Archive for the 'Technology' Category
California Police Used Stingrays in Planes to Spy on Phones
January 27th, 2016Via: Wired: The government’s use of a controversial invasive technology for tracking phones just got a little more controversial. The Anaheim Police Department has acknowledged in new documents that it uses surveillance devices known as Dirtboxes—plane-mounted stingrays—on aircraft flying above the Southern California city that is home to Disneyland, one of the most popular tourist […]
Google Achieves AI ‘Breakthrough’ by Beating Go Champion
January 27th, 2016Via: BBC: A Google artificial intelligence program has beaten the European champion of the board game Go. The Chinese game is viewed as a much tougher challenge than chess for computers because there are many more ways a Go match can play out. The tech company’s DeepMind division said its software had beaten its human […]
Japan: Automated, Clean Room Agriculture
January 27th, 2016Via: TechInsider: The Japanese lettuce production company Spread believes the farmers of the future will be robots. So much so that Spread is creating the world’s first farm manned entirely by robots. Instead of relying on human farmers, the indoor Vegetable Factory will employ robots that can harvest 30,000 heads of lettuce every day. Don’t […]
Harvard Is Trying to Build an AI as Fast as the Human Brain
January 25th, 2016Via: Wired UK: Harvard University has been awarded $28 million (£19m) to investigate why brains are so much better at learning and retaining information than artificial intelligence. The award, from the Intelligence Advanced Projects Activity (IARPA), could help make AI systems faster, smarter and more like human brains. While many computers have a comparable storage […]
The Story Behind National Reconnaissance Office’s Octopus Logo
January 21st, 2016Never mind the nauseating gibberish in the release from NRO. I thought this commentary was comedy gold. Via: Muckrock: The logo was widely lampooned as emblematic of the intelligence community’s tone-deafness to public sentiment. Incidentally, an octopus enveloping the planet also so happens to be the logo of SPECTRE, the international criminal syndicate that James […]
DARPA: Bridging the Bio-Electronic Divide
January 20th, 2016Via: U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: A new DARPA program aims to develop an implantable neural interface able to provide unprecedented signal resolution and data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world. The interface would serve as a translator, converting between the electrochemical language used by neurons in the brain and the […]
IBM Watson Head Mike Rhodin On The Future Of Artificial Intelligence
January 20th, 2016Did you ever read, The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson? Do you remember Nell’s copy of the Primer? But to call it a book does not really do it justice — it is really a massively parallel computer in which each page can dynamically rearrange itself to tell a story. Check this out, from the […]
Not The Onion: Lamb Chop Weight Enforcers Want Warrantless Access to Australians’ Metadata
January 20th, 2016Via: Guardian: If you are in the business of selling lamb chops, make sure you are weighing them properly: the National Measurement Institute wants warrantless access to Australians’ metadata to help them hunt down supermarkets skimping on portions. The NMI is one of 61 agencies that has applied to the attorney general, George Brandis, to […]
Rise of the Robots Will Eliminate More Than 5 Million Jobs
January 18th, 2016Via: Bloomberg: Over five million jobs will be lost by 2020 as a result of developments in genetics, artificial intelligence, robotics and other technological change, according to World Economic Forum research.
Obama Proposes $4 Billion Autonomous Vehicle Pilot Projects
January 17th, 2016In other news, self driving trucks will wipe out millions of jobs: We are facing the decimation of entire small town economies, a disruption the likes of which we haven’t seen since the construction of the interstate highway system itself bypassed entire towns. Via: Forbes: Self-driving cars have a new supporter: President Obama. After talking […]
