Though the disease was eradicated decades ago, national security experts fear that stocks of the virus in labs could be released as a bioweapon.
Category: security – Page 128
The Nuclear Reactor Renaissance: Space Exploration and National Security
The nuclear power sector is seeing a resurgence in innovation, supported by new policies and emerging technologies. The general public and various governments are starting to grasp the value of nuclear power as an alternative, sustainable energy source. Unlike renewables, such as wind and solar power, nuclear energy is not dependent on weather conditions for power generation, having a capacity factor of over 90 percent. Nuclear power is also more eco-friendly than natural gas and coal and its “carbon-free” attributes are seen as critical in the fight against climate change.
For decades, advancements in the nuclear power sector have been incremental and focused largely on making systems “walk away safe.” Today, the industry is pushing the boundaries and exploring applications for nuclear power in ways that have never before been considered.
BWXT is at the forefront of this nuclear renaissance. This 6,000-employee company operates on the model of letting capital drive strategy. BWXT is constantly evaluating new ways to ensure workers, funding, and policies are utilized in the most effective way possible. The company also analyzes the needs of numerous other industries to determine how nuclear power could provide innovative solutions.
I never said that! High-tech deception of ‘deepfake’ videos
WASHINGTON — Hey, did my congressman really say that? Is that really President Trump on that video, or am I being duped?
New technology on the internet lets anyone make videos of real people appearing to say things they’ve never said. Republicans and Democrats predict this high-tech way of putting words in someone’s mouth will become the latest weapon in disinformation wars against the United States and other Western democracies.
We’re not talking about lip-syncing videos. This technology uses facial mapping and artificial intelligence to produce videos that appear so genuine it’s hard to spot the phonies. Lawmakers and intelligence officials worry that the bogus videos — called deepfakes — could be used to threaten national security or interfere in elections.
Zoltan Istvan: It Goes beyond Human
I’m excited to share my interview with Jakub Dymek on #transhumanism in the new edition of The Aspen Institute (Eastern Europe) quarterly Aspen Review magazine.
Let’s think about this: what happens when sometime in the future the whole generation of Chinese kids have higher IQs than their American peers, because they’re technologically hardwired for that? Will this be a national security issue? This is a global security issue—says Zoltan Istvan in an interview with Jakub Dymek.
JAKUB DYMEK: You are a transhumanist—member of a movement endorsing technologically augmented advancement of human species and using technology to extend our capabilities. What does transhumanist thinking bring into the world of policy debate in the US and worldwide and how politically influential it is?
ZOLTAN ISTVAN: Transhumanism influences politics today only a little bit. But at the same time, transhumanist movement grows exponentially, like 1000% every year. So I think its implications for the policy debate here in the US and globally will only grow in scale and importance, obviously. Transhumanism can define policy debate of the future, of that I’m sure. President Trump can say today that manufacturing jobs and jobs in general are lost because of immigrants. But he wouldn’t be able to say the same thing up until 2020 campaign, because it’s simply not true, and more people realize the simple fact that jobs aren’t lost to immigration, but automation. It’s tech “stealing the jobs” he is going to have to say then. And you cannot build a wall to stop technology from spreading. This is how transhumanism is already shaping this debate. And it goes beyond jobs.
Trump’s ‘Space Force’ could fuel a new $1 trillion economy, Morgan Stanley says
Space is the next frontier for war.
- President Donald Trump’s proposed “Space Force” could help fuel the $1 trillion intergalactic economy, Morgan Stanley says.
- The bank is tracking 100 private companies poised to profit from interstellar industries.
If President Donald Trump successfully organizes his so-called Space Force, it could speed up investment in what Morgan Stanley sees as the next trillion-dollar economy.
In a note to clients Friday, the bank doubled down on its intergalactic thesis from last October, saying the Space Force “could address critical vulnerabilities in national security, raising investor awareness in the formation of what we see as the next trillion-dollar economy.”
10 Charts That Will Change Your Perspective On Artificial Intelligence’s Growth
- There has been a 14X increase in the number of active AI startups since 2000. Crunchbase, VentureSource, and Sand Hill Econometrics were also used for completing this analysis with AI startups in Crunchbase cross-referenced to venture-backed companies in the VentureSource database. Any venture-backed companies from the Crunchbase list that were identified in the VentureSource database were included.
- The share of jobs requiring AI skills has grown 4.5X since 2013., The growth of the share of US jobs requiring AI skills on the Indeed.com platform was calculated by first identifying AI-related jobs using titles and keywords in descriptions. Job growth is a calculated as a multiple of the share of jobs on the Indeed platform that required AI skills in the U.S. starting in January 2013. The study also calculated the growth of the share of jobs requiring AI skills on the Indeed.com platform, by country. Despite the rapid growth of the Canada and UK. AI job markets, Indeed.com reports they are respectively still 5% and 27% of the absolute size of the US AI job market.
- Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are the three most in-demand skills on Monster.com. Just two years ago NLP had been predicted to be the most in-demand skill for application developers creating new AI apps. In addition to skills creating AI apps, machine learning techniques, Python, Java, C++, experience with open source development environments, Spark, MATLAB, and Hadoop are the most in-demand skills. Based on an analysis of Monster.com entries as of today, the median salary is $127,000 in the U.S. for Data Scientists, Senior Data Scientists, Artificial Intelligence Consultants and Machine Learning Managers.
- Error rates for image labeling have fallen from 28.5% to below 2.5% since 2010. AI’s inflection point for Object Detection task of the Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (LSVRC) Competition occurred in 2014. On this specific test, AI is now more accurate than human These findings are from the competition data from the leaderboards for each LSVRC competition hosted on the ImageNet website.
- Internationally, robot imports have risen from around 100,000 in 2000 to around 250,000 in 2015. The data displayed is the number of industrial robots imported each year into North America and Internationally. Industrial robots are defined by the ISO 8373:2012 standard. International Data Corporation (IDC) expects robotics spending to accelerate over the five-year forecast period, reaching $230.7B in 2021, attaining a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 22.8%.
- Global revenues from AI for enterprise applications is projected to grow from $1.62B in 2018 to $31.2B in 2025 attaining a 52.59% CAGR in the forecast period. Image recognition and tagging, patient data processing, localization and mapping, predictive maintenance, use of algorithms and machine learning to predict and thwart security threats, intelligent recruitment, and HR systems are a few of the many enterprise application use cases predicted to fuel the projected rapid growth of AI in the enterprise. Source: Statista.
- 84% of enterprises believe investing in AI will lead to greater competitive advantages. 75% believe that AI will open up new businesses while also providing competitors new ways to gain access to their markets. 63% believe the pressure to reduce costs will require the use of AI. Source: Statista.
- 87% of current AI adopters said they were using or considering using AI for sales forecasting and for improving e-mail marketing. 61% of all respondents said that they currently used or were planning to use AI for sales forecasting. The following graphic compares adoption rates of current AI adopters versus all respondents. Source: Statista.
Edward Snowden: ‘The people are still powerless, but now they’re aware’
Developers at major technology companies, outraged by the Snowden disclosures, started pushing back. Some, such as those at WhatsApp, which was bought by Facebook a year after the story broke, implemented their own encryption. Others, such as Yahoo’s Alex Stamos, quit rather than support further eavesdropping. (Stamos is now the head of security at Facebook.)
Five years after historic NSA leaks, whistleblower tells the Guardian he has no regrets.
Mon 4 Jun 2018 13.00 EDT Last modified on Tue 5 Jun 2018 04.46 EDT.
The Trump Self-Defense Doctrine for the New Space Era
A new space era is dawning and will be upon us by the early 2020s. In the face of emerging novel threats and vulnerabilities, whether the self-defense doctrine allows us to counter the threat before the attack occurs can make the difference between peace and war.
President Trump unveiled the America First National Space Strategy on March 23 covering both commercial and civil space, and national security space. This important document has drawn few comments, which are typified by the observation of Spacepolicyonline.com founder and editor Marcia Smith that “the Trump strategy contains little that is new.”
Indeed, most of the national security provisions, which are the focus of this article, are only different in rhetoric but not in substance from those of the Obama administration and it’s predecessors. However, that they are the same is fine because they are equally essential for the new space era.
Quantum Computing Key Could Protect Blockchain Security
Although blockchain is traditionally seen as secure, it is vulnerable to attack from quantum computers. Now, a team of Russian researchers say they have developed a solution to the quantum-era blockchain challenge, using quantum key distribution (QKD).
Quantum computers are different from binary digital electronic computers based on transistors. Whereas common digital computing requires that the data be encoded into binary digits (bits), each of which is always in one of two definite states (0 or 1), quantum computation uses quantum bits, which can have more by being in superpositions of states.
Writing in the journal Quantum Science and Technology, the researchers set out a quantum-safe blockchain platform that uses QKD to achieve secure authentication.