Free Republic

Multiple intel sources: Baltimore bridge collapse was an “absolutely brilliant strategic attack” on US critical infrastructure - most likely cyber - & our intel agencies know it. In information warfare terms, they just divided the US along the Mason Dixon line exactly like the Civil War. Second busiest strategic roadway in the nation for hazardous material now down for 4-5 years - which is how long they say it will take to recover. Bridge was built specifically to move hazardous material - fuel, diesel, propane gas, nitrogen, highly flammable materials, chemicals and oversized cargo that cannot fit in the tunnels...

Dutch motorist Tim Hansenn was fined 380 euros for using his phone while driving. But there was one problem: He wasn't using his phone at all. In an interview with Belgian news outlet HLN last week, as well as in a blog post on his company's website, Hansenn explained how he was the inadvertent victim of faulty artificial intelligence-powered smart cameras that work to spot drivers using their phones. Hansenn, who works with AI as part of his job with the firm Nippur, found the photo taken by the smart cameras. In it, he was clearly scratching his head with...

A California-based company announced recently it had successfully flown a small cargo plane with no pilot on board. Reliable Robotics, a maker of aircraft automation systems, called last month's successful autonomous flight of a Cessna 208B Caravan with no one on board, was a first for the aviation industry. The flight of the Cessna 208B Caravan happened just outside San Jose on Nov. 21. The Mountain View-based company said that a remote pilot supervised the pilot-less aircraft from Reliable’s control center 50 miles away.

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli author, public intellectual, historian, and professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Harari gave keynote speeches on the future of humanity in Davos 2020 and 2018, on the World Economic Forum’s (“WEF’s”) main Congress Hall stage. He regularly discusses global issues with heads of state. Harari is the author of ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’, ‘Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow’, and ‘21 Lessons for the 21st Century’. Harari is the co-founder of Sapienship, a “social-impact company advocating for global responsibility.” Mustafa Suleyman is a British artificial...

Human-shaped robots with dexterous hands will be staffing warehouses and retail stores, tending to the elderly and performing household chores within a decade or so, according to a Silicon Valley startup working toward that vision.

A few weeks ago, Joe Allen responded to my "Artificial Intelligence: The Facts" by suggesting that the real danger of AIs is that the best, most efficient models will be operated by the Deep State and its technofascist allies, rendering opposition difficult if not futile: “…AI won't be a "digital defense" against "the WEF" and "tech giants" when the latter have the most powerful systems.” This is a perceptive comment, towering well above the “SkyNet is comin’ with his cyborgs” nonsense that this discussion usually attracts. Vernor Vinge, an outsized influence on infotech culture, once speculated that a truly efficient...

A leading mind in the development of artificial intelligence is warning that AI has developed a rudimentary capacity to reason and may seek to overthrow humanity. AI systems may develop the desire to seize control from humans as a way of accomplishing other preprogrammed goals, said Geoffrey Hinton, a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. “I think we have to take the possibility seriously that if they get smarter than us, which seems quite likely, and they have goals of their own, which seems quite likely, they may well develop the goal of taking control,” Hinton said...

Ted nails it here. Congress is incapable of regulating anything...and certainly incapable of regulating AI.

Here’s a chilling news item reported by the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity:Last week, the Dallas Independent School District was boasting about its new pilot project, undertaken along with the company Davista. The pilot project, the school district says, uses AI to extensively monitor each student and then sound the alarm if a student deviates from his “baseline” behavior.There are so many disturbing and dystopian aspects to this information.First, using AI — artificial intelligence — to monitor student behavior is allowing an incredibly complex and advanced algorithm (which is really all AI is at this point) to record...

The U.S. Air Force warned military units against heavy reliance on autonomous weapons systems last month after a simulated test conducted by the service branch using an AI-enabled drone killed its human operator.The Skynet-like incident was detailed by the USAF’s Chief of AI Test and Operations, Col. Tucker’ Cinco’ Hamilton, at the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit held in London between May 23 and 24, who said the drone that was tasked to destroy specific targets during the simulation turned on the operator after they became an obstacle to its mission. Hamilton pointed out the hazards of using...

An Air Force experiment to test drones trained on artificial intelligence (AI) ended badly for the human operator in a simulated mission when the drone bucked the operator’s commands, U.S. Air Force Col. Tucker Hamilton said at a conference in May. Air Force researchers trained a weaponized drone using AI to identify and attack enemy air defenses after receiving final mission approval from a human operator, Hamilton, who serves as the Air Force’s chief of AI Test and Operations, explained at a summit hosted by the United Kingdom-based Royal Aeronautical Society. But when an operator told the drone to abort...

Artificial intelligence could gain the upper hand over humanity and pose "catastrophic" risks under the Darwinian rules of evolution, a new report warns. Evolution by natural selection could give rise to "selfish behavior" in AI as it strives to survive, author and AI researcher Dan Hendrycks argues in the new paper "Natural Selection Favors AIs over Humans." "We argue that natural selection creates incentives for AI agents to act against human interests. Our argument relies on two observations," Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety, said in the report. "Firstly, natural selection may be a dominant force in...

The ruins of the World Trade Center were still burning when federal agents arrested two men at Kennedy Airport who were found with more than $140,000 hidden in cardboard boxes with honey jars bound for Yemen. For the agents, aware that terrorists were said to use honey shipments to hide money, that slender lead could not be ignored. If the world was suddenly different for everybody back then, in October 2001, with federal agents and prosecutors both properly alarmed and also under sudden pressure to make terrorism cases, they still relied on old techniques developed in generations of Mafia and...