Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: surveillance

However, as Malcolm Murdock, machine-learning engineer and author of the 2019 novel The Quantum Price, puts it, “AI doesn’t have to be sentient to kill us all. There are plenty of other scenarios that will wipe us out before sentient AI becomes a problem.”

“We are entering dangerous and uncharted territory with the rise of surveillance and tracking through data, and we have almost no understanding of the potential implications.” —Andrew Lohn, Georgetown University.

In interviews with AI experts, IEEE Spectrum has uncovered six real-world AI worst-case scenarios that are far more mundane than those depicted in the movies. But they’re no less dystopian. And most don’t require a malevolent dictator to bring them to full fruition. Rather, they could simply happen by default, unfolding organically—that is, if nothing is done to stop them. To prevent these worst-case scenarios, we must abandon our pop-culture notions of AI and get serious about its unintended consequences.

Read more | >

Recharging Drones in only 45 minutes.

Recently, Autel Robotics released a new drone charging platform that allows drones to take on multiple recursive missions independent of weather across a wide variety of industrial applications, including industrial energy inspection, natural disaster monitoring, and more.

But another tilt-rotor VTOL drone from Autel can transition to a “fixed-wing” mode, and “scout areas after a hurricane, with a lot of different really high-end camera options,” said John Simmons, a representative for Autel Robotics at the CES 2022 exhibit.

The drone charging platform is called EVO Nest, while the long-range, fixed-wing VTOL is called the “Dragonfish” series. And it could simplify the energy needs of visual surveillance, monitoring, and public service.

Full Story:

Read more | >

In the early days of the pandemic, with commercial COVID tests in short supply, Rockefeller’s Robert B. Darnell developed an in-house assay to identify positive cases within the Rockefeller community. It turned out to be easier and safer to administer than the tests available at the time, and it has been used tens of thousands of times over the past nine months to identify and isolate infected individuals working on the university’s campus.

Now, a new study in PLoS confirms that Darnell’s test performs as well, if not better, than FDA-authorized nasal and oral swab tests. In a direct head-to-head comparison of 162 individuals who received both Rockefeller’s “DRUL” saliva test and a conventional swab test, DRUL caught all of the cases that the swabs identified as positive—plus four positive cases that the swabs missed entirely.

“This research confirms that the test we developed is sensitive and safe,” says Darnell, the Robert and Harriet Heilbrunn professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Neuro-Oncology. “It is inexpensive, has provided excellent surveillance within the Rockefeller community, and has the potential to improve safety in communities as the pandemic drags on.”

Read more | >

Webb, and Psychean editorial note by Adriano V. Autino.

We just attended the launch of the James Webb Telescope, headed to the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 2 (L2), at 1.5 kilometers from Earth. A very ambitious project, aimed to place a human eye in a location where it will be easier to investigate the origin and the meaningful life events of the universe, of our solar system and our mother planet. What raised some thoughts in my mind is one of the characteristics of this beautiful sample of human ingenuity and hunger for knowledge: the JWST mirror has been plated with gold, due to elements properties like a high reflection of infrared light and extreme un-reactivity. My aim is not to discuss this choice from the scientific point of view. It makes me rather think about the value of precious metals, that’s not only their beauty, nor the use we make of them to realize precious jewels.

While I was in space just with my mind, it was easy to go some more million kilometers further away, reaching to the 16 Psyche Asteroid. Psyche – an M-type asteroid, fragment of a proto-planet broken up during the birth of the solar system — dwells somewhere in the middle of the Asteroid Belt, between Mars and Jupiter. The distance from Earth ranges from 252 million to 645 million kilometers.

Why Psyche owns such a great reputation, among the space expansionist community, and the space miners subassembly, in a more specific way? Its diameter is estimated not less than 227 km. Due to the gravitational perturbations it causes among other asteroids in its surroundings, Psyche is kind of under special surveillance, since long time. Such perturbations are due to high mass and density, and such properties raised further analysis, by means of ultraviolet light observation. To make short a long research story, Psyche is likely mainly composed by iron and nichel, and its global value is estimated around $10 quintillion, a figure even hard to imagine.

Read more | >

Lockheed Martin’s new hypersonic plane is expected to travel at Mach 6.

The Lockheed Martin SR-72, which is rumored to be the world’s fastest plane, is expected to make a test flight in 2025, eight years after its private proposal in 2013.

SR-72 will be the successor of the SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest manned aircraft which smashed speed records in 1974 and was retired by the U.S. Air Force back in 1998.

The SR-72, or “Son of Blackbird” is envisioned as an unmanned, hypersonic and reusable, reconnaissance, surveillance, and strike aircraft. The striking ability of the aircraft comes to the fore as it will, reportedly, support Lockheed Martin’s novel High-Speed Strike Weapon (HSSW). The aircraft’s combat capabilities enable it to strike its target in dangerous environments that are deemed risky for slower manned aircraft.

Since the technology to build the aircraft was overly ambitious when the project was announced in 2013, the project had to wait for several years.

Full Story:

Intech Company is the ultimate source of the latest AI news. It checks trusted websites and collects bests pieces of AI information.

Read more | >

A documentary exploring how artificial intelligence is changing life as we know it — from jobs to privacy to a growing rivalry between the U.S. and China.

FRONTLINE investigates the promise and perils of AI and automation, tracing a new industrial revolution that will reshape and disrupt our world, and allow the emergence of a surveillance society.

This journalism is made possible by viewers like you. Support your local PBS station here: http://www.pbs.org/donate.

Love FRONTLINE? Find us on the PBS Video App where there are more than 250 FRONTLINE documentaries available for you to watch any time: https://to.pbs.org/FLVideoApp.

Subscribe on YouTube: http://bit.ly/1BycsJW

#ArtificialIntelligence #Automation #documentary.

Read more | >

The government wants to have a “search engine for faces,” but the experts are wary.

If you haven’t heard of Clearview AI then you should, as the company’s facial recognition technology has likely already spotted you. Clearview’s software goes through public images from social media to help law enforcement identify wanted individuals by matching their public images with those found in government databases or surveillance footage. Now, the company just got permission to be awarded a U.S. federal patent, according to Politico.

The firm is not without its fair share of controversy. It has long faced opposition from privacy advocates and civil rights groups. The first says it makes use of citizens’ faces without their knowledge or consent. The latter warns of the fact that facial recognition technology is notoriously prone to racially-based errors, misidentifying women and minorities much more frequently than white men and sometimes leading to false arrests.

Read more | >

The Israeli spyware maker in the Pegasus surveillance scandal said Friday it was investigating reports the firm’s technology was used to target iPhones of some US diplomats in Africa.

Apple has begun alerting people whose phones were hacked by NSO’s spyware, which essentially turns handsets into pocket spying devices and sparked controversy this year after reportedly being used on activists, journalists and politicians.

“On top of the independent investigation, NSO will cooperate with any relevant government authority and present the full information we will have,” the firm said in a statement.

Read more | >

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook is pulling the plug on its facial recognition program. The company is planning to delete more than one billion people’s individual facial recognition templates, and will no longer automatically recognize people’s faces in photos or videos as a result of this change, according to its own post. The use of facial recognition technology has a disparate impact on people of color, disenfranchising a group who already face inequality, and Facebook seems to be acknowledging this inherent harm. The Breakdown You Need to Know.

CultureBanx reported that Meta seems to always be embroiled in corporate drama and with intense scrutiny. When you add that to the growing concern from users and regulators that facial recognition space remains complicated, an exit makes sense. More than 600 million daily active users on Facebook had opted into the use of the face recognition technology.

Research shows commercial artificial intelligence systems tend to have higher error rates for women and black people. Some facial recognition systems would only confuse light-skin men 0.8% of the time and would have an error rate of 34.7% for dark-skin women. Just imagine surveillance being used with these flawed algorithms. A 2018 IDC report noted it expects worldwide spending on cognitive and AI systems to reach $77.6 billion in 2022.

Read more | >

One of China’s biggest AI solution providers SenseTime is a step closer to its initial public offering. SenseTime has received regulatory approval to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, according to media reports. Founded in 2014, SenseTime was christened as one of China’s four “AI Dragons” alongside Megvii, CloudWalk, and Yitu. In the second half of the 2010s, their algorithms found much demand from businesses and governments hoping to turn real-life data into actionable insights. Cameras embedded with their AI models watch city streets 24 hours. Malls use their sensing solutions to track and predict crowds on the premises.

SenseTime’s three rivals have all mulled plans to sell shares either in mainland China or Hong Kong. Megvii is preparing to list on China’s Nasdaq-style STAR board after its HKEX application lapsed.

The window for China’s data-rich tech firms to list overseas has narrowed. Beijing is making it harder for companies with sensitive data to go public outside China. And regulators in the West are wary of facial recognition companies that could aid mass surveillance.

But in the past few years, China’s AI upstarts were sought after by investors all over the world. In 2018 alone, SenseTime racked up more than $2 billion in investment. To date, the company has raised a staggering $5.2 billion in funding through 12 rounds. Its biggest outside shareholders include SoftBank Vision Fund and Alibaba’s Taobao. For its flotation in Hong Kong, SenseTime plans to raise up to $2 billion, according to Reuters.

Full Story:

Read more | >