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Category: military – Page 248

With all the movies and TV shows currently streaming online, who has time to learn a new language or some other cognitive skill anymore? DARPA (the U.S government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has been working on the ultimate cheat code for brains that would cut down the time needed to acquire knowledge and complete skill training. The program was not named after any of the characters from The Matrix, but it probably should have been.

According to Futurism, DARPA announced the Targeted Neuroplasticity Training (TNT) program back in 2016. In theory, DARPA would develop technology that would stimulate peripheral nerves to release more neuromodulators (brain chemicals) including acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine. The chemicals would activate synaptic plasticity and the brain would be trained to process information for cognitive skills more quickly. The stated goal of TNT is to speed up training processes for military personnel and in turn reduce costs and improve results. “DARPA is approaching the study of synaptic plasticity from multiple angles to determine whether there are safe and responsible ways to enhance learning and accelerate training for skills relevant to national security missions,” said TNT Program Manager Doug Webe, in a press release. But the technology could be used for much cooler applications, like teaching me Jiu-jitsu or how to fly a helicopter in a matter of seconds.

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Washington (AP) — Seated before the grounded space shuttle Discovery, a constellation of Trump administration officials used soaring rhetoric to vow to send Americans back to the moon and then on to Mars.

After voicing celestial aspirations, top officials moved to what National Intelligence Director Dan Coats called “a dark side” to space policy. Coats, Vice President Mike Pence, other top officials and outside space experts said the United States has to counter and perhaps match potential enemies’ ability to target U.S. satellites.

Pence, several cabinet secretaries and White House advisers gathered in the shadow of the shuttle at the Smithsonian Institution’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center to chart a new path in space — government, commercial and military — for the country. It was the first meeting of the National Space Council, revived after it was disbanded in 1993.

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Looking back at vintage conceptions of the future can be interesting. Most depictions of the 2000s that were rendered in the 1800s or early 1900s come off as whimsical, because they’re so off-target. Illustrators in the past were often focused on transportation, military tactics, and domestic life, and they predicted everything from whale buses to Fallout -esque fashion. Some illustrated predictions, however, are eerily accurate.

In 1963, science fiction author Hugo Gernsback posed for Life Magazine wearing a fake mock-up of a tool featured in one of his stories. He called the contraption “TV glasses”. Considering them now, they look a lot like an oculus rift. Hugo told Life that users would one day watch television on screens so close to their eyes that they felt immersed in the action, effectively predicting the media’s recent preoccupation with virtual reality.

No one’s sure if Hugo also predicted immersive “action” of the pornographic kind, but that’s what technology’s up to now.

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The military wants to “network everything to everything,” which sounds a bit like the setup for the Terminator franchise.

Service chiefs are converging on a single strategy for military dominance: connect everything to everything.

Leaders of the Air Force, Navy, Army and Marines are converging on a vision of the future military: connecting every asset on the global battlefield.

Continue reading “The Future the US Military is Constructing: a Giant, Armed Nervous System” | >

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Electronics Resurgence Initiative’s will create six new programs over the next four years.

These are aimed at ensuring the predictions made by Moore’s law, which have governed the increases in microchip processing power, will continue to apply to chip development.

Three areas will be focused on, materials and integration, circuit design, and systems architecture.

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Trying to outrun the expiration of Moore’s Law.

As conventional microchip design reaches its limits, DARPA is pouring money into the specialty chips that might power tomorrow’s autonomous machines.

The coming AI revolution faces a big hurdle: today’s microchips.

Continue reading “Can the US Military Re-Invent the Microchip for the AI Era?” | >

My new policy article for the HuffPost on why more than ever we need to avoid war and armed conflict:

Some of the early years of my adult life were in conflict zones as a journalist—which included covering the Pakistan/Indian Kashmir conflict for the National Geographic Channel and The New York Times Syndicate. War zones are terrifying. One always is worried about bullying soldiers, speeding armed military vehicles, stray bullets, and whether there’s a roadside bomb on your path. Anyone that approaches you is suspect and could be carrying ready-to-detonate explosives.

One thing conflict zones teach you is that freedom is precious. The nearly 70-year Kashmir conflict has approximately a half million soldiers involved, so even if they’re supposedly on your side (depending on what country you’re in), you still feel under siege. My time in certain parts of Sudan, Israel, Palestine, Zimbabwe, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Eritrea, Mali, and Yemen left me with the same feeling.

We face an unusual time with President Trump, whose bold behavior could prove dangerous to stable foreign policy. This situation has now become even more worrisome this month when Russia’s Vladimir Putin, according to RT, said publicly that whoever “leads in artificial intelligence will rule the world.” Some experts believe we will have an AI equivalent to human intelligence in less than 10 years time—which means in 15–20 years time, AI will far outdo human thinking and could be in control of all nuclear weaponry on the planet.

Continue reading “The Libertarian Futurist’s Case for Avoiding War and Military Entanglements” | >

“North Korea claims it is now part of the thermonuclear club, after successfully testing on Sunday a miniaturized hydrogen bomb capable of fitting on an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).”

“Assuming the reports are true, the North’s most recent nuclear detonation wasn’t just another test on a growing list of Kim Jong Un’s provocations. It was a major escalation in the nuclear face-off on the Korean peninsula. The world’s most belligerent rogue state going from fission to fusion weapons is ominous to say the least.”

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