Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: internet – Page 269

My new article from Vice Motherboard on liberty and privacy. This is one of my most ambitious philosophical works yet: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjx5y5/liberty-mi…th-privacy #Libertarian

If tech is surveilling us constantly, we need the ability to use it to watch the watchers.

Zoltan Istvan is a futurist, transhumanist, author of The Transhumanist Wager, and a Libertarian candidate for California Governor.

The constant onslaught of new technology is making our lives more public and trackable than ever, which understandably scares a lot of people. Part of the dilemma is how we interpret the right to privacy using centuries-old ideals handed down to us by our forbearers. I think the 21st century idea of privacy—like so many other taken-for-granted concepts—may need a revamp.

Continue reading “Liberty Might Be Better Served by Doing Away with Privacy” | >

Technology can be wonderful. But how do you keep track of yourself when technology allows you to be everywhere at once?

In this film Prof. Yair Amichai-Hamburger (director of the Research Center for Internet Psychology at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications) argues that even though technology allows us to reach out and connect more easily than ever before, if we don’t ever take a step back, we can lose track of our humanity in the process.

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The toilet-paper principle suggests that we should be paying as much attention to the cheapest technologies as to the most sophisticated. One candidate: cheap sensors and cheap internet connections. There are multiple sensors in every smartphone, but increasingly they’re everywhere, from jet engines to the soil of Californian almond farms — spotting patterns, fixing problems and eking out efficiency gains.

Forget flying cars or humanoid robots. The most disruptive inventions are often cheap, simple and easy to overlook.

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In this challenging and crowded market, new competitors are emerging all the time. Moving further into software brings manufacturers up against specialised information technology companies, and there is a shifting landscape of competition and co-operation between different groups that a decade ago could have safely ignored each other.

The likes of GE and Siemens are investing billions in the ‘industrial internet’ but will face competition from IT groups and start-ups.

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  • Disney researchers have developed innovative technology that will allow people to charge their devices in a truly wireless fashion
  • If this technology could be commercially adopted, it could revolutionize the way that we use and create everything from smartphones to AI robots

It seems like almost everything has gone wireless. Yet somehow, when it comes to charging electronic devices, we still have to deal with cords. Sure wireless charging exists, but only for small devices like your smartphone. And even then, it’s not convenient as you might hope. To actually power a device, a phone must maintain contact with a charging pad, which means it can’t be used while charging. This seems to be even a bigger hassle than dealing with cords and cables.

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Meanwhile there was a Big New Development. The Internet and digital technology came of age. And here’s the thing. Digital artefacts – whether they’re an algorithm, a website, an app or a coding language – are always and everywhere potential public goods. Once produced digital artefacts are essentially costless to replicate which raises the question of whether they can or should be made freely available to all.

Digital public goods in the age of the data revolution.

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Fun in fiction. Perhaps not so much in reality.

The human mind is already pretty open to manipulation—just ask anyone who works in advertising. But neural implant technology could potentially open up a direct digital link to our innermost thoughts that could be exploited by hackers.

In recent months, companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, Kernel, and Facebook have unveiled plans to create devices that will provide a two-way interface between human brains and machines.

While these devices could undoubtedly bring many benefits, they would be networked to computers and therefore essentially part of the Internet of Things. That should immediately set off alarm bells for anyone paying attention to cybersecurity news.

Continue reading “Neural Implant Tech Raises the Specter of Brainjacking” | >

We are incredibly excited to announce that Firmamentum, a division of Tethers Unlimited, Inc. (TUI), has signed a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a system that will use in-space manufacturing and robotic assembly technologies to construct on orbit a small satellite able to provide high-bandwidth satellite communications (SATCOM) services to mobile receivers on the ground.

Under the OrbWeaver Direct-to-Phase-II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) effort, Firmamentum aims to combine its technologies for in-space recycling, in-space manufacturing, and robotic assembly to create a system that could launch as a secondary payload on an Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV). This system would recycle a structural element of that rocket, known as an EELV Secondary Payload Adapter (ESPA) ring, by converting the ring’s aluminum material into a very large, high-precision antenna reflector. The OrbWeaver™ payload would then attach this large antenna to an array of TUI’s SWIFT® software defined radios launched with the OrbWeaver payload to create a small satellite capable of delivering up to 12 gigabits per second of data to K-band very small aperture terminals (VSAT) on the ground.

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