I see this competition now between the US vs Russia/China in robotics as a good thing. For one it will make the silly campaigns against robots go away, as this will now become a matter of national security to advance robotics. And, secondly, it will force the government to put up a huge amount of money into robotics research even if they didnt really want to; the old guys think robots are silly. What that means for us in the general public is that we will get robot caregivers much sooner than we thought thanks to all this defense spending on robotics.
U.S. officials have ordered an investigation into whether China might be gaining an unfair competitive advantage in the robotics race.
I usually never post articles like this one; however, it does raise a question for me. Could both defense and homeland security needs in addressing risks, and other emergencies really propel us sooner than later into singularity in order to ensure citizens their own protection. As other country militaries race to improve their own military AI & robotic capabilities. https://lnkd.in/ebMQ3Ab
If you thought Enhanced Human Operations (EHO) were an extravagant fantasy of Hollywood films and video games, then think again. Russia and China are involved in EHO, the act of modifying the brain and body in order to create “super soldiers” who will have the upper hand in battles.
Nice venture for GeckoSystems; this is their 2nd venture with another Japanese robotics company in less than 12 months.
Invitation to Japan next month from company’s CEO
CONYERS, GA / ACCESSWIRE / January 15, 2016 / GeckoSystems Intl. Corp. (OTC: GOSY) announced that its CEO, Martin Spencer, has been invited by the CEO of a prominent Japanese robotics company to meet for the purpose of signing a joint venture agreement. For over eighteen years GeckoSystems has dedicated itself to development of “AI Mobile Robot Solutions for Safety, Security and Service™.”
“I am pleased to report that due to the continued hard work of one of our Japanese representatives, Mr. Fujii Katsuji, we have again achieved demonstrable progress securing viable joint ventures in Japan. This latest, one of several joint ventures being entertained, is particularly significant due to the breadth and depth of the robotics expertise of this company and their insistence we meet them next month in Japan to sign the JV agreement,” commented Spencer.
Ex-NSA boss says FBI director is wrong on encryption
What happens if the National Park Service fences off scenic lookout points at the Grand Canyon’s south rim near the head of the Bright Angel trail? Would it prevent the occasional suicide jumper? Not a chance. (The National Park Service tried this in the mid 1980s). People will either gore themselves on fences and posts or they will end their lives on the road in a high speed automobile, putting others at risk. Either way, tourists will be stuck with looking at the North Rim and the Colorado River through prison bars.
Let’s move from analogy to reality. What happens if you jam cell phone signals on tunnels and bridges. Will it stop a terrorist from remotely detonating a bomb? No. But it will certainly thwart efforts to get rescue and pursuit underway. And what about personal encryption?…
Gadgets and apps are finally building encryption into their wares by default. Does a locked-down iPhone or the technology that businesses use to secure trade secrets and plan strategy among colleagues enable criminals. Not even close. But if the FBI criminalizes encryption, they cripple the entire American economy. After all, the Genie is already out of the lamp.
Insertables are here! They are a new class of devices that go literally under your skin! Heffernan, Vetere, and Chang from the University of Melbourne discuss what they are, what they could be used for, their risks and the challenges for the HCI community. Fascinating! @kaylajheffernan # insertables #hci # wearables
DNA is similar to a hard drive or storage device, in that contains the memory of each cell of every living, and has the instructions on how to make that cell. DNA is four molecules combined in any order to make a chain of one larger molecule. And if you can read that chain of four molecules, then you have a sequence of characters, like a digital code. Over the years the price of sequencing a human genome has dropped significantly, much to the delight of scientists. And since DNA is a sequence of four letters, and if we can manipulate DNA, we could insert a message and use DNA as the storage device.
At this point in time, we are at the height of the information age. And computers have had an enormous impact on all of our lives. Any information is able to be represented as a collection of bits. And with Moore’s law, which states that computing power doubles every 18 months, our ability to manipulate and store these bits has continued to grow and grow. Moore’s law has been driven by scientists being able to make transistors and integrated circuits continuously smaller and smaller, but there eventually comes a point we reach in which these transistors and integrated circuits cannot be made any smaller than they already are, since some are already at the size of a single atom. This inevitably leads us into the quantum world. Quantum mechanics has rules which are, in many ways, hard for us to truly comprehend, yet are nevertheless tested. Quantum computing looks to make use of these strange rules of quantum physics, and process information in a totally different way. Quantum computing looks to replace the classical bits which are either a 0 or a 1, with quantum bits, or qubits, which can be both a 0 and a 1 at the same time. This ability to be two different things at the same time is referred to as a superposition. 200 qubits hold more bits of information than there are particles in the universe. A useful quantum computer will require thousands or even millions of physical qubits. Anything such as an atom can serve as a quantum bit for making a quantum computer, then you can use a superconducting circuit to build two artificial atoms. So at this point in time we have a few working quantum transistors, but scientists are working on developing the quantum integrated circuit. Quantum error correction is the biggest problem encountered in development of the quantum computer. Quantum computer science is a field that right now is in its very early stages, since scientists have yet been able to develop any quantum hardware.
A new kind of security guard is on patrol in Silicon Valley: Crime-fighting robots that look like they’re straight out of a sci-fi movie. News, Sports, Weather, Traffic and the Best of SF
It’s an interesting idea, if not an original one. (it’s not) The problem is that, military grade encryption or not, it would be a single point of failure that could compromise your on AND offline security in one fell swoop.
Fugitive presidential candidate John McAfee is going back to his roots with a new security product that he calls “a f—ing game changer.”
Despite more than a thousand artificial-intelligence researchers signing an open letter this summer in an effort to ban autonomous weapons, Business Insider reports that China and Russia are in the process of creating self-sufficient killer robots, and in turn is putting pressure on the Pentagon to keep up.
“We know that China is already investing heavily in robotics and autonomy and the Russian Chief of General Staff [Valery Vasilevich] Gerasimov recently said that the Russian military is preparing to fight on a roboticized battlefield,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work said during a national security forum on Monday.
Work added, “[Gerasimov] said, and I quote, ‘In the near future, it is possible that a complete roboticized unit will be created capable of independently conducting military operations.’”
I’ve been increasingly interested in translated science fiction novels, and one of the best ones that I picked up this year was Taiyo Fujii’s debut Gene Mapper.
Gene Mapper takes place in a future where augmented reality and genetic engineering is commonplace. When a freelance gene mapper named Hayashida finds that a project that he had worked on is collapsing, he believes that it’s being sabotaged. Determined to fix it, he travels to Vietnam where he finds that there’s more behind the problem than he initially thought.
