Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: military – Page 272

This is what scares me; autonomous warfare.

WASHINGTON: DARPA is taking another step toward building autonomous electronic warfare systems with a small contract award to BAE Systems.

Artificial intelligence and autonomy loom large in the Pentagon these days. And electronic warfare, much more quietly, dominates a great deal of thinking across the services these days after we’ve watched how the Russians operate against Ukraine and in Syria. So DARPA’s additional $13.3 million award announced today is worth noting.

Why does all this matter? One of the biggest challenges facing the F-35 program, for example, is the creation of a huge digital threat library (known as mission data files) for the airplane. It includes electronic spectrum information for a wide array of emitters — radar, radio and other sources.

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Come “ask me anything” right now!!! I’m trying to answer all questions I get asked:

Hi Reddit,

Thank you for having me here. My name is Zoltan Istvan, and I’m a futurist, journalist, and science fiction writer. I’m also the 2016 Presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party.

For the last 725 days, I have been campaigning full time to spread transhumanism and life extension policies across America and the world. While I never expected to win the US Presidency, my campaign has received a lot of attention—both good and bad—for its emphasis on radical science, technology, secularism, and futurist ideas.

During my campaign, I’ve spoken on transhumanism at the World Bank, consulted with the US Navy on artificial intelligence, got a chip implanted in my hand, interviewed with underground group Anonymous, and drove a coffin-shaped bus called the Immortality Bus across America to deliver a Transhumanist Bill of Rights to the US Capitol. My 20-point political platform has many futurist policies in it, but some of the most important ones are supporting a Universal Basic Income, classifying aging as a disease, legalizing all drugs, creating a Transhumanist Olympics, and taking money from the military and giving it to science.

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We have already seen the HoloLens mixed reality headset put to military use by the Israeli Defense Force for advanced battlefield planning.

Now Ukrainian company LimpidArmor has shown off a new application for the augmented reality device on the actual battlefield to improve the field of view of tank commanders without exposing them to additional risk. The technology was shown off at the Arms and Security show, held in Kiev from 11 to 14 October.

LimpidArmor’s hardware and software system uses a HoloLens integrated with a helmet and cameras mounted around the tank to give commanders a 360 degree view of their environment in both optical and thermal and makes this available in real-time.

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In Brief:

  • Now with just under $800 million in funding, Florida startup Magic Leap has applied for a patent for its VR/AR headsets, bringing them one step closer to market.
  • From healthcare to the military, VR/AR is being applied to industries far beyond its humble roots in gaming.

Florida-based startup Magic Leap has been getting considerable attention thanks in no small part to the awesome-looking augmented reality video demos it has released. Apart from these videos and the info we could glean from some interviews and Twitter posts, however, we haven’t yet been given a complete explanation of what the company has in store for consumers. What we do know is that it promises an AR experience unlike any other by delivering “neurologically true visual perception.” In short, the brain won’t be able to tell the difference between reality and virtual reality when you are using Magic Leap’s device.

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With pinpoint accuracy, this electronic warfare drone can black out opposing forces at will.

Bds Champ Boeing’s “CHAMP” (Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project) is a one-missile, flying blackout. Image source: Boeing.

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Elon Musk is obsessed with space. At age 30, he founded SpaceX. At age 41, he oversaw the first cargo mission to the International Space Station by a private company. And at age 12, as a kid living in South Africa, he made a space-themed PC game called Blastar. Now, thanks to the power of the internet, you can play that game.

Musk sold the code for Blastar for $500 to the magazine PC and Office Technology, and a reproduction of the page it appeared on was published in Ashlee Vance’s biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. From there, Tomas Lloret Llinares — a software engineer at Google — took the code and rebuilt the game to work in HTML5.

Your mission, as the game’s lonely space pilot, is to “destroy [the] alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam machines.” Blastar is mostly a mix of Space Invaders and Asteroid, though it’s much more basic. There is never more than two ships on the screen, there are few sound effects, and — like many games of its time — it really has no ending. It’s almost unimpressive; that is, until you remember that it was made by a 12-year-old in 1984.

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