all by themselves. Capital liberated from labor means not merely the end of work, but the end of the wage. And without the wage, workers lose their only access to wealth – not to mention their only means of survival. They also lose their primary source of social power. So long as workers control the point of production, they can shut it down. The strike is still the most effective weapon workers have, even if they rarely use it any more. A fully automated economy would make them not just redundant, but powerless.

Meanwhile, robotic capital would enable elites to completely secede from society. From private jets to private islands, the rich already devote a great deal of time and expense to insulating themselves from other people. But even the best fortified luxury bunker is tethered to the outside world, so long as capital needs labor to reproduce itself. Mass automation would make it possible to sever this link. Equipped with an infinite supply of workerless wealth, elites could seal themselves off in a gated paradise, leaving the unemployed masses to rot.

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In his book Four Futures, Peter Frase speculates that the economically redundant hordes outside the gates would only be tolerated for so long. After all, they might get restless – and that’s a lot of possible pitchforks.What happens if the masses are dangerous but are no longer a working class, and hence of no value to the rulers?” Frase writes. Someone will eventually get the idea that it would be better to get rid of them.” He gives this future an appropriately frightening name: “Exterminism”, a world defined by the “genocidal war of the rich against the poor”.


Get ready for robots made with human flesh

Two University of Oxford biomedical researchers are calling for robots to be built with real human tissue, and they say the technology is there if we only choose to develop it. Writing in Science Robotics, Pierre-Alexis Mouthuy and Andrew Carr argue that humanoid robots could be the exact tool we need to create muscle and tendon grafts that actually work.

The researchers propose a "humanoid-bioreactor system" with "structures, dimensions, and mechanics similar to those of the human body." As the robot interacted with its environment, tissues growing on its body would receive the typical strains and twists that they would if they grew on an actual human. The result would be healthy tissue, grown for the exact area on the body it was destined to replace. Mouthuy and Carr note that this would be especially helpful for "bone-tendon-muscle grafts... because failure during healing often occurs at the interface between tissues."

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How millions of kids are being shaped by Alexa AI and her siblings

As millions of American families buy robotic voice assistants to turn off lights, order pizzas and fetch movie times, children are eagerly co-opting the gadgets to settle dinner table disputes, answer homework questions and entertain friends at sleepover parties.

Many parents have been startled and intrigued by the way these disembodied, know-it-all voices - Amazon's Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft's Cortana - are impacting their kids' behavior, making them more curious but also, at times, far less polite.

Children certainly enjoy their company, referring to Alexa like just another family member.

"We like to ask her a lot of really random things," said Emerson Labovich, a fifth-grader in Bethesda, Md., who pesters Alexa with her older brother Asher.

Psychologists, technologists and linguists are only beginning to ponder the possible perils of surrounding kids with artificial intelligence, particularly as they traverse important stages of social and language development.

"How they react and treat this nonhuman entity is, to me, the biggest question," said Sandra Calvert, a Georgetown University psychologist and director of the Children's Digital Media Center. "And how does that subsequently affect family dynamics and social interactions with other people?"

Toy giant Mattel recently announced the birth of Aristotle, a home baby monitor launching this summer that "comforts, teaches and entertains" using AI from Microsoft. As children get older, they can ask or answer questions. The company says, "Aristotle was specifically designed to grow up with a child."

"These devices don't have emotional intelligence," said Allison Druin, a University of Maryland professor who studies how children use technology. "They have factual intelligence."

Yarmosh's 2-year-old son has been so enthralled by Alexa that he tries to speak with coasters and other cylindrical objects that look like Amazon's device. Meanwhile, Yarmosh's now 5-year-old son, in comparing his two assistants, came to believe Google knew him better.

Naomi S. Baron, an American University linguist who studies digital communication, is among those who wonder whether the devices, even as they get smarter, will push children to value simplistic language - and simplistic inquiries - over nuance and complex questions.

Asking Alexa, "How do you ask a good question?" produces this answer: "I wasn't able to understand the question I heard." But she is able to answer a simple derivative: "What is a question?"

"A linguistic expression used to make a request for information," she says.

And then there is the potential rewiring of adult-child communication.

Although Mattel's new assistant will have a setting forcing children to say "please" when asking for information, the assistants made by Google, Amazon and others are designed so users can quickly - and bluntly - ask questions. Parents are noticing some not-so-subtle changes in their children.

"Cognitively I'm not sure a kid gets why you can boss Alexa around but not a person," Walk wrote. "At the very least, it creates patterns and reinforcement that so long as your diction is good, you can get what you want without niceties."

"There can be a lot of unintended consequences to interactions with these devices that mimic conversation," said Kate Darling, an MIT professor who studies how humans interact with robots. "We don't know what all of them are yet."

[Joe looks into David's eyes and tells him what he believes in about David being like the rest of the Mecha]
Gigolo Joe: She loves what you do for her, as my customers love what it is I do for them. But she does not love you, David. She cannot love you. You are neither flesh nor blood. You are not a dog a cat or a canary. You were designed and built specific like the rest of us... and you are alone now only because they tired of you... or replaced you with a younger model... or were displeased with something you said or broke. They made us too smart, too quick and too many. We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us. That's why they hate us.

- A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)


For continuity to the preceding thread that disappeared ...

Fully Automated Combat Robots Part 1

btw; Thank You very much, ritter; and live long and prosper, pstarr
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late.
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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Fri 03 Mar 2017, 13:27:50

Air Force Wants to Test a Laser on an Attack Plane Within A Year

A laser-armed C-130 project is U.S. Special Operations Command’s top unfunded priority, according to Lt. Gen. Brad Webb, the head of Air Force Special Operations Command.

“I’m pretty optimistic,” Webb said of the project Thursday at an Air Force Association-sponsored conference. “There are a lot of vendors that are really contributing to and continue to push that technology along.”

"The plan is to install a relatively low-kilowatt laser, do a 'proof of concept' and go from there,” Webb said, increasing laser weapon power after it’s proven accurate and effective in testing. The command has money “to do the first steps” of the project.

“At some point … a policy discussion is going to have to be had on where and how can you use a laser and where and where and how can you not,” he said. “But I think that’s a discussion to be had further down the road.”

I still contend that an offensive capability — which is what we’re looking for in the AFSOC contribution to the effort — is contributing to the defensive aspects that other commands are looking [for],” Webb said.

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"Don't Run Away! We Are Your Friends!"


Air Force Laser Weapons to Defend B-52 Bomber

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The age of laser warfare is truly becoming a reality.

U.S. Air Force Chief Scientist Greg Zacharias told the defense blog Scout Warrior that under a five-year project called the SHIELD program (that is actually its real name!), the Air Force envisions creating lasers that can take out a target by putting the laser on the attacking weapon for a long enough period of time.

The B-52 once had radar-guided machine guns for self-defense, but those were disabled years ago. That mostly has to do with long-range air-to-air missiles coming more lethal, which sort of negated the need for a tail gun. Even with radar fire control, the risk of friendly fire (either from the machine gun itself, or from anti-radar missiles homing in on the tail gun’s radar) was too great. The last gunner to board a B-52 was in 1991, saying costs and cutting 525 positions.

That said, the B-52 is not a stealthy platform and needs a modern weapons system that can defend it against smaller, oncoming attack aircraft trying to take it out without risking the lives in gunners who can’t possibly machine gun an AAM out of the sky. The defensive laser weapons could meet that challenge. Defending a B-52 could becoming increasing important in years to come if some kind of reconfigured B-52 is used as the Pentagon’s emerging Arsenal Plane or “flying bomb truck.”
Under the first phase of this upgrade, the Conventional Rotary Launcher will be able to hold 24 GBU-38 500lb JDAMs or a whopping 20 of the GBU-31 2,000lb JDAMs. Laser guided JDAMs and other smart gravity and glide bombs will follow soon after. Yet short-range weapons will not be the CRL’s only claim to combat fame.

Soon, the launcher will be able to sling gobs of stand-off weapons such as the stealthy AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) and the very guileful Miniture Air Launched Decoy Jammers (MALD-J). What this means is that a single B-52H could fly thousands of miles around the globe, approach the outer edge of an enemy’s air defenses and let loose a full on barrage of stealth cruise missiles and smart cruise decoys, then turn around to cruise back to base for more weapons and a new crew.

Ironically, the B-52, introduced in February of 1955, was supposed to be retired by 1975. But the bomber is expected to be in service until 2040 because no viable alternative seems available.

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As technology progresses, particularly in the realm of autonomous systems, many wonder if a laser-drone weapon will soon have the ability to find, acquire, track and destroy and enemy target using sensors, targeting and weapons delivery systems – without needing any human intervention.


DARPA Tests Dirty-Bomb Hunting Ambulances

For the past seven months, some Washington, D.C., ambulances have been doing double duty: simultaneously responding to emergencies and scanning the city for nuclear threats.

A Pentagon research program aiming to detect “dirty bombs” and nuclear threats recently outfitted fire and emergency medical services ambulances with radiological detectors they used to draw out a map of radiation levels in the city. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Activity’s nuclear threat detection program, called SIGMA, wrapped up testing last month.

In its search for radiological phenomena, DARPA installed about 73 detectors on the ambulances, which travel across the city each day responding to medical and fire emergencies. The detectors gathered about 100,000 hours of data and traveled a total of about 150,000 miles.

The detectors were plugged into the ambulance and reported back to DARPA in real time, so ambulance operators didn’t need any training.

The DARPA program has developed another radiation detector model the size of a smartphone; one day in October, the agency asked about 1,000 volunteers to carry them around the National Mall.


Test blasts simulate a nuclear attack on a U.S. port

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Video - Under cover of night, a blacked-out fishing boat slips into Baltimore, Maryland’s Inner Harbor. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter moves to apprehend the intruder. But before officers can board, both boats and much of Baltimore disappear in an intense flash: A nuclear bomb hidden on the boat has detonated. As first responders rush to victims, nuclear forensics specialists scrutinize data on radiation and acoustic and seismic waves from sensors placed around the city in a breakneck effort to decipher the bomb’s design and perhaps determine who was behind the blast.
It’s well nigh impossible to track the myriad small craft flitting in and out of the 361 U.S. ports and 153,000 kilometers of open shoreline. “There are a zillion fishing boats that leave U.S. ports and nobody inspects them when they come home,” says Matthew Bunn, a specialist on nuclear terrorism at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “If there is highly enriched uranium metal that’s shielded and below the water line, it’s going to be really tough to detect at long range.”

At a time when a bomb smuggled by terrorists is as big a concern as one from a foreign power, delivered by missile or airplane, an attack at a port is “definitely a more likely scenario,” says Thomas Cartledge, a nuclear engineer with the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. But forensic experts, who rely largely on nuclear test data collected years ago in Western deserts, lack a clear picture of how energy from a detonation would propagate in the highly saturated geology of many U.S. port cities. To remedy that, DTRA last October quietly staged Humming Terrapin: a 2-week test series at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland that detonated nearly 2 metric tons of conventional explosives to simulate nuclear blast effects in shallow water.
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late.
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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Sat 04 Mar 2017, 16:08:45

Congress Told: "U.S. Military May Be Fighting ‘Terminator’-Style AI Within 10 years"

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Video - House lawmakers were warned Wednesday that artificial intelligence could soon be used by potential adversaries in military operations.

Jason Healey, a senior fellow on the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative, told members of a House panel with oversight of the Pentagon that he expects the capabilities to be developed in the next decade.

“There has been lot of speculation … about how soon it will be before robotic soldiers take the place of the fight in the kinetic world,” Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas) asked the panel of cyber experts.
“How soon will A.I. supplant the need … for all these human beings to be able to defend these networks and do what we do?”

Healey answered that he expects the capability to be developed more quickly than anticipated.

New America Foundation strategist, Peter Singer, replied that the U.S. should expect “Terminators” in camouflage. “It’s not just when is it going to happen, but we don’t yet know is it going to privilege the offense or defense, what are going to be the affects of it,” Singer said, recommending that Congress hold a classified hearing on where the U.S. stands in comparison to likely adversaries on this capability.

Healey expressed concerns about the possibility of artificial intelligence augmenting our adversaries’ offensive capabilities more significantly than the United States’ defense of its critical infrastructure.

“The part of it that particularly worries me the most is that on the defensive side many people are thinking that artificial intelligence, new heuristics, better analytics and automation are going to help the defense, that if only we can roll these things out faster we will be better and the system will be more stable,” Healey explained.

“I think that these technologies are going to aid the offense much more than it aids the defense because to defend against these kinds of attacks, you need your own super computer,” he continued.

Healey warned that while the Pentagon can afford computer systems necessary to defend against adversaries using artificial intelligence, small- or mid-sized enterprises that own U.S. critical infrastructure cannot.

“It leaves much of America undefended,” he said.

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, later suggested that while the U.S. might soon develop these capabilities, the government might not have sufficient policies in place to control how it uses them.

“It seems to me that we’re always a lot better at developing technologies than we are the policies on how to use them,” Thornberry said.

House Armed Services Committee Hearing: Cyber Warfare in the 21st Century: Threats, Challenges, and Opportunities
Healey Testimony
Singer Testimony
Libicki Testimony

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- What does close combat mean when ground maneuver elements can be brought under devastating surprise long-range precision fire barrages enabled by drone reconnaissance and cyber and information operations long before they close with enemy combat forces?
- If even infantry squads are equipped with stand-off weapons, what is the future of close quarters combat?
- Is the ability to take and hold ground an anachronism in anti-access/area-denial environments?
- Will the purpose of maneuver be to force enemy ground maneuver elements to expose themselves to targeting by long-range precision fires? Or will maneuver mean movement to advantageous long-range precision firing positions, particularly if targeting across domains?
- Is an emphasis on technological determinism reducing the capabilities of land combat units to just what they shoot?

http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/blog/tag/ ... -strategy/


DARPA's new drone wants to cover the sea with air support

Based around the idea of vertical takeoff, DARPA's new long-range drone project, TERN aims to make a drone that can take advantage of small-deck ships as landing sites.

TERN stands for Tactically Exploited Reconnaissance Node, or basically a scouting vessel which takes off vertically while sitting on its tail, and then transitions to horizontal flight in the air. Currently in Phase 3 of development, a single TERN will be able to carry up to 600 pounds of sensors and equipment. Each one will be able to fly as far as 1,000 miles away from its parent ship. DARPA and its partner in construction, Northrop Grumman, are planning a full test of the TERN system in late 2018.

Beyond TERN, other current DARPA projects have the same goal: to get drones launching from as many places as possible. It might not be too long before TERN and DARPA's robotic arm meet face-to-face.

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Russia Has New Drone Attack Weapon

Russia has developed a new artillery-launched small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that it is offering for export.

Under the Russian concept, the UAV would be launched via a 300mm rocket shot from a Smerch Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) at ranges of roughly 90 kilometers. Once the rocket is over the target area, the drone is released at a height of 500m. The aircraft has an endurance of 20 minutes and can survey area of approximately 25 square kilometers.

This type of UAV development is in line with Russia's diverse development of unmanned systems, from small tactical to large, weaponized platforms,” Bendett said. “This is directed at export markets. The Russians have been working on integrating UAVs into existing artillery systems for at least a decade.”

The development of this new novel Russian UAV is a harbinger of the future. Russia is investing heavily in unmanned system to make up for its current technological deficit in this arena. Moscow has the technical skills to make that happen, the real question will be if Russia has the financial wherewithal to meet its ambitions.

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BM-30 Smerch


Tiny Drone-Based Surveillance System Can Watch Over a Entire Small Town

One of the most useful things about drones is their ability to tirelessly loiter for hours at a time. Combined that with a wide-area camera and you've got a combination that a visual record of everything below that moves or changes over time. One of the best new examples is the Integrator unmanned aerial vehicle paired with the new Redkite wide-area motion imaging package, which shrinks this tech into a small package that can record the area of an entire small town.

In the span of four years, Logos technology has shrunk from a 1,500-pound surveillance package in Constant Hawk to a 53-pound package in a RQ-7 Shadow-class drone in 2010. Now, the company has shrunk that same capability set—including camera, onboard processing, data storage, and communications relay—yet again, down to 31 lbs. in a package named Redkite.

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Was A New Type Of Drone-Launched Weapon Used To Kill Al Qaeda's #2 Man?

Instead of a burned out and shattered hulk of a vehicle obliterated by the AGM-114 missile, or a smudge surrounded by burnt rubble that results from a GBU-12 500lb laser-guided bomb strike, the car pictured literally has a whole punched through its roof with no real sign of a large explosion. It's almost as if an anvil was dropped on the car's occupants. So what's going on here? It's not clear, but there are a few possible answers.

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Why is Russia getting ready for war in the Arctic?

Why Are U.S. Army Paratroopers Practicing in the Frozen Arctic?

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Traditionally, the Arctic has been a low military priority for everybody. The bitter cold makes it inhospitable. The lack of dry land makes stationing forces there difficult. Outposts are generally limited to arctic research, early warning radar, and meteorological stations.

Global warming is changing that. Rising temperatures are contributing to a decline in Arctic sea ice and a rise in human activity way up north. Less ice means previously unreachable arctic resources can now be accessed and a new Arctic shipping route might be possible—two new things for human beings to fight over.


WASHINGTON — President Trump’s newly appointed national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, views on starting WW3 ...

Harbingers of Future War: Implications for the Army with Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster

McMaster:“…what I’d really like to talk to you about is (the) period we’re in right now, a period of increasing risks…risks to our nation, to our allies, and really all of humanity………. globally – the situation in connection with U.S. vital interests and security – .. is changing really in a direction that’s going to raise additional challenges to the U.S. and U.S. national security…. what we’re seeing is a shift in geopolitics in a way that imposes great dangers and has elevated the risk of a major international military crisis to the highest level in the last 70 years.”
... Our holiday from history in the post-Cold War period is over

McMaster: “I also think Margaret MacMillan’s great essay written in 2014 making the analogy between 2014 and 1914, and really making the point that geopolitics is back; maybe our – what we might call our holiday from history in the post-Cold War period is over.”


McMaster then offers a remedy for so called ‘Russian aggression’: “…what is required to deter a strong nation that is waging limited war for limited objectives on battlegrounds involving weaker states … is forward deterrence, to be able to ratchet up the cost at the frontier, and to take an approach to deterrence that is consistent with deterrence by denial, convincing your enemy that he is unable to accomplish his objectives at a reasonable cost rather than sort of an offshore balancing approach and the threat of punitive action at long distance later, which we know obviously from – recent experience confirms that that is inadequate.”

So in McMaster’s mind, another global conflagration on a par with World War 1 is now in the making. Unlike most people, he sees this as a challenge rather than an apocalyptic event that should be avoided at all cost.

In other words, we are going to continue to fight for oil and markets (our “vital interests”), we’re going to go it alone if necessary, and if somebody tries to stop us, we’re going to annihilate them.
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late.
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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Mon 06 Mar 2017, 16:09:17

DARPA’s Brain Chip Implants Could Be the Next Big Mental Health Breakthrough—Or a Total Disaster

... Rumors have swirled that the DARPA’s real goal in all this research is to create enhanced super soldiers. The agency has several other brain computer interface projects, which seek not just to use chips to treat mental illness, but also to restore memories and movement to battle-wounded soldiers. A 2015 book about about the history of DARPA, “The Pentagon’s Brain,” suggested that government scientists hope that implanting chips in soldiers will eventually unlock the secrets of artificial intelligence and allow us to give machines the kind of higher-level reasoning that humans can do, or allow soldiers to perform feats like waging war using their thoughts alone. DARPA, though, has maintained that its main goal is to develop therapies for the many thousands of soldiers and veterans with wounded brains.

... Case studies of patients who have received the treatment have shown that those implants sometimes have severe side effects.
... On the downside, Deep brain stimulation (DBS) procedures in regions are associated with surgical risks (eg, hemorrhage) and psychiatric complications (suicidal attenuation, hypomania) as well as high costs.
- http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v39/n ... 1428a.html

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POTUS Narcissist Syndrome?
... “What’s turning out to be most important for us is timing,” said Alik Widge, the engineering lead for the DBS project. If you hit the right region at just the right moment you can nudge a decision. It’s all about knowing when the brain is the right state.”

... In the 1970s, a Yale University neuroscientist named Jose Delgado implanted radio-equipped electrode arrays—he called them “stimoceivers”—into cats, monkeys, bulls and even humans. His work demonstrated that electrically stimulating the brain could elicit movement and on occasion even particular emotions.

In one now famous experiment, Delgado agitated the temporal lobe of a young epileptic woman while she calmly played the guitar, prompting her to react by violently smashing the guitar against the wall in rage.

Delgado, who was Spanish, left the U.S. shortly after Congressional hearings in which he was accused of developing “totalitarian” mind-control devices. (... just what tRump needs) His work receded into the archives of history.

... With the new system, the entire DBS unit, including rechargeable batteries, will be implanted on the back of the skull. The implant will contain five electrodes, with 64 points of contact allowing them to target the brain with incredible geographic specificity. Those electrodes will gather data from the brain, process it, and then administer the appropriate dose of stimulation accordingly.

Widge told me that he imagines their device one day being sophisticated enough that patients could control some settings via an app, giving them (or their handler) control over how much psychiatric assistance they receive on a day-to-day basis.

Listening to patients like Murphy describe their experience—a sudden lightness, an immediate surge of warmth—it’s hard not to wonder whether in tweaking a person’s circuitry, we aren’t also altering something at their core.

Murphy, though, disagrees. She actually finds the term “cyborg” offensive.

“People think that when you have something implanted, it changes who you are,” she told me. “It’s like another body part. It’s just part of me. The device didn’t change anything about who I am.

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Mr Trump?
Mr Donald Trump?
Mr Donald John Trump?
Listen!


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Baxter the Robot Fixes Its Mistakes by Reading Your Mind

BAXTER IS BUT a child, with bright eyes and a subtle grin. It sits at a table and cautiously lifts a can of spray paint, then dangles it over a box marked “WIRE.” The error seems to smack Baxter across the face—its eyebrows furrow and blush appears on its cheeks. It swings its arm to an adjacent box marked “PAINT” and drops in the can with a clunk and that spray-paint rattle.

Good,” says a voice off-screen, as Baxter’s face reverts to a grin.

Baxter is in fact a robot, and an industrial one at that, with hulking arms meant for lifting much larger things than cans and wire. Its face is not flesh, but a screen. And its decisions are not entirely its own, but those of a human sitting across the table—a woman with electrodes strapped to her head. The setup detects a particular signal in her brain’s electrical activity when she sees a mistake. In real time, the woman telepathically scolds Baxter for choosing the wrong box, and the robot corrects.

Today, communicating with the machines is mostly about typing or vocalizing commands, which creates lag time. Letting Baxter read your mind takes milliseconds. “It’s a new way of controlling the robot that I actually like to think of as being natural, in the sense that we aim to have the robot adapt to what the human would like to do,” says MIT roboticist Daniela Rus, a co-author on the study. Namely, don’t put the paint in the wrong box, dummy.

... The human and machine are communicating at the most basic of levels—not speech but the electrical signals that prelude speech. “The paper shows an interesting capability in terms of doing this in real time,” says Carnegie Mellon roboticist Aaron Steinfeld. The researchers’ machine learning algorithms are so powerful, they can sort the error-related potentials from the other electrical noise to immediately create something the robot can comprehend.

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Brain Implant Makes Telepathic Typing Possible

A new brain-computer interface (BCI) developed by Stanford University promises to help paralyzed patients communicate more efficiently – by reading their minds.

This is quite literally true, actually. The technology enables people with spinal injuries or severe limb weakness to type words on a computer screen, via direct brain control, at up to 39 characters per minute.

The “baby-aspirin-sized” array has 100 electrodes and can monitor individual neurons. It plugs into the motor cortex and users imagine moving a limb in the direction they want to move the cursor; with minimal training, some were outperforming extant systems and typing dozens of characters per minute without assistance.

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Algorithm identified Trump as 'not-married'
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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Tue 07 Mar 2017, 15:43:50

Right on cue, the Russian FSB handlers passed their old CIA stash to Wikileaks to help their дерьмократ Коррумпированный олигарх in need. Like Zorg said "Let's change the beat" - Fifth Element (1997)

Wikileaks claims MI5 and CIA developed spyware to turn Samsung TVs into bugs

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Wikileaks just dropped a massive collection of information detailing how the US government is attacking the devices that many of us use every single day in an effort to gain intel for its own purposes. Tactics for breaching iPhones, iPads, Android devices, PCs, routers, and even smart TVs are included in the leak, which has some serious privacy and security implications if even a fraction of it proves to be accurate.

Much the of the leak confirms what most people assume about the US government’s ability to circumvent the built-in security features of computer software and mobile devices — for example, that the organization has many “zero day” exploits for computers running Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and more. The sheer power of the CIA’s tools, according to the report, is really the story here.

Among the 8,761 documents of the “Vault 7” leak are papers describing “weaponised” malware directed at iPhone and Android users, designed to bypass encryption used by popular apps such as Confide. One of the more colorful descriptions is the tool created to hack Samsung smart TVs, which turned them into covert microphones.

The CIA called the hack "Weeping Angel."

For any fan of the Doctor Who, the reference was clear. The Weeping Angels are a monster on the show, known for their peculiar ability: The Angels (which are evil, of course) can move lightning-fast, but only when no one is looking at them. As soon as you lock your gaze in their direction, they freeze, unable to move, resembling statues.
It's a fairly clever reference: According to WikiLeaks, the specific hack involves putting the Samsung TV in "Fake-Off" mode, meaning the TV looks off, but is really on, leaving the microphone engaged so the hacker can listen to anyone within earshot of the TV. That makes the TV most dangerous when no one is actually watching it — just like the Weeping Angels.

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Wikileaks’ report even suggests that the CIA was developing tools that could remotely control certain vehicle software and could allow the agency to cause “accidents” which would effectively be “nearly undetectable assassinations.”

... The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell's 1984, but "Weeping Angel", developed by the CIA's Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realization.

... The CIA's Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) developed numerous attacks to remotely hack and control popular smart phones. Infected phones can be instructed to send the CIA the user's geolocation, audio and text communications as well as covertly activate the phone's camera and microphone.

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Despite iPhone's minority share (14.5%) of the global smart phone market in 2016, a specialized unit in the CIA's Mobile Development Branch produces malware to infest, control and exfiltrate data from iPhones and other Apple products running iOS, such as iPads. CIA's arsenal includes numerous local and remote "zero days" developed by CIA or obtained from GCHQ, NSA, FBI or purchased from cyber arms contractors such as Baitshop. The disproportionate focus on iOS may be explained by the popularity of the iPhone among social, political, diplomatic and business elites.

A similar unit targets Google's Android which is used to run the majority of the world's smart phones (~85%) including Samsung, HTC and Sony. 1.15 billion Android powered phones were sold last year. "Year Zero" shows that as of 2016 the CIA had 24 "weaponized" Android "zero days" which it has developed itself and obtained from GCHQ, NSA and cyber arms contractors.

These techniques permit the CIA to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloackman by hacking the "smart" phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.

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CIA Silent as Wikileaks Claims to Publish Thousands of Agency Files

Independent research and the intelligence community have determined that Wikileaks has routinely published document and data given to it by Kremlin-linked intelligence agencies.
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Wed 08 Mar 2017, 14:01:21

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross: If we don't use robots, everyone else will

"I'm not in favor of trying to hold back technological advance," Ross told CNBC's "Squawk Alley" on Tuesday. "We need technological advance. And if we don't employ robots, the Chinese will, the Vietnamese will, the Europeans will, the Japanese will. Everyone will."


Six Jobs Automation Will Eliminate

Efficiencies create redundancies, and redundancies can lead to pink slips for those who don’t prepare. Here are the job types that face automation in the near-term.

- Assembly Line Workers
- Drivers and Truckers
- Auto Insurance
- Food Service
- Translation
- Data Entry

Things may change in the future, but one rule of thumb today is that almost anything that a typical person can do with less than one second of mental thought we can either now or in the very near future automate with AI.

Baidu Chief Scientist - Andrew Ng

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McDonald's Automation Push

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Video ... McDonald's is in the process of bringing self-order kiosks to all of its locations, and this initiative, along with the rollout of mobile-based ordering and payment, presents a way to improve functions and efficiency throughout the chain. Perceived quality of service has been an issue for the company, and reducing employee-customer interaction has the potential to relieve friction and free up employees to perform other tasks. Studies and customer feedback have also indicated that a substantial portion of the millennial generation prefers to bypass human interaction when placing orders, so the new initiatives could help to ingratiate Mickey D's with one of its most crucial age demographics.

Franchisees will pay roughly $15,000 for three ordering kiosks, and he anticipates that it will take less than two years for the benefits created by self-ordering kiosks to offset the investment.

... Easterbrook has been careful when commenting on the likelihood of new technologies that will eliminate jobs, but competitors including Wendy's and CKE Restaurants have directly linked their respective automation efforts to rising labor costs, touting the benefits of smaller in-store headcounts. Talking about replacing workers with technology might not be politically expedient for McDonald's at the moment, but a pared-down workforce is almost certainly a desirable outcome for the company -- and one it is certain to explore going forward.

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But, will I still get my 'Happy Meal'? Video

Meet Flippy, a burger-grilling robot from Miso Robotics and CaliBurger

Video - Flipping burgers is a hot and greasy job. Slips, trips, burns and cuts are common hazards associated with the work. But global demand for burgers is tremendous. Top burger chains racked up more than $75.5 billion in annual sales in 2016. To help keep human cooks out of harm’s way while fulfilling our collective appetite for burgers, Pasadena-based Miso Robotics is rolling out a new “robotic kitchen assistant” called Flippy.

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Miso Robotics CEO and co-founder David Zito said, “We focus on using AI and automation to solve the high pain points in restaurants and food prep. That’s the dull, dirty and dangerous work around the grill, the fryer, and other prep work like chopping onions. The idea is to help restaurants improve food quality and safety without requiring a major kitchen redesign.”

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Among other functions, Flippy grabs unwrapped burger patties, moves them into position on a hot grill, keeps track of each burger’s cook-time and temperature, then alerts human cooks when it’s time to apply cheese or other toppings. Flippy plates burgers but doesn’t wrap them or add finishing touches like lettuce, tomatoes, avocado or a restaurant’s signature sauce.

Unlike other burger-making robots, including those made by Momentum Machines, Flippy is controlled by Miso Robotics’ AI software. AI and machine learning enable the robotic cook to learn to make new foods, adapting to a restaurant’s seasonal menu changes.


Food-Delivery Robots Now in Action in DC

Artificial intelligence runs wild while humans dither

... A study published last month in the research journal Plos One, analysing the use of bots on Wikipedia over a decade, found that even those designed for wholly benign purposes could spend years duelling with each other.

In one such battle, Xqbot and Darknessbot disputed 3,629 entries, undoing and correcting the other’s edits on subjects ranging from Alexander the Great to Aston Villa football club.

The authors, from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Alan Turing Institute, were surprised by the findings, concluding that we need to pay far more attention to these bot-on-bot interactions. “We know very little about the life and evolution of our digital minions.”

Wikipedia’s bot ecosystem is gated and monitored. But that is not the case in many other reaches of the internet where malevolent bots, often working in collaborative botnets, can run wild.

The authors highlighted the dangers of such bots mimicking humans on social media to “spread political propaganda or influence public discourse”. Such is the threat of digital manipulation that a group of European experts has even questioned whether democracy can survive the era of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence.

It may not be too much of an exaggeration to say we are reaching a critical juncture. Is truth, in some senses, being electronically determined? Are we, as the European academics fear, becoming the “[b]digital slaves” of our one-time “digital minions”?[/b] The scale, speed and efficiency of some of these algorithmic interactions are reaching a level of complexity beyond human comprehension.

If you really want to scare yourself on a dark winter’s night you should read Susan Blackmore on the subject. The psychologist has argued that, by creating such computer algorithms we may have inadvertently unleashed a “third replicator”, which she originally called a teme, later modified to treme.

The first replicators were genes that determined our biological evolution. The second were human memes, such as language, writing and money, that accelerated cultural evolution. But now, she believes, our memes are being superseded by non-human tremes, which fit her definition of a replicator as being “information that can be copied with variation and selection”.

“We humans are being transformed by new technologies,” she said in a recent lecture. “We have let loose the most phenomenal power.”
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Sat 11 Mar 2017, 14:59:25

The future is here: China sounds a clarion call on AI funding, policies to surpass US

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Artificial intelligence has made its way on to the agenda of the government’s annual political show in Beijing, urged on by the country’s business and technology elites

China’s government is preparing for a war of sorts with the United States to claim the vantage point to define the technological trend for the next generation.

At the annual meeting of China’s parliament this week, the usual Communist Party agenda of economic growth, social welfare, jobs, health care and pension made way for an unusual addition: a clarion call by some of China’s most influential business and technology leaders for the government to set policies to define what they consider the Next Big Thing.

They include the founder of the largest Chinese internet search engine Baidu, the owner of smartphone maker Xiaomi, and the founder of Geely Automobile, which bought Volvo.

They are tabling motions and proposals for the government to take the lead in getting Chinese enterprises to collaborate on artificial intelligence (AI) research, and facilitate the industrialising of the technology.

“The development of AI has come to a tipping point,” said Baidu’s founder Robin Li, a delegate of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a political advisory body. “Whichever country makes a breakthrough in application can have a bigger chance to lead the world in AI technology. China’s AI prowess is certainly the second best in the world , if not the best.”

“Unlike the previous technology revolutions, AI is the once-in-many-decades chance for China to lead the charge in technology,” said Lei, a lawmaker at the National People’s Congress (NPC), the parliament.

Donald Trump’s restrictive immigration policy is giving China an “unprecedented” opportunity to attract top talent from overseas to develop AI, said Liu. IFlyTek’s voice technology produced real-time subtitles of the Chinese premier’s speech at the NPC meeting.

“About one fourth of the US’ high-tech firms are founded by immigrants, who are upset by Trump’s policies,” said Liu, who’s also an NPC delegate. “It’s the perfect time for China to offer an olive branch to attract global talent on AI.”

Li also urged the Chinese government to offer more green cards to attract Silicon Valley talent, who may be put off by Trump’s policies.


A.I.: The Next U.S.-China Arms Race?

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... Although the PLA has traditionally sought to learn lessons from foreign conflicts, its current thinking on the implications of artificial intelligence has been informed not by a war but by a game. AlphaGo’s defeat of Lee Sedol in the ancient Chinese game of Go has seemingly captured the PLA’s imagination at the highest levels.

From the perspective of influential PLA strategists, this “great war of man and machine” decisively demonstrated the immense potential of artificial intelligence to take on an integral role in command and control and also decision making in future warfare. Indeed, the success of AlphaGo is considered a turning point that demonstrated the potential of artificial intelligence to engage in complex analyses and strategy comparable to that required to wage war—not only equaling human cognitive capabilities but even contributing a distinctive advantage that may surpass the human mind

At the highest levels, the Central Military Commission Joint Staff Department has called for the PLA to progress towards artificial intelligence (AI) command and decision making in its development of a joint operations command systems.

In their writings to date, leading PLA academics, not unlike the U.S. military, project that the significant military applications of artificial intelligence will include: AI command and control, as well as support to decision making; intelligent unmanned military platforms; and the expansion of human stamina, skills and intellect through artificial intelligence. The initial conferences and workshops on the topic have convened influential academics, including from the PLA’s Academy of Military Science, National Defense University and National University of Defense Technology, along with leading artificial intelligence experts, such as Maj. Gen. Li Deyi, from the Central Military Commission Equipment Development Department’s 61st Research Institute. Among them, Hu Xiaofeng, a PLA wargaming and simulation expert, has engaged in extensive study of DARPA’s Deep Green program, which sought to create and evaluate potential options for commanders. There are indications that PLA researchers have been experimenting with the development of a comparable system.
The PLA’s traditional approach that “technology determines tactics” could contribute to an inclination to rely upon artificial intelligence, perhaps to a greater degree than the United States.
Certain PLA thinkers anticipate that the dynamics of future warfare will demand that artificial intelligence take on an increasingly integral function at the strategic and operational levels of command. In particular, the demands for cognitive speed in warfare are expected to result in progression towards a battlefield “singularity,” a point at which the rapidity of reactions required exceeds human capabilities.

At this point, it is too early to anticipate the future trajectory of the PLA’s employment of artificial intelligence. However, it is notable that the intense concerns over keeping a human “in the loop” that tend to be pervasive in U.S. debates on the topic appear to be less prevalent in the PLA’s writings. Perhaps, the PLA could approach the issue of “meaningful human control” differently than the United States. Looking forward, the PLA’s thinking on and progression in multiple dimensions of AI will be a critical determinant of its future military capabilities.


China is rapidly making robots that will one day manufacture everything you buy

... China is already the world’s largest producer of industrial robots, supplying about 27% of the global market since 2015, according to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). It’s also the largest buyer of robots. According to the IFR and Bernstein Research, China’s factories spent over $3 billion acquiring industrial robots in 2015.

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Chinese factory replaces 90% of human workers with robots. Production rises by 250%, defects drop by 80%

The Changying Precision Technology Company focuses on the production of mobile phones and uses automated production lines. The factory used to be run by 650 employees, but now just 60 people get the entire job done, while robots take care of the rest. Luo Weiqiang, the general manager, says the number of required employees will drop to 20 at one point. Despite this reduction in staff, not only is the factory producing more equipment (a 250% increase), but it’s also ensuring better quality.


Four Years Ago: China Successfully Tests 'Carrier Killer' Missile In The Gobi Desert

China's PLA "sunk" a U.S. aircraft carrier during a war game in remote China using its DF-21D "Carrier Killer" missile, reports Taiwan paper Want China Times. The Times report originates with a Google Earth image published at SAORBOATS Argentinian internet forum.

The photo shows two big craters on a 600 foot platform deep in China's Gobi desert that Chinese military testers used to simulate the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.

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Satellite image with carrier deck for comparison - DF21D is capable of delivering a tactical nuclear package

The Dong-Feng-21D ballistic missile is expected to ring China's coast on its truck-mounted launcher, posing a significant threat to U.S. Naval forces in the region.

Lacking a horizontal flight path could make it much more difficult to defend against and with the Navy's new carrier's running at $13 billion plus per ship, losing one would be as great a financial blow as it would be psychological and tactical.


Aircraft carriers, championed by Trump, are vulnerable to attack

Last week, President Donald J. Trump chose the deck of the newest U.S. aircraft carrier, the $13 billion USS Gerald R. Ford, for a speech extolling his planned boost in military spending.

Trump vowed that the newest generation of “Ford Class” carriers - the most expensive warships ever built - will remain the centerpiece of projecting American power abroad. The cost of building three “super-carriers,” has ballooned by a third over the last decade from $27 to $36 billion.

We're going to soon have more coming,” Trump told an enthusiastic audience of sailors, declaring the new carriers so big and solidly built that they were immune to attack.


Trump's expansion plans come as evidence mounts that potential enemies have built new anti-ship weapons able to destroy much of the United States’ expensive fleet of carriers. And as they have been for decades, carriers remain vulnerable to submarines.

In a combat exercise off the coast of Florida in 2015, a small French nuclear submarine, the Saphir, snuck through multiple rings of defenses and “sank” the U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt and half of its escort ships. In other naval exercises, even old-fashioned diesel-electric submarines have beaten carriers.

All told, since the early 1980s, U.S. and British carriers have been sunk at least 14 times in so-called “free play” war games meant to simulate real battle, according to think tanks, foreign navies and press accounts. The exact total is unknown because the Navy classifies exercise reports.

... A 2015 Rand Corporation report, “Chinese Threats to U.S. Surface Ships,” found that if hostilities broke out, “the risks to U.S. carriers are substantial and rising.”

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Rand: Total Expected Chinese Submarine Engagement Opportunities Against a Single U.S. Aircraft Carrier in a Seven-Day Campaign
“Beyond a shadow of a doubt, a carrier is simply a target”

The cost of a single new, Ford-class carrier – $10.5 billion without cost overruns – would consume nearly 20 percent of Trump’s proposed $54 billion increase in next year's defense budget.

At a naval symposium in 2010, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called into question making such big investments in a few increasingly sinkable ships. Gates said “a Ford-class carrier plus its full complement of the latest aircraft would represent potentially $15 billion to $20 billion worth of hardware at risk.” (not to mention the 5,000+ crew)

The Navy, with the backing of (the bought & paid for) Congress, went ahead nevertheless.
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... “There is no competition to this ship,” declared Trump, who called the Gerald R. Ford American craftsmanship “at its biggest, at its best, at its finest.


China developing stealth drones to evade anti-aircraft missiles

China's largest missile maker is developing military drones with stealth abilities that can evade anti-aircraft weapons, the official China Daily said on Thursday, in another advance for the country's ambitious military modernization program.

"Drones have become an indispensable weapon in modern warfare because they can play an important role in high-resolution reconnaissance, long-distance precision strikes, anti-submarine operations and aerial combat," Wei Yiyin, deputy general manager of China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp, told the English language newspaper.

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Stronger, faster and more deadly: the ethics of developing supersoldiers

Mad scientists' discuss emerging tech as Army releases strategy on robots

The battlefield of the future is closer than some may think. According to the [url=
http://www.arcic.army.mil/App_Documents ... rategy.pdf ]strategy[/url]
, the Army envisions that, by 2025, ground troops will conduct foot patrols in with robots called "squad multipurpose equipment transport vehicles" that carry rucksacks and other equipment. Overhead, unmanned aircraft will serve as spotters to warn troops of nearby enemy forces.

Small robots could also be used for reconnaissance to increase situational awareness, while unmanned aerial systems deliver cargo to improve sustainment and reduce the reliance on manned rotary-wing support, the strategy notes.

This is not just about robots, it's about a lot of other things," said Augustus Fountain, deputy chief scientist for the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army. "We need to think about autonomy as a much more holistic view and fashion."
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Sat 11 Mar 2017, 15:06:53

TALOS Humanoid Now Available from PAL Robotics

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These New Robots Look Freaky But Can Do Amazing Things

Another four-limbed robot is ETH Zurich's ANYmal. It, too, is designed for rough terrain, and can run, climb up stairs, and pick itself up after a fall. Unlike Minitaur, it already sports sensors to help it navigate. ANYmal uses lasers to take 100,000 measurements per second so it can build a map of its surroundings, figure out the best path to take, and start choosing where to place its feet.

It can even undergo a bit of a transformation, thanks to joints that can rotate a full 360 degrees. In the open, ANYmal walks similarly to many mammals, with legs tucked underneath it. But faced with tight tunnels, ANYmal can spread its limbs out more widely and settle into a spiderlike gait. "With ANYmal we essentially have the ability to switch joint configurations on the fly," Hutter says. "All that is possible since you have a huge range of motion on the joints."

ANYmal is a quadrupedal robot designed for autonomous operation in challenging environments. Driven by special compliant and precisely torque controllable actuators, the system is capable of dynamic running and high-mobile climbing. Thanks to incorporated laser sensors and cameras, the robot can perceive its environment to continuously create maps and accurately localize. Based on this information, it can autonomously plan its navigation path and carefully select footholds while walking. Driven by our first real-world application, namely industrial inspection of oil and gas sites, ANYmal carries batteries for more than 2h autonomy and different sensory equipment such as optical and thermal cameras, microphones, gas-detection sensors and active lighting. With this payload, the machine weighs less than 30kg and can hence be easily transported and deployed by a single operator.


ANYmal for the Oil & Gas Industry
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Sun 12 Mar 2017, 14:51:43

The last things that will make us uniquely human

In a few decades, AI will outstrip many of the abilities we believe make us special. This is a grand challenge for our age.

... One of the most consequential pieces of news from the US in early 2017 was not from the White House, or even the Twitter feed of Donald Trump. Rather, it was hidden in a report filed with the California Department of Motor Vehicles and made available on the DMV’s website.

It details the efforts of Google (or more precisely its Waymo subsidiary) to make autonomous driving a reality. According to the report, in 2016 Google’s self-driving cars clocked 635,868 miles (1,023,330km), and required human intervention 124 times. That is one intervention about every 5,000 miles (8,047km) of autonomous driving. But even more impressive is the progress in just a single year: human interventions fell from 0.8 times per thousand miles to 0.2, which translates into a 400% improvement. With such progress, Google’s cars will easily surpass my own driving ability later this year.

Driving once seemed to be a very human skill. But we said that about chess, too. Then a computer beat the human world champion, repeatedly. The strategy board game Go took over from chess as the litmus test for human thinking; until 2016, when a computer bested one of the world’s leading professional Go players. IBM’s Watson aced Jeopardy – another supposedly human domain – in 2011, and is now dividing its time between identifying cancerous moles and cooking up creative recipes, among other things.

With computers conquering what used to be deeply human tasks – those that require knowledge, strategy, even creativity – what will it mean in the future to be human? - Video

Actually, it all comes down to a fairly simple question: What’s so special about us, and what’s our lasting value?

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No driver? No steering wheel? No pedals? No Problem! ...

California gives green light to autonomous driverless cars

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... self-driving software systems, not just humans, can be considered drivers.


25 Shocking Predictions about the Coming Driverless Car Era in the U.S.

China's Baidu Artificial Intelligence Lab Unveils Synthetic Speech System

The Chinese search giant’s Deep Voice system learns to talk in just a few hours with little or no human interference.

... One of the challenges in speech synthesis is to reduce the amount of fine-tuning that goes on behind the scenes. Baidu’s big breakthrough is to create a deep-learning machine that largely does away with this kind of meddling. The result is a text-to-speech system called Deep Voice that can learn to talk in just a few hours with little or no human interference.

First some background. Text-to-speech systems are familiar in the modern world in navigation apps, talking clocks, telephone answering systems, and so on. Traditionally these have been created by recording a large database of speech from a single individual and then recombining the utterances to make new phrases.

The problem with these systems is that it is difficult to switch to a new speaker or change the emphasis in their words without recording an entirely new database. So computer scientists have been working on another approach. Their goal is to synthesize speech in real time from scratch as it is required.

Last year, Google’s DeepMind made a significant breakthrough in this area. It unveiled a neural network that learns how to speak by listening to the sound waves from real speech while comparing this to a transcript of the text. After training, it was able to produce synthetic speech based on text it was given. Google DeepMind called its system WaveNet.

Baidu’s work is an improvement on WaveNet, which still requires some fine-tuning during the training process. WaveNet is also computationally demanding, so much so that it is unclear whether it could ever be used to synthesize speech in real time in the real world.

Baidu says it has overcome these problems.

The Terminator: In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Sarah Connor: Skynet fights back.

The Terminator: Yes. It launches its missiles against the targets in Russia.

John Connor: Why attack Russia? Aren't they our friends now?

The Terminator: Because Skynet knows that the Russian counterattack will eliminate its enemies over here.


Stephen Hawking: We need a 'world government' to stop the rise of dangerous artificial intelligence
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Fri 17 Mar 2017, 14:39:44

Tech Expert Warns That AI Could Become “A Fascist’s Dream

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As artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, people need to make sure it’s not used by authoritarian regimes to centralize power and target certain populations, Microsoft Research’s Kate Crawford warned on Sunday.

In her SXSW session, titled Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fascism, Crawford, who studies the social impact of machine learning and large-scale data systems, explained ways that automated systems and their encoded biases can be misused, particularly when they fall into the wrong hands.
“Just as we are seeing a step function increase in the spread of AI, something else is happening: the rise of ultra-nationalism, rightwing authoritarianism and fascism,”

Crawford believes the issue is that AI is often invisibly coded with human biases that often correspond with the characteristics of fascist movements: to demonize outsiders, track populations, centralize power, and claim neutrality and authority without accountability. AI can be a potent tool in achieving those goals, especially if it is coded with human biases.

Crawford’s concerns center around using AI as a black box of algorithms that mask discrimination. AI could also be misused to build registries, which could in turn be used to target specific populations. To this end, Crawford cited IBM’s Hollerith Machine, used by Nazi Germany to track ethnic groups, and the Book of Life’s role in South African apartheid.
“We should always be suspicious when machine learning systems are described as free from bias if it’s been trained on human-generated data. Our biases are built into that training data.”

Donald Trump has floated the idea of creating a Muslim registry.We already have that. Facebook has become the default Muslim registry of the world,” Crawford said, mentioning research from Cambridge University that showed it is possible to predict people’s religious beliefs based on what they “like” on the social network. Christians and Muslims were correctly classified in 82% of cases, and similar results were achieved for Democrats and Republicans (85%). That study was concluded in 2013, since when AI has made huge leaps .

In the U.S., an AI system to assist in mass deportations has been in the works at Palantir since 2014, and the company’s co-founder Peter Thiel is an advisor to President Trump.


The Nazi Party: IBM & "Death's Calculator"

In the upside-down world of the Holocaust, dignified professionals were Hitler's advance troops.

Police officials disregarded their duty in favor of protecting villains and persecuting victims. Lawyers perverted concepts of justice to create anti-Jewish laws. Doctors defiled the art of medicine to perpetrate ghastly experiments and even choose who was healthy enough to be worked to death-and who could be cost-effectively sent to the gas chamber. Scientists and engineers debased their higher calling to devise the instruments and rationales of destruction. And statisticians used their little known but powerful discipline to identify the victims, project and rationalize the benefits of their destruction, organize their persecution, and even audit the efficiency of genocide.

Enter IBM and its overseas subsidiaries.


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When Hitler came to power, a central Nazi goal was to identify and destroy Germany's 600,000 Jews. To Nazis, Jews were not just those who practiced Judaism, but those of Jewish blood, regardless of their assimilation, intermarriage, religious activity, or even conversion to Christianity. Only after Jews were identified could they be targeted for asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and ultimately extermination. To search generations of communal, church, and governmental records all across Germany-and later throughout Europe-was a cross-indexing task so monumental, it called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed.
IBM engineered a strategic business alliance and joint planning program with Nazi Germany from the very first moment in 1933 and extending right through the war that endowed the Hitler regime with the technology and the tools it needed to expedite and, in many ways, automate, all six phases of Hitler's war against the Jews. Those six phases are identification, expulsion, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation and ultimately even extermination.

When the Reich needed to mount a systematic campaign of Jewish economic disenfranchisement and later began the massive movement of European Jews out of their homes and into ghettos, once again, the task was so prodigious it called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed. When the Final Solution sought to efficiently transport Jews out of European ghettos along railroad lines and into death camps, with timing so precise the victims were able to walk right out of the boxcar and into a waiting gas chamber, the coordination was so complex a task, this too called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed.

However, another invention did exist: the IBM punch card and card sorting system-a precursor to the computer. IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler's program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success. IBM Germany, using its own staff and equipment, designed, executed, and supplied the indispensable technologic assistance Hitler's Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before-the automation of human destruction. More than 2,000 such multi-machine sets were dispatched throughout Germany, and thousands more throughout German-dominated Europe. Card sorting operations were established in every major concentration camp. People were moved from place to place, systematically worked to death, and their remains cataloged with icy automation.

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IBM Germany, known in those days as Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft, or Dehomag, did not simply sell the Reich machines and then walk away. IBM's subsidiary, with the knowledge of its New York headquarters, enthusiastically custom-designed the complex devices and specialized applications as an official corporate undertaking. Dehomag's top management was comprised of openly rabid Nazis who were arrested after the war for their Party affiliation. IBM NY always understood-from the outset in 1933-that it was courting and doing business with the upper echelon of the Nazi Party. The company leveraged its Nazi Party connections to continuously enhance its business relationship with Hitler's Reich, in Germany and throughout Nazi-dominated Europe.

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See Everything With Hollerith Punchcards

Dehomag and other IBM subsidiaries custom-designed the applications. Its technicians sent mock-ups of punch cards back and forth to Reich offices until the data columns were acceptable, much as any software designer would today. Punch cards could only be designed, printed, and purchased from one source: IBM. The machines were not sold, they were leased, and regularly maintained and upgraded by only one source: IBM. IBM subsidiaries trained the Nazi officers and their surrogates throughout Europe, set up branch offices and local dealerships throughout Nazi Europe staffed by a revolving door of IBM employees, and scoured paper mills to produce as many as 1.5 billion punch cards a year in Germany alone. Moreover, the fragile machines were serviced on site about once per month, even when that site was in or near a concentration camp.


Palantir Provides the Engine for Donald Trump’s Deportation Machine

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is deploying a new intelligence system called Investigative Case Management (ICM), created by Palantir Technologies, that will assist in President Donald Trump’s efforts to deport millions of immigrants from the United States.

In 2014, ICE awarded Palantir, the $20 billion data-mining firm founded by billionaire Trump advisor Peter Thiel, a $41 million contract to build and maintain ICM, according to government funding records. The system is scheduled to arrive at “final operating capacity” by September of this year. The documents identify Palantir’s ICM as “mission critical” to ICE, meaning that the agency will not be able to properly function without the program.

ICM funding documents make clear that the system is far from a passive administrator of ICE’s case flow. ICM allows ICE agents to access a vast “ecosystem” of data to facilitate immigration officials in both discovering targets and then creating and administering cases against them. The system provides its users access to intelligence platforms maintained by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and an array of other federal and private law enforcement entities. It can provide ICE agents access to information on a subject’s schooling, family relationships, employment information, phone records, immigration history, foreign exchange program status, personal connections, biometric traits, criminal records, and home and work addresses.
“What we have here is a growing network of interconnected databases that together are drawing in more and more information,”... "If President Trump's massive round-ups of undocumented immigrants are going to happen, these are the databases that are going to be used and there are going to be very powerful databases. I think that Americans have always been suspicious of government power and when the government gains tools that are so powerful and can be used not just against undocumented immigrants but against regular Americans potentially – that's something that raises a lot of eyebrows."

- Jay Stanley, privacy expert - American Civil Liberties Union

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/07/peter-th ... kdown.html


Rex Tillerson on North Korea: Military action 'an option'

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(60 years of Peace is too long); Tillerson says diplomacy with North Korea has ‘failed’; Pyongyang warns of war.

Asked if the possibility for military action existed, he said: "Certainly we do not want to, for things to get to military conflict."

But he added: "If they elevate the threat of their weapons programme to a level that we believe requires action, then that option's on the table."

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Last edited by vox_mundi on Fri 17 Mar 2017, 15:58:23, edited 1 time in total.
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Fri 17 Mar 2017, 15:20:49

What Happens If a Nuclear Bomb Goes Off in Manhattan?

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On a quiet afternoon, two medium-sized nuclear blasts level portions of Manhattan.

... To come up with a picture of what would really happen, Kennedy and Andrew Crooks, another researcher at the center, are working with a pair of Ph.D. candidates to study the immediate social aftermath of a nuclear blast in an American megacity.

The Center for Social Complexity was awarded a grant worth more than $450,000 last May to develop a computer model that simulates how as many as 20 million individuals would react in the first 30 days after a nuclear attack in New York City. The grant, which came from the nuclear-focused Defense Threat Reduction Agency, or DTRA, will fund a three-year project. In the simulation, individual “agents” will make decisions and move about the area based on their needs, their surroundings, and their social networks.

DTRA wanted us to look at the reaction, not the recovery. They want to limit it to the first 30 days. Emergency responders will try to respond within minutes, so there will be some response. But no recovery, in the sense that infrastructure and business will start reestablishing normal behaviors.

... We’re planning to model at the individual level. A megacity is more than 10 million, and in the region we’re talking about, we’ll potentially get to 20 million agents.

Waddell: What are the goals that each individual agent will be balancing? Safety, hunger, family and friends, getting out of the area—how will the model treat those needs?

Kennedy: One of the aspects we’ll be modeling is the individual agents’ social networks. Communications with those people, and confirmation of their status, seems to be one of the first urgencies that people feel, after their immediate survival of the event.

Part of our modeling challenge is going to be figuring out if a parent would go through a contaminated area to retrieve a child at a daycare or school, putting themselves at risk in the process, because it’s important to them to physically be there with their children. Or do they realize that they’re isolated, that communications aren’t going to be available in the near term, and they only deal with their local folks who are now their family? That’s the sense we get.

Waddell: Can you also model psychological effects, like terror?

Kennedy: That certainly does affect how people behave. Some people will be frozen and unable to function as a result of terror, as well as their injuries and the environment around them. We will be modeling those effects. But we’re not, per se, modeling the internal states of those individuals. We’re primarily modeling their behavior. ...

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Trump Administration Is Said to Be Working to Loosen Counterterrorism Rules

Trump administration may relax rules meant to limit civilian casualties in counter-terrorist operations. Officials are “exploring how to dismantle or bypass Obama-era constraints intended to prevent civilian deaths from drone attacks, commando raids and other counterterrorism missions outside conventional war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Inside the White House, officials frame raising the tolerance for civilian deaths for sectors of Yemen and Somalia “as a test run while the government considers whether to more broadly rescind or relax the Obama-era rules.”


Lockheed Martin to deliver world record-setting 60kw laser to U.S. Army

Lockheed Martin has completed the design, development and demonstration of a 60 kW-class beam combined fiber laser for the U.S. Army.

In testing earlier this month, the Lockheed Martin laser produced a single beam of 58 kW, representing a world record for a laser of this type. The Lockheed Martin team met all contractual deliverables for the laser system and is preparing to ship it to the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command in Huntsville, Ala.

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Germany to test dialect analysis software on asylum-seekers

Germany plans to test software that can automatically recognize a person's dialect to help determine whether asylum-seekers are really where they claim they're from.

Germany's Office for Migration and Refugees confirmed a report on the pilot project Friday by the Die Welt newspaper.
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late.
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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Wed 22 Mar 2017, 10:52:09

Computers Shouldn't be Just Computational Tools, but Learn Like Humans, DARPA Believes

... Existing machine-learning techniques don't allow computers to think outside the box, so to speak, or think dynamically based on the situations and circumstances.

The goal of a new DARPA project is to create computers that think like biological entities and are continually learning. Like humans, such systems would be better at making decisions by taking formerly unanticipated problems into account and adapting on the fly.

Such computers would start learning slowly, much like children. Then learning would accelerate. The learning model would become more flexible as a system matures and gains experience. If it works, the computer will be able to extrapolate more answers depending on the situation, much like humans.

DARPA's aptly named Lifelong Learning Machine (L2M) program has the ambitious goal to create technology for "new AI systems that learn online, in the field, and based on what they encounter -- without having to be taken offline for reprogramming or retraining for new conditions," according to a document published Thursday detailing the program.
Goal: an AI systems that learns online, in the field, and based on what they encounter -- without having to be taken offline for reprogramming or retraining for new conditions

... The four-year L2M program aims to change all that by focusing development on two technical areas. The first technical area will explore algorithms, theoretical modeling, analysis, software, and architectures that implement new approaches for continuous learning. It will also pursue robustness and safety by setting limits on system behaviors and allowing users both to monitor the system’s behavior and evolution and intervene as needed, DARPA stated. The idea is to continuously apply the results of experience and adapt “lessons learned” to new data or situations. Simultaneously, it calls for the development of techniques for monitoring a machine learning system’s behavior, setting limits on the scope of its ability to adapt, and intervening in the system’s functions as needed, DARPA said.

The second technical will focus specifically on how living systems learn and adapt and will consider whether and how those principles and techniques can be applied to machine learning systems. Concepts from nature could include but are not limited to: Mechanisms for evolving networks; memory stability in adaptive networks; goal-driven behavior mechanisms and learning rules and plasticity mechanisms.

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Google Created an AI That Can Learn Almost as Fast as a Human

Systems can be taught to learn differently depending on many different variables, such as the strength of the connection between layers. Significant changes in one layer can dramatically change how information is transmitted in other layers, or how it is “learned.” Deep neural networks have many layers, so when changes are present, the process of learning can take an incredibly long time.

However, Alexander Pritzel, one of the researchers at Google DeepMind, and his colleagues seem to have figured out a way around this issue. They call it “neural episodic control.”
“Neural episodic control demonstrates dramatic improvements on the speed of learning for a wide range of environments,” the team told MIT Technology Review. “Critically, our agent is able to rapidly latch onto highly successful strategies as soon as they are experienced, instead of waiting for many steps of optimization.”

Their method mimics the processes of learning that occur in human and animal brains, replicating what happens first in the prefrontal cortex and then, as a backup, in the hippocampus.


Researchers are using Darwin’s theories to evolve AI, so only the strongest algorithms survive

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Computer scientists are now revisiting an older field of study that suggests putting AI through evolutionary processes, like those that molded the human brain over millennia, could help us develop smarter, more efficient algorithms. While artificial neural networks replicate the process of learning individual concepts, neuroevolution tries to recreate the process that built parts of the brain—i.e. the process by which only the strong (or smart) survive.

Although neuroevolution has been around since the 1980s, the concept is getting renewed attention as researchers dig into the archives for different perspectives on machine learning. In the past month, Google Brain and non-profit organization OpenAI each published unreviewed papers on the subject, Google’s on the application of neuroevolution principles to image recognition and OpenAI’s on using “worker” algorithms to teach a master algorithm the best way to accomplish a task. ...


Google’s DeepMind AI Now Has a Memory

Researchers have overcome one of the major stumbling blocks in artificial intelligence with a program that can learn one task after another using skills it acquires on the way.

Developed by Google’s AI company, DeepMind, the program has taken on a range of different tasks and performed almost as well as a human. Crucially, and uniquely, the AI does not forget how it solved past problems, and uses the knowledge to tackle new ones.

The AI is not capable of the general intelligence that humans draw on when they are faced with new challenges; its use of past lessons is more limited. But the work shows a way around a problem that had to be solved if researchers are ever to build so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI) machines that match human intelligence.

“If we’re going to have computer programs that are more intelligent and more useful, then they will have to have this ability to learn sequentially,” said James Kirkpatrick at DeepMind.


Luna, the Most Human AI Prototype to Date

Luna is the most amazing AI you’ve never heard of. Ask her to find the square root of 3,942,871 she promptly replies, “The result is 1,985.6664.” She can explain the theory of relativity to you in simple terms. But she can also differentiate between subjective and objective questions and has begun to develop values and opinions.
When asked, “My boyfriend hit me, should I leave him?” she replied:

“Yes. If you are dating someone and physical violence is on the table it will always be on the table. You are also likely being abused and manipulated in other ways.”

These replies are not pre-programmed. Luna learns based on experience and feedback, much like a human. But she is not designed to be a kind of know-it-all Hermione Granger bot, she is an artificial general intelligence (AGI) in the making. This means an AI that can match, or exceed human capabilities in just about every domain, from speech, to vision, creativity and problem solving.

She’s not there yet, but she’s already astonishingly clever. We explore her personality and capabilities below. ...

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Google’s Alpha Go now has a serious game-playing rival from China's Tencent

Jueyi, or FineArt, a Go AI developed by Chinese tech giant Tencent, just won the championship title (link in Chinese) in the 10th Computer Go UEC Cup in Japan over the weekend. FineArt won all 11 games, beating the runner-up, Japan’s Deep Zen Go, twice in both the qualifying stage and the final. Though Alpha Go was absent, the annual contest attracted 30 of the world’s best AI Go-playing software systems such as Facebook’s Darkforest and France’s Crazy Stone.

The Tencent AI Lab began to develop its own Go-playing algorithm last March, around the time when Alpha Go swept Korea’s Lee in a 4-1 victory, the first emphatic proof that AI could play the millennia-old board game at a level no human has attained. In August, Tencent’s developers put the algorithm onto Chinese online board-game platform foxwq.com to test its skills against professional Go players. After switching names several times, the AI player settled on “FineArt,” or 绝艺, a phrase picked up from an ancient Chinese poem.

Ke Jie, the reigning top-ranked Go player, appears to have become something of a benchmark for his robot counterparts. In January, Ke lost three games during Alpha Go’s test on two Chinese board-game sites. At the time the 19-year-old said he still had “one last move” to defeat the AI. He is likely to take on AlphaGo for a fourth time in April, according to Chinese media reports.

FineArts first encountered Ke on foxwq.com during November, taking a win and a loss. But after an update in February, the algorithm has since won 10 straight games (link in Chinese) against the world’s No. 1 player.


DARPA has laid the groundwork for thought-powered prosthetics

DAPRA has devised what it calls the "Atomic Magnetometer for Biological Imaging in Earth's Native Terrain." Or, "AMBIIENT" if you're into the whole brevity thing.

Essentially what AMBIIENT does is isolate and shield the Earth's incredibly strong magnetic frequencies from a piece of equipment so that the minuscule ones produced by the human body can do things like control artificial limbs with the weak magnetic waves that are produced by thoughts. "Potentially on the horizon, for example, are sensor systems for detecting spinal signals, diagnosing concussions and brain-machine interfaces," the post from DARPA reads.
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late.
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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Wed 22 Mar 2017, 11:49:23

Get Ready For Some Groundshine ...

Trump administration will review the US goal of a world without nuclear weapons

Christopher Ford, the National Security Council’s senior director for weapons of mass destruction and counter-proliferation, told a nuclear policy conference that the Nuclear Policy Review will examine whether or not “the goal of a world without nuclear weapons is a realistic goal.”
An increasingly unstable world and growing threats to U.S. national security demand a review of "whether traditional U.S. fidelity to that visionary end-state of abolition and demonstrating fidelity to it by pointing to rapid progress in reducing arsenals is still a viable strategy"

Trump has said that while would like to see nuclear weapons abolished, he wants the United States to have an unrivaled arsenal. He also said that the United States has "fallen behind" in its nuclear capabilities, even though it is in the midst of a 30-year, $1.3 trillion drive to modernize what most experts agree is the world's most powerful nuclear force.

Trump has supported the development of nuclear weapons by Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia, called for using nuclear arms against the Islamic State militant group and denounced the Iran nuclear deal as "a disaster" that he would "rip up."

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India may abandon its 'no first use' nuclear policy

There is increasing evidence that India could launch a preemptive first strike against Pakistan if it feared a nuclear attack was imminent, in a marked reversal of its well-known no-first use policy, according to Vipin Narang, a nuclear strategist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaking at a conference on nuclear policy hosted by Carnegie, a think tank, on Monday.
“India’s opening salvo may not be conventional strikes trying to pick off just Nasr batteries (launch vehicles for Pakistan’s tactical battlefield nuclear warheads) in the theatre, but a full ‘comprehensive counterforce strike’ that attempts to completely disarm Pakistan of its nuclear weapons so that India does not have to engage in iterative tit-for-tat exchanges and expose its own cities to nuclear destruction,”

Comprehensive counterforce is an informal phrase used to describe counterattack on a nuclear arsenal.

To buttress his theory, Narang cited Shivshankar Menon, who oversaw nuclear targeting for India as National Security Adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from his book, “Choices: Inside the Making of Indian Foreign Policy”, which was released in November 2016 but has found a new celebrity recently, to build his case: “There is a potential gray area as to when India would use nuclear weapons first against another NWS (nuclear weapon state). Circumstances are conceivable in which India might find it useful to strike first, for instance, against an NWS that had declared it would certainly use its weapons, and if India were certain that adversary’s launch was imminent.”


Low Yield Nuclear Weapons (Again)

The Defense Science Board report issued last December, “Seven Defense Priorities for the New Administration.” This report reached the “worrisome conclusion,” widely shared within the “Nuclear Enterprise,” that, “the nuclear threshold may be decreasing owing to the stated doctrines and weapons developments of some states, and with the introduction of new technology.
Recommendation: ... a more flexible nuclear enterprise that could produce, if needed, a rapid tailored nuclear option should existing non-nuclear or nuclear options prove insufficient.


How US nuclear force modernization is undermining strategic stability: The burst-height compensating super-fuze

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Because of improvements in the killing power of US submarine-launched ballistic missiles, those submarines now patrol with more than three times the number of warheads needed to destroy the entire fleet of Russian land-based missiles in their silos. US submarine-based missiles can carry multiple warheads, so hundreds of others, now in storage, could be added to the submarine-based missile force, making it all the more lethal.

The revolutionary increase in the lethality of submarine-borne US nuclear forces comes from a “super-fuze” device that since 2009 has been incorporated into the Navy’s W76-1/Mk4A warhead as part of a decade-long life-extension program. We estimate that all warheads deployed on US ballistic missile submarines now have this fuzing capability. Because the innovations in the super-fuze appear, to the non-technical eye, to be minor, policymakers outside of the US government (and probably inside the government as well) have completely missed its revolutionary impact on military capabilities and its important implications for global security.

Before the invention of this new fuzing mechanism, even the most accurate ballistic missile warheads might not detonate close enough to targets hardened against nuclear attack to destroy them. But the new super-fuze is designed to destroy fixed targets by detonating above and around a target in a much more effective way. Warheads that would otherwise overfly a target and land too far away will now, because of the new fuzing system, detonate above the target.

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The result of this fuzing scheme is a significant increase in the probability that a warhead will explode close enough to destroy the target even though the accuracy of the missile-warhead system has itself not improved.

As a consequence, the US submarine force today is much more capable than it was previously against hardened targets such as Russian ICBM silos. A decade ago, only about 20 percent of US submarine warheads had hard-target kill capability; today they all do.

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Trump budget: An extra billion dollars for nuclear weapons

His draft 2018 budget would drastically curtail State Department spending and foreign aid by 28 % and end financing for the U.S. Institute of Peace, but boost the budget for nuclear weapons production by 11%.


Amid North Korea threat, Tillerson hints that ‘circumstances could evolve’ for a Japanese nuclear arsenal

The possibility of a nuclear-armed Japan has again been raised by the Trump administration, after U.S. Secretary of State Tillerson appeared to say in an interview ahead of his visit to Beijing that, with “all options on the table” regarding the North Korean threat, “circumstances could evolve” in terms of Tokyo acquiring atomic weapons.
... we do think it is important that everyone in the region has a clear understanding that circumstances could evolve to the point that for mutual deterrence reasons, we might have to consider that.”

Observers chalked Tillerson’s controversial remarks up to simple inexperience and heightened concerns over the new administration’s often-time contentious moves.

“This seems to be a combination of Tillerson’s inexperience, poor staff work and the extra scrutiny that goes with everything Team Trump says,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert with the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California.

“I don’t think there is anything behind this,” he added. “It’s just smoke and mirrors to distract from the fact that they haven’t the slightest idea what to do.”


NUCLEAR TURKEY? Imam close to Erdogan calls for weapons NOW amid tensions with EU

TURKEY should ignore rules set by ‘the West’ and build its own NUCLEAR WEAPONS - an Imam close to president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has advised - as the fallout between Brussels and Ankara deepens.

Hayrettin Karaman, the Turkish AK Party’s go-to religious leader, attacked ‘the West’ in a letter which insisted Erdogan should immediately invest in weapons of mass destruction.

In the online post the imam accused Christian countries in the West of egotism and racism - stating the bad attitude towards Turkey has been “accelerated” and called for the swift development of nuclear weapons.
“Once upon a time, military forces are arrows and horses, and now weapons are effective weapons invented by the age of science and technology, especially nuclear, and are the means by which they can be used.

“We need to look at inventing these weapons, not buying them, without losing any time and listening to the words and obstacles of the West."


Sweden preparing hundreds of nuclear bunkers amid fears of Russian attack

Sweden is reportedly preparing hundreds of nuclear war shelters to prepare for a potential attack from Russia amid growing concerns in the Baltics.

The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) has ordered a review of 350 civilian bunkers on the Baltic Sea island of Gotland, where Sweden has stationed permanent troops.

The shelters are designed to protect people against the shock wave and radiation from a nuclear detonation, as well as chemical and biological weapons.

Mats Berglund, head of civil protection at the MSB, told Sverige Radio the shelters should be checked by the end of the year.

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The island's 350 shelters have capacity for around 35,000 people, although Gotland has a population of nearly 60,000.

Over 65,000 shelters were established during the Cold War to protect the Swedish population from the potential threat of nuclear warfare.

All of the shelters are marked with a distinctive orange and blue logo, along with the word skyddsrum (shelter).

Non-Nato member Sweden has been upgrading its military with a sharp hike in spending and has urged local governments to prepare their civil defence infrastructure and procedures for a future war.


If a nuclear bomb is dropped on your city, here's where you should run and hide

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President Trump has egged on a new arms race. Russia violated weapons treaties to upgrade its nuclear arsenal. North Korea is developing long-range missiles and practicing for nuclear war — and the US military is considering preemptive attacks on the isolated nation's military facilities.

Meanwhile, nuclear terrorism and dirty bombs remain a sobering threat.

What could possibly go wrong?

Michael Dillon, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher, crunched the numbers and helped figure out just that in a 2014 study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

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and https://fas.org/irp/agency/dhs/fema/ncr.pdf


Welcome to America’s ‘Nuclear Sponge’


The United States currently deploys hundreds of nuclear missiles across Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Each missile carries a nuclear payload many times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people. The Pentagon is now planning to build a new, deadlier generation of these missiles, which are housed in underground silos.

But these intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, are not meant to be launched, ever. Not even in a nuclear war. Their primary mission is to be destroyed in the ground, along with all the people that live anywhere near them (or downwind). Their main purpose is to “absorb” a nuclear attack from Russia, acting as a giant “nuclear sponge.” Such is the twisted logic of atomic warfare.

But it never made sense to draw a nuclear attack toward the United States, rather than away from it. Yet the nuclear sponge is still with us. Not only that, the Trump administration is planning to spend $100 billion to do it all over again.

Newly minted Defense Secretary Jim Mattis defended the ICBM and the nuclear sponge mission, although he did not call it that. Testifying before the Senate on Jan. 12, Mattis said:
“It’s clear they are so buried out in the central U.S. that any enemy that wants to take us on is going to have to commit two, three, four weapons to make sure they take each one out. In other words, the ICBM force provides a cost-imposing strategy on an adversary.

Cost-imposing for whom? Yes, attacking U.S. ICBMs would be very costly for Russia, mainly because the United States would retaliate with hundreds of nuclear weapons launched from submarines at sea. But what about the costs to Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming?

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Old declassified U.S. nuclear targets

According to 1992 NRC study: if nuclear power plants and spent fuel storage units are targeted - which they are. High rad fallout/persistent radiation (>3000) will make sites unlivable up to 600 mile downwind/100 miles upwind - for a VERY LONG TIME.


Donald Trump Is Filling Top Pentagon and Homeland Security Positions With Defense Contractors

President Donald Trump has weaponized the revolving door by appointing defense contractors and their lobbyists to key government positions as he seeks to rapidly expand the military budget and homeland security programs.

Personnel from major defense companies now occupy the highest ranks of the administration including cabinet members and political appointees charged with implementing the Trump agenda. At least 15 officials with financial ties to defense contractors have been either nominated or appointed so far, with potentially more industry names on the way as Trump has yet to nominate a variety of roles in the government, including Army and Navy secretaries.


Former Trump Campaign Head Manafort Was Paid Millions By A Putin Ally, AP Says

A Russian billionaire paid former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort millions of dollars to boost the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Associated Press reports.

In his deal with Deripaska, Manafort promised to counter anti-Russian sentiment, according to Day and his AP colleague Jeff Horwitz. Citing a strategy memo from 2005, they say Manafort told Deripaska that he would advocate a pro-Russian agenda both in former republics and "at the highest levels of the U.S. government - the White House, Capitol Hill and the State Department."


DARPA Sub-Hunting Drone Ship to Launch Offensive Attacks

The Navy is expanding the mission portfolio of its emerging submarine-hunting drone ship so that it can conduct surface warfare missions, fire weapons and launch electronic attacks.

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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Sat 25 Mar 2017, 13:24:55

Trump's Treasury Secretary Says the Threat of Robots Taking Jobs is 'Not Even On Our Radar'

Automation is one of the biggest concerns of labor economists these days. But US president Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary thinks the threat that robots will replace whole classes of white- and blue-collar jobs is too remote to even think about. Steven Mnuchin said today in an interview with Axios:
“I’m not worried at all” about job-stealing robots in the nearer term, that time is “not even on our radar screen"


... and his definition of artificial intelligence comes from Star Wars. When pressed, Mnuchin said that he wasn’t talking about things like self-driving cars, which he believes could run from coast to coast in the not-so-distant future. “That to me isn't artificial intelligence, that's computers and using real technology we have today,” he said. “But those types of things are very real. That's very different from artificial [intelligence], you know, R2-D2 taking over your job.”

He also doesn’t think that robots will put Americans out of jobs in either the short or long term. “Quite frankly, I'm optimistic. I mean, that's what creates productivity. And what we need to do, we need to invest in training, we need to invest in education,” said Mnuchin, whose administration has proposed cutting the Department of Education’s budget by 13.5 percent.
“If anything what it's done is, it's taken jobs that are low-paying jobs”


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Mnuchin’s remarks seem important in signaling the administration’s agenda and priorities. Trump has blamed globalization for the loss of American industrial jobs and promised to bring them back by creating incentives for companies to manufacture in the US. In reality, labor economists think automation is already responsible for a lot of the job decline. A study by Ball University in 2015 estimated that if US industry were producing in 2010 at the same level of productivity as it did in 2000, the US would have needed 20.9 million manufacturing workers; instead it had only 12.1 million (pdf, p. 4).

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Steve Mnuchin Doesn’t Think A.I. Is an Immediate Threat to Jobs. That’s Insane

... the notion that A.I. substituting for human labor is something that is 50 to 100 years away is, simply, nuts.

I doubt Mnuchin has spent much time in factories; but if he did, he’d see that machines and software are increasingly doing the work that people used to do. They’re not just moving goods through an assembly line, they’re soldering, coating, packaging, and checking for quality.

Whether you’re visiting a GE turbine plant in South Carolina, or a cable-modem factory in Shanghai, the thing you’ll notice is just how few people there actually are. It’s why, in the U.S., manufacturing output rises every year while manufacturing employment is essentially stagnant. It’s why it is becoming conventional wisdom that automation is destroying more manufacturing jobs than trade. And now we are seeing the prospect of dark factories, which can run without lights because there are no people in them, are starting to become a reality. The integration of A.I. into factories is one of the reasons Trump’s promise to bring back manufacturing employment is absurd. You’d think his treasury secretary would know something about that.

It goes far beyond manufacturing, of course. Programmatic advertising buying, Spotify’s recommendation engines, chatbots on customer service websites, Uber’s dispatching system—all of these are examples of A.I. doing the work that people used to do. One of the biggest occupations for males without college educations is driving a truck. Last fall, Otto, Uber’s self-driving truck, made its first delivery. Companies are working on pilotless planes as we speak.

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Hate to Break It to Steve Mnuchin, But AI’s Already Taking Jobs

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told an audience in Washington. “In terms of artificial intelligence taking over the jobs, I think we’re so far away from that that it’s not even on my radar screen,” ...“I think it’s 50 or 100 more years.”

Great! That’s a relief! President Trump can go back to twittering confident in the knowledge self-driving trucks won’t replace millions of drivers in a few years.

Except Mnuchin’s wrong. Like super-wrong. Artificial intelligence is not only coming for jobs, the jobs it’s coming for are the precious few left over after old-school automation already came for so many others. Technologists and economists know this. People who’ve lost jobs to robots and computers already know this.

The only people who apparently don’t know it are in the White House.


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McAfee polled 140 experts in artificial intelligence on automation and employment


Robots could take over 38% of U.S. jobs within about 15 years, report says

More than a third of U.S. jobs could be at “high risk” of automation by the early 2030s, a percentage that’s greater than in Britain, Germany and Japan, according to a report released Friday.

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The analysis, by accounting and consulting firm PwC, emphasized that its estimates are based on the anticipated capabilities of robotics and artificial intelligence, and that the pace and direction of technological progress are “uncertain.”

It said that in the U.S., 38% of jobs could be at risk of automation, compared with 30% in Britain, 35% in Germany and 21% in Japan.

For example, the report says the financial and insurance sector has much higher possibility of automation in the U.S. than in Britain. That’s because, it says, American finance workers are less educated than British ones.

While London finance employees work in international markets, their U.S. counterparts focus more on the domestic retail market, and workers “do not need to have the same educational levels,” the report said. Jobs that require less education are at higher potential risk of automation, according to the report.

Other industries that could be at high risk include hospitality and food service and transportation and storage.

Analysts have said truck driving probably will be the first form of driving in the U.S. to be fully automated, as long-range big rigs travel primarily on highways — the easiest roads to navigate without human intervention.

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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Mon 27 Mar 2017, 20:14:43

Elon Musk creates new firm to make Matrix-style AI interface that can be implanted into the BRAIN

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is backing a brain-computer interface venture called Neuralink, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company is centered on creating devices that can be implanted in the human brain, with the eventual purpose of helping human beings merge with software and keep pace with advancements in artificial intelligence. These enhancements could improve memory or allow for more direct interfacing with computing devices.

... This isn't the first time that Musk has hinted that Tesla may be working on artificial intelligence.
' If you assume any rate of advancement in [artificial intelligence], we will be left behind by a lot,' he said at a conference last June.

In a recent interview with Y Combinator, Musk explained that the 'best outcome' between humankind and machines would be a collective lifestyle where 'we are the AI.'

Such a scenario would stamp out the possibility of an 'evil dictator AI,' Musk said, allowing anyone who wants to take part to become an 'AI-human symbiote.'

Musk likened the situation to the cooperation of the limbic system and the cortex in the human brain.

Like Tesla or SpaceX, the company plans to present a working prototype to prove the technology is safe and viable before moving on to the more ambitious goal of increasing the performance of the human race. In this case, the prototype will likely be brain implants that can treat diseases like epilepsy, Parkinson's or depression. Musk himself told Vanity Fair that he believes:
... the technology for "a meaningful partial-brain interface" is only "roughly four or five years away."

https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/27/elo ... computing/

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Tiny child mistakes broken water heater for a robot

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Video-
"Hi, robot."
"Hi, robot."
*tiny wave*
"I wuv you, robot."
"I wuv you, robot."

What we'd all give to be as pure and cute as this little girl meeting her very first "wobot."

It was Rayna's lucky day as she got to greet and hug her new robot friend, starting what looks to be an everlasting friendship (or until Mr. Robot is picked up by the garbage men).

Kids today are going to know a world more full of robots than any of us old saps can imagine. The real question is: will they still love wobots when wobots start taking our jobs?

Awww... Next up...

Thomas the Tank Engine meets Mad Max

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“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Tue 28 Mar 2017, 11:47:57

Squilliam wrote:hey Vox. Are you an AI?

What makes you think that?

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“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Tue 28 Mar 2017, 12:15:46

AI to become main way banks interact with customers within three years: Accenture

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Artificial intelligence (AI) will become the primary way banks interact with their customers within the next three years, according to three quarters of bankers surveyed by consultancy Accenture in a new report.

The report, Accenture Banking Technology Vision 2017, draws on the analysis of an advisory board of more than two dozen individuals, interviews with technology luminaries and industry experts, and results of a survey of more than 600 bankers.

According to the report, more than three-quarters (78 percent) of bankers believe that AI will enable simpler user interfaces that will help banks create a more human-like customer experience. In addition, four out of five respondents (79 percent) believe that AI will revolutionize the way banks gather information and interact with customers, and three-quarters (76 percent) believe that within three years, banks will deploy AI as their primary method for interacting with customers.


Treasury's Mnuchin is 'out of touch with reality' on A.I.'s job-destroying potential, billionaire says

The U.S. workforce is about to undergo "unprecedented job destruction" as computers and robots get smarter, billionaire Jeff Greene told CNBC on Tuesday.

A new study backs up Greene's view on automation. The National Bureau of Economic Research said every new robot added to a U.S. factory in recent decades reduced employment in the surrounding area by 6.2 workers.

"We see negative effects of robots on essentially all occupations, with the exception of managers," wrote economists Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University in the study. "Predictably, the major categories experiencing substantial declines are routine manual occupations, blue-collar workers, operators and assembly workers, and machinists and transport workers."

According to estimates from the International Federation of Robotics, there are currently between 1.5 and 1.75 million industrial robots in operation, a number that could increase to 4 to 6 million by 2025, with the majority in the auto industry and electronics industry.


Robots do destroy jobs and lower wages, says new study

... They found that each new robot added to the workforce meant the loss of between 3 and 5.6 jobs in the local commuting area. Meanwhile, for each new robot added per 1,000 workers, wages in the surrounding area would fall between 0.25 and 0.5 percent.
"It's hard to think of a job that a computer ultimately won't be able to do as well if not better than we can do"

Looking at this study, though, the million-dollar question is: what happens next? Are these trends going to hold, or will they get worse?

Acemoglu and Restrepo note that because there are relatively few industrial robots in the US, the number of jobs lost to them so far has been limited. (They estimate between 360,00 and 670,000 jobs — a decline in employment to population ratio of between a 0.18 and 0.34 percentage points.) “However, if the spread of robots proceeds as expected by experts over the next two decades, the future aggregate implications of the spread of robots could be much more sizable.”

The spread of industrial robots is one thing; the spread of industrial robots augmented with AI, and of new innovations like self-driving cars (and trucks) is another.


The AI revolution is coming, and Donald Trump isn't ready for it

Two weeks ago, President Trump gave a speech at the American Center for Mobility in Detroit. Those who tuned in expected he’d say something about how his administration plans to regulate the fully self-driving cars that Ford and others have vowed to introduce by 2021.

But Trump didn’t mention self-driving technology once in his speech. Instead, he promised a “new future of automotive leadership” that focused on relaxing environmental regulations and protecting American autoworkers from foreign competitors.

Then on Friday, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was asked if he was worried about artificial intelligence taking American jobs. “I think we’re so far away from that,” Mnuchin told Axios’s Mike Allen. He declared that the issue was “not even on my radar screen,” because he thought AI-driven job losses were still 50 or 100 years in the future.

... That’s why the Trump administration’s demonstrated lack of interest in artificial intelligence is so alarming: Over the next four years, federal policymakers are going to play a crucial role in determining how AI-related breakthroughs affect the American economy and society, whether Trump realizes it or not.


Evidence That Robots Are Winning the Race for American Jobs

Who is winning the race for jobs between robots and humans? Last year, two leading economists described a future in which humans come out ahead. But now they’ve declared a different winner: the robots.

The industry most affected by automation is manufacturing.

For every robot per thousand workers, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent, according to a new paper
by the economists, Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University. It appears to be the first study to quantify large, direct, negative effects of robots.

The paper is all the more significant because the researchers, whose work is highly regarded in their field, had been more sanguine about the effect of technology on jobs. In a paper last year, they said it was likely that increased automation would create new, better jobs, so employment and wages would eventually return to their previous levels. Just as cranes replaced dockworkers but created related jobs for engineers and financiers, the theory goes, new technology has created new jobs for software developers and data analysts.

But that paper was a conceptual exercise. The new one uses real-world data — and suggests a more pessimistic future.


This terrifying tool shows you whether robots will take your job

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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Wed 05 Apr 2017, 12:01:08

White House: 'The clock has now run out' on North Korean nuclear program

Washington (CNN)A senior White House official issued a dire warning to reporters Tuesday on the state of North Korea's nuclear program, declaring "the clock has now run out and all options are on the table."

"The clock has now run out, and all options are on the table," the official said, pointing to the failure of successive administration's efforts to negotiate an end to North Korea's nuclear program.

... Those options could include stepped up economic sanctions -- including against Chinese entities that do business with North Korea -- cyberattacks or military action.

Earlier Tuesday, Gen. John Hyten, the commander of US Strategic Command, which oversees US nuclear weapons and missile defense forces, contradicted Trump, saying China was critical to solving the North Korea nuclear challenge.


Trump Once Said He Would Bomb North Korea's Nuclear Reactors

Trump has long honed in on North Korea as one of the biggest threats facing the United States. Over the past two decades, he has at times even suggested bombing North Korea's nuclear facilities. When Trump explored a presidential run back in 1999, he wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which he suggested he would bomb North Korea if it didn't end its nuclear weapons program.

"I would let Pyongyang know in no uncertain terms that it can either get out of the nuclear arms race or expect a rebuke similar to the one Ronald Reagan delivered to Muammar Gadhafi in 1986," he wrote, referring to the U.S. bombing of Libya under Reagan's administration.

Trump followed up those comments with a passage about North Korea in his 2000 book, "The America We Deserve." In the book, Trump called US policy towards North Korea "weak-minded," and explicitly said he would bomb the country's nuclear facilities.
"Am I ready to bomb this reactor? You're damned right," Trump wrote.

"When the Israelis bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor they were condemned by the world community. But they did what they had to do to survive. The Korean nuclear capability is a direct threat to the United States. As an experienced negotiator, I can tell you that negotiation with these madmen will be fruitless once they have the ability to lob a nuclear missile into Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York. I don't advocate a thermonuclear war, but if negotiations fail, I advocate a surgical strike against these outlaws before they pose a real threat."

Except, there's a problem. NK nuclear bomb production is distributed in deep underground facilities. Locations unknown.

Also, NK would return the favor in spades. Like this ...

Spent Nuclear Fuel Fire on U.S. Soil Could Dwarf Impact of Fukushima

A major fire “could dwarf the horrific consequences of the Fukushima accident,” says Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. “We’re talking about trillion-dollar consequences,” says Frank von Hippel, a nuclear security expert at Princeton University, who teamed with Princeton’s Michael Schoeppner on the modeling exercise.

The revelations come on the heels of a report last week from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the aftermath of the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan. The report details how a spent fuel fire at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant that was crippled by the twin disasters could have released far more radioactivity into the environment.

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July
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October
Nightmare scenarios: A simulated spent fuel fire at the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania had a devastating impact on the mid-Atlantic region. Click on the dates to see the extent of contamination, which depended on weather patterns. Courtesy of F. Von Hippel and M. Schoeppner

In their simulations, the Princeton duo focused on Cs-137, a radioisotope with a 30-year half-life that has made large tracts around Chernobyl and Fukushima uninhabitable. They assumed a release of 1600 petabecquerels, which is the average amount of Cs-137 that NRC estimates would be released from a fire at a densely packed pool. It’s also approximately 100 times the amount of Cs-137 spewed at Fukushima. They simulated such a release on the first day of each month in 2015.

The contamination from such a fire on U.S. soil “would be an unprecedented peacetime catastrophe,” the Princeton researchers conclude in a paper to be submitted to the journal Science & Global Security. In a fire on 1 January 2015, with the winds blowing due east, the radioactive plume would sweep over Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and nearby cities. Shifting winds on 1 July 2015 would disperse Cs-137 in all directions, blanketing much of the heavily populated mid-Atlantic region. Averaged over 12 monthly calculations, the area exposed to more than 1 megabecquerel per square meter -- a level that would trigger a relocation order -- is 101,000 square kilometers. That’s more than three times NRC’s estimate, and the relocation of 18.1 million people is about five times NRC’s estimates.


Like Middle East Wars? You’re Gonna Love President Trump

In charting a new course to combat terrorism across the greater Middle East, Trump has both embraced and rejected elements of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama approaches—but he has done so in an almost perfectly dysfunctional way. He has escalated U.S. military actions, while remaining diplomatically aloof from festering conflicts and de-emphasizing non-military instruments of American power. The result, so far, is a kind of bizarro-Goldilocks approach: not hot enough, not cold enough—just wrong. Left uncorrected, the emerging Trump doctrine will result in more war, but few sustainable gains against terrorism emanating from the world's most dangerous region.

Like Bush, Trump seems enamored with massive demonstrations of American military might. Despite Trump’s complicated history with the Iraq war, he is clearly attracted to the “shock and awe” approach of the 2003 invasion and the military escalation embodied by the 2007 “surge.” No phrase better encapsulates this than Trump’s campaign promise to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS. And it is reflected in the ease with which he has embraced military escalation during his first few months in office—with almost no public debate.
“We’re gonna beat ISIS very, very quickly folks. It’s gonna be fast. I have a great plan...They ask, ‘What is it?’ Well, I’d rather not say. I’d rather be unpredictable.

- d. tRump - Apr 23, 2016

And while Trump has consistently stated his desire to crush America’s terrorist enemies, he has no apparent interest in picking up the pieces. Trump has described the Middle East as “one big, fat quagmire.” He believes the responsibility for rebuilding shattered countries should fall on regional and local actors, and the United States should “[get] out of the nation-building business.” In an “America first” world, these are simply not burdens the United States should bear.

The 2003 Iraq war and 2011 Libya interventions may have revealed the folly of U.S.-imposed regime change, but they also demonstrated the dangers of not having a coherent diplomatic and stabilization plan to sustain the gains from successful military campaigns.

Yet, despite these hard lessons, it is not clear if Trump has a strategy that incorporates any “non-kinetic” dimensions. This is a big mistake.


After Syria Gas Attack, World Awaits What Kind of Leader Trump Will Be
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

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