Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

In semiconductor chip research, IBM has been racking up the breakthroughs for decades. And now it says that work is paying off with the creation of the first 7-nanometer chips.

And these chips will ensure that industry progress, summarized as Moore’s Law, will continue for at least another generation. Once the chips proliferate in the market, we’ll see faster, cheaper, and better electronics products out in the marketplace, from faster computers to smarter “Internet of things” devices, or everyday objects that are smart and connected.

Read more

Invisibility cloaks, cyborg insects, laser beam weapons…you name it, it’s probably secretly being development as you read this right now. Advances in modern weaponry have leapt straight out of science fiction films and into military reality. The US Military budget for 2016 is $786.6 billion. With that kind of spending, it’s not surprising that there have been some insane recent advancements. Here is a list of the 10 most futuristic weapons that will change modern warfare for ever.

Read more

It’s official: Star Trek-style replicators are on the way. Well, sort of. Assembly lines for specific molecules could be a thing of the future, thanks to a recent breakthrough in atomic bonding published in the journal Physical Review Letters. A team of scientists has found a way of using laser beams to control the path of chemical processes, possibly ushering in a new age of photochemistry.

Read more

“Advocates argue that the rule-based approach has one major virtue: it is always clear why the machine makes the choice that it does, because its designers set the rules. That is a crucial concern for the US military, for which autonomous systems are a key strategic goal. Whether machines assist soldiers or carry out potentially lethal missions, ‘the last thing you want is to send an autonomous robot on a military mission and have it work out what ethical rules it should follow in the middle of things’.”

Read more

Lonewolfcover

Washington, DC (PRWEB) July 07, 2015

Lone Wolf (LW) terrorism is on the rise around the world but it can get a lot worse when self-motivated bad guys make weapons of mass destruction in their kitchens or bio-labs. Could 100,000 People be Killed in a Single Lone Wolf Attack? When? Where? And How Could this be Prevented?

In a recent study, half of an international group of security and other experts forecasted that a single individual could kill 100,000 people or more in a single attack by 2050. Or not: the other half of the panel said such an event might happen after the turn of the next century or never.

While there was sharp disagreement among the experts, we already know that lone wolf terrorists have tried to build these massively destructive weapons and the FBI is already using the term WMD in many of their indictments.

As a new book titled Lone Wolf Terrorism Prospects just released by a Millennium Project team points out, systems of pre-detection are also being developed that can identify suspicious individuals by using tools that monitor communications and behavior, or new techniques from psychology, brain anatomy, and genetics. Or synthesize information from all of these imperfect sources.

The book sketches the increasing race between the growing destructive capacity of lone wolves and the improving tools of detection and interdiction. “The outcome of this race will set the world security stage for decades”, comments Ted Gordon, lead author of the book.

Around this fascinating and dangerous interplay between multiple single aggressors with increasingly destructive power, and the development of means for identifying destructive intent in individuals before they act, lie a host of legal and moral issues that will test our will as a free society.

Will the methods of detection be adequate and timely enough to avoid catastrophe? If they are implemented will we be able to maintain our freedoms?

The book is available as a 200-page paperback through Amazon and downloadable as a pdf file on http://www.lonewolfthreat.com. For single review copies please email [email protected].

The authors of the book are:
Theodore Jay Gordon, co-founder of The Millennium Project, author of the Macmillan encyclopedia article on the future of science and technology and currently on the editorial board of Technological Forecasting and Social Change.
Dr. Yair Sharan, a retired colonel in the Israeli Defense force, currently the director of TAM-C/FIRST group, active in the security and technology fields. He has been a senior associate researcher in Begin-Sadat Center for strategic studies (BESA) and has coordinated several EU projects, including FESTOS in the Security program and PRACTIS in the Science in Society program.
Elizabeth Florescu, Director of Research at The Millennium Project, co-author of the annual “State of the Future,” the report “Environmental Crimes, Military Actions, and the International Criminal Court” and involved in committees and forums addressing issues related to S&T, environment, security, international regulations, ontology, and knowledge management.

The Millennium Project is a global participatory think tank connecting 56 Nodes around the world that identify important long-range challenges and strategies, and initiate and conduct foresight studies, workshops, symposiums, and advanced training. Its mission is to improve thinking about the future and make it available through a variety of media for feedback to accumulate wisdom about the future for better decisions today. It produces the annual “State of the Future” reports, the “Futures Research Methodology” series, the Global Futures Intelligence System (GFIS), and special studies. Over 4,500 futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities have participated in The Millennium Project’s research since its inception, in 1992. The Millennium Project was selected among the top ten think tanks in the world for new ideas and paradigms by the 2013 and 2014 University of Pennsylvania’s GoTo Think Tank Index, and 2012 Computerworld Honors Laureate for its contributions to collective intelligence systems.

Read more