Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
U.N. Wants Drones
November 24th, 2012Via: AFP: The United Nations wants to use drones for the first time to monitor fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where Rwanda has been accused of aiding rebels, officials said Friday.
Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots
November 19th, 2012Via: Human Rights Watch: Governments should pre-emptively ban fully autonomous weapons because of the danger they pose to civilians in armed conflict, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. These future weapons, sometimes called “killer robots,” would be able to choose and fire on targets without human intervention. The 50-page report, “Losing Humanity: […]
Foxconn Begins Deploying Robots
November 14th, 2012Via: Singularity Hub: It appears as if Gou has started the ball in motion. Since the announcement, a first batch of 10,000 robots — aptly named Foxbots — appear to have made its way into at least one factory, and by the end of 2012, another 20,000 more will be installed.
Mind-Controlled Robot Avatars Inch Towards Reality
November 14th, 2012Life imitating art: Sleep Dealer Avatar Surrogates Via: Gizmag: Researchers at the CNRS-AIST Joint Robotics Laboratory (a collaboration between France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology) are developing software that allows a person to drive a robot with their thoughts alone. The technology could one […]
Apple Rejects App That Tracks U.S. Drone Strikes
November 9th, 2012Via: Wired: It seemed like a simple enough idea for an iPhone app: Send users a pop-up notice whenever a flying robots kills someone in one of America’s many undeclared wars. But Apple keeps blocking the Drones+ program from its App Store — and therefore, from iPhones everywhere. The Cupertino company says the content is […]
7 Technologies That Will Make It Easier for the Next President to Hunt and Kill You
November 6th, 2012Via: Wired: Robotic assassination campaigns directed from the Oval Office. Cyber espionage programs launched at the president’s behest. Surveillance on an industrial scale. The White House already has an incredible amount of power to monitor and take out individuals around the globe. But a new wave of technologies, just coming online, could give those powers […]
‘Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves’
November 2nd, 2012“For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” —Sun Tzu, The Art o War Update: Nicholas Negroponte Is the Brother of John Negroponte Reader DW tipped me off to something pretty remarkable that I hadn’t noticed […]
IBM’s Watson Goes to Medical School
November 1st, 2012Via: New York Times: Next up for Watson, I.B.M.’s clever question-answering computer? A stint as a medical student at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University. The collaboration, announced on Tuesday, includes a bit of controlled crowdsourcing, with the Cleveland clinicians and medical school students answering Watson’s questions and correcting […]
Most U.S. Drones Openly Broadcast Secret Video Feeds
October 30th, 2012Via: Wired: Four years after discovering that militants were tapping into drone video feeds, the U.S. military still hasn’t secured the transmissions of more than half of its fleet of Predator and Reaper drones, Danger Room has learned. The majority of the aircraft still broadcast their classified video streams “in the clear” — without encryption. […]
U.S. Navy Tests Armed Drone Boat
October 28th, 2012Via: Wired: Killer robots have officially gone out to sea. For the first time, the Navy has fired missiles from a remote-controlled boat, as shown in the video above. The firing came as part of a test off the Maryland coast on Wednesday. Six of Rafael’s anti-armor Spike missiles got fired off a moving inflatable […]
