Lifeboat Foundation

Allen McDuffee — Wired
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sGqQek3pqQ#t=106
With UAVs crowding navigable airspace and plans underway to put giant mega-satellites into orbit, it was just a matter of time before a drone-satellite hybrid was developed to fit between the two spaces. StratoBus, a new project out of France, is conceptualized to do just that. Designed to be about the length of a football field and 25 yards in diameter, the blimp-shaped vehicle’s shell will be made of carbon fiber.

Without a launcher, StratoBus floats to the lower stratosphere at an altitude of about 13 miles where developers say it will be in a perfect position to carry out a range of functions, including surveillance, border security monitoring, communications reinforcement and facilitating navigation — all from a stationary position with the help of two self-adjusting electric motors. The StratoBus will be able to endure missions of up to a year with a total lifetime of five years.

Read more

Darrell Etherington — Tech Crunch

In the sci-fi show Almost Human, everyone has a bitcoin wallet. More and more places to spend bitcoin means that could become a reality, and popular indie merchant mobile payment provider Square is the latest to accept the cryptocurrency.

In an announcement today on their blog, which isn’t an April Fool’s Joke pushed early Square assures us, the company notes that bitcoin can be used to buy goods and services with Square Market as of today. That means shoppers can pay using the virtual currency on Square’s online storefront, which includes items from merchants around the world collected in one place.

Read more

Laura Montini — Inc.

For years, authors like David Allen and Tim Ferriss have researched and written about productivity. But judging from the high tech trends in the field, the best efficiency practices are yet to be discovered.

That’s because productivity is on the brink of transformation via Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), according to Colin Lewis, who provides consulting services in automation, robotics and Artificial Intelligence. In a recent blog post on Harvard Business Review, Lewis looked at the research and development trends among big tech companies and concluded that it’s only a matter of time before virtual assistants start to revamp your daily routine.

Read more

George Dvorsky — i09
It’s been 50 years since Isaac Asimov devised his famous Three Laws of Robotics — a set of rules designed to ensure friendly robot behavior. Though intended as a literary device, these laws are heralded by some as a ready-made prescription for avoiding the robopocalypse. We spoke to the experts to find out if Asimov’s safeguards have stood the test of time — and they haven’t.

First, a quick overview of the Three Laws. As stated by Asimov in his 1942 short story “Runaround”:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Read more

LIST OF UPDATES (MARCH 31 THROUGH APRIL 06/2014). By Mr. Andres Agostini at The Future of Scientific Management, Today! At http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

The Secrets of Roman Concrete Finally Revealed After 2,000 Years http://www.21stcentech.com/secrets-roman-concrete-finally-revealed-2000-years/

The Future of War Post-Crimea http://www.21stcentech.com/future-war-post-crimea/

Continue reading “The Future of Space-Age Risk Management!” »

Adele Peters — Fast Company

Every year, more than 46,000 square miles of arable land turns to desert. As deserts spread–a process that keeps moving faster thanks to climate change and practices like clear-cutting–the UN estimates that more than 1 billion people will be directly affected. Many of them, living in places like Northern Africa and rural China, are already struggling with poverty, so the loss of farmland would be especially hard to handle.

One potential answer: An enormous mobile oasis that roams over drylands planting seeds. The Green Machine, originally designed by Malka Architecture and Yachar Bouhaya Architecture for the Venice Biennale, may some day be rolling around the borders of the Sahara Desert holding back the dust and sand.

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3028173/this-enormous-rolling-cit…esertp://” target=“_blank”>Read More

Jessica Leber — Fast Company

People are always joking about our robot overlords, but before robots become the world’s rulers, they’re probably going to be our bosses at work first. Either way, it’s important to know how pliable we humans are going to be.

Researchers at the University of Manitoba were curious about how far people would go in obeying the commands of a robot, so they designed an experiment that echoes Stanley Milgram’s infamous obedience studies, in which many participants obeyed an authority figure who told them to administer painful electrical shocks to strangers.

Substitute a small but slightly evil-sounding humanoid robot for the lab-coated researcher, and give the participants a really, really boring task rather than a morally fraught one, and you have the set up below. It’s actually a little uncomfortable to watch.

Read more

Damon Tabor — Popular Science


On September 16, 2008, Carl Pike, the deputy head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Operations Division, watched live video feeds from a command center outside Washington, D.C., as federal agents fanned out across dozens of U.S. cities. In Dallas, a team in SWAT gear tossed a flash-bang grenade into a suburban home and, once inside, discovered six pounds of cocaine behind a stove, and a stockpile of guns. At a used-car dealer’s house in Carmel, Indiana, agents pulled bricks of cocaine from a secret compartment in his Audi sedan, while state troopers dragged a stove-size safe onto the lawn and went at it with a sledgehammer.

In the coming weeks, the net widened to include caches of assault rifles, a Mexico-bound 18-wheeler with drug money hidden in fresh produce, and a crooked Texas sheriff who helped traffic narcotics through his county. In Mexico City, a financier was arrested for laundering drug money through a minor-league soccer team named the Raccoons (and an avocado farm). After one especially large bust, when it came time for a “dope on the table” photo, there was in fact no table big enough to support the thousands of tightly bundled kilos of confiscated cocaine. They had to be stacked in the back parking lot of a police station.

The raids and arrests were the final stage of a DEA-led investigation called Project Reckoning—18 months, 64 cities, 200 agencies—intended to cripple Mexico’s Gulf Cartel. Over the past two decades, the organization had built a drug empire that spanned across Mexico and into the U.S. It had become pervasive, hyper-violent, brazen. Cartel operatives had smuggled billions of dollars’ worth of narcotics into the U.S. They had assassinated Mexican politicians and corrupted entire police departments. One of the organization’s leaders had famously brandished a gold-plated .45 at two agents from the DEA and FBI traveling through northeastern Mexico. The cartel had even formed its own paramilitary unit, a band of former Mexican police and special-forces soldiers called the Zetas, to seize territory and dispatch rivals. The notorious syndicate became known as La Compañia, or The Company.

Read more

By Harry J. Bentham

Originally published at h+ Magazine

Who is more “luddite”: the individual or the state?

Continue reading “Who’s More Luddite?” »