Lifeboat Foundation

The UN attempt to regulate AI is doomed to failure. If the USA doesnt veto, and i’m sure it would, China and Russia will.

UN efforts to limit or regulate military AI may be failing before they even begin.

Arms control advocates had reason for hope when scores of countries met at the United Nations in Geneva last week to discuss the future of lethal autonomous weapons systems, or LAWS. Unlike previous meetings, this one involved a Group of Governmental Experts, a big bump in diplomatic formality and consequence, and those experts had a mandate to better define lethal autonomy in weapons. But hopes for even a small first step toward restricting “killer robots” were dashed as the meeting unfolded. Russia announced that it would adhere to no international ban, moratorium or regulation on such weapons. Complicating the issue, the meeting was run in a way that made any meaningful progress toward defining (and thus eventually regulating) LAWS nearly impossible. Multiple attendees pointed out that that played directly toward Russia’s interests.

Continue reading “Russia to the United Nations: Don’t Try to Stop Us From Building Killer Robots” »

The research got a lot of attention after Bilham presented it at the October meeting of the Geological Society of America. Several critics noted that correlation is not causation — earthquake clusters and fluctuations of Earth’s rotation might happen on the same time scales, but that doesn’t mean they are linked.

There’s a curious connection between earthquakes and the Earth’s rotation. But that doesn’t mean the planet is in for a major shaking next year.

Most people probably aren’t aware of this, but the 2016 U.S. Presidential election included a candidate who had a radio-frequency identification chip implanted in his hand. No, it wasn’t Donald J. Trump. It was Zoltan Istvan, a nominee representing the Silicon Valley-based Transhumanist Party and his body-worn chip unlocked his front door, provided computer password access and sent an auto-text that said: “Win in 2016!”

The transhumanist movement – employing technology and radical science to modify humans – offers a glimpse into the marriage of machines and people, the focus of a recent paper released by the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT). With cybernetic implants already available to consumers, the prospect for techno-human transmutation – cyborgs – is not as far away as many may think.

Continue reading “Why cyborg creators must self-govern security, privacy efforts” »

The agency wants ideas for turning computers into lifelong learners.

Planning to try and automate the entire store.

Walmart (WMT) has been quietly testing out autonomous floor scrubbers during the overnight shifts in five store locations near the company’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.

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Continue reading “Walmart is ‘secretly’ testing self-driving floor scrubbers, signaling that more robots are coming” »

But can it backflip?

The Pentagon is developing a new fleet of shadow bombers that possibly disappear on radar like those featured in Star Trek movies.

The unit of B-21 stealth bombers, a futuristic combat aircraft, are being created at a secret desert plant in Palmdale, California, after the company Northrop Grumman won the contract for their development two years ago, The Times reported.

The U.S. military has sanctioned the development of around 100 of the bat-like bombers for as much as $80 billion. The precise amount remains top secret.

Continue reading “The U.S. Military Is Building a Fleet of Star Trek-Inspired ‘Shadow’ Bombers Invisible to Radar” »

In a recent article, I began to unpack Rodney Brooks’ October 2017 essay “The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions.” Now I continue my analysis by looking into the faulty atheistic thinking that motivates the AI salvation preached by futurists such as Google’s Ray Kurzweil. Although Brooks does not address this worldview dimension, his critique of AI predictive sins provides a great opportunity for just that.

Brooks is a pioneer of robotic artificial intelligence (AI) and is MIT Panasonic Professor of Robotics Emeritus. He is also the founder and chief technology officer of Rethink Robotics, which makes cobots—robots designed to collaborate with humans in a shared industrial workspace.

Previously I discussed Brooks’ remark that “all the evidence that I see says we have no real idea yet how to build” the superintelligent devices that Kurzweil and like-minded singularity advocates imagine.

Continue reading “What’s Wrong with Godless AI Technological Salvation, the Singularity?” »

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