Imagine a police car that issues tickets without even pulling you over.
What if the same car could use artificial intelligence to find good hiding spots to catch traffic violators and identify drivers by scanning license plates, tapping into surveillance cameras and wirelessly accessing government records?
What if a police officer tapping on your car window asking for your license and registration became a relic of transportation’s past?
DARPA has a new surveillance program in the works, and it doesn’t involve training human agents or AI operators. Instead, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense wants to genetically engineer plant-based sensors as battlefield spy tech.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the think-tank that’s under the U.S. Department of Defense, recently announced that it’s working on a new project that could change how pertinent information is gathered on the battlefield. The project, dubbed the Advanced Plant Technologies (APT) program, examines the possibility of turning plants into next-generation surveillance technology.
I saw hundreds of homes in one subdivision destroyed (8900 homes were destroyed in total in the fires). We must seek out better technological solutions to stop wildfires in California. Lives are at risk and hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake. The state is getting drier, and innovative technologies—especially drone surveillance—can help spot fires before they get too large to easily contain. AI can also tell us, based on weather conditions, where fire protection resources and first responders should be stationed. Quickly putting out fires that do occur is the key to protecting the state.
From flying taxis to Batman-style surveillance motorcycles, Dubai’s GITEX expo this week showcased innovations that were symbols of the city-state’s ambitions to be a metropolis of the future.
Known for its futuristic skyline and artificial islands, Gulf emirate Dubai has carved out a place alongside cities like Singapore as a hub for innovative ideas.
At this year’s 37th Gulf Information Technology Exhibition (GITEX), which runs until Thursday, city authorities were keen to show off they remain on the cutting edge.
Are U.S. killer drones headed to the Philippines? There are already U.S. special operators fighting ISIS there. There could soon be American drones carrying out airstrikes there, too, according to a plan under consideration inside the Pentagon, NBC News reported Monday. “The authority to strike ISIS targets as part of collective self-defense could be granted as part of an official military operation that may be named as early as Tuesday, said the officials. The strikes would likely be conducted by armed drones.”
SecState Rex Tillerson gave the pitch some momentum Monday in Manila when he said the U.S. was providing the Philippine government “some recent transfers of a couple of Cessnas and a couple of UAVs (drones) to allow to them to have better information with which to conduct the fight down there.”
And in a bid to cut off concerns over working even more closely with alleged human rights abuser Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Tillerson said that’s pretty much just not an issue right now: “I see no conflict at all in our helping them with that situation and our views of other human rights concerns we have with respect to how they carry out their counternarcotics activities.” More from NBC News, here.
Cory Doctorow has made several careers out of thinking about the future, as a journalist and co-editor of Boing Boing, an activist with strong ties to the Creative Commons movement and the right-to-privacy movement, and an author of novels that largely revolve around the ways changing technology changes society. From his debut novel, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom (about rival groups of Walt Disney World designers in a post-scarcity society where social currency determines personal value), to his most acclaimed, Little Brother (about a teenage gamer fighting the Department of Homeland Security), his books tend to be high-tech and high-concept, but more about how people interface with technologies that feel just a few years into the future.
But they also tend to address current social issues head-on. Doctorow’s latest novel, Walkaway, is largely about people who respond to the financial disparity between the ultra-rich and the 99 percent by walking away and building their own networked micro-societies in abandoned areas. Frightened of losing control over society, the 1 percent wages full-on war against the “walkaways,” especially after they develop a process that can digitize individual human brains, essentially uploading them to machines and making them immortal. When I talked to Doctorow about the book and the technology behind it, we started with how feasible any of this might be someday, but wound up getting deep into the questions of how to change society, whether people are fundamentally good, and the balance between fighting a surveillance state and streaming everything to protect ourselves from government overreach.
First and foremost, consumers must realize what’s involved with 30 GHz. A Gigahertz (GHz) is a frequency equal to one billion hertz or cycles per second. Now multiply that 30 times; how many cycles per second do you get? Isn’t that 30 billion cycles per second? Now, imagine those GHz frequencies traveling over in-wall copper electric house wires that are built to take only 60 Hz!
Such GHz frequencies just may be considered as sinusoidal harmonics or “dirty electricity.”
To put the above into proper perspective about microwave technology and non-ionizing radiation waves such frequencies emit, we need to understand the frequency of electricity. One Hertz (Hz) equals one cycle per second. One kilohertz (KHz) is equivalent to one thousand cycles per second. One megahertz (MHz) equals one million cycles per second. One gigahertz (GHz) is equal to one billion hertz or cycles per second—frequencies not found naturally in Nature, except from man-made/generated electromagnetics.
