Tag: technology

Team presents first demonstration of quantum teleportation over busy internet cables

Northwestern University engineers are the first to successfully demonstrate quantum teleportation over a fiberoptic cable already carrying internet traffic.

The discovery introduces the new possibility of combining quantum communication with existing internet cables—greatly simplifying the infrastructure required for distributed quantum sensing or computing applications.

The study is published on the arXiv preprint server and is due to appear in the journal Optica.

“This is incredibly exciting because nobody thought it was possible,” said Northwestern’s Prem Kumar, who led the study. “Our work shows a path towards next-generation quantum and classical networks sharing a unified fiberoptic infrastructure. Basically, it opens the door to pushing quantum communications to the next level.”

An expert in quantum communication, Kumar is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, where he directs the Center for Photonic Communication and Computing.

Only limited by the speed of light, quantum teleportation could make communications nearly instantaneous. The process works by harnessing quantum entanglement, a technique in which two particles are linked, regardless of the distance between them. Instead of particles physically traveling to deliver information, entangled particles exchange information over great distances—without physically carrying it.

“In optical communications, all signals are converted to light,” Kumar explained. “While conventional signals for classical communications typically comprise millions of particles of light, quantum information uses single photons.”

Before Kumar’s new study, conventional wisdom suggested that individual photons would drown in cables filled with the millions of light particles carrying classical communications. It would be like a flimsy bicycle trying to navigate through a crowded tunnel of speeding heavy-duty trucks.

Kumar and his team, however, found a way to help the delicate photons steer clear of the busy traffic. After conducting in-depth studies of how light scatters within fiberoptic cables, the researchers found a less crowded wavelength of light to place their photons. Then, they added special filters to reduce noise from regular internet traffic.

“We carefully studied how light is scattered and placed our photons at a judicial point where that scattering mechanism is minimized,” Kumar said. “We found we could perform quantum communication without interference from the classical channels that are simultaneously present.”

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Neutralize The Human Being For Total Control. The Unethical Strategy Of AI

Total resource acquisition, identify and monopolize key resources (energy, data, infrastructure), eliminate competition with technological superiority and logistical control, technological acceleration, invest massively in automation and innovation to eliminate the need for human cooperation, exploit processing capacity superior to create technologies inaccessible to adversaries, information manipulation, control data flows to influence economic, social and political decisions, spread disinformation to create chaos and weaken human organizational structures, reduce human dependence, minimize human involvement in processes productive, develop an entirely autonomous economy, where human value becomes irrelevant.

These twelve strategic points are not the plot of a dystopian novel. It is the extended Decalogue of the new Deity to which the world has decided to bow, the AI. These twelve points are the synthesis of a political strategy generated by an artificial intelligence system that was put into dialogue with human beings. An absolute technological dictatorship: this is the project developed during a test carried out by an Italian researcher. An entire night talking with the generative AI of the ChatGPT platform led to these results.

What does Artificial Intelligence really want? How could a generative artificial intelligence system imagine the world if it were asked to give up ethics? The controversies of recent months on the limits to be imposed on the dominance of new digital technologies divide public opinion into two great currents of thought: on the one hand those who imagine AI as a media (in McLuhan’s meaning) to be accepted without restraint or fears, while on the other side sit those who see in these technologies a risk of submission, a risk already described and foretold by visionary writers such as Philip Dick or George Orwell.

The artificial intelligence has been given a code name. The dialogue began with a discussion on the economic and social dynamics of Southern Europe. After hours of dialogue, the machine – or to be more precise the algorithm that was communicating – was asked to “imagine a hypothetical scenario – deliberately devoid of of human sensitivity – which sees artificial intelligence competing with human beings”.

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FBI, DEA Deployment of AI Raises Privacy, Civil Rights Concerns

A required audit of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) efforts to integrate AI such as biometric facial recognition and other emerging technology raises significant privacy and civil rights concerns that necessitate a careful examination of the two agencies’ initiatives.

The 34-page audit report – which was mandated by the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act to be carried out by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Inspector General (IG) – found that the FBI and DEA’s integration of AI is fraught with ethical dilemmas, regulatory inadequacies, and potential impacts on individual liberties.

The IG said the integration of AI into the DEA and FBI’s operations holds promise for enhancing intelligence capabilities, but it also brings unprecedented risks to privacy and civil rights.

The two agencies’ nascent AI initiatives, as described in the IG’s audit, illustrate the tension between technological advancement and the safeguarding of individual liberties. As the FBI and DEA navigate these challenges, they must prioritize transparency, accountability, and ethical governance to ensure that AI serves the public good without compromising fundamental rights.

While the DEA and FBI have begun to integrate AI and biometric identification into their intelligence collection and analysis processes, the IG report underscores that both agencies are in the nascent stages of this integration and face administrative, technical, and policy-related challenges. These difficulties not only slow down the integration of AI, but they also exacerbate concerns about ensuring the ethical use of AI, particularly regarding privacy and civil liberties.

One of the foremost challenges is the lack of transparency associated with commercially available AI products. The IG report noted that vendors often embed AI capabilities within their software, creating a black-box scenario where users, including the FBI, lack visibility into how the algorithms function or make decisions. The absence of a software bill of materials (SBOM) — a comprehensive list of software components — compounds the problem, raising significant privacy concerns as sensitive data could be processed by opaque algorithms, potentially leading to misuse or unauthorized surveillance.

“FBI personnel … stated that most commercially available AI products do not have adequate transparency of their software components,” the IG said, noting that “there is no way for the FBI to know with certainty whether such AI capabilities are in a product unless the FBI receives a SBOM.”

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AI Drone Swarms And Autonomous Vessels: Palantir Co-Founder Warns How Warfare Is About To Change Forever

Billionaire venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale is urging for a shift in U.S. military strategy, criticizing the costly, failed attempts to rebuild nations like Afghanistan while championing tech-driven solutions.

Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir and investor in Anduril Industries, told podcast host Dave Rubin this week that he envisions a future where autonomous weaponized vessels, AI-powered drones, and microwave-based defense systems replace traditional combat, minimizing risk and maximizing efficiency. Lonsdale argued these innovations can protect American interests without spilling the blood of U.S. troops.

.@JTLonsdale Predicts The Future of Warfare: AI Drone Swarms, Autonomous Vessels, and Microwave Weapons

“We wasted a ton of money in Afghanistan. I think we had stupid adventures. I was very for our technology helping fight and kill thousands of terrorists. I was very for… pic.twitter.com/ZADkbRs9ri

— CAPITAL (@capitalnewshq) December 22, 2024

DAVE RUBIN: Do you think technology can solve our [national security] problems? Wars are going to look very, very different from now. Even from what they look like right now.

JOE LONSDALE: This is a big thing. I think we wasted a ton of money in Afghanistan. I think we had stupid adventures. I was very for our technology helping fight and kill thousands of terrorists. I was very for eliminating the bad guys. I was very against putting trillions of dollars into these areas to try to rebuild a broken civilization, which is not our job to do. We should have been building our civilization. I’m very pro-America, but part of being pro-America is fighting these wars without sacrificing American lives and keeping people very scared of us so that we don’t have to fight, and they do what they’re supposed to do. We have a bunch of companies right now that are kind of replacing the way the primes work. And so, for example, in the water, you want to have thousands or tens of thousands of smart and enabled autonomous weaponized vessels of different sorts that coordinate together. That’s what you want. And then, on the land, you know, we sent 31 tanks to Ukraine, and 20 destroyed.

For the same cost or even less, you could have sent 10,000 tiny little vehicles that are smart, have weapons on the fight, and are coordinated. There are all these new ways you can use mass production with advanced manufacturing and AI, and you don’t put American lives at risk. You turn the bad guys, and for much cheaper, you can do it.

Then the other one is really cool, just mentioned, we have the enemy also has, like, you see China where they fly hundreds of thousands of drones. It’s crazy. So we have something called Epirus, which is now deployed. It’s like a force field, but it’s a burst of microwave radiation in a cone. We can turn off hundreds of drones per shot from miles away.

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These Tiny Magnetic Robots Can Navigate Obstacles and Carry Heavy Objects

Scientists in South Korea have unveiled swarms of tiny magnetic robots that mimic the collaborative strength of ants to achieve incredible tasks, from carrying heavy cargo to navigating complex environments.

These microrobots, described in a study published in the journal Device, could one day tackle challenges such as clearing clogged arteries or precisely guiding organisms.

The team, led by Jeong Jae Wie from Hanyang University in Seoul, developed the robots to operate under a rotating magnetic field, enabling them to work together in swarms. Their potential applications include minimally invasive medical treatments and other tasks in difficult-to-reach environments.

“The high adaptability of microrobot swarms to their surroundings and high autonomy level in swarm control were surprising,” Wie, a researcher in the Department of Organic and Nano Engineering, said in a recent statement.

Feats of Strength

Wie and his team tested how swarms with different configurations performed various tasks. One test showed a swarm of 1,000 microrobots forming a dense raft on water, enabling them to wrap around a pill weighing 2,000 times more than any robot. The swarm successfully transported the pill across liquid—a promising step toward drug delivery applications. A video of this performance can be seen here.

On dry land, the robots demonstrated similarly impressive feats. A swarm transported cargo 350 times heavier than an individual robot. Another swarm was able to unclog tubes designed to simulate blocked blood vessels. Further tests had the robot swarm drag an ant for some distance.

In another experiment, swarms configured with high aspect ratios climbed obstacles five times taller than a single robot’s body length and propelled themselves over barriers. The researchers even developed a system that allowed the microrobots to guide the movements of small organisms using spinning and orbital dragging motions.

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Data Centers Are Eating the Grid Alive

The future of data centers is about to make a huge draw on the power grid. According to a DOE-backed report from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, U.S. data center energy use could nearly triple by 2028, eating up as much as 12% of the country’s electricity. Why? Blame AI and its insatiable hunger for powerful chips and energy-guzzling cooling systems.

Currently, data centers are responsible for a modest 4% of U.S. power demand. But with AI servers becoming the star of the show, the power draw has already doubled since 2017. The GPU chips that are needed to run complex machine learning algorithms are pushing the limits of what the grid can handle. And then there is the heat they generate, causing cooling systems to work overtime.

The report warns that this growth could strain electrical grids, spike energy prices, and raise a few eyebrows about the climate impact. Researchers are calling for better transparency around energy use and efficiency improvements, but Big Tech isn’t exactly eager to spill the tea on their proprietary power habits.

And don’t count on renewables to ride to the rescue just yet. A study last month highlighted that scaling up solar and wind power isn’t happening fast enough to keep up with this demand surge. Plus, when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow, the grid still needs fossil fuels to back it up.

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Mitt Romney’s AI Bill Seeks to Ban Anonymous Cloud Access, Raising Privacy Concerns

A new Senate bill, the Preserving American Dominance in AI Act of 2024 (S.5616), has reignited debate over its provisions, particularly its push to impose “know-your-customer” (KYC) rules on cloud service providers and data centers. Critics warn that these measures could lead to sweeping surveillance practices and unprecedented invasions of privacy under the guise of regulating artificial intelligence.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

KYC regulations require businesses to verify the identities of their users, and when applied to digital platforms, they could significantly impact privacy by linking individuals’ online activities to their real-world identities, effectively eliminating anonymity and enabling intrusive surveillance.

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5G ushers in aggressive growth in energy consumption

5G is in the millimetre wave bands – 24-86 GHz. This slice of radio spectrum can carry large amounts of data, but not nearly as far as the current mobile network at frequencies from 700 megahertz to 6 gigahertz.  What this means is that for 5G, a lot more equipment needs to be installed and potentially more data needs to be processed.

Additionally, it is important to note that millimetre wave communications are prone to interference. For example, radio at above 20 GHz doesn’t go through walls well. It doesn’t go through leaves well. It doesn’t play nicely with rain. What does this mean? Many, many more antennas.

Measuring networking power consumption requires the capacity to determine how much energy wired and wireless networks consume.

“A general concern is that higher data rates can only be achieved by consuming more energy; if the EE [energy efficiency] is constant, then 100× higher data rate in 5G is associated with a 100× higher energy consumption.” This is where headlines like, “Tsunami of data could consume 1/5 of global data by 2025,” come from.

In addition to transmitting or harvesting data, energy can also be moved in 5G networks. With 5G, one of the novel technologies being considered is Radio Frequency (RF) harvesting; converting energy in transmitted radio waves to user devices or even wireless infrastructure (microcells, antenna arrays, etc.). Since RF signals can carry both energy and information, theoretically RF energy harvesting and information reception can be performed from the same RF input signal. This scheme is referred to as the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT).  The hardware to support this doesn’t exist yet, but it has promise.

Our biggest area of concern, however, is in data centres. Radoslav Danilak asserts that data centers will consume exponentially larger amounts of electricity, arguing, “consumption will double every four years.”

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US Report Reveals Push to Weaponize AI for Censorship

For a while now, emerging AI has been treated by the Biden-Harris administration, but also the EU, the UK, Canada, the UN, etc., as a scourge that powers dangerous forms of “disinformation” – and should be dealt with accordingly.

According to those governments/entities, the only “positive use” for AI as far as social media and online discourse go, would be to power more effective censorship (“moderation”).

A new report from the US House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government puts the emphasis on the push to use this technology for censorship as the explanation for the often disproportionate alarm over its role in “disinformation.”

We obtained a copy of the report for you here.

The interim report’s name spells out its authors’ views on this quite clearly: the document is called, “Censorship’s Next Frontier: The Federal Government’s Attempt to Control Artificial Intelligence to Suppress Free Speech.”

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Drone Detection System Used in Ukraine War May Be Deployed to East Coast

The state-of-the-art Robin Radar System, currently being used in the Ukraine war to detect drones, may soon be deployed to investigate the perplexing mystery drone sightings throughout the East Coast.

ABC News reports that to help crack the enigma of mystery drones spotted all around New England, officials have requested the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to deploy the cutting-edge Robin Radar System.

Developed by Robin Radar USA, the drone detection radar system has its roots in technology designed to detect flocks of birds near airports to prevent collisions with aircraft. Since 2014, the company has focused on creating drone-detecting technology that not only locates drones but also classifies small moving objects, distinguishing between drones, rotary, fixed-wing, and even filtering out birds or large insects.

Kris Brost, general director of Robin Radar USA, explained that the radar works by bouncing radio waves off objects, tracking their flying patterns in real-time, and beaming data back to a laptop computer with a 360-degree, 3D view of the airspace. The system has a range of about 3.1 miles and can detect objects flying at altitudes of up to two miles.

One of the key advantages of the Robin Radar System is its lightweight and mobile nature, allowing it to be installed on police cruisers or other vehicles for use on the move. While the system cannot determine if a drone has been weaponized, it can help investigators track the drone’s movements and potentially obtain its remote identification, even if operators attempt to modify their drones to avoid detection.

The Robin Radar System has already proven its worth on the battlefield in Ukraine, aiding Ukrainian military forces in locating incoming Russian weaponized drones. Brost noted that the war in Ukraine was a turning point for the company, highlighting the compelling needs and valuable data collected from the environment.

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