Lifeboat Foundation

Vayyar is an Israel-based company that’s developed a sensor that can “see” through solid objects using radio frequencies.

Read more

The battlefields of the future look set to be the province of robots duking it out on the field as their operators sit pretty, miles away. Russia is moving in leaps and bounds towards fielding its own unmanned forces.

Modern robots are nothing like the Terminator: Fielding human-shaped automatons for combat is much more trouble than it’s worth, so most ground robots are more or less tank- or car-shaped. They aren’t fully controlled by an artificial intelligence, either – not just yet, at least.

With its enormous war budgets and military industrial sector, it’s no surprise the US has been at the forefront of unmanned combat vehicle development. Its Predator drones have been raining death on Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen for over 15 years now, and it has been employing small, ground-based firing platforms like SWORDS for years, not to mention the multitude of bomb disposal and surveillance robots.

On a recent BBC World Service program (News Hour Extra, 12.18.15), a group of space scientists were gathered to discuss these and other aspects of the post-human era. “What about the human soul”, the moderator asked, wondering whether or not these post-humans would still be human. None of the participants were particularly troubled by the question, since they all had assumed that the soul was no more than the particular configurations of DNA which resulted in varying degre…es of insight, intelligence, creativity, and sensitivity. Post-humans will be no different, they all agreed. Only their individual genomes will have been altered to produce a very different human reality – in other words a different human soul.

Once the human genome was completely sequenced; once efforts to recombine DNA had become a reality; and once a mind-computer interface had been realized, there was never any doubt that a post-human era was coming.

Continue reading “The Post-Human Generation–An Engineered Evolution” »

Additional challenges for those who want to colonize Mars…

Mars was once lush with water. A new analysis of Martian climate data shows a mechanism that might have helped dehydrate the planet.

This intelligent plant can offer inspirational quotes.

Ryleigh Taylor found a rare, 475-million-year-old trilobite fossil while fishing with her family in Dandridge, Tennessee.

The University of Everywhere is on the horizon.

It’s going to emerge while the current generation of young people mature into adulthood.

This is what it will look like and what attending it will mean:

Continue reading “Are we about to see the end of universities as we know them?” »

Computer security specialists must understand the beast they are up against before they can hope to defeat it.

If cybersecurity experts are to combat malevolent artificial intelligence, they will need to know how such a system can emerge, say computer scientists.