Microsoft made a multibillion dollar investment in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, reigniting an old rivalry with Google. The move also set off an “AI arms race” that puts Google at risk. FT explains.
Category: military – Page 64
Boeing has come up with a new advanced airlifter concept with stealth features to meet the growing need for more durable cargo and tanker planes.
Boeing has shown an idea for a tactical, stealth-capable cargo plane with a blended wing body, or BWB. It comes almost two weeks after Frank Kendall, the secretary of the U.S. Air Force, said that having more airlifters and aerial refueling tankers that can survive will be important in future high-end conflicts against near-peer adversaries, especially China.
The company has been funding this project internally up until this point.
Wikimedia Commons.
“We thought it was a good time to share the major features of our Blended Wing Body concept, [instead of] the concepts we have shown previously to represent our BWB investigation,” according to a statement Boeing gave to The War Zone. “We are continuing BWB concept research activities with government customers to advance [the] state of the art in military transport aircraft design,” they said.
They’re warning of a global AI-pocalypse.
While artificial intelligence systems might make lives exponentially easier, they could also have a sinister side effect — making us go extinct. That’s right, researchers are deeming rogue AI an “existential threat to humanity” that needs to be regulated like nuclear weapons if we are to survive.
Please join the Project on Nuclear Issues for a book launch event, featuring “The Fragile Balance of Terror: Deterrence in the Nuclear Age.”
In The Fragile Balance of Terror, edited by Vipin Narang and Scott Sagan, the foremost experts on nuclear policy and strategy offer insight into an era rife with more nuclear powers. Some of these new powers suffer domestic instability, others are led by pathological personalist dictators, and many are situated in highly unstable regions of the world—a volatile mix of variables. The increasing fragility of deterrence in the twenty-first century is created by a confluence of forces: military technologies that create vulnerable arsenals, a novel information ecosystem that rapidly transmits both information and misinformation, nuclear rivalries that include three or more nuclear powers, and dictatorial decision making that encourages rash choices. The nuclear threats posed by India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea are thus fraught with danger.
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Tech giants from Google to Amazon and Alibaba —not to mention nation-states vying for technological supremacy—are racing to dominate this space. The global quantum-computing industry is projected to grow from $412 million in 2020 to $8.6 billion in 2027, according to an International Data Corp. analysis.
Whereas traditional computers rely on binary “bits”—switches either on or off, denoted as 1s and 0s—to process information, the “qubits” that underpin quantum computing are tiny subatomic particles that can exist in some percentage of both states simultaneously, rather like a coin spinning in midair. This leap from dual to multivariate processing exponentially boosts computing power. Complex problems that currently take the most powerful supercomputer several years could potentially be solved in seconds. Future quantum computers could open hitherto unfathomable frontiers in mathematics and science, helping to solve existential challenges like climate change and food security. A flurry of recent breakthroughs and government investment means we now sit on the cusp of a quantum revolution. “I believe we will do more in the next five years in quantum innovation than we did in the last 30,” says Gambetta.
But any disrupter comes with risks, and quantum has become a national-security migraine. Its problem-solving capacity will soon render all existing cryptography obsolete, jeopardizing communications, financial transactions, and even military defenses. “People describe quantum as a new space race,” says Dan O’Shea, operations manager for Inside Quantum Technology, an industry publication. In October, U.S. President Joe Biden toured IBM’s quantum data center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., calling quantum “vital to our economy and equally important to our national security.” In this new era of great-power competition, China and the U.S. are particularly hell-bent on conquering the technology lest they lose vital ground. “This technology is going to be the next industrial revolution,” says Tony Uttley, president and COO for Quantinuum, a Colorado-based firm that offers commercial quantum applications. “It’s like the beginning of the internet, or the beginning of classical computing.”
Biological and chemical weapons have the potential to pose a national security threat to the U.S. that the country is not equipped to handle, a panel of lawmakers and a military leader told an audience at the Aspen Security Forum.
Part of one of the inscriptions found at Kom Ombo, a temple in southern Egypt. The image at the top of the inscription appears to show the king Seti I with the gods Horus and Sobek. Part of one of the inscriptions found at Kom Ombo, a temple in southern Egypt. The image at the top of the inscription appears to show the king Seti I with the gods Horus and Sobek. (Image credit: Egyptian Antiquities Ministry)A giant stone engraving that fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, found in a temple in southern Egypt, may reveal new information about a pharaoh named Seti I, who launched a series of military campaigns in North Africa and the Middle East after he became pharaoh in about 1,289 or 1,288 B.C., several Egyptologists told Live Science.
The engraving has both drawings and hieroglyphs on it; the engraving mentions an event that happened during the reign of Horemheb, an elite general in King Tut’s army who eventually became a pharaoh.
Archaeologists with the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities discovered the engraving while conducting a groundwater-lowering project in Aswan; inside Kom Ombo, a temple dedicated to the god Horus and a crocodile-headed god named Sobek. The temple dates back 2,300 years; the engraving may have originally been in an earlier temple, now lost, at Kom Ombo that was located on the same spot as the later temple. [The 25 Most Mysterious Archaeological Finds on Earth].
Researchers have experimentally demonstrated, for the first time, a mechanically flexible silver mesh that is visibly transparent, allows high-quality infrared wireless optical communication and efficiently shields electromagnetic interference in the X band portion of the microwave radio region. Optical communication channels are important to the operation of many devices and are often used for remote sensing and detection.
Electronic devices are now found throughout our homes, on factory floors and in medical facilities. Electromagnetic interference shielding is often used to prevent electromagnetic radiation from these devices from interfering with each other and affecting device performance.
Electromagnetic shielding, which is also used in the military to keep equipment and vehicles hidden from the enemy, can also block the optical communication channels needed for remote sensing, detection or operation of the devices. A shield that can block interference but allow for optical communication channels could help to optimize device performance in a variety of civilian and military settings.
Rachel Bronson, PhD, president and CEO, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said: “We are living in a time of unprecedented danger, and the Doomsday Clock time reflects that reality. 90 seconds to midnight is the closest the Clock has ever been set to midnight, and it’s a decision our experts do not take lightly. The US government, its NATO allies and Ukraine have a multitude of channels for dialogue; we urge leaders to explore all of them to their fullest ability to turn back the Clock.”
The Doomsday Clock’s time is set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board with the support of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, which includes 10 Nobel Laureates. Previously, the Doomsday Clock had been set at 100 seconds to midnight since 2020.
The Doomsday Clock statement explains that “Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks. And worst of all, Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk. The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high… Russia has also brought its war to the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor sites, violating international protocols and risking widespread release of radioactive materials. Efforts by the International Atomic Energy Agency to secure these plants so far have been rebuffed.” The statement has been translated into Ukrainian and Russian.
Nine military officers who had worked decades ago at a nuclear missile base in Montana have been diagnosed with blood cancer and there are “indications” the disease may be linked to their service, according to military briefing slides obtained by The Associated Press. One of the officers has died.
All of the officers, known as missileers, were assigned as many as 25 years ago to Malmstrom Air Force Base, home to a vast field of 150 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile silos. The nine officers were diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, according to a January briefing by U.S. Space Force Lt. Col. Daniel Sebeck.
Missileers ride caged elevators deep underground into a small operations bunker encased in a thick wall of concrete and steel. They remain there sometimes for days, ready to turn the launch keys if ordered to by the president.