Lifeboat Foundation

We had a wonderful group of international and interdisciplinary speakers at Saint Mary’s University on March 31 to April 1, 2017. They all took time out from their very busy schedules to come to Halifax to discuss robots and artificial intelligence at the Cyborg Futures Workshop. Academics from literary theory, digital culture, anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, robotics, and evolutionary biology, along with students and the public, convened for a lively discussion about technologies that are impacting us all.

This workshop is part of a larger SSHRC-funded project–Where Science Meets Fiction: Social Robots and the Ethical Imagination–that is about shifting the conversation about robots and AI, which has been animated by fiction but dominated in the real world by the military and industry. Opening the discussion up to wider social and cultural contexts–from the impact of technology on human relations; to non-human animals, the environment and trash; to racism, imperialism and misogyny; to automation, labour and capitalism; to killer robots and the military; to the problematic collapse of science and fiction—this workshop considered both the infrastructure currently being laid that is forcing us down a troubling path and imaginative alternatives to it. What follows cannot possibly do justice to the richness and complexity of the talks, so please click on the hyperlinks to listen to them.

An explosive material fabricated with a highly porous structure is inactive but is easily “switched on” when filled with water.

Despite great effort, researchers have failed to find ways to make explosives entirely safe during storage yet still easily usable when needed. Now a research team has demonstrated an explosive with these properties by creating a highly porous structure for their explosive material [1]. The voids prevent the structure from supporting a sustained propagating wave of detonation, but filling the voids with water can quickly restore the explosive capacity. The researchers hope this technique can provide safer explosives for use in areas such as mining and oil exploration.

Storing highly explosive materials is inherently risky—in the military world, for example, over 500 accidental explosions occurred at munitions sites between 1979 and 2013, according to a survey [2]. These materials could be safer if they could be easily switched between an explosive-ready state and a “safe” state. “A switchable explosive is the holy grail of explosives research,” says chemist Alexander Mueller of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He and his colleagues believe that they are the first to achieve it.

Rockets and their engines have long been of interest for both space exploration and military use—including for powering hypersonic weapons.

While the world’s major powers are locked in an arms race to develop the best and most advanced hypersonic weapons, missiles capable of flying faster than Mach 5 and are thus able to defeat missile defense systems and radars, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been flying at these speeds for more than a decade.

The history of hypersonics go back much, much further than the 21st century. Nazi Germany’s V-2 rockets were able to reach speeds of Mach 4.3 after takeoff, but when they struck targets, they were often exceeding Mach 5. By 1949, the United States had adopted German rocket technology, which allowed rockets to exceed Mach 5 on takeoff for the first time.

Through this development, the U.S. was able to build its intercontinental ballistic missile arsenal, all of which were capable of speeds above Mach 5 upon reentry. It wasn’t until 1980 that hypersonic research began to focus on glide maneuvering and carrying people. This led to the creation of the X-15 rocket plane, a manned craft that could reach those speeds but was launched from a B-52 “mother ship.” An X-15 holds the official world record for the highest speed ever recorded by a crewed, powered aircraft when it reached Mach 6.7 in 1967.

To check that atomic weapons work, scientists run simulations of explosions using high-energy lasers—and Russia is building the strongest one of all.

But as I describe in my book “Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life,” even before humanmade batteries started generating electric current, electric fishes, such as the saltwater torpedo fish (Torpedo torpedo) of the Mediterranean and especially the various freshwater electric eel species of South America (order Gymnotiformes) were well known to produce electrical outputs of stunning proportions. In fact, electric fishes inspired Volta to conduct the original research that ultimately led to his battery, and today’s battery scientists still look to these electrifying animals for ideas.

Prior to Volta’s battery, the only way for people to generate electricity was to rub various materials together, typically silk on glass, and to capture the resulting static electricity. This was neither an easy nor practical way to generate useful electrical power.

Continue reading “How electric eels inspired the first battery two centuries ago” »

Regeneration, Resuscitation & Biothreat Countermeasures — Commander Dr. Jean-Paul Chretien, MD, Ph.D., Program Manager, Biological Technology Office, DARPA

Commander Dr. Jean-Paul Chretien, MD, Ph.D. (https://www.darpa.mil/staff/cdr-jean-paul-chretien) is a Program Manager in the Biological Technology Office at DARPA, where his research interests include disease and injury prevention, operational medicine, and biothreat countermeasures. He is also responsible for running the DARPA Triage Challenge (https://triagechallenge.darpa.mil/).

Continue reading “CDR Dr. Jean-Paul Chretien — DARPA BTO — Regeneration, Resuscitation And Biothreat Countermeasures” »

In December 2019, the United States established its new space force: the United States Space Force. A logical step in a globalized and digitized world whose infrastructure depends on satellites in space. This infrastructure is under threat. Also by a resurgence of conflict between East and West. This episode of Spacetime describes how the military conquered space and why the world is in a new arms race in Earth orbit.

#documentary #spacetime #usa.

Continue reading “SPACE FORCE: The Secret Orbit — Arms Race in Space | SpaceTime — WELT Documentary” »

Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer fired for violating the company’s confidentiality policy, has now expressed concerns about the risks associated with AI-driven chatbots like Microsoft’s Bing AI.

The latest AI models, according to him, are the most potent technological advancement since the atomic bomb and can alter the course of history fundamentally.