T - war, W - future

Automated Blackhawk

 

Importantly, the RASCAL was operating on the fly. “No prior knowledge of the terrain was used,” Matthew Whalley, the Army’s Autonomous Rotorcraft Project lead, told Dailytech.

The RASCAL is just the latest for a military that is serious about removing its soldiers from harm’s way and letting robots do the dirty work. Already 30 percent of all US military aircraft are drones. And the navy’s X-47B robotic fighter is well on course to become the first autonomous air vehicle to take off and land on an aircraft carrier. Just days ago it completed its first catapult takeoff (from the ground).

 

Ref: Automated Blackhawk Helicopter Completes First Flight Test – SingularityHub

T - war

A Human Will Always Decide When a Robot Kills You

Human rights groups and nervous citizens fear that technological advances in autonomy will slowly lead to the day when robots make that critical decision for themselves. But according to a new policy directive issued by a top Pentagon official, there shall be no SkyNet, thank you very much.

Here’s what happened while you were preparing for Thanksgiving: Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter signed, on November 21, a series of instructions to “minimize the probability and consequences of failures” in autonomous or semi-autonomous armed robots “that could lead to unintended engagements,” starting at the design stage

 

Ref: Pentagon: A Human Will Always Decide When a Robot Kills You – Wired
Ref: Autonomy in Weapon Systems – Departement of Defense (via Cryptome)

 

T - domestic

Study suggests humans are slowly but surely losing intellectual and emotional abilities

Human intelligence and behavior require optimal functioning of a large number of genes, which requires enormous evolutionary pressures to maintain. A provocative hypothesis published in a recent set of Science and Society pieces published in the Cell Press journal Trends in Genetics suggests that we are losing our intellectual and emotional capabilities because the intricate web of genes endowing us with our brain power is particularly susceptible to mutations and that these mutations are not being selected against in our modern society.

 

Ref: Study suggests humans are slowly but surely losing intellectual and emotional abilities – MedicalXpress

T - politic, W - now

Data Cruncher Who Helped Obama Win

The analytics team used four streams of polling data to build a detailed picture of voters in key states. In the past month, said one official, the analytics team had polling data from about 29,000 people in Ohio alone — a whopping sample that composed nearly half of 1% of all voters there — allowing for deep dives into exactly where each demographic and regional group was trending at any given moment. This was a huge advantage: when polls started to slip after the first debate, they could check to see which voters were changing sides and which were not.

It was this database that helped steady campaign aides in October’s choppy waters, assuring them that most of the Ohioans in motion were not Obama backers but likely Romney supporters whom Romney had lost because of his September blunders. “We were much calmer than others,” said one of the officials. The polling and voter-contact data were processed and reprocessed nightly to account for every imaginable scenario. “We ran the election 66,000 times every night,” said a senior official, describing the computer simulations the campaign ran to figure out Obama’s odds of winning each swing state. “And every morning we got the spit-out — here are your chances of winning these states. And that is how we allocated resources.”

 

Team Romney has therefore devised a clever app that finds which friends are most likely to be influential on Election Day, given their geography and history of Facebook political activity.

 

 

Ref: Inside the Secret World of the Data Cruncher Who Helped Obama Win – The Time
Ref: Wrath of the Math: Obama Wins Nerdiest Election Ever – Wired
Ref: Romney’s New Facebook App Knows Which Friends Are Most Influential – TechCrunch
Ref: Google, Facebook And Twitter Want You To Use Their Election 2012 Web Tools – TPM

M - media refs, T - ethics

Unabomber Manifesto & THX-1138

Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, wrote in his manifesto about what he considers the power process and surrogate activities and how technology is a more powerful social force than freedom. In his power process, people need to have some attainable goal they have to work for in order to be fulfilled. Without the need to work to survive, a surrogate activity is needed, one that is determined by others for the good of the society. The Unabomber comes to the conclusion that not only does technology take away man’s ability to control his own power process, but that it further prevents society from shaping itself. This is exactly what happened in THX-1138 where each member of society gave up their individual freedoms to the technological society little by little until there were no individuals left.

 

Ref: THX-1138, A Lost Film – James Glettler

T - war, W - future

Ethical Algorithms

Nano drones that an infantryman can pull out of his pocket; helicopters piloted by robots who extract wounded soldiers from the battlefield; micro satellites on demand; large spy balloons in the upper reaches of the stratosphere; virtual training with a helmet from your office; algorithms that resolve pilots’ ethical dilemmas (so they won’t have to deal with those pesky war crimes tribunals); and farming out code to a network of high school kids.

Ref: Nano Drones, Ethical Algorithms: Inside Israel’s Secret Plan for Its Future Air Force

T - war, W - now

WikiLeaked Data Can Predict Insurgent Attacks

And yet the military has spent millions developing predictive tools. They don’t work very well. Darpa’s Integrated Crisis Early Warning System actually predicts few crises. Its predecessors, which date back to the 1980s, were arguably even more inaccurate. But those seek to predict big, sweeping geopolitical events. Researchers have had better luck estimating expected fatalities from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But predicting violent events with news reports as data?

Ref: WikiLeaked Data Can Predict Insurgent Attacks – Robert Beckhusen

T - domestic, W - now

Google Now

Google Now gets you just the right information at just the right time.

It tells you today’s weather before you start your day, how much traffic to expect before you leave for work, when the next train will arrive as you’re standing on the platform, or your favorite team’s score while they’re playing. And the best part? All of this happens automatically. Cards appear throughout the day at the moment you need them.

 

M - projects

ADM8

Ongaging finance in its most recent and complex developments, RYBN has undertaken the construction of its own trading bot, designed to invest and speculate on the financial markets. Using an online broker service to directly access the markets, this autonomous program can trigger orders as well as buy and sell stocks. Its decisions are taken with the help of an internal algorithmic intelligence system and can be influenced by a wide range of external, arbitrary parameters. The whole decision system allows the program to foresee the next moves in the markets while it tries to identify and anticipate the relevant and effective patterns within the financial chaotic oscillations. Along with its computations and performance, the robot’s activity is monitored, recorded, and visualized within dynamic mapping. A panopticon of information unfolds that is formally similar to the control rooms of the stock exchanges’ back offices.

The whole program is designed and distributed in open-source format, in contrast to the black box of the algorithmic and high-frequency trading.

Ref: ADM8, RYBN