Lifeboat Foundation

Peace and love on this Memorial Day to those who served and gave their lives for freedom. My interview a while back with Express is still right on.track about the future of military and how most human soldier casualties will be a thing of the past.

THERE will be no longer be human casualties of war from wealthy countries within 10 years as advanced militaries will begin sending MACHINES to warzones, an expert has claimed.

The research agency hopes its XS-1 jumpstarts a whole new industry of very-low-cost satellite launches.

Boeing did such a good job plotting out the commercial future of a reusable satellite-launching plane that they’re going to get to build it — and just maybe, launch a whole new low-cost satellite industry.

Continue reading “DARPA Picks Boeing To Build Its New Space Plane” »

Rethink Robotics co-founder and CTO, former CSAIL director and all-around robot luminary Rodney Brooks joined the Disrupt New York stage this afternoon to tackle some complex questions, ranging from robots place in the living room to the battlefield.

Brooks has a fair bit of experience in both categories, as a cofounder of iRobot, whose product offerings have ranging from vacuuming to bomb diffusion. And while his current company deals more in the realm of factory automation, a number of these ethical issues still clearly weigh heavily on the Australian roboticist.

It was a question about whether robots should be considered unfit for any human tasks that really caused Brooks to ponder their place in the world.

Continue reading “‘A robot doesn’t have to shoot back,’ Rodney Brooks says of machines in the military” »

These fighter jets can fly themselves.

Biological systems don’t completely freeze up when they encounter a new situation, but computers often do.

Biological organisms are pretty good at navigating life’s unpredictability, but computers are embarrassingly bad at it.

That’s the crux of a new military research program that aims to model artificially intelligent systems after the brains of living creatures. When an organism encounters a new environment or situation, it relies on past experience to help it make a decision. Current artificial intelligence technology, on the other hand, relies on extensive training on various data sets, and if it hasn’t encountered a specific situation, it can’t select a next step.

Continue reading “DARPA Wants Artificial Intelligence That Doesn’t Forget Everything It Knows” »

Tracked Combat Vehicles

Multi-Utility Tactical Transport (MUTT)

Continue reading “Futuristic Warfare” »

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) — The U.S. military’s experimental X-37B space plane landed on Sunday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, completing a classified mission that lasted nearly two years, the Air Force said.

The unmanned X-37B, which resembles a miniature space shuttle, touched down at 7:47 a.m. EDT (1147 GMT) on a runway formerly used for landings of the now-mothballed space shuttles, the Air Force said in an email.

Continue reading “Unmanned U.S. Air Force space plane lands after secret, two-year mission” »

Without even realizing it, soldiers could soon be training robot sharpshooters to take their jobs.

Modern sensors can see farther than humans. Electronic circuits can shoot faster than nerves and muscles can pull a trigger. Humans still outperform armed robots in knowing what to shoot at — but new research funded in part by the Army may soon narrow that gap.

Researchers from DCS Corp and the Army Research Lab fed datasets of human brain waves into a neural network — a type of artificial intelligence — which learned to recognize when a human is making a targeting decision. They presented their paper on it at the annual Intelligent User Interface conference in Cyprus in March.

Continue reading “The Military is Using Human Brain Waves to Teach Robots How to Shoot” »

The DARPA Targeted Neuroplasticity Training (TNT) program is exploring ways to speed up skill acquisition by activating synaptic plasticity. If the program succeeds, downloadable learning that happens in a flash may be the result.

In March 2016, DARPA — the U.S. military’s “mad science” branch — announced their Targeted Neuroplasticity Training (TNT) program. The TNT program aims to explore various safe neurostimulation methods for activating synaptic plasticity, which is the brain’s ability to alter the connecting points between neurons — a requirement for learning. DARPA hopes that building up that ability by subjecting the nervous system to a kind of workout regimen will enable the brain to learn more quickly.