A meteor has exploded over the Atlantic Ocean with the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It’s one of the ways that civilisation as we know it could end, with an asteroid impact sending the human race the way of the dinosaurs. It’s a terrifying prospect, and the film Don’t Look Up with Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio really didn’t help matter with its demonstration of the paralysis and greed which could doom humanity.
The weaponization of the scientific and technological breakthroughs stemming from human genome research presents a serious global security challenge. Gene-editing pioneer and Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna often tells a story of a nightmare she once had. A colleague asked her to teach someone how her technology works. She went to meet the student and “was shocked to see Adolf Hitler, in the flesh.”
Doudna is not alone in being haunted by the power of science. Famously, having just returned home from Los Alamos in early 1945, John von Neumann awakened in panic. “What we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left,” he stammered while straining to speak to his wife. He surmised, however, that “it would be impossible not to see it through, not only for military reasons, but it would also be unethical from the point of view of the scientists not to do what they knew is feasible, no matter what terrible consequences it may have.”
According to biographer Ananyo Bhattacharya, von Neumann saw what was happening in Nazi Germany and the USSR and believed that “the best he could do is allow politicians to make those [ethical and security] decisions: to put his brain in their hands.” Living through a devastating world war, the Manhattan Project polymath “had no trust left in human nature.”
Similar to Interstellar, Oppenheimer (now in theaters) finds Christopher Nolan at his most abstract, with the director working overtime to ascribe a visual language to concepts just beyond our comprehension.
It wasn’t enough to simply make a biopic about the father of the atomic bomb — he needed to take us inside the extraordinary theoretical mind of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played in the film by Cillian Murphy) and show us the Big Bang-like birth of quantum physics and how it directly led to the creation of the atomic bomb.
RELATED: Oppenheimer’s Atomic Bombs Marked a New Geologic Age of Humans.
Ignatiev/iStock.
“It’s hard to imagine that you are the target of spycraft, but spying on employees is the next frontier of military AI. Surveillance techniques familiar to authoritarian dictatorships have now been repurposed to target American workers,” stated the article.
Is Program Manager, Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H — https://arpa-h.gov/people/ross-uhrich/), which is focused on advancing high-potential, high-impact biomedical and health research that cannot be readily accomplished through traditional research or commercial activity, accelerating better health outcomes targeting society’s most challenging health problems.
Under the ARPA-H portfolio, Dr. Uhrich is responsible for the recently launched Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration in Osteoarthritis (NITRO — https://arpa-h.gov/engage/programs/nitro/) program which seeks to develop new ways of helping the human body repair its own joints, with the goal of revolutionizing treatment for osteoarthritis — a common and often very painful condition where bones and cartilage break down.
Dr. Uhrich joined ARPA-H in March 2023 from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC) and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, where he worked as a board-certified oral and maxillofacial surgeon and assistant professor of surgery. In addition to these roles, he spent 12 years with the U.S. Navy, finishing his tenure as a Lieutenant Commander.
Throughout his career, Dr. Uhrich has cared for thousands of members of the U.S. Armed Forces at various healthcare facilities, including the USS Gerald R. Ford, Naval Health Clinic Quantico, and WRNMMC, and served as an oral and maxillofacial surgery consultant to Congress. He also treated patients at Charleston Area Medical Center, R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center, and Suburban Hospital.
Dr. Uhrich holds a doctorate in dental medicine from the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from the University of Virginia, and completed his surgical residency at WRNMMC. He also has a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering from Yale University.
Keeping it within a democracy is a great idea.
Helsing AI is building an operating system for warfare and says it’ll only ever sell to democracies.
We’re not at the scope of usage Cameron is anxious about yet, but we don’t have to imagine what AI’s role in the military could look like hypothetically—it’s already starting to happen. The U.S. Department of Defense is already investigating moves to create an archive of military data to use as part of what it sees as an escalating digital arms race with other nations, and the eventual weaponization of such technology. Not that Cameron himself hasn’t already thought about that extensively in his own filmmaking career already, of course.
“I warned you guys in 1984 and you didn’t listen,” the director not-so-jokingly added. But you know, hopefully we get protections for actors, writers, directors, and other creatives against generative AI replacements before we have to worry too much about someone making Skynet. Hopefully.
I gotta admit although effective and innovative, it’s also kinda creepy.
Last year, Monash University scientists created the “DishBrain” – a semi-biological computer chip with some 800,000 human and mouse brain cells lab-grown into its electrodes. Demonstrating something like sentience, it learned to play Pong within five minutes.
The micro-electrode array at the heart of the DishBrain was capable both of reading activity in the brain cells, and stimulating them with electrical signals, so the research team set up a version of Pong where the brain cells were fed a moving electrical stimulus to represent which side of the “screen” the ball was on, and how far away from the paddle it was. They allowed the brain cells to act on the paddle, moving it left and right.
Then they set up a very basic-reward system, using the fact that small clusters of brain cells tend to try to minimize unpredictability in their environment. So if the paddle hit the ball, the cells would receive a nice, predictable stimulus. But if it missed, the cells would get four seconds of totally unpredictable stimulation.
Posted in media & arts, military, robotics/AI
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Robots play an ever greater role in every aspect of our lives, including the battlefield, but what will their role be in the wars of the future?
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Credits:
Robots & Warfare.
Episode 403a, July 16, 2023
Written, Produced & Narrated by:
Isaac Arthur.
Music Courtesy of:
Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Markus Junnikkala, “We Roam the Stars“
Stellardrone, “Red Giant”, “Between the Rings“
Miguel Johnson, “Far From Home”, “So Many Stars“
Aerium, “Fifth Star of Aldebaran”
Flying cars. Space tourism. Safe reentry for astronauts coming back from Mars.
These technologies are still science fiction, but some won’t be for much longer, according to Charles “Mike” Fremaux, NASA Langley Research Center’s chief engineer for intelligent flight systems.
To test these concepts, particularly in regard to public and military safety, NASA Langley is building its first new wind tunnel in over 40 years. The NASA Flight Dynamic Research Facility, a project Fremaux has been pursuing for 25 years, will replace two smaller wind tunnels that are around 80 years old. The center’s most recent and largest, the National Transonic Facility, was built in 1980.
