This chapter appears concurrently in Age of Robots and includes content and quotes garnered from interviews with James J. Hughes, Jerome Glenn, Ian Pearson, Richard Yonck, John C. Havens and Alexandra Whittington on the Seeking Delphi™ podcast between April of 2017 and November of 2018. **.
“The possibility that 100 years old might become the new 60” : EXCELLENT SLOGAN that doesn’t resort to the troublesome” I word” (“Immortality”)! Good article to share with non-science friends: light on hard science, but good emotional impact, incl. that catchy slogan.
Technology hasn’t just improved our lives; it’s also extended them — considerably.
For most of history, humans lived about 25 years. Real acceleration emerged at the turn of the 20th century, when everything from the creation of antibiotics to the implementation of better sanitation to the increased availability of clean water, and the ability to tackle killers like cancer and heart disease has us living routinely into our 80s. But many scientists believe we’re not stopping there.
Technological convergence is fueling this conviction. The intersection of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, networks, sensors, robotics, massive datasets, biotechnology and nanotechnology is taking direct aim at the limits of human lifespan.
The first UAE-made high-performance drone has taken flight.
ADASI, the regional leader in autonomous systems and services, officially launched the Garmousha vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) drone in a deal with the General Headquarters of the UAE Armed Forces.
The drone is a light military unmanned aircraft designed to carry 100kg over a six-hour period and 150km with a high-definition camera.
The US Navy has successfully installed its first Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy (ODIN) laser weapon aboard one of its warships. During dry-dock operations, the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey (DDG 105) received the stand-alone laser system, which is designed to blind the sensors on Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS).
The ODIN laser isn’t the first to be deployed on a US Navy warship. That honor goes to the Office of Naval Research’s (ONR) Laser Weapon System (LaWS), which was deployed on the USS Ponce (LPD-15) in 2014. However, this experience by the team behind LaWS at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Dahlgren Division provided the expertise needed to complete the development of ODIN.
Unlike other laser weapons that are designed to destroy targets with blasts of concentrated laser light, ODIN is what is known as a dazzler laser. That is, it’s one of a class of lasers that are intended to blind or distract rather than destroy. Though the legality of using such lasers against human pilots restricts them to only distracting the person by acting like the glare of oncoming headlamps, such lasers can also disable or destroy delicate optical sensors on drones.
I’ve been reading an excellent book by David Wood, entitled, which was recommended by my pal Steele Hawes. I’ve come to an excellent segment of the book that I will quote now.
“One particular challenge that international trustable monitoring needs to address is the risk of more ever powerful weapon systems being placed under autonomous control by AI systems. New weapons systems, such as swarms of miniature drones, increasingly change their configuration at speeds faster than human reactions can follow. This will lead to increased pressures to transfer control of these systems, at critical moments, from human overseers to AI algorithms. Each individual step along the journey from total human oversight to minimal human oversight might be justified, on grounds of a balance of risk and reward. However, that series of individual decisions adds up to an overall change that is highly dangerous, given the potential for unforeseen defects or design flaws in the AI algorithms being used.”
The fifteen years from 2020 to 2035 could be the most turbulent of human history. Revolutions are gathering pace in four overlapping fields of technology: nanotech, biotech, infotech, and cognotech, or NBIC for short. In combination, these NBIC revolutions offer enormous new possibilities: enormous opportunities and enormous risks.
