Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: military

“We are all stardust,” astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tells CBS News Chief White House Correspondent Major Garret on this week’s episode of “The Takeout.” “And you have a connectivity to the universe that for me is uplifting rather than ego-busting.”

Tyson joined the podcast to discuss his new book, “Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysicists and the Military.” The book, written with co-author Avis Lang, explores the long and complicated history of how the study of astrophysics changed warfare.

In July, “The Takeout” welcomed NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who described how reliant we are on space technology.

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ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. — Future American Soldiers will be better protected in combat by stronger and lighter body armor thanks to innovative work at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. Materials science engineers are using nature as the inspiration for breakthroughs in additive manufacturing.

“My project is to design a system that can 3D print armor ceramics that will allow production of parts with graded structures similar to an abalone structure in nature that will improve the ceramic armor’s toughness and survivability with lower weight,” said Joshua Pelz, a materials science and engineering doctoral candidate at the University of California San Diego. He spent this summer working with Army scientists at ARL’s Rodman Materials Science Laboratory at APG to design and build a unique 3D printer.

Two syringes containing distinct, viscous ceramic slurries are connected to a custom-made auger and print head. Pelz took advantage of his computer programming skills to hack into the 3D printer, tricking it into using its own fan controls to manipulate the ratio of materials being printed. He designed a custom auger and print head and even used the same 3D printer to create those parts.

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Just how valuable is that stretch of space between Earth and the moon’s orbit? Might this celestial real estate become hot property as an extension of military arenas in low Earth orbit, medium Earth orbit, and geosynchronous orbit?

Given forecasts of 21st-century activity on and around the moon by both private and government entities, could this be an economic area of development that needs protection in sthe years and decades to come? [In Photos: President Donald Trump and NASA].

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THE two superpowers of artificial intelligence (AI) are America and China. Their tech giants have collected the most data, attracted the best talent and boast the biggest computing clouds—the main ingredients needed to develop AI services from facial recognition to self-driving cars. Their dominance deeply worries the European Union, the world’s second-largest economic power (see article). It is busily concocting plans to close the gap.

That Europe wants to foster its own AI industry is understandable. Artificial intelligence is much more than another Silicon Valley buzzword—more, even, than seminal products like the smartphone. It is better seen as a resource, a bit like electricity, that will touch every part of the economy and society. Plenty of people fret that, without its own cutting-edge research and AI champions, big digital platforms based abroad will siphon off profits and jobs and leave the EU a lot poorer. The technology also looms large in military planning. China’s big bet on AI is partly a bet on autonomous weapons; America is likely to follow the same path. Given the doubt over whether America will always be willing to come to Europe’s defence, some see spending on AI as a matter of national security.

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Over its 60-year history, DARPA has played a leading role in the creation and advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that have produced game-changing capabilities for the Department of Defense. Starting in the 1960s, DARPA research shaped the first wave of AI technologies, which focused on handcrafted knowledge, or rule-based systems capable of narrowly defined tasks. While a critical step forward for the field, these systems were fragile and limited. Starting in the 1990s, DARPA helped usher in a second wave of AI machine learning technologies that created statistical pattern recognizers from large amounts of data. The agency’s funding of natural language understanding, problem solving, navigation and perception technologies has led to the creation of self-driving cars, personal assistants, and near-natural prosthetics, in addition to a myriad of critical and valuable military and commercial applications. However, these second wave AI technologies are dependent on large amounts of high quality training data, do not adapt to changing conditions, offer limited performance guarantees, and are unable to provide users with explanations of their results.

To address the limitations of these first and second wave AI technologies, DARPA seeks to explore new theories and applications that could make it possible for machines to adapt to changing situations. DARPA sees this next generation of AI as a third wave of technological advance, one of contextual adaptation. To better define a path forward, DARPA is announcing today a multi-year investment of more than $2 billion in new and existing programs called the “AI Next” campaign. Agency director, Dr. Steven Walker, officially unveiled the large-scale effort during closing remarks today at DARPA’s D60 Symposium taking place Wednesday through Friday at the Gaylord Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland.

“With AI Next, we are making multiple research investments aimed at transforming computers from specialized tools to partners in problem-solving,” said Dr. Walker. “Today, machines lack contextual reasoning capabilities, and their training must cover every eventuality, which is not only costly, but ultimately impossible. We want to explore how machines can acquire human-like communication and reasoning capabilities, with the ability to recognize new situations and environments and adapt to them.”

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The undisclosed “security issue” behind all of the activity at the National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico remains a mystery to the public.

It has been a week since the National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, was shut down, evacuated, and visited by FBI agents—and the undisclosed “security issue” behind all this activity remains a mystery to the public.

Theories about the true reasoning behind the shutdown range from an accidental interception of military signals to captured proof of alien life.

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The Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program will fund research on tech that can transmit high-fidelity signals between the brain and some external machine without requiring that the user be cut open for rewiring or implantation. It hasn’t escaped DARPA’s attention that no-surgery-required brain gear that gives people superpowers may find applications beyond the military. The proof-of-concept tech that comes out of the N3 program may lead to consumer products, says Justin Sanchez, director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office. “This will spawn new industries,” he says…

The N3 program will create no-surgery-required neurotech that the general public may also find useful.

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The military’s research arm said Friday it will invest up to $2 billion over the next five years toward new programs advancing artificial intelligence, stepping up both a technological arms race with China and an ideological clash with Silicon Valley over the future of powerful machines.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Defense Department, said it will fund dozens of new research efforts as part of a “Third Wave” campaign aimed at developing machines that can learn and adapt to changing environments.

DARPA director Steven Walker announced the effort Friday to an audience from American academia, private industry and the military at a symposium outside Washington, saying the agency wants to explore “how machines can acquire human-like communication and reasoning capabilities.”

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