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Hmmmm.


The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on a new generation of electronic warfare systems that are based on artificial intelligence (A.I.). If the program were to prove a success, the new A.I.-driven systems would provide the United States military a way to counter evermore-capable Russian and Chinese radars.

“One of our programs at DARPA is taking a whole new approach to this problem, this is an effort we refer to as cognitive electronic warfare,” DARPA director, Dr. Arati Prabhakar, told the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities on February 24. “We’re using artificial intelligence to learn in real-time what the adversaries’ radar is doing and then on-the-fly create a new jamming profile. That whole process of sensing, learning and adapting is going on continually.”

Current generation aircraft—including the stealthy Lockheed Martin F-22 and F-35—have a preprogrammed databank of enemy radar signals and jamming profiles stored in a threat library. But if those warplanes encounter a signal that has not previously been encountered, the system registers the threat as unknown—which means the aircraft is vulnerable to that threat.

Researchers at Bar Ilan University and the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, both in Israel, have developed new technology that allows tiny bots to release drugs into the body controlled by human thought alone. The test involved a man using his thoughts to activate nano robots inside a cockroach.

The bots have been built using a DNA origami structure with hollow shell-like components, and they come with a “gate” that can be opened and shut with the help of iron oxide nanoparticles that act as a “lock” – which can be prized open using electromagnetic energy.

The Israeli team believe the bots could help in controlled release of drugs over time. Led by Dr Ido Bachelet of Bar Ilan University, scientists demonstrated how to control this process with human brainwaves. Using a computer algorithm, they trained the system to detect when a person’s brain was under strain from doing mental arithmetic. The team then placed a fluorescent drug in the bots and injected them into various cockroaches that were placed inside an electromagnetic coil.

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In a test lab, Bert2 — a humanoid robot with three separate displays, allowing its eyes and mouth to express various emotions — performed in three different ways. One was silent and made zero mistakes, while a second was mute and programmed to make a single blunder (which it would then correct, quietly). A third was able to speak and accept simple “yes” or “no” responses from the user. In a basic kitchen scenario, the vocal android would apologise for its mistakes — after dropping an egg, for instance — and give a heads-up when it was about to try a new technique.

While the slowest, it was the robot that most people preferred.

But here’s where it gets interesting. At the end of the exchange, the robot would ask for a job. Some participants were reluctant to say no — even if they preferred the silent, more efficient robot — because they thought it would upset the machine. “It felt appropriate to say no, but I felt really bad saying it,” one of the test participants said. “When the face was really sad, I felt even worse. I felt bad because the robot was trying to do its job.”

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What he says is mostly true. Russia and China will build robot soldiers. Russia is actually ahead of the US in robotic tank type vehicles. But, i doubt these countries will hesitate to raise an army of robot combat soldiers when that becomes practical, probably around 2025’ish, which would force the US to field their own.


The future of war will involve autonomous robots instead of humans, according to Air Force General and Vice Chair of the Joint of Chiefs of Staff Paul Selva, who warned enemies could build “Terminator”-like machines to fight in battlefields.

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Driving a motor vehicle requires making tough choices in the heat of the moment. Whether slamming on the brakes in traffic or speeding up before a light turns red, split-second decisions are often a choice between the lesser of two evils. Sometimes, a choice could lead to bodily injury or even a loss of life.

As more self-driving cars reach the road, life-and-death decisions once made by humans alone will increasingly shift to machines. Yet the idea of giving that responsibility over to a computer may be unsettling to some.

Self-driving cars have the potential to significantly reduce the tens of thousands of auto fatalities occurring yearly—but a reduction isn’t the same as elimination. In fact, some deaths will inevitably happen at the hands of computer algorithms once they make those decisions for us.

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Virtual reality robots could someday teleport juries to gruesome crime scenes to investigate murders…


Juries are rarely allowed to visit crime scenes.

There are some exceptions, usually in difficult, high-profile murder cases such as the O.J Simpson trial in 1995.

Asking jurors to become fact finders in this way comes with a range problems, from possible biases to the logistical and security challenges.

GAME OF DRONES


WORLD superpowers are engaged in a feverish “arms race” to develop the first killer robots completely removed from human control, the Sun Online can reveal.

These machines will mark a dramatic escalation in computer AI from the drones and robots currently in use, all of which still require a human to press the “kill button”.

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CIA reveals Spacenet ‘AI in the sky’ that could constantly monitor activity on Earth via high resolution satellites…


It sounds like something out of a sci-fi film — an AI that constantly monitors the Earth, looks for unusual activity.

However, CosmiQ Works, a division of the CIA’s venture arm, has revealed SpaceNet, a project with Amazon, satellite mapping firm DigitalGlobe and chip firm Nvidia to train algorithms to work out what’s happening on our planet.

In the US during the early 2000s there was an old political term for low skilled jobs, politicians called these jobs “the jobs that no one in America wanted.” Well, we now can start seeing the slogan by politicians as “the jobs that Robots can do for free.”


The focus of automation in farming has shifted from assisting humans to replacing them.

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The average age of Japanese farmers is 67. Across all developed countries, the average age of growers is 60. Robotics and automation technologies are just now reaching the stage where agricultural robots can replace human farmers for many or most crop growing tasks.