Lifeboat Foundation

Are U.S. killer drones headed to the Philippines? There are already U.S. special operators fighting ISIS there. There could soon be American drones carrying out airstrikes there, too, according to a plan under consideration inside the Pentagon, NBC News reported Monday. “The authority to strike ISIS targets as part of collective self-defense could be granted as part of an official military operation that may be named as early as Tuesday, said the officials. The strikes would likely be conducted by armed drones.”

SecState Rex Tillerson gave the pitch some momentum Monday in Manila when he said the U.S. was providing the Philippine government “some recent transfers of a couple of Cessnas and a couple of UAVs (drones) to allow to them to have better information with which to conduct the fight down there.”

And in a bid to cut off concerns over working even more closely with alleged human rights abuser Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Tillerson said that’s pretty much just not an issue right now: “I see no conflict at all in our helping them with that situation and our views of other human rights concerns we have with respect to how they carry out their counternarcotics activities.” More from NBC News, here.

Continue reading “US drones to the Philippines?; Spy planes over the US; AI tool to detect fake video; US bases get OK to down unknown drones; and just a bit more…” »

Just weeks after one research team appeared to put words in a leader’s mouth, here comes a new tool that can check questionable video for a pulse.

A recent demonstration showing how easy it is to spoof video of a world leader recently made headlines, foretelling a future where robot-created videos cause political and financial havoc. But now comes word of an antidote. On Monday, a group of computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute published new research showing how algorithms can tell whether the person on-screen has a human heartbeat. The technique will help future intelligence analysts, journalists, or just scared television viewers detect the difference between spoofed video and the real thing.

Continue reading “AI Will Make Fake News Video — and Fight It As Well” »

Dr. Oliver Medvedik, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, and Dr. Alexandra Stolzing discuss.

Japanese tech giant SoftBank has been plowing billions of dollars into tech companies, both public and privately held, in the last year — so much so that one investor has questioned whether SoftBank is fueling a new valuation bubble in tech.

Some of these investments are coming from the gigantic SoftBank Vision Fund, which includes funds from SoftBank as well as Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and tech companies like Apple, Foxconn, Qualcomm and Sharp. The fund announced in May that it had closed $93 billion in capital, and hopes to raise $100 billion by the end of the year.

But SoftBank has also announced many investments that don’t involve the Vision Fund. According to reports and sources familiar, some of these investments will be offered to the Vision Fund, while others will not.

Continue reading “SoftBank is plowing billions into tech companies: Here’s a list of investments so far” »

Are we near a future of “designer babies”?

Via NBC News MACH

Image © CERN

A Chinese garment company is partnering with American robotics to use Sewbots in manufacturing. How many people will this new innovation put out of work?

One of the world’s foremost authorities on artificial intelligence lays out how he thinks society will change over the next 30 years as the technology becomes commonplace.

Some of the world’s most renowned scientists are questioning whether the cosmos has an inner life similar to our own.