This new reality promises robotic dogs to enforce social distancing and publicly owned flying taxis to provide transportation since private vehicles are only available to the rich. The technology is currently being rolled out in other western nations, including Canada.
On a hard disk somewhere in the surveillance archives of Singapore’s Changi prison is a video of Jolovan Wham, naked, alone, performing Hamlet.
Get ready for the ‘White Bat’.
What’s the best way to counter gossip? Coming out with the truth. That seems to be the idea behind a new video released by the U.S. Air Force’s Profession of Arms Center of Excellence (PACE).
The video that was released earlier this month recounts the ways intelligence gathering, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) have improved over the decades. The U.S. has moved far ahead from the days when balloons were sent up in the air to understand what was happening behind enemy lines. Adversaries of the U.S. are now a world away and the military still has the ability to “find the unfindable.”
Whoever controls AI controls the world
“Most Valuable AI unicorn” goes for IPO.
“In 2019, SenseTime became one of the first Chinese companies to be placed on the US Entity List, a trade blacklist that restricts it from gaining access to certain technologies originating from the US. The White House under Donald Trump claimed that the company was ”implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance” against the Uyghur population, a mostly Muslim ethnic group in the Xinjiang region.
SenseTime – a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company – has been approved to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Five prototypes were tested before the project was shelved.
In what might seem counter-intuitive at first, the U.S. Army supported the development of a helicopter that had no engine. One can even visit the Army’s Aviation Museum at Fort Rucker in Alabama to catch a glimpse of this design by the American Helicopter Company that is fondly called Jet Jeep.
The Jet Jeep was thought of many decades ago as the solution for a light observation needed by the Army. The U.S. Army was looking for a flight-capable option for light surveillance and by that, it meant enough to carry one or two people at the most. This is quite like the problem jet pack makers are trying to solve these days. But this was way back in the 1950s and helicopters and aircraft were largely the way flying worked.
So, the U.S Air Force took upon this task and made a lighter version of the helicopter, XH-26, by skipping the bigger engine. Instead, it put two AJ7.5–1 pulse jets at the end of each of its rotors and was also successful in avoiding the transmission system, which reduced its weight further, the U.S. Army’s website said.
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There’s no road to computers that think like people that wouldn’t take us through 24/7 computer surveillance first. Thiel says. Is that what we want?
Quarantining people in Disneyland.
While thousands of visitors to Shanghai Disneyland on Sunday were queuing for roller coasters and watching fireworks above the fairytale castle, staff quietly sealed the amusement park. People in Hazmat suits streamed in through the gates, preparing to test everyone for Covid-19 before they could leave for the day.
Nearly 34,000 people at Disneyland underwent testing, which ended close to midnight, long after the festivities at the park are usually finished. Ferried home on 220 special buses, all were found Monday to be negative but are still required to isolate at home for two days, and be re-tested for the coronavirus in two weeks.
The shutdown of one of Walt Disney Co.’s most lucrative parks came after a positive case in a woman who traveled to Shanghai from nearby Hangzhou over the weekend. While officials are yet to confirm whether she visited Disneyland, her infection sparked an aggressive contact tracing effort across China, which eventually ensnared the park-goers, their families and Disneyland staff.
To people in parts of the world where Covid is already endemic, the reaction may seem extreme, but it’s emblematic of China’s increasingly hardcore approach to keeping the pathogen out at any cost.
Since containing its initial outbreak in Wuhan last April, China has sought to not just quell the virus but eliminate it. To do that it’s deployed a raft of measures from border curbs and compulsory quarantines, to localized lockdowns and mass testing, aimed at hunting out cases before an outbreak takes root — and quashing them. It was a strategy used successfully in other parts of the Asia-Pacific region, from Singapore and Taiwan to Australia and New Zealand, before the delta variant made it almost impossible to execute.
China and its territory Hong Kong are now the last real Covid Zero proponents left as other places look to open their borders and live with the virus. But instead of slowly easing toward reopening, too, China is doubling down, even as waves of the more contagious delta come more frequently and with the current resurgence — totaling some 480 cases — spreading to more than half of the country’s provinces.
As the threat has become more persistent, so has the intensity of China’s curbs, which are becoming as disruptive to people’s lives as they are effective in controlling the virus’s spread.
The dramatic rise of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has spotlit concerns about the role of technology in exam surveillance — and also in student cheating.
Some universities have reported more cheating during the pandemic, and such concerns are unfolding in a climate where technologies that allow for the automation of writing continue to improve.
Over the past two years, the ability of artificial intelligence to generate writing has leapt forward significantly, particularly with the development of what’s known as the language generator GPT-3. With this, companies such as Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA can now produce “human-like” text.
With VR data they’ve got data about 100 per cent of your experience — how you saw it, where you looked. The next generation of Facebook’s VR headset is going to have eye tracking.
This is probably the most invasive surveillance technology we’re going to bring into our homes in the next decade.
Facebook’s pivot was met with plenty of scepticism, with critics saying the timing points to a cynical rebrand designed to distance the company from Facebook’s rolling scandals. Others have argued the metaverse already exists as a graveyard strewn with ideas like Google Glass smart glasses, which have failed to catch on. But with Zuckerberg pledging to invest at least $US10 billion this year on metaverse development and proposing to hire 10,000 workers across the European Union over the next five years, there is a looming question for policymakers about how this ambition can or should be regulated.
The nation excels in computer vision and facial recognition, but practical applications are limited to surveillance. The U.S. has much broader expertise.
In the United States, animal health authorities are now on high alert. The US Department of Agriculture has pledged an emergency appropriation of $500 million to ramp up surveillance and keep the disease from crossing borders. African swine fever is so feared internationally that, if it were found in the US, pork exports—worth more than $7 billion a year—would immediately shut down.
“Long-distance transboundary spread of highly contagious and pathogenic diseases is a worse-case scenario,” Michael Ward, an epidemiologist and chair of veterinary public health at the University of Sydney, told WIRED by email. “In agriculture, it’s the analogue of Covid-19.”
As with the Covid pandemic at its start, there is no vaccine—but also as with Covid, there is the glimmer of hope for one, thanks to basic science that has been laying down findings for years without receiving much attention. Two weeks ago, a multinational team led by scientists at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service announced that they had achieved a vaccine candidate, based on a weakened version of the virus with a key gene deleted, and demonstrated its effectiveness in a field trial, in pigs, in Vietnam.
