Free Republic

China is the United States’ strongest competitor in cutting edge military technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, according to a US report. But security experts said the location of a conflict remained a major constraint for China to exercise its power as the nation’s advantages diminished the further from China’s shores that its military operated. The report – “Emerging Military Technologies: Background and Issues for Congress” by the US Congressional Research Service – said the US was the leader in developing many of the advanced technologies. However, China and Russia were making steady progress in this area. “China...

WASHINGTON: In a 5 to 0 sweep, an AI ‘pilot’ developed by Heron Systems beat one of the Air Force’s top F-16 fighter pilots in DARPA’s simulated aerial dogfight contest today. “It’s a giant leap,” said DARPA’s Justin (call sign “Glock”) Mock, who served as a commentator on the trials. AI still has a long way to go before the Air Force pilots would be ready to hand over the stick to an artificial intelligence during combat, DARPA officials said during today’s live broadcast of the AlphaDogfight trials. But the three-day trials show that AI systems can credibly maneuver an...

DARPA’s AlphaDogfight trials have officially come to a close with Heron Systems’ incredible artificial intelligence pilot system defeating not only its industry competitors, but going on to secure 5 straight victories against a highly trained U.S. Air Force F-16 pilot, without the human pilot scoring a single hit. Eight teams were selected to create artificial intelligence (AI) “agents” that would be capable of simulating a real dogfight between fighters, referred to as within-visual-range air combat maneuvering, more formally. The first two rounds of this competition saw these virtual pilots engage with one another in simulated combat environments in November and...

Confronted with an onslaught of social media posts filled with misinformation and harmful content, Facebook said Tuesday it has begun to rely on artificial intelligence to boost its efforts to evaluate whether posts violate its policies and should be labeled or removed. AI is being used to rank content on its platforms involving self-harm, sexual exploitation, and hate speech. However, content will still be evaluated by human moderators, regardless of whether the offending posts are reported by users or detected by the company’s proactive systems. Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, told reporters on a call Tuesday that the...

Researchers with the University of Chicago's SAND Lab have detailed the development of a new tool called Fawkes that subtly alters images in a way that makes them unusable for facial recognition. The tool comes amid growing concerns about privacy and an editorial detailing the secret scraping of billions of online images to create facial recognition models. Put simply, Fawkes is a cloaking tool that modifies images in ways imperceptible to the human eye. The idea is that anyone can download the tool, which has been made publicly available, to first cloak their images before posting them online. The name...

Northwest of beijing’s Forbidden City, outside the Third Ring Road, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has spent seven decades building a campus of national laboratories. Near its center is the Institute of Automation, a sleek silvery-blue building surrounded by camera-studded poles. The institute is a basic research facility. Its computer scientists inquire into artificial intelligence’s fundamental mysteries. Their more practical innovations—iris recognition, cloud-based speech synthesis—are spun off to Chinese tech giants, AI start-ups, and, in some cases, the People’s Liberation Army.

A growing number of places of worship around the world are employing robotic priests, who can recite prayers and even comfort worshippers experiencing spiritual crises Religions around the world are evolving as technology progresses, and now some faiths are relying on "god robots " to spread the good word. Back in the Middle Ages, Christian "robots" of a kind were fashioned to perform the religious pageantry of the Easter and Christmas rituals. In the 16th century, a mechanical monk was created by a Spanish clockmaker that incredibly remains fully functional to this day. The automaton beats his chest and raises...

The daily email that arrived in physician Samantha Wang’s inbox at 8 a.m., just before morning rounds, contained a list of names and a warning: These patients are at high risk of dying within the next year.One name that turned up again and again belonged to a man in his 40s, who had been admitted to Stanford University’s hospital the previous month with a serious viral respiratory infection. He was still much too ill to go home, but Wang was a bit surprised that the email had flagged him among her patients least likely to be alive in a year’s...

Since February of last year, tens of thousands of patients hospitalized at one of Minnesota’s largest health systems have had their discharge planning decisions informed with help from an artificial intelligence model. But few if any of those patients has any idea about the AI involved in their care.That’s because frontline clinicians at M Health Fairview generally don’t mention the AI whirring behind the scenes in their conversations with patients.At a growing number of prominent hospitals and clinics around the country, clinicians are turning to AI-powered decision support tools — many of them unproven — to help predict whether hospitalized...

If you adopted your pet from a rescue shelter, they probably have a microchip embedded just beneath the skin on the back of their neck. It's a tiny radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip that's no larger than a grain of rice, and it helps you find your furry friend if they ever get lost. Now, in a strange twist, you could also have a microchip just like it, as some companies have adopted the tracking technology in lieu of keys or traditional building access badges. Last week, however, the Michigan House of Representatives took a preemptive strike against the technology, passing...

The U.S. is using every tool at its disposal to defeat the novel coronavirus, including artificial intelligence. American laboratories are harnessing AI to discover new therapeutics. The Food and Drug Administration approved an AI tool to help detect coronavirus in CT scans. And the White House led an initiative to create a database with more than 128,000 articles that scientists can analyze using AI to help understand the virus better and develop treatments.At the same time, AI is being twisted by authoritarian regimes to violate rights. The Chinese Communist Party is reportedly using AI to uncover and punish those...

Once upon a time, Japan was widely expected to eclipse the United States as the technological leader of the world. In 1988, the New York Times reporter David Sanger described a group of U.S. computer science experts, meeting to discuss Japan’s technological progress. When the group assessed the new generation of computers coming out of Japan, Sanger wrote, “any illusions that America had maintained its wide lead evaporated.” Replace “computers” with “artificial intelligence,” and “Japan” with “China,” and the article could have been written today. In AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, which unsurprisingly became an...

A dissident Chinese economist filed a White House petition, nearly a third of the way to the 100,000 signatures required to merit the President’s attention, to investigate Twitter for appointing to its board of directors a controversial Artificial Intelligence expert, lifelong deepstater, already fired from Google in disgrace, for her ties to the Chinese military. Highlights: Mad scientist "Cat Mengele", NWO technocracy, corporate subversion, Twitter hijinks, China's co-option of Google, China has run out of money, Soros co-option of this brain from the get-go.

The Chinese government has drawn wide international condemnation for its harsh crackdown on ethnic Muslims in its western region, including holding as many as a million of them in detention camps. Now, documents and interviews show that the authorities are also using a vast, secret system of advanced facial recognition technology to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. It is the first known example of a government intentionally using artificial intelligence for racial profiling, experts said. The facial recognition technology, which is integrated into China’s rapidly expanding networks of surveillance cameras, looks exclusively for Uighurs based on...

While self-driving cars won't get distracted or drive drunk, that only accounts for a third of wrecks that occur, according to the insurance industry. In a blow to hopes for a future free of car crashes with the coming of self-driving cars, a study released Thursday by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety shows totally driverless cars would have a difficult time achieving such a goal. The IIHS looked at more than 5,000 police-reported crashes from the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey, which the insurance industry-funded group said represents vehicle crashes that resulted in one car towed and required...

Ultra-creepy technology that George Orwell could not have imagined in his most terrifying nightmares is invading government-school classrooms — and children's minds — all around the world. While many of the Big Brother innovations are coming out of Communist China, they are making their way into American schools quickly as well. Parents, beware. In a video report by the Wall Street Journal on artificial intelligence in Communist Chinese schools, children in a communist indoctrination camp masquerading as a school are shown wearing bands around their heads. The devices feature colored lights on the front that indicate for the “teacher” whether...

The Estonian company Milrem Robotics is trying to revolutionize the global defense industry by developing a new type of unmanned tracked IFV (Infantry Fighting Vehicle) for mechanized units, a Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) designated Type-X. Although it is not a tank, the Type-X moves on tracks and has a turret. Milrem Robotics is best known for its THeMIS UGV which is operated by several countries, namely the French armed forces in Mali. Milrem Robotics founder and CEO Kuldar Väärsi said that a new long-term goal is to replace all old-style infantry fighting vehicles with new systems. He is convinced that,...

Huntsville, Ala., May 06, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- HUNTSVILLE, Ala., May 6, 2020 - Dynetics, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Leidos (LDOS), has been awarded Phase 1 of the Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program, Technical Area 3 (TA3), by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Strategic Technology Office (STO). ACE TA3, also known as Alpha Mosaic, is valued at $12.3 million. The ACE program is using aerial dogfighting as the initial challenge scenario for implementing artificial intelligence (AI) into high-intensity air conflicts, which intends to increase warfighter trust in combat autonomy. Similar to how the United States military...

Democrats have converted an AI project that was initially funded by the department of defense to combat propaganda from ISIS and other extremists, into a tool to track down and counter Trump supporters on social media. The “Defeat Disinfo” group is being advised by retired Army General Stanley McChrystal.The project is called “Defeat Disinfo,” a creation of entrepreneur Curtis Hougland. It was initially funded by the Pentagon’s top-secret DARPA research agency, when the goal of the technology was to identify and counter online narratives from Islamic extremists. Founded by technology entrepreneur Curtis Hougland, it is still advised by retired Army...

In what is a massive milestone for Boeing and potentially for unmanned aerial combat systems as a whole, the company officially rolled out the first of three pre-production unmanned teaming aircraft, which is the central component of a total system called the Airpower Teaming System, or ATS for short. The War Zone was part of a small roundtable of journalists that talked with two of the minds behind ATS ahead of the official unveiling and we learned a lot about this potentially game-changing system, to say the least. ATS is designed to work with manned aerial assets in the 'loyal...