Menu

Blog

Page 10453

Mar 18, 2017

Israeli tech firms revving up engines for self-driving cars

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, robotics/AI, transportation

JERUSALEM (AP) — As the world moves toward an era of self-driving cars, Israel is positioning itself to be the Detroit of the future.

The country has emerged as a global leader in the fast-growing field of driverless cars, as illustrated by Intel’s more than $15 billion acquisition of Israeli firm Mobileye this week.

Israel is now home to hundreds of startups that provide everything from sensors to cybersecurity to data collection for autonomous vehicles, putting it alongside Silicon Valley at the forefront of an industry that many expect to take off over the next decade.

Read more

Mar 18, 2017

Air Force’s Mysterious X-37B Space Plane Nears Orbital Record

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, space travel

The U.S. Air Force’s X-37B space plane is just eight days away from setting a record on its current clandestine mission.

If the robotic vehicle stays aloft until March 25, it will break the X-37B mission-duration mark of 674 days, which was established back in October 2014.

It’s unclear whether that will actually happen, however; the Air Force is tight-lipped about most X-37B payloads and activities, including touchdown plans. [The X-37B’s Fourth Mystery Mission in Photos].

Continue reading “Air Force’s Mysterious X-37B Space Plane Nears Orbital Record” »

Mar 18, 2017

Who wants to live forever? Transhumanism’s promise of eternal life

Posted by in categories: life extension, robotics/AI, transhumanism

A nice long feature on #transhumanism in The Irish Times, one of Ireland’s largest papers. It focuses on the book To Be A Machine: http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/who-wants-to-live-fo…-1.3010223 Separately, The New York Times ran a rather somber view of a few transhumanism books, two of the books (The Body Builders & To Be a Machine) which I’m quoted in: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/books/review/gene-machine.…html?_r=0


Mark O’Connell has spent several years talking to people who want to live through robots and technology, and he admits it stems from his own obsession with death.

Read more

Mar 18, 2017

House of Wonders

Posted by in category: habitats

Studio aisslinger — berlin and singapore interior design, productdesign, industrial design.

Read more

Mar 18, 2017

Trump Should Make Space-Based Solar Power A National Priority

Posted by in categories: solar power, space, sustainability

My take on why the Trump Administration should make space-based solar power a real priority.


Space-based solar power — technology that would harvest solar energy directly in space for use on Earth — is a concept whose time has come.

Read more

Mar 18, 2017

You Can Ban a Person, But What About Their Hologram?

Posted by in categories: augmented reality, holograms, law, media & arts

If you think augmented reality is only fun and games, consider that we’ve already witnessed the first known police action taken against hologram technology. During the summer of 2015, a performance by controversial gangster-rapper, Keith Cozart, was shut down when local police discovered the musician was broadcast as a hologram into a benefit concert in Indiana—close to the border of his home state of Illinois.

Cozart, who goes by the stage name “Chief Keef,” is from a rough neighborhood in Chicago, and has ties to local gangs as well as a criminal record including felony gun charges. His music, which glamorizes a gang lifestyle and violence, has prompted public officials—including Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel—to pressure music festivals to avoid inviting Cozart because they say it poses a “significant public safety risk.”

Continue reading “You Can Ban a Person, But What About Their Hologram?” »

Mar 18, 2017

E-tattoos turn knuckles and freckles into smartphone controls

Posted by in category: mobile phones

Tattoos that turn skin into a touchscreen could display notifications on your body and let you answer a call or pump up the volume with a tap of your fingers.

Read more

Mar 17, 2017

Google Director’s Push for Computers Inside Human Brains Is ‘Anti-Christ,’ ‘Human Rights Abuse,’ Theologians Explain

Posted by in categories: engineering, Ray Kurzweil, robotics/AI, singularity, transhumanism

3 Christian articles/sites w/ #transhumanism in it: http://www.christianpost.com/news/google-directors-hope-for-…in-177809/ & http://straightoutthegate.com/tech-savings-gate/zoltan-istva…has-to-go/ & https://blogs.lcms.org/2017/storming-gates-paradise


Google’s director of engineering is saying implanting computers “inside our brains” is upon us, words theologians and Christian bioethicists consider a “slap in the face” to Christ and would result in horrific human rights violations.

According to the Daily Mail, Ray Kurzweil, a futurist who works on Google’s machine learning project, said at the South by Southwest conference taking place this week in Austin, Texas, that by the year 2029, technological “singularity” will be achieved, the complete merging of human and computer intelligence.

Continue reading “Google Director’s Push for Computers Inside Human Brains Is ‘Anti-Christ,’ ‘Human Rights Abuse,’ Theologians Explain” »

Mar 17, 2017

Ground Demonstration of Plant Cultivation Technologies and Operation in Space

Posted by in categories: food, space travel

A critical component of future, human exploration to worlds unknown, will be the supply of edible food for crewmembers. To develop innovations in cultivating food in closed-loop systems becomes integral to future missions.

The goal of the EDEN ISS project is to advance controlled environment agriculture technologies beyond the state-of-the-art. It focuses on ground demonstration of plant cultivation technologies and their application in space. EDEN ISS develops safe food production for on-board the International Space Station (ISS) and for future human space exploration vehicles and planetary outposts.

Read more

Mar 17, 2017

Towards a lip-reading computer

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Scientists at Oxford say they’ve invented an artificial intelligence system that can lip-read better than humans.

The system, which has been trained on thousands of hours of BBC News programmes, has been developed in collaboration with Google’s DeepMind AI division.

“Watch, Attend and Spell”, as the system has been called, can now watch silent speech and get about 50% of the words correct. That may not sound too impressive — but when the researchers supplied the same clips to professional lip-readers, they got only 12% of words right.

Read more