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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 » Wed 05 Apr 2017, 19:14:05

These Self-Learning Robot Arms Teach Each Other How to Pick Up Unfamiliar Objects

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It’s all but certain that human workers in factories and fulfillment centers are a dying breed. The last nail in their coffin might be a new robotic arm from a company called RightHand Robotics that’s not only able to teach itself how to pick up objects it’s never handled before, but it can also share what it learns with other robot arms around the world.
To ensure its new RightPick system can continuously adapt to new products all the time, RightHand Robotics developed a multi-fingered gripper with both an extending suction tool in the middle, and a camera that’s able to analyze objects and determine the best strategy for grasping and holding any object. Images from the camera are instantly processed by an algorithm developed by RightHand that tells the gripper what combination of fingers it should use, and if activating the suction tool is necessary. The system can also take advantage of machine learning techniques to automatically refine and tweak that algorithm as it encounters and learns to handle unfamiliar products.

The new skills that one RightPick system learns on the job can also help improve RightPick setups at other factories and fulfillment centers, as the robot arms remain connected to a cloud server at all time, sharing their collective knowledge to help improve each one’s capabilities. This connectivity also allows the company’s engineers and developers to remotely connect to one of the arms if it’s having an especially hard time adapting to a new object, and needs to be taught how to properly handle it.


Amazon’s Robot War Is Spreading

Video - A slew of new automation specialists appear on the warehouse battlefield.

What that means for warehouse humans is an open question. There were 939,000 people working in the industry in February, up 44 percent over the past 10 years, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The rise of e-commerce has created a need for more hands to pick items and pack boxes. Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc.’s rapid shipping times have taught customers to expect goods on their doorstep in two days or less, fueling a warehouse boom as retailers scramble to amass distribution hubs closer to their shoppers.

Logistics firms can have a hard time hiring enough people, particularly during peak shopping seasons. Adding robots should ease some of the seasonal shortages, and may make the work less physically demanding. Working conditions at U.S. warehouses are often scrutinized for their grueling nature: Pickers complain of exhausting shifts, sometimes in oppressive heat or biting cold. Many of the jobs are temporary, fluctuating with the shopping calendar.

In the logistics business, smarter warehouse bots will likely reduce the number of people it takes to run a fulfillment center.

“I don’t think people are investing in automation because of a near-term labor shortage,” said Karl Siebrecht, CEO at Flexe, a Seattle-based company that bills itself as the Airbnb of warehouse space. “It’s about improving productivity. Fundamentally, that means people will be replaced.”

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NASA’s scientists formed a club to dream up uses for AI like self-replicating robots and harpooning comets

“We have a little skunkworks project here at JPL that we call ‘AI moonshots,’ which has nothing to with the moon,” JPL AI head Steve Chien tells Quartz. “It has to do with a bunch of AI people thinking about ‘What are ways we can have tremendous impact on NASA’s mission?'”

Chien says they’ve discussed concepts like robots that can convert near-Earth objects like asteroids into antennas; robots that self-replicate by using found materials to 3D-print new robots; autonomous exploration of still-undiscovered Planet 9; and even hitchhiking on passing comets.


DARPA X-Plane completes initial demos, eyes full-scale flight in 2018

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Video The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA's) LightningStrike vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) X-Plane programme has completed an initial flight demonstration phase with a scale model. DARPA said Wednesday the subscale X-Plane model demonstrated auto takeoff, sustained hover, directional and translational control, waypoint navigation and auto landing functions during flight tests that began in March 2016. That test run is now over and officials will next focus on a full-scale system demonstration.

Carl Schaefer, Aurora's programme manager for XV-24A, said the SVD is a 325 lb (147.4 kg), lithium battery powered scale model with a 10.7 ft (3.2 m) wingspan, capable of flying at 100 kt. "It did validate our aerodynamic approach to this," he said of the scale model testing.

Bagai said the full-scale model is expected to be tested at speeds of 300-400 kt, or twice as fast as contemporary helicopters.

Notably, the effort hopes to advance electrical engines for aircraft, although it will take a hybrid approach for the upcoming full-scale model. It will use Rolls-Royce's AE 1107C turboshaft engine to power three Honeywell one-megawatt electric distributed propulsion (EDP) generators that drive 24 ducted fans on the wings and the canards, according to Mark Wilson, chief operating officer for Rolls-Royce North American Technologies (Liberty Works).


Carnegie Mellon AI Takes On Chinese Poker Players

PITTSBURGH, April 5, 2017 — A version of Carnegie Mellon University’s Libratus, which in January became the first artificial intelligence to defeat top poker pros at Heads-up, No-Limit Texas Hold’em, will play six top Chinese players for a $290,000 winner-take-all purse.

The 36,000-hand exhibition featuring the different AI, named Lengpudashi or “cold poker master,” will be April 6-10 on the island province of Hainan, China.


Google says its AI chips smoke CPUs, GPUs in performance tests

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Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a chip that is designed to accelerate the inference stage of deep neural networks.

Google tested the chips on six different neural network inference applications, representing 95 percent of all such applications in Google’s data centers. The applications tested include DeepMind AlphaGo, the system that defeated Lee Sedol at Go in a five-game match last year.
“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 » Thu 06 Apr 2017, 12:53:53

In a decade, many fast-food restaurants will be automated, says Yum Brands CEO

AI, robots and automation could replace humans in the food services industry "by the mid [2020s]," Yum Brands CEO Greg Creed told CNBC on Tuesday.

The Yum executive says his company, which owns several fast-food restaurant brands, including Pizza Hut, KFC and Taco Bell, has already set up automated kiosks in Shanghai, China. In one case a Pizza Hut customer is greeted by a robot, he said.

Creed's assertion is in stark contrast to comments made by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who said he is not worried about artificial intelligence displacing jobs for at least 50 to 100 years. Creed told CNBC he disagrees with Mnuchin and believes it will be much sooner.

"I think it's gonna happen," Creed said. "We'll see a dramatic change in how machines run things.
http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000604858

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4 Million Driving Jobs at Risk from Autonomous Vehicles: Report

With more than 30 companies—including automakers BMW, Daimler and Ford and technology giants Apple, Uber and Google—developing autonomous vehicle technology, the idea that transportation workers will be replaced by these innovations is no longer science fiction, finds a new paper from the progressive think tank Center for Global Policy Solutions (CGPS).

Stick Shift: Autonomous Vehicles, Driving Jobs, and the Future of Work” reports that some states and populations will be harder hit than others.

Men and people of color nationally and workers in states such as North Dakota, Idaho, Wyoming, West Virginia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Iowa and Indiana would suffer disproportionate economic disruption from such a transition, according to CGPS. In these states, a higher share of workers is in driving occupations and those jobs pay significantly more than non-driving occupations.

Many could lose their jobs and experience declining wages in both driving and non-driving occupations, the authors say.

According to the organization, the economic ripple effects throughout those states and their regions would be severe.

This crisis is likely right around the corner,” said Dr. Maya Rockeymoore, CGPS president and CEO. “We need a strong safety net that can bolster workers in the event of large-scale, rapid job losses, along with policies that can transition them to new jobs.”


Robots Are Replacing Humans at All These Wall Street Firms

The world's largest money management firm, BlackRock, is poised to conduct a complete overhaul of its current systems to focus on using algorithmic solution to improve its services. 13% of its portfolio managers will be laid off in the process, confirming that no profession is immune to automation disruption.

BlackRock and Wall Street's motivation for the changes is clear: Replacing humans with artificial intelligence will lower their ratio of costs to profits by 28%, according to Opimas.

Even celebrity stock-pickers who made their name making the right call at the right time are turning to AI for consistent returns.

After cutting 15% of his workforce in mid-2016, veteran hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones introduced computer-driven tools that would imitate trades by the firm's best managers, according to Bloomberg. Jones is also incorporating machine-learning technology in an effort to expand the firm's computerized trading capabilities.

Even the family office of legendary trader Steven Cohen, Point72 Asset Management has been trying to use computer algorithms to find what exactly made his most profitable trades work so well, in the hopes of replicating that success, according to Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, the founder of the world's largest hedge fund, Ray Dalio, has been investing in AI technology related to trading, as well as trying to automate most of his processes for managing his firm Bridgewater.


'Rogue' Algorithm Blamed for Historic Crash of the British Pound

The British pound suffered a “flash crash” earlier this morning in which it plummeted six percent against the US dollar within a matter of minutes. All signs point to high frequency stock trading as the culprit—and possibly a single algorithm.

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“I initially doubted what I saw on my screen, said Kenji Yoshii, a foreign exchange strategist at Mizuho Securities, in the Wall Street Journal.

... This “rogue” bot (or bots—we still don’t know what actually caused this latest flash crash) was clearly overreacting to news, and the other algorithms reacted accordingly in a bizarre herd-like manner.


Watch 10 seconds of high-frequency stock trading in super slow motion

This video, produced by Eric Hunsader of Nanex, offers us puny humans a tiny glimpse of what's going on in high-frequency trading computer land. Well, at least for 10 second's worth, anyway. The result is sobering, to say the least.


Too Fast to Fail: How High-Speed Trading Fuels Wall Street Disasters

At 9:30 A.M. on August 1, a software executive in a spread-collar shirt and a flashy watch pressed a button at the New York Stock Exchange, triggering a bell that signaled the start of the trading day. Milliseconds after the opening trade, buy and sell orders began zapping across the market's servers with alarming speed. The trades were obviously unusual. They came in small batches of 100 shares that involved nearly 150 different financial products, including many stocks that normally don't see anywhere near as much activity. Within three minutes, the trade volume had more than doubled from the previous week's average.

Soon complex computer programs deployed by financial firms swooped in. They bought undervalued stocks as the unusual sales drove their prices down and sold overvalued ones as the purchases drove their prices up. The algorithms were making a killing, and human traders got in on the bounty too.

Within minutes, a wave of urgent email alerts deluged top officials at the Securities and Exchange Commission. On Wall Street, NYSE officials scrambled to isolate the source of the bizarre trades. Meanwhile, across the Hudson River, in the Jersey City offices of a midsize financial firm called Knight Capital, panic was setting in.
A program that was supposed to have been deactivated had instead gone rogue, blasting out trade orders that were costing Knight nearly $10 Million per minute. And no one knew how to shut it down.

At this rate, the firm would be insolvent within an hour. Knight's horrified employees spent an agonizing 45 minutes digging through eight sets of trading and routing software before they found the runaway code and neutralized it.

By then it was shortly after 10 a.m., and officials from the NYSE, other major exchanges, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority were gathering for an emergency conference call. It didn't end until 4 p.m. ...


The End of Banking as We Know It

The epicenter of the use of artificial intelligence is in Switzerland – and not in Silicon Valley. In a village called Walzenhausen, not far from Lake Constance, a fund manager has developed the use of artificial intelligence in portfolio management. Hendrik Leber is the founder and owner of Acatis asset management.

Leber this week will launch the first completely machine-optimized fund, in cooperation with Bayerinvest. We are releasing the computer into the wilderness, Leber told finews.com. The fund manager recently was elected as the fund manager of the year by Finanzen Verlag. And yet:
"I readily admit, this computer is vastly superior to me."

The tests with the new fund have shown that the use of artificial intelligence yields phenomenal results.
The experimental fund outperformed the market by 3 to 5 percent a year over a five-year period, and 10 to 50 percent a year in the preceding period. Which goes to show that markets have become more efficient as well.


Brexit Britain Could Replace Migrants With Robots

In Brexit Britain, robots are booting up to fill jobs held by European migrants as Prime Minister Theresa May’s government prepares to cut immigration.

Wilmington, Massachusetts-based Locus Robotics intends to start selling an autonomous machine that whizzes around storehouses, delivering boxes from shelves to shipping bays, in Britain this year. ABB Ltd. of Switzerland supplies industrial robots to British pancake, poppadom and marshmallow producers. Fanuc Corp. of Japan, which makes computer-controlled machine tools for smartphone providers, plans to open a new U.K. plant in May.

The $35,000 robot can boost the number of items picked by a worker by 200 percent to 500 percent, Welty said, and six employees can handle work normally done by 20 to 25.

If Brexit “is going to result in fewer being involved in this kind of work, it will make it a more attractive market for us,” Locus founder Bruce Welty said by phone.

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About one-quarter of packers and pickers in the warehouses that supply the likes of Amazon, Asos Plc and Wm Morrison Supermarkets Plc were not born in Britain, while 41 percent of those employed in food manufacturing are from abroad, according to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. As Brexit threatens to curb the number of EU migrants coming to the country, companies are looking to accelerate their push into robotics and automation to help make up the shortfall.

Minimum-wage increases are an additional incentive for companies to invest in automation


If U.K. employers embrace automation, 15 million British jobs could be lost, Bank of England Chief Economist Andy Haldane has said.


Deutsche Bank explores AI in NY

Deutsche Bank has opened an innovation lab in New York to explore the use of artificial intelligence and other technologies, just months after appointing new leadership to strengthen its ties with the fintech sector.

The new centre will explore technologies including AI, cloud technology and cyber security. Staff in the labs will then work out how to use the technology to address business challenges and create opportunities within the bank.


Cyborgs at work: employees getting implanted with microchips

The syringe slides in between the thumb and index finger. Then, with a click, a microchip is injected in the employee's hand. Another "cyborg" is created.

What could pass for a dystopian vision of the workplace is almost routine at the Swedish startup hub Epicenter. The company offers to implant its workers and startup members with microchips the size of grains of rice that function as swipe cards: to open doors, operate printers, or buy smoothies with a wave of the hand.

The injections have become so popular that workers at Epicenter hold parties for those willing to get implanted.
Last edited by vox_mundi on Thu 06 Apr 2017, 13:50:49, 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

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 » Thu 06 Apr 2017, 13:09:42

This Is How the Next World War Starts

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With one miscalculation, by one startled pilot, at 400 miles an hour. And now that Russia is determined to destabilize the West, this scenario is keeping the military establishment up at night.

In normal times, being intercepted isn’t a cause for concern. Russian jets routinely shadow American jets over the Baltic Sea and elsewhere. Americans routinely intercept Russian aircraft along the Alaskan and California coasts. The idea is to identify the plane and perhaps to signal, “You keep an eye on us, we keep an eye on you.”

These, however, are far from normal times. Every few weeks, a Russian pilot will get aggressive. Instead of closing in on the RC-135 at around 30 miles per hour and skulking off its wing for a while, a fighter jet will careen directly toward the American plane at 150 miles per hour or more before abruptly going nose-up to bleed off airspeed and avoid a collision.

Or it might perform the dreaded “barrel roll”—a hair-raising maneuver in which the Russian jet makes a 360-degree orbit around the 135’s midsection while the two aircraft hurtle along at 400 miles per hour. When this happens, there is only one thing the U.S. pilot can do: pucker up, fly straight and hope his Russian counterpart doesn’t smash into him.
One false move and you may have a half second to react

... “The degree of hair-triggeredness is a concern,” said U.S. Air Force General Tod D. Wolters, who commands American and NATO air operations, and a former fighter pilot who encountered Soviet bloc pilots during the Cold War. “The possibility of an intercept gone wrong,” he added, is “on my mind 24/7/365. Admiral James G. Stavridis, the commander of NATO from 2009 to 2013 and now Dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, is more blunt. The potential for miscalculation “is probably higher than at any other point since the end of the Cold War,” he told me. “We are now at maximum danger.


Military nightmare scenario brewing in the East China Sea

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OKINAWA-While the world watches mounting military tensions in the South China Sea, another, more ominous situation is brewing in the East China Sea that could be the trigger point for a major war between the superpowers. At the heart of tensions are eight uninhabited islands controlled by Japan that are close to important shipping lanes, rich fishing grounds and potential oil and gas reserves. China contests Japan's claims and is escalating its military activity in Japan airspace. In response, Japan has been doubling its F-15 jet intercepts.

The situation increases the risk of an accidental confrontation — and could draw other countries, like the United States, into a conflict.

"They've routinized their intrusions into our territorial sea space," says Eisuke Tanabe, a senior policy coordinator in the joint staff councilor's office at the Japanese Ministry of Defense, noting that incursions by Chinese surface ships into waters claimed by Japan are increasing alongside airborne incursions by Chinese fighter jets. "We send our fighters, and that makes the situation possibly very dangerous, when fighters and fighters come close."

From April to December of last year, Japanese fighter jets scrambled to intercept Chinese aircraft 644 times (Japan's fiscal year runs April 1 to March 31 of the following year). While Japan has not yet released total figures for fiscal 2016, Ministry of Defense officials briefing CNBC on the matter maintain that the tempo of airborne intercepts continues to increase, as it has every year since 2008.

JASDF forces haven't intercepted this many aircraft since the busiest days of the Cold War, when aircraft from the Soviet Union were active in the region.
"The Chinese are always looking at what the Americans do," ... "So when the Americans aren't doing well, they think they are doing very well."

China has openly said it aims to secure access to the Western Pacific beyond what's known as the "first island chain" — the string of islands stretching from the Japanese archipelago to Taiwan to the Philippines and across the southern fringe of the South China Sea, all the way to the Malay Peninsula. Ultimately, China aims to extend its military reach into the South China Sea and Western Pacific in such a way that it can effectively control who can — and cannot — enter those regions, analysts say.

Because the increase in both surface ships around the Senkakus and airborne missions in the region require long-term planning and preparation, intelligence analysts have no choice but to read the uptick in activity as deliberate policy, she says.


Defense Sec. James Mattis: North Korea ‘Has Got to Be Stopped’

... a full-scale invasion would be unlikely — not to mention extremely difficult — according to U.S. Army strategist Maj. ML Cavanaugh.

Cavanaugh wrote an article in the Modern War Institute at West Point, which is a research center of the United States Military Academy, warning of North Korea's tough, "Afghanistan-like geography" and an army that could act like "a much better-trained, much better-armed version of the Taliban."

An American invasion would also carry the risk of a retaliatory missile strike against America's allies, South Korea and Japan. The South Korean capital of Seoul, with its population of 10 million, is just 50 miles from its border with the North.


Well, come on generals, let's move fast;
Your big chance has come at last.
Now you can go out and get those reds
'Cause the only good commie is the one that's dead
And you know that peace can only be won
When we've blown 'em all to kingdom come.
...
Come on Wall Street, don't be slow,
Why man, this is war isa-go-go
There's plenty good money to be made
By supplying the Army with the tools of its trade,
But just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb,
They drop it on the Viet Kong little Kim Jong .
...
Come on mothers throughout the land,
Pack your boys off to Vietnam North Korea.
Come on fathers, and don't hesitate
To send your sons off before it's too late.
And you can be the first ones on your block
To have your boy come home in a box.

With apologies to "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag" - Country Joe and the Fish


meanwhile ...

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spends his first weeks isolated from an anxious bureaucracy

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson takes a private elevator to his palatial office on the seventh floor of the State Department building, where sightings of him are rare on the floors below.

On many days, he blocks out several hours on his schedule as “reading time


Most of his interactions are with an insular circle of political aides who are new to the State Department. Many career diplomats say they still have not met him, and some have been instructed not to speak to him directly — or even make eye contact.

Eight weeks into his tenure as President Trump’s top diplomat, the former ExxonMobil chief executive is isolated, walled off from the State Department’s corps of bureaucrats in Washington and around the world. His distant management style has created growing bewilderment among foreign officials who are struggling to understand where the United States stands on key issues.


The Death Star's Laser May No Longer Be Science Fiction

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The massive laser weapon that blows up Alderaan in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope would require a lot of energy. A while back, here on TechRadar, we wrote a feature about how to build a real-life Death Star, and in it we quoted a research paper that calculated exactly how much energy you'd need to blow up the Earth.

We've got no technology that can deliver anything close to that level of power in a single laser beam, but, perhaps worryingly, we're getting closer. Optical engineers at Macquarie University have developed a method for multiplying laser power using exceptionally pure crystals of diamond, where the power of several beams are combined into a single intense output beam.

The full details of the research were published in the journal Laser & Photonics Reviews.


AI is one step closer to mastering StarCraft

China’s Alibaba has published a paper describing a system that learned to execute a number of strategies employed by high-level players without being given any specific instruction on how best to manage combat. Like many deep learning systems, the software improved through trial and error, demonstrating the ability to adapt to changes in the number and type of troops engaged in battle.

... “BiCNet can handle different types of combats under diverse terrains with arbitrary numbers of AI agents for both sides. Our analysis demonstrates that without any supervisions such as human demonstrations or labelled data, BiCNet could learn various types of coordination strategies that is similar to these of experienced game players,” the authors wrote in a paper published to arXiv. “Moreover, BiCNet is easily adaptable to the tasks with heterogeneous agents. In our experiments, we evaluate our approach against multiple baselines under different scenarios; it shows state-of-the-art performance, and possesses potential values for large-scale real-world applications.”

It will be extra ironic if a sentient, SkyNet type of artificial intelligence is one day created from a software program trained on virtual space marines.

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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

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 » Thu 06 Apr 2017, 13:47:35

Spot's Back: Marines Resume Testing With Four-Legged Robot

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Officials with the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab told Military.com that Spot, the Corps' four-legged robot, will enter developmental testing this fall focused on the possibilities of manned-unmanned teaming with ground troops.

The dog-sized robot's hydraulic legs may prove more maneuverable than the Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System, a small unmanned system with tank-like treads that has also been tested at the Warfighting Lab, said Capt. Mike Malandra, the lab's ground branch head for science and technology.

"It's not a tracked vehicle so it can turn around on a dime. The other benefit of something like that is it can get up when it falls over, whereas MAARS can't," Malandra said. "So that's really what we're looking at doing, potentially, with those kinds of things moving forward here in fall: Use it as a surrogate platform for something that is maneuverable in a way similar to a human."

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Weaponized Robot! Olé!

Amazing what an extra $54 Billion lets you play with.

This U.S. Army Helicopter Drone UAV Could Evacuate Wounded Soldiers

DPI’s DP14 Hawk, a dual-rotor unmanned aerial system, could play a role in a U.S. Army effort to one day use drones to evacuate wounded soldiers from the battlefield.

The DP14 Hawk, which resembles a miniature CH-47 Chinook helicopter, can carry 430 pounds in its six-foot by 20-inch cargo space for about 2.4 hours.

It has a cruising speed of about 82 miles per hour and is capable of flying in crosswinds up to 46 mph.

The DP14 Hawk uses onboard LIDAR, or 3D laser scanning, and advanced algorithms to self-navigate in complex, restricted environments, according to DPI’s website. This includes advanced intelligence for path planning, course corrections, perception, obstacle avoidance, and landing-site selection.

“These cutting-edge capabilities allow the Hawk to fly intelligent autonomous, NLOS, nap-of-earth missions and dynamically adapt to changes in flight conditions and terrain,” according to DPI.

Hawk can also carry slung loads under the drone, or even team up with a second drone to share carrying an even larger slung load.

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Why DARPA Funded a Farm Tech Startup

Why would DARPA, which has funded projects like ballistic missile defense and surveillance drones, care about crops? The answer, while not totally obvious, actually makes a lot of sense.

"One of the things we’ve seen is that regional unrest has been linked to circumstances that seem detached from national security—like the price of bread," says Joseph Evans, a program manager in DARPA's strategic technology office. "If we can get more accurate tools to predict famine, we can head off these types of situations with humanitarian versus military intervention."


Google Maps Already Tracks You; Now Other People Can, Too

Google Maps users will soon be able to broadcast their movements to friends and family via the app—the latest test of how much privacy people are willing to sacrifice in an era of rampant sharing.

The location-monitoring feature will begin rolling out Wednesday in an update to the Google Maps mobile app, which is already installed on most of the world's smartphones. It will also be available on personal computers.

But location sharing in one of the world's most popular apps could cause friction in marriages and other relationships if one partner demands to know where the other is at all times. Similar tensions could arise if parents insist their teenagers turn on the location-sharing option before they go out.

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Consumer Surveillance for Loyalty and Profit
“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 » Thu 06 Apr 2017, 14:04:08

Israel's Missile-Firing Robot Ships Are Coming: Rafael launches Spike missiles from Protector Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV)

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Protector Unmanned Surface Vehicle fires Spike Interceptor Missile during recent test

For the first time, an unmanned vessel has successfully fired a Spike missile during an exercise.

The missile was one of several fired from a Protector unmanned surface vehicle during a test in December by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. that hit simulated enemy targets. The Protector is one of the Israeli Navy’s unmanned ships that is used alongside manned gunships and patrol boats to guard the country’s coasts.


Small Drone 'Shot with Patriot Missile'

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The strike was made by a US ally, Gen David Perkins told a military symposium.

"That quadcopter that cost 200 bucks from Amazon.com did not stand a chance against a Patriot," he said. Gen Perkins suggested deploying large surface-to-air missiles as a defense was probably not economically wise.

"I'm not sure that's a good economic exchange ratio, In fact, if I'm the enemy, I'm thinking, 'Hey, I'm just gonna get on eBay and buy as many of these $300 quadcopters as I can and expend all the Patriot missiles out there'."

Patriot missiles were first produced in 1980 and are operated by 12 countries including the US, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The missiles themselves travel at five times the speed of sound, whereas a quadcopter drone typically has a top speed of 50mph (80km/h).

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Disney to introduce AI robot Mickey Mouse at theme parks, insists it does not want to terrify children

In an attempt to make its theme parks even more magical, Disney's Research division is working to develop bi-pedal robots and animatronic characters that walk and move like the lively cartoon characters in its animated films and TV shows.

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Now have some milk & cookies and go to sleep!
“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 12 Apr 2017, 13:39:51

Google's AI seeks further Go glory

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Google has challenged China's top Go player to a series of games against its artificial intelligence technology at the “Future of Go Summit,” a collaboration between the Chinese Go Association, the Chinese government. It said the software would play a best-of-three match against Ke Jie, among other games against humans in the eastern Chinese city of Wuzhen from 23-27 April. The idea is to test AlphaGo’s creativity and adaptability, plus its ability to work in tandem with human players.
"Unless Ke Jie is magnitudes better than Lee Se-dol, I would think they are confident of winning."

"We've been hard at work improving AlphaGo to become even more creative, and since playing Lee Se-dol, the program has continued to learn through self-play training," a spokeswoman for DeepMind told the BBC. "[In recent months] it has been playing a lot of very, very good AlphaGo players online without disclosing it was an AI playing, and has won all of the games.


Top Poker-Playing Algorithm Cleans Up in China; AI wins $290,000 in Chinese Poker Competition

An artificial intelligence program has beaten a team of six poker players at a series of exhibition matches in China.

The AI system, called Lengpudashi, won a landslide victory and $290,000 (£230,000) in the five-day competition. It is the second time this year that an AI program has beaten competitive poker players. An earlier version of the program, known as Libratus, beat four of the world's best poker pros during a 20-day game in January.

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"Losers!"


Magic AI: These are the Optical Illusions that Trick, Fool, and Flummox AI

Last year, researchers were able to fool a commercial facial recognition system into thinking they were someone else just by wearing a pair of patterned glasses. A sticker overlay with a hallucinogenic print was stuck onto the frames of the specs. The twists and curves of the pattern look random to humans, but to a computer designed to pick out noses, mouths, eyes, and ears, they resembled the contours of someone’s face — any face the researchers chose, in fact. These glasses won’t delete your presence from CCTV, but they can trick an AI into thinking you’re the Pope. Or anyone you like.

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These types of attacks are bracketed within a broad category of AI cybersecurity known as “adversarial machine learning,” so called because it presupposes the existence of an adversary of some sort — in this case, a hacker.

These patterns can be used in all sorts of ways to bypass AI systems, and have substantial implications for future security systems, factory robots, and self-driving cars — all places where AI’s ability to identify objects is crucial. “Imagine you’re in the military and you’re using a system that autonomously decides what to target,” Jeff Clune, co-author of a 2015 paper on fooling images, tells The Verge.
“What you don’t want is your enemy putting an adversarial image on top of a hospital so that you strike that hospital. Or if you are using the same system to track your enemies; you don’t want to be easily fooled [and] start following the wrong car with your drone.”

The challenge of defending from adversarial attacks is twofold: not only are we unsure how to effectively counter existing attacks, but we keep discovering more effective attack variations.


The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI

No one really knows how the most advanced algorithms do what they do. That could be a problem.

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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Wed 03 May 2017, 13:17:32

Mach Effects for In Space Propulsion: Interstellar Mission

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NASA: We propose to study the implementation of an innovative thrust producing technology for use in NASA missions involving in space main propulsion. Mach Effect Thruster (MET) propulsion is based on peer-reviewed, technically credible physics. Mach effects are transient variations in the rest masses of objects that simultaneously experience accelerations and internal energy changes. They are predicted by standard physics where Mach’s principle applies – as discussed in peer-reviewed papers spanning 20 years and a recent book, Making Starships and Stargates: the Science of Interstellar Transport and Absurdly Benign Wormholes published recently by Springer-Verlag. These effects have the revolutionary capability to produce thrust without the irreversible ejection of propellant, eliminating the need to carry propellant as required with most other propulsion systems.

Our initial Phase I effort will have three tasks, two experimental and one analytical:

- Improvement of the current laboratory-scale devices, in order to provide long duration thrust at levels required for practical propulsion applications.
- Design and development of a power supply and electrical systems to provide feedback and control of the input AC voltage, and resonant frequency, that determine the efficiency of the MET.
- Improve theoretical thrust predictions and build a reliable model of the device to assist in perfecting the design. Predict maximum thrust achievable by one device and how large an array of thrusters would be required to send a probe, of size 1.5m diameter by 3m, of total mass 1245 Kg including a modest 400 Kg of payload, a distance of 8 light years (ly) away.


Ultimately, once proven in flight and after more development, these thrusters could be used for primary mission propulsion, opening up the solar system and making interstellar missions a reality. The MET device is not a rocket, it does not expel fuel mass, and does not suffer from the velocity restriction of rockets. Freedom from the need to expel propellant means very high velocities might be achievable simply by providing electrical power and adequate heat rejection for the drive system. A mission to Planet 9 (or Planet X as it has been called) is possible in the near future using RTG power and thruster arrays. A future goal would be interstellar travel to the nearest exoplanet, within 5-9 ly distance. A mission of this type might take 20 or more years using the MET thruster. Although the nearest exoplanet is 14 or so ly distance, more Earth-like planets are being discovered daily.

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http://ssi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/ ... 201609.pdf
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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Wed 03 May 2017, 14:04:21

DARPA to Use Electrical Stimulation to Enhance Military Training

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The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) wants to speed up that training process using electrical stimulation to enhance the brain’s ability to learn. The Defense Department’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), today announced it had awarded multimillion-dollar contracts to eight university groups that will study and develop such technologies.

DARPA wants to see a 30 percent improvement in learning rates by the end of the four-year program. Studies will be conducted on human volunteers and animals.

For the new stimulation project, dubbed targeted neuroplasticity training, or TNT, research teams will focus on peripheral nerves that project into the brain and tug at memories. By delivering electrical pulses into the body’s nervous system, the scientists aim to modulate the brain’s neural connectivity and production of key chemicals.

That kind of neural tuning can “influence cognitive state—how awake you are, or how much attention you’re paying to something you’re viewing or performing,” says Doug Weber, a bioengineer at DARPA who heads up the TNT project. Video

Weber says he envisions intelligence agents or soldiers wearing some kind of noninvasive stimulation device that delivers precise electrical pulses as they practice their skills. And unlike caffeine or energy drinks, the stimulation can be turned off and, hopefully, causes fewer side effects.

The brain may seem like the obvious place to start, but DARPA has asked researchers to focus instead on the peripheral nervous system—nerves outside the brain and spinal cord. Peripheral nerve circuits are simpler and easier to map than those of the brain. And they tend to be more accessible than those in the brain, making surgical implantation of electrodes less invasive. “It would be impossible to justify a brain implant for someone who is otherwise healthy,” says Weber.

Tillery’s team will also stimulate the trigeminal nerve in human volunteers to see how it affects behavior.

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TNT researchers will likely face some ethical questions, such as the ethics of using enhancement on war fighters, says Helms Tillery. And if electrical stimulation proves effective at enhancing learning, how pervasive and mandatory it would become in the military is unclear.

Capt. Ramsey: Speaking of horses did you ever see those Lipizzaner stallions. ...

Capt. Ramsey: Some of the things they do, uh, defy belief. Their training program is simplicity itself. You just stick a cattle prod up their ass and you can get a horse to deal cards.

Capt. Ramsey: Simple matter of voltage

Crimson Tide (1995)


DARPA Is Planning to Hack the Human Brain to Let Us “Upload” Skills

The DARPA Targeted Neuroplasticity Training (TNT) program is exploring ways to speed up skill acquisition by activating synaptic plasticity. If the program succeeds, downloadable learning that happens in a flash may be the result.

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In March 2016, DARPA — the U.S. military’s “mad science” branch — announced their Targeted Neuroplasticity Training (TNT) program. The TNT program aims to explore various safe neurostimulation methods for activating synaptic plasticity, which is the brain’s ability to alter the connecting points between neurons — a requirement for learning. DARPA hopes that building up that ability by subjecting the nervous system to a kind of workout regimen will enable the brain to learn more quickly.

The ideal end benefit for this kind of breakthrough would be downloadable learning. Rather than needing to learn, for example, a new language through rigorous study and practice over a long period of time, we could basically “download” the knowledge after putting our minds into a highly receptive, neuroplastic state. Clearly, this kind of research would benefit anyone, but urgent military missions can succeed or fail based on the timing. In those situations, a faster way to train personnel would be a tremendous boon.

The ultimate goal of Targeted Neuroplasticity Training is to essentially “reset” the brain to that period of utmost receptivity that exists in early childhood, when our minds are insatiable learning sponges, greedily soaking up new knowledge and experiences. The practical implications, from a Defense Department standpoint, include reducing the time and expense of training in foreign languages, intelligence analysis, cryptography, and other military and defense applications.

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DARPA’s Synthetic Biology Initiatives Could Militarize the Environment

... Among other initiatives, researchers at DARPA are attempting to engineer insects to deliver protective genes to plants; to transform bacteria and yeast into factories to produce on-demand chemicals and fuels; and to develop methods to reverse any threats posed by gene drives. (Gene drives are a mechanism, both natural and human-induced, that drives genetic traits through a population, in some instances to suppress a population.)

And in late 2016, DARPA issued a call-out for academics to submit grant proposals to develop ecological niche-preference engineering technologies, which would “enable the genetic engineering of an organism’s preference for a niche (e.g., temperature, range, food source, and habitat)” in order to lessen their “economic, health, and resource burdens.” Imagine an agricultural pest that has a niche, or preference, for a particular crop. Maybe the leaves of that plant produce a certain chemical compound that the pest is attracted to, or the flower gives off an appealing scent. If you could engineer the insect to change its “niche preference” for that particular trait, or change the crop to prevent that niche from being produced, you could reduce the impact that insect has because it will have lost its niche.

These programs represent a new and controversial approach to leveraging the natural world—one that, in essence, militarizes the environment. The technologies that emerge will not only be a big deal for the innovations they will bring, but also for the legal and ethical lines they may cross.

Many of these projects are strictly for defense, rather than offense, but given the size of the budgets here, the U.S. military investment makes up a rather large portion of the money in synthetic biology research. It’s possible, then, that DARPA’s work is bending the entire field of synthetic biology toward military applications.

... It’s not hard to see how some in the international community may perceive these as potential bioweapons programs, rather than investments in purely defensive technologies. After all, if the U.S. is able to engineer an insect to carry a virus for protective purposes, it wouldn’t be hard to engineer that same insect to carry a deadly virus for offensive ones. It’s a classic dual-use technology scenario.

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First US success of nonhuman primate gene editing


In a study led by Michigan State University, scientists have shown that gene editing using CRISPR/Cas9 technology can be quite effective in rhesus monkey embryos - the first time this has been demonstrated in the U.S.

(Next up: Humans)


Real or Fake? AI Is Making It Very Hard to Know

Thanks to machine learning, it’s becoming easy to generate realistic video, and to impersonate anyone. Video

The ability to manipulate voices and faces so realistically could raise a number of issues, as the creators of Lyrebird acknowledge.
“Voice recordings are currently considered as strong pieces of evidence in our societies and in particular in jurisdictions of many countries,” reads an ethics statement posted to the company’s website. “Our technology questions the validity of such evidence as it allows to easily manipulate audio recordings. This could potentially have dangerous consequences.”


This robot speech simulator can imitate anyone's voice

What if you could make President Trump say whatever you wanted? Like this.

Canadian start-up Lyrebird has created a program that can emulate almost any human voice. It is able to generate thousands of spoken sentences per second that it has honed using artificial intelligence to match recordings of speech with transcripts.

As well as mimicking the sounds it hears, Lyrebird's AI can also create new sentences with unique variations such as intonation and emotion. Lyrebird is aware of the dangers and warns that its program could be used to manipulate recordings that are commonly used as evidence in legal proceedings.

"Our technology questions the validity of voice recordings as strong pieces of evidence as it allows to easily manipulate audio recordings," the company said. "This could potentially have dangerous consequences such as misleading diplomats, fraud and more generally any other problem caused by stealing the identity of someone else."

It could also result in people placing too much trust in machines.


Restricted U.S. Army Special Forces Guide to Information Operations

MILITARY DECEPTION

2-11. JP 1-02 defines MILDEC as actions executed to deliberately mislead adversary military decision makers as to friendly military capabilities, intentions, and operations, thereby causing the adversary to take specific actions (or inactions) that will contribute to the accomplishment of the friendly mission.

2-17. The uncertainties of combat make decisionmakers susceptible to deception. The basic mechanism for any deception is either to increase or decrease the level of uncertainty (commonly referred to as ambiguity) in the mind of the deception target. Both MILDEC and deception in support of OPSEC present false information to the adversary’s decisionmaker to manipulate their uncertainty. Deception may be used in the following ways:

Ambiguity-decreasing deception. This type of deception presents false information that shapes the adversary decisionmaker’s thinking so he makes and executes a specific decision that can be exploited by friendly forces. This deception reduces uncertainty and normally confirms the adversary decisionmaker’s preconceived beliefs so the decisionmaker becomes very certain about his COA. By making the wrong decision, which is the deception objective, the adversary could misemploy forces and provide friendly forces an operational advantage. For example, ambiguity-decreasing deceptions can present supporting elements of information concerning a specific adversary’s COA. These deceptions are complex to plan and execute, but the potential rewards are often worth the increased effort and resources.

Ambiguity-increasing deception. This deception presents false information aimed to confuse the adversary decisionmaker, thereby increasing the decisionmaker’s uncertainty. This confusion can produce different results. Ambiguity-increasing deceptions can challenge the enemy’s preconceived beliefs, draw enemy attention from one set of activities to another, create the illusion of strength where weakness exists, create the illusion of weakness where strength exists, and accustom the adversary to particular patterns of activity that are exploitable at a later time. For example, it can cause the target to delay a decision until it is too late to prevent friendly-mission success. It can place the target in a dilemma for which there is no acceptable solution. It may even prevent the target from taking any action at all.
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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Wed 03 May 2017, 14:38:35

When Robots Storm the Beach

Video - The beach assault began not with a bang but the whirring of drone propellers overhead, a grumble of gears, and the low sweep of the ocean. Frisbee-sized quadcopters raced ahead of enormous, self-driving amphibious assault vehicles. Satellites peered down as robotic submarines probed outward and up. With gigabytes of data flowing between these interconnected machines, it seemed — misleadingly — like a war that did not need humans at all. Video and Video

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The difference between a robot assault that’s effective and one that’s more dangerous to allies than to adversaries depends on whether those gun-wielding robots, the Marines coming in behind them, and the commanders behind them are all speaking the same language, sharing the same picture, and doing so in way that can’t be intercepted or blocked by the enemy.

That challenge is a lot harder than slapping a 50.-cal gun on a self-driving beach bot, and it’s one the Pentagon is still struggling with. Some of the most important technologies that will guide robotic amphibious warfare are still waiting in the wings.

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The Pentagon is closer to battlefield-usable artificial intelligence than it is getting sensors and software from different vendors to mesh securely and reliably. Among these efforts is the Tactical Situational Awareness System program from Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command.

SPAWAR is also working on drones that can follow orders given by voice. A longtime Pentagon ambition, this means creating circuits that can work out how to conduct complex operations from a relatively tiny amount of input


Here’s a Look at New Exosuits for the Civilian World

Hollywood set a high bar for exoskeleton suits. Technology imagined in Iron Man, Aliens, and Edge of Tomorrow all endow humans with superhuman abilities. After years of tinkering and military adventures, the first exoskeleton suits are finally walking out of the lab and into the market. Phoenix X, an experimental powered version, allows paraplegics to walk unassisted for four hours up to 1.1 miles per hour.

... The point of these exoskeletons is to augment humans where they are weak. “It’s not about making workers superman,” says Homayoon Kazerooni, a University of California robotics professor who has worked with a number of exoskeleton companies. “We want to eliminate the pain of the physical labor of these guys.”
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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Sat 06 May 2017, 08:27:07

Military Drones Can Now Deal With Threats on Their Own

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Until a few years ago, drones still needed pilots-by-proxy, who essentially did everything pilots normally do, with inputs transmitted to the aircraft via datalink rather than cockpit wires. Today a ground-based pilot can simply pick a spot on the map or highlight a target, and the drone will fly itself there and maneuver to keep the target in view.

Now Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Air Force have demonstrated the next step: a drone that can detect and respond to unexpected threats on its own, with no human intervention required.
“What we wanted to do with Have Raider II was really focus on how intelligent, if you will, can we make the unmanned asset from a mission planning and execution standpoint,”

Have Raider II, a two-week series of demonstration flights, showed that a drone could carry out a mission autonomously even when interrupted by an unknown surface-to-air missile threat. Lockheed’s Skunk Works uploaded its autonomous mission-planning software onto the Air Force Test Pilot School’s venerable NF-16 VISTA experimental aircraft, and had the school’s students put it through its paces as their capstone project.

An operational rollout of this or similar software seems inevitable—eventually. The Pentagon has for years wanted autonomy for drones as well as long-range data sharing. A few years from now, if you see a military formation overhead, there may only be one human pilot in the whole flight.


Air Force tests air-to-ground strikes with an autonomous F-16 wingman

The system successfully met its goals to adapt, plan and execute maneuvers all on its own.

In the future, Loyal Wingman could see a single F-35 accompanied by one or more autonomous F-16s on a strike mission. As the aircraft near the target, autonomous F-16s could be dispatched to take out advanced air defense systems. Survivors could then join up with the F-35 and proceed to strike the main target. Future wingmen could be purpose-built stealthy drones, but for now the Air Force has plenty of F-16s that are free (? ... the tax payer will buy more), the only cost being to convert them to operate autonomously.


China Is Building a Sea-Skimming Anti-Ship Drone

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China is developing a new drone that uses ground effect technology to skim the surface of the ocean, allowing it to fly just eighteen inches off the water. The unmanned vehicle could be a challenging opponent for potential adversaries, some of whom would find it difficult to detect.

Most modern cruise missiles are what are called "sea-skimmers," flying thirty feet or less above the surface of the water in order to avoid detection. The curvature of the Earth means sea skimming shortens the distance that enemy ship radars can detect it, giving the defender less time to shoot it down.

The new unnamed drone, by comparison, is claimed to fly just 18 inches above the surface of the water. Against typical sea skimmers, a ship radar thirty feet above sea level would detect the incoming missile at 15.4 miles. The same radar would only detect the Chinese drone at 9.48 miles. A drone flying that close to the ground won't be flying supersonic, and by appearances the UAV has a turbofan engine. Assuming a speed of 600 miles an hour, typical for subsonic anti-ship missiles, an enemy ship would have 59 seconds to react.

The drone has an estimated flying time of 1.5 hours, which at 600 miles an hour would give it a 900 mile range. It has a maximum takeoff weight of 6,000 pounds and a maximum payload—likely a blast fragmentation warhead—of 2,000 pounds. That's the average size of warheads the Soviet Union fielded during the Cold War to take out American aircraft carriers—that is, if and when they weren't fielding nuclear warheads.


Lockheed's Catapult-Launched Drone Called Fury Lingers 15 Hours Over the Battlefield

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Fury, which looks a little like a pumpkin seed with bat wings, can operate for more than 15 hours at altitudes up to 15,000 feet. An in-house project funded on the company dime, Lockheed's new drone is designed to give ground troops or warships their own surveillance or communications platform. The 17-foot-wingspan drone doesn't need a runway to operate. Instead, it's launched from a truck or deck-mounted catapult and can be recovered by flying it into a recovery net.


Iranian Drones Now Regular Nuisance for Carrier in Persian Gulf

While small Iranian vessels continue to approach the carrier and harass U.S. ships elsewhere in the region, the spy drones appear more regularly, said Capt. Will Pennington, commanding officer of the USS George H. W. Bush.

"That is a capability that the entire world is getting, and Iran is no different," he told Military.com in an interview. "These aren't small, radio-controlled drones. They're reconnaissance." Pennington said, the Bush detects nearby Iranian drones nearly every day
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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Sat 06 May 2017, 13:03:36

The Parts of America Most Susceptible to Robot Automation

A new analysis suggests that the places that are going to be hardest-hit by automation in the coming decades are in fact outside of the Rust Belt. It predicts that areas with high concentrations of jobs in food preparation, office or administrative support, and/or sales will be most affected—places such as Las Vegas and the Riverside-San Bernardino area may be the most vulnerable to automation in upcoming years, with 65 percent of jobs in Las Vegas and 63 percent of jobs in Riverside predicted to be automatable by 2025. Other areas especially vulnerable to automation are El Paso, Orlando, and Louisville.

A new map has shown where the most 'automatable' jobs are in the nation - and almost every metropolitan area is set to experience a robot takeover.

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The bubble size shows the number of workers employed in the metropolitan areas in December 2016. And the colors of the bubbles predict how likely jobs are to be replaced by robots – with red being the highest risk

In addition to what areas are at risk, the ISEA also looked at the 'implied reduction in wages' in each metropolitan area. What’s particularly striking about the new Redlands report is that the regions that are susceptible to automation are those that already have a high share of low-wage jobs. It is the low-wage cities like Las Vegas, Nevada, El Paso, Texas and San Bernardino, California that will be hit the hardest. 'This looks like especially tough times ahead for Vegas and the Inland Empire,' adds Professor Moenius.

Previously, automation had hurt middle-class jobs such as those in manufacturing. Now, it’s coming for the lower-income jobs. When those jobs disappear, an entire group of less-educated workers who already weren’t making very much money will be out of work.

Moenius worries about the possibility of entire regions in which low earners are competing for increasingly scarce jobs. “I wasn’t in L.A. when the riots happened, but are we worried about this from a social perspective?” he said. “Not for tomorrow, but for 10 years from now? It’s quite frankly frightening.”

People in America’s struggling regions feel left behind economically, as the 2016 election indicated. But the anger that motivated many voters in November may pale in comparison to what comes next, if some regions see two-thirds of their jobs disappear while other areas continue to thrive.

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TOP 10 CITIES AT RISK
1. Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise, NV: 65.2%
2. El Paso, TX: 63.9%
3. Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA: 62.6%
4. Greensboro-High Point, NC: 62.5%
5. North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton, FL: 62.4%
6. Bakersfield, CA: 62.4%
7. Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL: 61.8%
8. Fresno, CA: 61.5%
9. Greenville-Anderson-Mauldin, SC: 61.3%
10. Louisville/Jefferson County, KY-IN: 61.3%

6 Agriculture Robot Startups for Farming

A robot that picks apples? Washington state’s orchards could see a ‘game-changer’

Harvesting Washington’s vast fruit orchards requires thousands of farmworkers, and many of them work illegally in the United States. That system eventually could change dramatically as at least two companies are rushing to get robotic fruit-picking machines to market.

The robotic pickers don’t get tired and can work 24 hours a day.

“Human pickers are getting scarce,” said Gad Kober, a co-founder of Israel-based FFRobotics. “Young people do not want to work in farms, and elderly pickers are slowly retiring.”

President Donald Trump’s hard line against immigrants in the U.S. illegally has many farmers in the country looking for alternative harvest methods. Some have purchased new equipment to try to reduce the number of workers they’ll need, while others have lobbied politicians to get them to deal with immigration in a way that minimizes harm to their livelihoods.

“Who knows what this administration will do or not do?” said Jim McFerson, head of the Washington State Tree Fruit Research Center in Wenatchee. For farmers, “It’s a question of survival.”


Robot & Us: Self-Driving Trucks Are Coming to Save Lives and Kill Jobs

Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition Robotics Open House

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Video- To celebrate National Robotics Week the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition recently hosted the annual Robotics Open House at the newly constructed Levin Center for IHMC Research. IHMC Researchers demonstrated work across multiple platforms including the Atlas Humanoid robot, MinaV2 Exoskeleton, Planar Elliptical Runner, and Virtual reality stations.


Human-robot interactions take step forward with 'emotional' chatbot

Researchers describe the ‘emotional chatting machine’ as a first attempt at the problem of creating machines that can fully understand user emotion.

An “emotional chatting machine” has been developed by scientists, signalling the approach of an era in which human-robot interactions are seamless and go beyond the purely functional.

One concern is the potential for technology designed to seduce the user into sharing sensitive personal data. “It could be that children share insights with their ‘artificial friends’ and this data might be stored,” said Wachter. “What if we were to find out that people are more likely to buy more products when they are angry, sad, or bored? The ability to detect these emotions and successfully manipulate them could be a very interesting tool for companies.”
“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 » Mon 08 May 2017, 11:44:24

Freedom of the mind under threat with new technology

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New human rights laws to prepare for advances in neurotechnology that put the “freedom of the mind” at risk have been proposed by Swiss researchers in the journal Life Sciences, Society and Policy.

The authors suggest four new human rights need to be defined to protect against exploitation and loss of privacy: the right to cognitive liberty, the right to mental privacy, the right to mental integrity and the right to psychological continuity.


Co-author Marcello Ienca, of the University of Basel, says: "The mind is considered to be the last refuge of personal freedom and self-determination, but advances in neural engineering, brain imaging and neurotechnology put the freedom of the mind at risk. Our proposed laws would give people the right to refuse coercive and invasive neurotechnology, protect the privacy of data collected by neurotechnology, and protect the physical and psychological aspects of the mind from damage by the misuse of neurotechnology."

Advances in neurotechnology, such as sophisticated brain imaging and the development of brain-computer interfaces, have led to these technologies moving away from a clinical setting and into the consumer domain. There is a risk that the technology could be misused and create unprecedented threats to personal freedom.


Facebook is building brain-computer interfaces for typing and skin-hearing

Today at F8, Facebook revealed it has a team of 60 engineers working on building a brain-computer interface that will let you type with just your mind without invasive implants. The team plans to use optical imaging to scan your brain a hundred times per second to detect you speaking silently in your head, and translate it into text.

Regina Dugan, the head of Facebook’s R&D division Building 8, explained to conference attendees that the goal is to eventually allow people to type at 100 words per minute, 5X faster than typing on a phone, with just your mind.

Facebook is working to develop a brain-computer interface that will, in the future, allow individuals to communicate with other people without speaking. Ultimately, they hope to develop a technology that allows individuals to “speak” using nothing but their thoughts—unconstrained by time, distance or language.

Eventually, brain-computer interfaces could let people control augmented reality and virtual reality experiences with their mind instead of a screen or controller. Facebook’s CEO and CTO teased these details of this “direct brain interface” technology over the last two days at F8.


Apple Predicts Black Mirror Memory Implants Could Soon Be a Reality

In one of the darkest, most popular episodes of the sci-fi television series “Black Mirror,” writer Jesse Armstrong imagines a world in which humans can record every single memory and experience they have, using a small device implanted in their skulls. The ability to play back memories as easily as rewinding a VCR, which at first seems useful, is quickly revealed to have horrifying effects on the characters’ relationships. The real nightmare of “The Entire History of You” is not only that there is no expectation of privacy, but that there is no potential for self-delusion.

Even more terrifying? Tom Gruber, the co-founder of Siri and an Apple executive, has a similar vision for the future.
“I believe A.I. will make personal memory enhancement a reality. I think it’s inevitable,”

Speaking onstage at the TED 2017 conference in Vancouver, Canada, Gruber illustrated his vision for a world in which technology records and remembers every event in our lives—the names of every person we meet, all the places we have been, and all of our life events.


In Five Years, Your Smartphone Could Be Reading Your Mind

A new system developed by a team of researchers from Japan’s Toyohashi University of Technology can read people’s minds using brainwaves.

To test the technology, participants in a study of the system were asked to say numbers out loud and used a robot to guess what they said in real time, based on its readings of an electroencephalogram (EEG) brain scan. The device was able to achieve a 90 percent accuracy rate in recognizing numbers from zero to nine and a 61 percent accuracy rate for deciphering single syllables in Japanese.


Using deep learning to read images being processed in the brain

Imagine a machine that could look into your mind, see what you are seeing in real time, and then print out a picture of it. There are teams of researchers working on just that problem, and thus far, they have met with less than stellar results. Now, the group in China has found a way to solve at least one part of the problem by combining fMRI machines and deep learning algorithms.

The researchers report that their technique is the most accurate to date—an individual letter printed by the system looks very much like the original image the person was shown while under an fMRI machine. They offer photographic evidence of their results alongside both the original images and images made by researchers using other techniques.

A paper describing their project is available on the arXiv preprint server, describing their results and comparing them with other research efforts that attempt to achieve the same thing.

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Examples of reconstructed 18 distinct handwritten characters taken from subject 3 of Dataset 3


The Military is Using Human Brain Waves to Teach Robots How to Shoot

Modern sensors can see farther than humans. Electronic circuits can shoot faster than nerves and muscles can pull a trigger. Humans still outperform armed robots in knowing what to shoot at — but new research funded in part by the Army may soon narrow that gap.

Researchers from DCS Corp and the Army Research Lab fed datasets of human brain waves into a neural network — a type of artificial intelligence — which learned to recognize when a human is making a targeting decision. They presented their paper on it at the annual Intelligent User Interface conference in Cyprus in March.

The researchers hope their new neural net will enable experiments in which a computer can easily understand when a soldier is evaluating targets in a virtual scenario, as opposed to having to spend lots of time teaching the system to understand how to structure different individuals’ data, eye movements, their P300 responses, etc. The goal, one day, is a neural net that can learn instantaneously, continuously, and in real-time, by observing the brainwaves and eye movement of highly trained soldiers doing their jobs.

We’re peeking into what their brains are doing. If you can have enough guys in a squad looking at similar things, then we can say, ‘Three or four guys looked at this thing. It’s probably important.”


From autonomous drones to fake news generators, Military researchers seek to weaponise AI

Autonomous drone swarms, robotic warehouses for self-assembling weapons, human-android armies and machine hackers are all part of the US military’s plans for the future of war. These were outlined in a report last year by the US Department of Defense’s research division that looked at how artificially intelligent and autonomous robots could become a cornerstone of the nation’s defence strategy.

Experts are also concerned about subtler foot soldiers in future wars: political propaganda bots, or fake social media profiles let loose online by governments or political despots to brainwash and intimidate citizens.

“At least 22 countries are using public money to create digital cyber troops that can manipulate public opinion through bots,” says Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher of computational propaganda at the Oxford Internet Institute. She is working on a global project to quantify these efforts.
“The problem with . . . AI weapons is not that they are on the verge of taking over the world. The problem is that they are trivially easy to reprogram, allowing anyone to create an efficient and indiscriminate killing machine”

...“The machines themselves aren’t what’s scary. It’s what any two-bit hacker can do with them on a relatively modest budget,” wrote Zach Musgrave, a software engineer at Google, and Bryan Roberts, an academic at the London School of Economics, in a 2015 article for The Atlantic.


Elon Musk’s Neuralink goal is a cyborg whole brain mind computer interface with an AI cloud and other people

Using Brainwaves to Guess Passwords
“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 09 May 2017, 15:34:03

Analysis predicts extremely disruptive, total transition to EV / autonomous vehicles in 13 years

RethinkX, an independent think tank that analyzes and forecasts disruptive technologies, has released an astonishing report predicting a far more rapid transition to EV/autonomous vehicles than experts are currently predicting. The report is based on an analysis of the so-called technology-adoption S-curve that describes the rapid uptake of truly disruptive technologies like smartphones and the internet. Additionally, the report addresses in detail the massive economic implications of this prediction across various sectors, including energy, transportation and manufacturing

Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030 suggests that within 10 years of regulatory approval, by 2030, 95 percent of U.S. passenger miles traveled will be served by on-demand autonomous electric vehicles (AEVs). The primary driver of this unfathomably huge change in American life is economics: The cost savings of using transport-as-a-service (TaaS) providers will be so great that consumers will abandon individually owned vehicles. The report predicts that the cost of TaaS will save the average family $5600 annually, the equivalent of a 10 percent raise in salary. This, the report suggests, will lead to the biggest increase in consumer spending in history.

Consumers are already beginning to adapt to TaaS with the broad availability of ride-sharing services; additionally, the report says, Uber, Lyft and Didi are investing billions developing technologies and services to help consumers overcome psychological and behavioral hurdles to shared transportation such as habit, fear of strangers and affinity for driving. In 2016 alone, 550,000 passengers chose TaaS services in New York City alone.

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"Our analysis indicates that 2021 is the most likely date for the disruption point," the report reads. "The TaaS disruption will be what is called a 'Big Bang Disruption': The moment that TaaS is available, it will outcompete the existing model in all markets. We find that within 10 years from this point, 95 percent of U.S. passenger miles will be traveled by TaaS."

In part, the analysis is based on findings that the greater the improvement in cost or utility, the more likely it is that people will adopt it.
The TaaS disruption will crater the value chain of the oil industry as demand plummets. By 2030, the report predicts that oil demand will drop to 70 million barrels per day. The resulting collapse in prices will be catastrophic for the industry, and these effects are likely to be felt as early as 2021.

The report suggests that oil demand from passenger road transport will drop by 90 percent by 2030; demand from the trucking industry will drop by 7 million barrels per day globally. This is, as the report says, an existential crisis for the industry. Current share prices and projections are based on the presumption of a system of individually owned vehicles.
"In the U.S., an estimated 65% of shale oil and tight oil — which under a “business as usual” scenario could make up over 70% of the U.S. supply in 2030 — would no longer be commercially viable."
“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 12 May 2017, 13:14:29

Attack Underway!

Ransomware Infections Reported Worldwide

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BBC: A massive ransomware campaign appears to have infected a number of organisations around the world.

Screenshots of a well known program that locks computers and demands a payment in Bitcoin have been shared online by parties claiming to be affected.

There are reports of infections in the UK, US, China, Russia, Spain, Italy, Vietnam, Taiwan and others.

Security researchers are linking the incidents together.
"This is huge"

One cyber-security researcher tweeted that he had detected 36,000 instances of the ransomware, called WannaCry and variants of that name.


"Ransomware" cyberattack cripples hospitals across England

A large cyberattack crippled computer systems at hospitals across England on Friday, with appointments canceled, phone lines down and patients turned away.

Britain's National Health Service said hospitals were hit by an apparent "ransomware" attack, but there was no immediate evidence that patient data had been accessed.

NHS Digital, which oversees hospital cybersecurity, says the attack used the Wanna Decryptor variant of malware, which infects and locks computers while the attackers demand a ransom.


Several Spanish firms targeted in cyber attacks

Telecom giant Telefonica and several other Spanish companies were targeted in cyber attacks Friday, the government said.

The energy ministry said it had "confirmation of various cyber attacks targeting Spanish companies", adding the attackers used so-called ransomware which blocks access to files until a ransom is paid.

Spain's national cryptology centre, a division of the country's intelligence services, said the ransomware used in the attacks was of the WannaCry type which locks targeted files with a secret encryption algorithm.

It affected Windows operating systems and any linked networks, it said.

Telefonica reacted by switching off all computers at its Madrid headquarters, after hundreds of PCs came under attack, a source at the company told AFP.

Telefonica staff were told in megaphone announcements to urgently shut down their workstations, the source said.

Power firm Iberdrola and utility provider Gas Natural were also reported to have suffered from the outbreak.


Experts Expect Simultaneous Cyber Attacks on Multiple Firms

Nine in 10 global cyber security and risk experts believe that cyber risk is systemic and that simultaneous attacks on multiple companies are likely in 2017, according to a study by American International Group.

More than half of survey respondents say a simultaneous attack on five to 10 companies is highly likely in the next year. More than one-third estimate the likelihood of a simultaneous attack on as many as 50 companies at greater than 50 percent. Twenty percent see an even greater threat, predicting a better than even chance that as many as 100 companies will be attacked.

The leading industries identified by experts as most likely to experience a systemic attack this year are:
Financial Services (19 percent)
Power/Energy (15 percent)
Telecommunications/Utilities (14 percent)
Healthcare (13 percent)
Information Technology (12 percent)

Financial networks or transaction systems, internet infrastructure, the power grid, and the healthcare system would be vulnerable in attacks on these industries. Information technology companies, including software and hardware providers that support the backbone of the digital economy, were also seen as particularly susceptible.
“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 12 May 2017, 19:42:25

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The WannaCry ransomware has now spread to 99 countries, according to security firm Avast.

Cybersecurity experts said the malicious software works by exploiting a flaw in Microsoft software that was described in NSA documents stolen from the agency and leaked publicly in April by a criminal group called Shadow Brokers.

The Wcry developers have combined the Eternalblue exploit with a self-replicating payload that allows the ransomware to spread virally from vulnerable machine to vulnerable machine, without requiring operators to open e-mails, click on links, or take any other sort of action.

Microsoft released a “critical” patch fixing the flaw in March, before the NSA documents were publicly released, but the patch was apparently applied inconsistently, with many computers continuing to be unprotected. The malicious software — called “ransomware” because it encrypts systems and threatens to destroy data if a ransom is not paid — is spreading among computers that have not been patched, experts said.

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The reports of the malware spread began in Britain, where the National Health Service (NHS) described serious problems throughout Friday. But government officials and cybersecurity experts later described a far more extensive problem growing across the Internet, with tens of thousands of computers in dozens of nations affected. Europe, Asia and Latin America were especially hard hit.

This is not targeted at the NHS,” British Prime Minister Theresa May told reporters. “It’s an international attack, and a number of countries and organizations have been affected.”

One NHS junior doctor at a London hospital, who wishes to remain anonymous, said they were unable to look after patients properly:
However much they pretend patient safety is unaffected - it’s not true. At my hospital we are literally unable to do any X-rays, which are an essential component of emergency medicine.


In Moscow, the Russian Interior Ministry reported Friday that it, too, was under attack. The ministry, which administers the country’s police, told the Interfax news agency that about 1,000 of its computers were blocked.

Forcepoint Security Labs said that “a major malicious email campaign” consisting of nearly 5 million emails per hour was spreading the ransomware.

The group said in a statement that the attack had “global scope”, affecting organisations in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Mexico.


Russia was hit early and hard by the attack, which could be a sign that the attacks originated in that country, according to Markus Jakobsson, chief scientist with security firm Agari.

Eleven of Scotland’s 14 geographical health boards and its ambulance service have been affected by the global cyberattack, according to the Press Association. GP surgeries and dental surgeries were among some of the locations hit by the ransomware attack on IT networks, the Press Association reports.

Global courier company FedEx has been infected by the ransomware.
“Like many other companies, FedEx is experiencing interference with some of our Windows-based systems caused by malware,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “We are implementing remediation steps as quickly as possible. We regret any inconvenience to our customers.”

US congressman Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California and one of the more technologically savvy lawmakers, criticized the NSA’s suspected role in the WannaCry malware on Twitter.
Best way to protect US & the world is for NSA/CIA to DISCLOSE zero-day vulnerabilities to software owner, NOT WRITE MALWARE

It just be rainin' bad shit ...

Microsoft releases emergency patch for 'crazy bad' Windows zero-day bug

The vulnerability has been dubbed the worst Windows remote code execution flaw in recent memory.

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The vulnerability allows attackers to remotely execute code if the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine scans a specially crafted file. When successfully exploited, attackers are able to worm their way into the LocalSystem account and hijack an entire system.

With such power, they have complete control to install or delete programs, steal information, create new accounts with full user rights, and download additional malware.

The Project Zero team says the vulnerability can be leveraged against victims by only sending an email to users -- without the need for the message to be opened or any attachments to be downloaded. An attack leveraging the exploit could also be conducted through malicious website visits or instant messaging.

According to Ormandy, the vulnerability could not only be exploited to work against default systems, but is also "wormable." In other words, malware using the exploit can replicate itself and spread beyond the target system.

"Vulnerabilities in MsMpEng are among the most severe possible in Windows, due to the privilege, accessibility, and ubiquity of the service," the team says.
“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 13 May 2017, 13:26:41

Squilliam wrote:Where do you get these posts from Vox? Are you in the field? Or just interested?

To get back to your question squill, when I'm not working in my garden or taking care of a family member I'll read what's happening in the world over a morning coffee; cross index to previous documents I've read over the past 5-10 years; fact check; add a(n) (ir)relevant visual or graph - and voilà.

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Ta-Dah!

I've been doing this as a diversion for the past 10 years here and formerly at TheOilDrum. Knowing how to use Google and other meta search engines helps. It's just the internet equivalent of connecting the dots. An eidetic memory doesn't hurt, either.

These post are a very small fraction of what interests me every day. Most of it probably wouldn't interest anybody - things like astronomy, archeology, history, ecology, chemistry, climatology, oceanography, botany, geopolitics, economics, geology, physics, statistics, clinical medicine, psychology, international security, system dynamics, intell, parapsychology, and dozens of other fields.

Is this my field? Yes and no.

Although I've designed & programmed laboratory operating systems, data systems, instrument interfaces, and billing packages; that was not my main occupation. I consider that high-school level, compared to AI and machine learning. I try to know enough to know what I don't know.

This is just one of dozens of parallel trajectories and flashpoints I keep an eye on. The future is unlikely to follow any one of them exactly. It's a horse race.

Best of Luck in the Southern Hemisphere

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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 » Sat 13 May 2017, 13:32:43

President Trump Wants Gerald Ford Carriers to Use ‘Goddamned Steam’ Catapults Instead of ‘No Good’ Electromagnetic Launchers

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Navy officials were “blindsided” on Thursday, a spokesman told me, by President Donald Trump’s suggestion that he has convinced the Navy to abandon a long-planned and installed electromagnetic launch system in favor of older steam catapults on its newest aircraft carrier.

The unexpected comments from Trump came during a wide-ranging interview with Time magazine that were published on Thursday. Trump referred negatively to the “digital catapult system” – a reference to the General Atomics Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) – and said it would take “Albert Einstein to figure it out.” The president described wanting to scrap EMALS, a key technological upgrade at the center of the multibillion-dollar carrier project, and return to the older discontinued steam catapults.
“It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out,” Trump said, according to the published interview.

“And I said – and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said, what system are you going to be – ‘Sir, we’re staying with digital.’ I said, no you’re not. [You’re] going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.”

His question about “digital” calls to mind his cluelessness about “the cyber.”
“... this is absolutely nuts,” ... The whole idea of ripping out the launch system in the already-built Ford, and re-designing the following carriers (including the already-under construction USS Enterprise), would be “immensely expensive.”

EMALS is already installed on Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), and in 2015 the Navy began buying materials for EMALS on the follow-on John F. Kennedy (CVN-79). In January, the service awarded a $527 million contract to General Atomics for EMALS on the third Ford-class carrier, Enterprise (CVN-80).

The Mk 13 steam catapult used on Nimitz-class carriers is no longer in production, and if the service elected to return to steam launching it would likely have to design a new system, with the Navy incurring an unknown level of additional expense, USNI News understands. There would also be penalties for breaking agreed upon shipbuilding contracts.

Not only are steam systems are harder to maintain than electrical ones; they have a lower upper-limit during combat—meaning electrical systems can launch more aircraft in a shorter amount of time. Electrical systems can also better handle smaller aircrafts and drones compared with steam.

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Maybe 'Il Duce' would like to bring back coal powered, paddle wheeled aircraft carriers also


Trump’s Know-Nothing Tour de Force

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"That is not only not right; it is not even wrong," or "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!" in Wolfgang Pauli's native German

The phrase "not even wrong" describes any argument that purports to be scientific but fails at some fundamental level, usually in that it contains a terminal logical fallacy or it cannot be falsified by experiment (i.e., tested with the possibility of being rejected), or cannot be used to make predictions about the natural world.


The Army is testing a more powerful anti-drone laser

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Soldiers at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, recently tested drone resupply, short-range air defense, precision targeting and anti-drone lasers, Training and Doctrine Command officials said Wednesday.

The 5kW Stryker-mounted Mobile Expeditionary High Energy Laser used in the exercise is the second version of the anti-drone laser, but a third version is on the way.

At the next exercise in November, testers will evaluate a more powerful 10kW laser, said John Haithcock, director of the Fires Battle Lab. If it performs well, the laser will be used at the Joint Warfighting Assessment next year and likely head out to deployed units.

The first version, unveiled at last year's MFIX, was a 2kW version.


Mirages of War: Six Illusions From our Recent Conflicts

Milley: In future wars, creature comforts are out

Future wars, in mega-cities and against enemies with similar technology and capabilities, won't have safe spaces, air conditioning and comfort food, Gen. Mark Milley told an audience at the Army and Navy Club. But on the other hand, that dynamic environment will cut down on bureaucracy.

"We have a wide variety of conditions that we’ve accustomed ourselves to," he said. "There’s an entire generation of officers now that think — their own experience in combat is to fight from Victory base, or Bagram base, or fixed sites, where you have access to a variety of comfort items, if you will. Pizza Huts and Burger Kings and stuff like that."

While counter-terrorism in undeveloped countries is a reality for the forseeable future, he said, the long game looks different.
"The likelihood of massing forces on a base for any length of time certainly means you’re going to be dead. If you’re stationary, you’ll die,"

Radio communication could also be degraded or destroyed, he added, by enemies with advanced electronic warfare skills.

"Those conditions are intense and very, very spartan," Milley said. "And we have got to condition ourselves to operate — untether ourselves from this umbilical cord of logistics and supply that American forces have enjoyed for a long time."
Last edited by vox_mundi on Sat 13 May 2017, 14:09:07, 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 » Sat 13 May 2017, 13:46:29

AI will rob companies of the best training tool they have: grunt work

A common answer to the fear that artificial intelligence will take over jobs is that machines are most likely to take over the types of tedious, repetitive tasks that humans find boring. Humans don’t want to do these jobs, the argument goes, so this isn’t a great loss. Their skills and humanness are better applied elsewhere.

But that misses an essential point that anyone who has worked their way up in a career knows: All that grunt work is actually instructive for workers. And without any experience in the trenches to draw upon, that training will be hard to replicate.

As Deloitte relies more on AI, it won’t necessarily have the same need for entry-level employees to do basic work such as combing through contracts. Increasingly, the organization will look more like a diamond: It will still need human workers to review the machines’ output and make decisions AI can’t, but the greater need will be for the middle-level employees who have the experience to make judgment calls.

Here’s the problem, Engelbert says: “Where do [those middle-level employees] get that experience and judgment? That’s probably the number one thing I worry about as we shift our model.”

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Robots are getting better at teaching other robots how to do things.

The test bed for C-LEARN is a small, two-armed bomb-disposal robot called Optimus. Once Optimus learns how to perform a task, it can transfer that knowledge to Atlas, a six-foot-tall, 400-pound robot


Amazon is offering $250,000 to a team that comes up with an advanced robot for its warehouses

Amazon is offering $250,000 to teams who invent robots that could potentially work in their massive fulfillment centers, and it has chosen 16 finalists for a tournament it is organizing later this year, the company said on Wednesday.

The e-commerce giant is running its third annual Robotics Challenge this year in July in Japan and has picked finalists from across the world. There are competitors from major U.S. institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton and Carnegie Mellon University.

Participants will need to show that their robot software and hardware can recognize objects, grab them, execute tasks, detect errors and recover as needed. The robots will be scored by how many items are successfully picked and stowed in a fixed amount of time, Amazon said.

Amazon currently has more than 80,000 automated robots in its warehouses globally.

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Pretty Low Bar to Beat


Watch Hackers Sabotage an Industrial Robot Arm

Researchers at the security firm Trend Micro and Italy’s Politecnico Milano have spent the last year and a half exploring that risk of a networked and internet-connected industrial robot. At the IEEE Security & Privacy conference later this month, they plan to present a case study of attack techniques they developed to subtly sabotage and even fully hijack a 220-pound industrial robotic arm capable of wielding gripping claws, welding tools, or even lasers.
“Looking at only one vendor, we found textbook examples of vulnerabilities, very simple ones,” ... “All our attacks can be applied to other categories of robots as well.”

The ABB IRB140 they compromised has applications in everything from automotive manufacturing to food processing and packaging to pharmaceuticals.
Last edited by vox_mundi on Sat 13 May 2017, 14:06:51, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Fully Automated Combat Robots Pt. 2

Unread postby vox_mundi » Sat 13 May 2017, 14:02:02

US firm unveils tiny handheld drone for soldiers

Video - Developed by unmanned air systems (UAS) specialist Aerovironment, the so-called Snipe quadcopter, which weighs 140g, has been developed specifically for close-range intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions.

Powered by rechargeable batteries that give it around 15 minutes of flight time, the tiny device is claimed to be capable of flight speeds of more than 20mph and has a range of over 1km.

The aircraft is equipped with electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR), low-light-capable and long-wave infrared (LWIR) sensors and can relay high-resolution images and record real-time video both day and night.

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Snipe is claimed to be capable of operating under challenging environmental conditions including wind gusts of up to 20mph. An integrated UHF radio allows non-line-of-sight operation, and the drone is able to return to its operator automatically if it loses its radio link.


Sikorsky making strides with Matrix autonomous technology

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Video - Work is continuing apace at Sikorsky Innovations on its Matrix Technology to enable autonomous and optionally piloted flight, as the manufacturer pursues both commercial certification and military qualification for the system.

“Zero-Crew” mode could be employed for the very simple operations, or for use in areas where it’s too dangerous for people to fly — such as flying in a radioactive environment like above the Fukushima nuclear plant

Van Buiten said the use of a tablet to control a helicopter amounted to a “reinvention” of the cockpit, enabling a non-pilot to fly the Sikorsky Autonomy Research Aircraft (SARA) — a customized S-76B, with just 10 minutes of orientation.

“You put in large fundamental commands, and it sorts out all the details,” he said. “The tablet is just the interface between the human and the autonomy system on board the helicopter, and it enables the helicopter to fly all the different trajectory elements and mission elements that the helicopter is capable of by itself.”

“For us, we’re setting the bar high. Our vision for certifying a single pilot helicopter would mean if the pilot is incapacitated, and there’s 12 passengers in the back, everyone lives. The helicopter executes a landing where it is, or decides if it’s safer to return to base, or it might even complete the mission. That’s going to be our criteria for single pilot functionality. That’ll be a whole new space for aviation.”

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This Machine Gun Robot Will Probably Lead the Uprising One Day

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DARPA to Hold Proposers Day for Mobile Warfighter Health Analytics Program

DARPA said May 2 the Warfighter Analytics using Smartphones for Health program seeks to use data from cellphone sensors to develop algorithms that can run passive, continuous and real-time assessment of military personnel.

WASH participants will work to create algorithms and techniques to identify known indicators of physiological issues as well as irregularities with warfighters’ micro-behaviors that could indicate health problems.


NVIDIA's AI May Keep Watch Over Smart Cities of the Future

Video - Artificial intelligence is pushing into every area of our life with deep inroads to our mobile devices, our video games, and even our own brains. Video surveillance could the next step if NVIDIA's new video analytics platform, Metropolis, is successful. The initiative, announced just ahead of the annual GPU conference this week, will use learning AI to analyze the massive amount of data from surveillance video for "public safety, traffic management and resource optimization."

According to NVIDIA, there are already hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras around the globe, with the number expected to rise to the 1 billion mark by 2020. Human beings have a hard time sifting through the flood of moving images, storing the majority of it on hard drives for later viewing. NVIDA thinks that deep learning AI can help video analytics much more accurately than humans or even real-time computer monitoring. The company has partnered with more than 50 companies that make security cameras, including Hikvision. "The benefit of GPU deep learning is that data can be analyzed quickly and accurately to drive deeper insights," said Shiliang Pu, president at the Hikvision Research Institute in China.

A city with cloud-connected, AI-powered surveillance systems in place could find missing persons, notify residents of nearby emergencies, alert police to crimes in progress or even send out traffic congestion warnings.

It could also track and monitor our behavior — both legal and otherwise — along with gathering personal data for advertisers.

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UK police will start using AI to decide whether suspects should be kept in custody

UK police in the city of Durham, England, are prepared to go live with a predictive artificial intelligence system that will determine whether a suspect should be kept in custody, according to the BBC. Called HART, which stands for Harm Assessment Risk Tool, the system is designed to classify individuals based on a low, medium, or high risk of committing a future offense. Police plan to put it live in the next few months to test its effectiveness against cases in which custody specialists do not rely on the system’s judgement.

In a thorough investigation from ProPublica published last year, these risk-assessment tools were found to be deeply flawed, with inherent human bias built in that made them twice as likely to flag black defendants as future criminals and far more likely to treat white defendants as low-risk, standalone offenders. Many algorithmic systems today, including those employed by Facebook, Google, and other tech companies, are similarly at risk of injecting bias into a system, as the judgement of human beings was used to craft the software in the first place.

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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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