Lifeboat Foundation

Looking back at vintage conceptions of the future can be interesting. Most depictions of the 2000s that were rendered in the 1800s or early 1900s come off as whimsical, because they’re so off-target. Illustrators in the past were often focused on transportation, military tactics, and domestic life, and they predicted everything from whale buses to Fallout -esque fashion. Some illustrated predictions, however, are eerily accurate.

In 1963, science fiction author Hugo Gernsback posed for Life Magazine wearing a fake mock-up of a tool featured in one of his stories. He called the contraption “TV glasses”. Considering them now, they look a lot like an oculus rift. Hugo told Life that users would one day watch television on screens so close to their eyes that they felt immersed in the action, effectively predicting the media’s recent preoccupation with virtual reality.

No one’s sure if Hugo also predicted immersive “action” of the pornographic kind, but that’s what technology’s up to now.

Continue reading “8 Science Fiction Illustrations That Now Feel Crazy Prescient” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=5rufkVCxjdY

The military wants to “network everything to everything,” which sounds a bit like the setup for the Terminator franchise.

Service chiefs are converging on a single strategy for military dominance: connect everything to everything.

Continue reading “The Future the US Military is Constructing: a Giant, Armed Nervous System” »

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Electronics Resurgence Initiative’s will create six new programs over the next four years.

These are aimed at ensuring the predictions made by Moore’s law, which have governed the increases in microchip processing power, will continue to apply to chip development.

Continue reading “US military invests $900 million on next generation microchips for AI” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BsKkqigDRmU

Trying to outrun the expiration of Moore’s Law.

As conventional microchip design reaches its limits, DARPA is pouring money into the specialty chips that might power tomorrow’s autonomous machines.

Continue reading “Can the US Military Re-Invent the Microchip for the AI Era?” »

My new policy article for the HuffPost on why more than ever we need to avoid war and armed conflict:

Some of the early years of my adult life were in conflict zones as a journalist—which included covering the Pakistan/Indian Kashmir conflict for the National Geographic Channel and The New York Times Syndicate. War zones are terrifying. One always is worried about bullying soldiers, speeding armed military vehicles, stray bullets, and whether there’s a roadside bomb on your path. Anyone that approaches you is suspect and could be carrying ready-to-detonate explosives.

One thing conflict zones teach you is that freedom is precious. The nearly 70-year Kashmir conflict has approximately a half million soldiers involved, so even if they’re supposedly on your side (depending on what country you’re in), you still feel under siege. My time in certain parts of Sudan, Israel, Palestine, Zimbabwe, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Eritrea, Mali, and Yemen left me with the same feeling.

Continue reading “The Libertarian Futurist’s Case for Avoiding War and Military Entanglements” »

“North Korea claims it is now part of the thermonuclear club, after successfully testing on Sunday a miniaturized hydrogen bomb capable of fitting on an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).”

“Assuming the reports are true, the North’s most recent nuclear detonation wasn’t just another test on a growing list of Kim Jong Un’s provocations. It was a major escalation in the nuclear face-off on the Korean peninsula. The world’s most belligerent rogue state going from fission to fusion weapons is ominous to say the least.”

Researchers for the U.S. military are studying salamanders and other animals to discover how they can regrow lost body parts.

General Atomics is working hard to put a close cousin of its Reaper anti-terrorism drone in the hands of local law enforcement.

The military research unit is looking for technology and software that can identify networks that have been infiltrated—and neutralize them.

The military’s research unit is looking for ways to automate protection against cyber adversaries, preventing incidents like the WannaCry ransomware attack that took down parts of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service networks.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is gathering proposals for software that can automatically neutralize botnets, armies of compromised devices that can be used to carry out attacks, according to a new broad agency announcement.

Continue reading “DARPA Wants Bots To Protect Us From Cyber Adversaries” »