Lifeboat Foundation

Nevertheless, to date, most of the wealth generated by advances in A.I. and robotics has been acquired by the executives of technology companies. It’s time for the benefits of the A.I. revolution to be broadly distributed through an expanded social safety net.

Unfortunately, members of Congress are taking the opposite path and have proposed cuts to a range of social programs. Several hundred thousand people arrived in Washington on Saturday to protest these cuts. During the demonstration, masked agitators threw rocks at the autonomous drones deployed for crowd control; in response, drones dispensed pepper spray on the protesters below, causing a stampede. More than 20 people were injured and treated at local hospitals; one protester died of his injuries on Monday. The police detained 35 people at the scene; 25 more arrests have been made since then, after authorities used facial recognition technology to identify protesters from surveillance video.

Punishing the poor who were harmed by economic disruptions has been a mistake repeated throughout American history. During the Industrial Revolution, machines displaced many artisans and agricultural workers. To deter these unemployed workers from seeking public relief, local governments set up poorhouses that required residents to perform hard labor. And between 1990 and 2020, the federal government — and some state governments — repeatedly cut social program spending even as middle-class jobs disappeared as a result of outsourcing and automation. Workers who didn’t have the skills to thrive in the knowledge economy were resigned to join the underclass of service workers.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is experimenting with using a swarm of autonomous drones and ground robots to assist with military missions. In a video of a recent test, DARPA showed how its robots analyzed two city blocks to find, surround, and secure a mock city building.

DARPA conducted its test back in June in Georgia, featuring both drones and ground-based robots. The demonstration was part of DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program, which is designed to eventually accompany small infantry units as they work in dense urban environments, and could eventually scale up to 250 drones and ground robots. The test back in June was the second of six planned tests, which DARPA says will increase in complexity as they happen over the next couple of years.

The Navy sent its expeditionary fast transport ship USNS Spearhead to sea to experiment with a number of cutting-edge technologies last week, including MartinUAV’s novel V-Bat drone. V-Bat is capable of infrastructure-independent vertical takeoff and landings while also retaining the high efficiency of a fixed-wing aircraft for long-endurance missions. Seeing as it can be launched and recovered in a nine square meter area and even in dense urban terrain, as well as on the tight decks of ships, the drone could have a lot of applications in the military, law enforcement/first responder, industrial, and environmental monitoring sectors.

The parcel carrier said Tuesday it had applied to the Federal Aviation Administration for certification of drone flights through the company’s recently formed subsidiary called UPS Flight Forward Inc.

The certification if approved, would allow drone flights beyond an operator’s visual line of sight, at night and without limit to the number of drones or operators in command, the company said. Such flights are highly restricted in the U.S.

The FAA is working out the regulatory framework to govern commercial uses of unmanned aircraft, which has been generally restricted to flights below 400 feet and within sight of an operator on the ground.

This guy is a hero. What a badass!

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Blockchain will make sure green pledges aren’t just green wash.

When a country or a company makes a promise to reduce carbon emissions, respect fishing quotas or cut toxic output, how can we be sure they’ll keep their word?

The truth is, it’s often extremely hard. But a new initiative — Global Ledger — led by a group of World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders (YGLs) aims to change that.

Continue reading “Blockchain will make sure green pledges aren’t just greenwash: a new initiative” »

Thanks to a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, a group of Virginia Tech engineers hopes to redefine these search and rescue protocols by teaming up human searchers with unmanned aerial robots, or drones.

In efforts led by Ryan Williams, an assistant professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering within the College of Engineering, these drones will use autonomous algorithms and machine learning to complement search and rescue efforts from the air. The drones will also suggest tasks and send updated information to human searchers on the ground.

Using mathematical models based on historical data that reflect what lost people actually do combined with typical searcher behavior, the researchers hope this novel approach of balancing autonomy with human collaboration can make searches more effective. The team has received support from the Virginia Department of Emergency Management and will work closely with the local Black Diamond Search and Rescue Council throughout the project.