Free Republic

Amazon is one step closer to implementing its creepy, futuristic flesh-and-blood payment system. The e-tailing giant’s engineers on Thursday filed a patent application for a device that can scan a human hand — without ever touching it — as a way to ring up a store purchase. As The Post exclusively reported in September, the device is being developed by Amazon engineers under the code name “Orville” for a future rollout at the Amazon-owned Whole Foods supermarket chain. Employees at Amazon’s New York offices have been serving as guinea pigs for the biometric technology, using it at a handful of...

- Artificial intelligence has clear positive uses, but it could be used to teach machines to attack people and their computer networks on their own. - Drones and autonomous vehicles could be hacked using AI and turned into weapons - Traditional cybersecurity methods won't know how to cope with new attacks carried out by smart machines.

The growing use of unmanned aircraft in combat situations raises huge moral and legal issues, and threatens to make war more likely as armed robots take over from human beings, according to an internal study by the Ministry of Defence. The report warns of the dangers of an "incremental and involuntary journey towards a Terminator-like reality", referring to James Cameron's 1984 movie, in which humans are hunted by robotic killing machines. It says the pace of technological development is accelerating at such a rate that Britain must quickly establish a policy on what will constitute "acceptable machine behaviour".

<p>Action star Arnold Schwarzenegger (search) traveled to Iraq Friday to pump up American GIs at their Independence Day festivities.</p> <p>Schwarzenegger addressed an enthusiastic crowd of soldiers at one of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's presidential palaces.</p> <p>"I play the Terminator, but you guys are the true terminators," he told the cheering crowd of soldiers.</p>