Tag: technology

AI Won’t Replace You, But It Will Spy on You

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, workers have had to contend with the inimical effects of technology on their jobs. From the power loom to the personal computer, each wave of automation has not only increased productivity, but also empowered the owners and managers who dictate how these technologies reshape the workplace. Today, workers worldwide are haunted by the specter of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence has been a mainstay in our popular imagination for decades.  Prognostications of an AI-driven future range from apocalyptic robot takeovers to thriving post-work societies where people live off the wealth produced by machines. In spite of these daydreams, robots with full human cognition are still well within the domain of science fiction.

When people speak of AI today, what they’re most often referring to are machines capable of making predictions through the identification of patterns in large datasets. Despite that relatively rote function, many in the space believe that inevitably AI will become autonomous or rival human intelligence. This raises concerns that robots will one day represent an existential threat to humanity or at the very least take over all of our jobs. The reality is that AI is more likely to place workers under greater surveillance than to trigger mass unemployment.

An overwhelming majority of workers are confident that AI will have a direct impact on their jobs, according to a recent survey by ADP,  but they do not agree on how. Some feel that it will help them in the workplace while 42 percent fear that some aspects of their job will soon be automated.

These concerns are not without merit. Grandiose statements of oncoming job losses made by tech executives in public forums fuel worker anxiety. Feelings of job insecurity are compounded by reports that a majority of US firms are planning to incorporate AI in the workplace within the next year. In fact, Goldman Sachs predictsthat generative AI could “substitute up to one-fourth of current work.”

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Digital Dystopia: Lessons from the Global IT Outage on the Perils of Cashless Living

As a global IT outage wreaks havoc on digital payment systems, mainstream media finally sounds the alarm on cashless society risks – but for truth-tellers like Sayer Ji, the warning comes too late.

The Growing Threat of a Cashless Society: Lessons from the Global IT Outage

In a startling shift, major British newspapers have begun highlighting the dangers of a fully cashless society following a widespread IT outage that crippled digital payment systems across the globe. This event has brought to light the inherent fragility of our increasingly digitized financial infrastructure and serves as a stark reminder of the vital role cash still plays in our economy.

The Chaos of Digital Dependency

On July 19, 2024, a content update by cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike caused millions of Microsoft systems worldwide to crash. As reported by Nick Corbishley for Naked Capitalism, this outage had far-reaching consequences:

“When a content update by the cyber-security giant CrowdStrike caused millions of Microsoft systems around the world to crash on Friday morning, bringing the operating systems of banks, payment card firms, airlines, hospitals, NHS clinics, retailers and hospitality businesses to a standstill, businesses were faced with a stark choice: go cash-only, or close until the systems came back online.”

This incident laid bare the vulnerability of our tightly coupled IT-based societies, particularly in the realm of banking and payments. The fallout was especially severe in countries like Australia, where cashless transactions have been actively encouraged by the government.

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The CrowdStrike global outage shows the serious dangers of a centralized, digitized world

The perils of over-reliance on digital systems have been once again highlighted by the crashing of computer systems around the world due to an update to the Falcon antivirus and security product from CrowdStrike affecting its interaction with the Windows operating systems. The update has caused chaos for banking, retail, railways, airports, healthcare and for a wide range of other businesses and infrastructure where the Falcon software runs on Windows systems. Advice for bringing affected computers back into working order has been published, but the exact mechanism by which the update caused “Blue Screen of Death” errors does not appear to have yet been reported.

(Article by Dr. R P republished from DailySceptic.org)

It appears that in many cases, while the update was distributed automatically over the internet to systems, the workaround to fix the problem requires the machines to be rebooted in Windows’ safe mode, which usually requires physical access. The person at the keyboard then needs to know the password for the computer’s administrator account, and use this level of access to delete a file within a subdirectory of Windows’ System32. This process can be more complicated where Microsoft’s BitLocker encryption is in use. In many organisations, the recovery keys for BitLocker have themselves been stored on a computer unable to start properly due to the CrowdStrike update. The quote “Men go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one”, originally from Charles Mackay in 1841, seems applicable now to computers too. They crash en masse, then require individual attention before they will work again.

It should be noted that while the perils of centralisation with a physical single point of failure are obvious to all but technocratic politicians and civil servants, this massive outage shows another way in which a “single point” of failure can occur. The single point in this case is not a particular server in one building somewhere on the planet; but rather a change within a single piece of software with that change then being rolled out to many individual systems around the globe. These systems then entered a state euphemistically described as Total Inability To Support Usual Performance (acronym intentional) among the tech community. There was a reason that NASA put a fifth backup flight computer in the space shuttle, running software written entirely independently of the software on its primary four computers. A single point of failure where software is concerned doesn’t have to happen at only a single point in space.

There is a very clear lesson to be learned here. Systems which can collapse at scale, even when they are not centralised in the physical sense, eventually will collapse in such a fashion. Advocates of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and Digital ID systems should consider these lessons. This update ‘only’ knocked out an estimated 8.5 million computers, belonging to over 24,000 organisations that subscribed to CrowdStrike’s Falcon software. A country reliant on a CBDC instead of cash would see an end to all transactions as a consequence of a similar failure affecting a component within whatever software stack was being used to operate CBDC infrastructure. That could mean a fault within the software on physically centralised or partly centralised servers logging transactions and holding records; or a fault within the software running on masses of devices operating as payment terminals in a wide variety of locations. In that dystopian CBDC-dependent nation, one would be looking at electric vehicles (already a bad idea simply on account of the abysmal energy density of batteries compared to chemical fuels) stranded at charging stations, unable to make payments to initiate the charging procedure. Consider that the World Economic Forum once advertised with slogans on the theme of “what if extreme weather froze your bank account”, right at the time when Justin Trudeau was freezing bank accounts on account of his extreme intolerance for peaceful protest. The reality is that in the centralised totalitarian model of society the WEF hungers for, this scenario becomes more probable, not less. That is to say, that as well as increasing the opportunities for censorship-obsessed elites to deliberately interfere in people’s lives, centralisation also increases the vulnerability of a society to accidental errors. Where Governments dream of requiring digital ID or age verification for internet access, or client-side scanning to look for objectionable opinions and only allow messages to be sent when approved as sufficiently “double plus good”, one can even imagine a situation where direct messages and online posts attempting to report a fault in the software stack running the verification or approval algorithms would be blocked from being sent. This wouldn’t need to be a matter of a deliberate attempt to cover up the fault, but instead the inability to report the fault would be a natural consequence of the fault itself. A censorship apparatus built on a principle of scanning everything before it can be shared ends up censoring absolutely everything if it is unable to perform scans.

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Hunt for Element 120 Underway as Team Confirms First Creation of Element 116 Using Titanium Beam

In a physics first, scientists at Berkeley Lab have succeeded at creating element 116 using a titanium beam, a development that could set the pace for the creation of heavier elements, including the long-theorized element 120.

The achievement brings scientists closer than ever to creating the heaviest atom ever created by physicists, believed to represent an “island of stability” amid superheavy elements.

With the discovery of 16 of the 118 elements currently known already under its belt, Berkeley Lab’s breakthrough marks a significant step toward bringing such hypothetical elements into existence.

The Hunt for Element 120

Formally known as unbinilium or Ubn, its temporary systematic IUPAC name and symbol, the theorized element 120 (also known by the nickname eka-radium), if officially discovered, would claim its place on the 8th row of the periodic table. For now, the theorized superheavy element is believed to represent an alkaline earth metal or s-block element.

Superheavy elements generally have short lifespans since they have large and very unstable nuclei capable of ripping themselves apart within just seconds of their creation. The instability arises from their size, which results in protons with positive charges within the nuclei repelling each other.

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Energy Scientists Invent Device That Draws Electricity Out of Thin Air

A team of scientists from the University of Singapore has announced the creation of a prototype energy-harvesting device that draws usable electricity seemingly out of thin air.

Designed to leverage nanoscale spin rectifier technology to capture what the device’s inventors term “waste RF” signals that exist in the air due to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 5G, and traditional radio signals, the novel energy harvesting system can convert those signals into enough usable direct current (DC) electrical energy.

Similar RF energy harvesting technologies have been developed in recent years, including one invented by researchers from the University of South Florida. However, the team behind this latest iteration says their device is able to capture energy from weaker overall signals (typically less than -20 dBm) than even the most sensitive RF energy harvesting technology.

“Harvesting ambient RF electromagnetic signals is crucial for advancing energy-efficient electronic devices and sensors,” explained project leader Professor Yang Hyunsoo from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the NUS College of Design and Engineering. “However, existing Energy Harvesting Modules face challenges operating at low ambient power due to limitations in existing rectifier technology.”

To overcome the limitations of similar devices, including the inefficiencies of converting such weak signals into useful electricity, the team developed their own ultra-compact, nanoscale spin rectifier technology to capture and convert the waste RF. Unlike previous attempts, this minuscule rectifier showed impressive results at converting RF signals below -20 dBm.

According to Professor Yang, his team’s efforts to improve energy harvesting at these low levels were drastically different from previous efforts. That’s mainly because of the implementation of nanoscale spin rectifiers.

“Recent efforts focused only on improving antenna efficiency and impedance-matching networks at the expense of bigger on-chip footprints,” the professor explained. “Nanoscale spin-rectifiers, on the other hand, offer a compact technology for sensitive and efficient RF-to-DC conversion.”

After trying several configurations designed to convert energy from different low yet usable EM wavelengths, the team settled on something that operated at a level of efficiency previously unseen. This result, the team explains, was due to their approach as much as the technology itself. The result was a device that successfully captured low levels of RF and converted them to enough electricity to power an electrical sensor and an LED.

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Ukraine’s Acoustic Drone Detection Network Eyed By U.S. As Low-Cost Air Defense Option

The U.S. should integrate a low-cost acoustic network to detect aerial threats developed by Ukraine into its own air defense systems, the commanding general of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command said Wednesday morning. Consisting of thousands of acoustic sensors across Ukraine, this system helps detect and track incoming Russian kamikaze drones, alert traditional air defenses in advance, and also dispatch ad hoc drone hunting teams to shoot them down.

“Their use of acoustic sensors has proliferated across the country to the point now where they’re almost positively identifying drones in the distance because of this acoustic and the fireteams attached to that acoustic, low-cost capability that they’ve developed and proliferated,” Army Lt. Gen. Stephen Gainey said during a discussion at the Hudson Institute. As a result, Ukraine has a “low-cost defeat” system. The U.S., he added, should “find a way” of integrating “that type of low-cost capability into our system. We should be able to find ways to work together and augment some of our capability with some of that lower-cost capability.”

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CHINA DETECTS WATER IN SAMPLES IT COLLECTED FROM THE MOON

Scientists have discovered traces of water while analyzing lunar soil samples collected by China’s Chang’e-5 rover.

While NASA already announced the discovery of water on the Moon’s sunlit areas back in 2020, the new research suggests that water can take on even more forms than previously thought on the lunar surface.

As detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the samples “revealed the presence of trace water,” tantalizing evidence that “water molecules can persist in sunlit areas of the moon in the form of hydrated salts.”

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TESLA TO MANUFACTURE HUMANOID ROBOTS THAT COULD BE AVAILABLE BY NEXT YEAR, ELON MUSK SAYS

Are robots poised to soon become our overlords? Maybe not yet, although billionaire technologist Elon Musk says they could soon take over Tesla production facilities as the company moves forward with plans to begin producing humanoid robots called Optimus as soon as next year. 

In a post on X, Musk said, “Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year and, hopefully, high production for other companies in 2026.”

First named the “Tesla Bot” and revealed in 2021 at a Tesla AI Day event, the robot’s design has drastically changed over the last few years. Recently renamed Optimus, the humanlike robot was designed to perform dangerous work and repetitive tasks.

At 170 centimeters in height and weighing around 123 pounds, the robot’s new design is sleek compared to its appearance while in the initial prototype phase. 

Tesla’s development of Optimus is not the first time robots designed to mimic human capabilities have made news. Other automotive and robotics companies, including Honda and Boston Dynamics, have made progress in recent years in the development of robots that include those with humanoid designs. 

In 2015, DARPA hosted the Robotics Challenge, and many of the designs looked similar to the robots currently under development by Tesla. 

The event, held at the Fairplex in Pomona, California, aimed to have participants create robot systems and software teams to help humans under conditions of natural and man-made disasters. 

Team Kaist of Daejeon, Republic of Korea, won first place and the $2 million prize with their robot DRC-Hubo, while Team IHMC Robotics from Pensacola, Florida, secured second place and $1 million with their robot Running Man.

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MORPHEUS SPACE LAUNCHING FIRST-EVER MASS PRODUCTION FACILITY FOR FIELD EMISSION ELECTRIC PROPULSION SYSTEMS

German propulsion company Morpheus Space has officially opened the world’s first-ever facility designed to mass produce its second-generation field emission electric propulsion (FEEP) system, the GO-2. Dubbed “Reoladed,” the Dresden-based facility will immediately begin production of 100 units of the GO-2, a potentially breakthrough system that uses liquid metal as a propellant.

In an email to The Debrief, company executives explained the growing need for a facility like Reloaded that can quickly and efficiently produce systems like the GO-2, which would provide satellite operators with extended mobility throughout the entire mission.

“One of the biggest problems satellite operators face today is the limited supply of available propulsion systems. We intend to sufficiently scale production of GO-2 to match this growing demand,” explained Morpheus Space President Kevin Lausten. “By offering a more affordable and readily available propulsion system able to facilitate all necessary maneuvers from initial orbit to de-orbit, the GO-2 marks an important leap for the industry.”

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NASA built a Moon rover but can’t afford to get it to the launch pad

NASA has spent $450 million designing and building a first-of-its-kind robot to drive into eternally dark craters at the Moon’s south pole, but the agency announced Wednesday it will cancel the rover due to delays and cost overruns.

“NASA intends to discontinue the VIPER mission,” said Nicky Fox, head of the agency’s science mission directorate. “Decisions like this are never easy, and we haven’t made this one, in any way, lightly. In this case, the projected remaining expenses for VIPER would have resulted in either having to cancel or disrupt many other missions in our Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) line.”

NASA has terminated science missions after development delays and cost overruns before, but it’s rare to cancel a mission with a spacecraft that is already built.

The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission was supposed to be a robotic scout for NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface in the next few years. VIPER was originally planned to launch in late 2023 and was slated to fly to the Moon aboard a commercial lander provided by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, which won a contract from NASA in 2020 to deliver the VIPER rover to the lunar surface. Astrobotic is one of 14 companies in the pool of contractors for NASA’s CLPS program, with the goal of transporting government-sponsored science payloads to the Moon.

But VIPER has been delayed at least two years—the most recent schedule projected a launch in September 2025—causing its cost to grow from $433 million to more than $609 million. The ballooning costs automatically triggered a NASA review to determine whether to proceed with the mission or cancel it. Ultimately, officials said they determined NASA couldn’t pay the extra costs for VIPER without affecting other Moon missions.

“Therefore, we’ve made the decision to forego this particular mission, the VIPER mission, in order to be able to sustain the entire program,” Fox said.

“We’re disappointed,” said John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic. “It’s certainly difficult news… VIPER has been a great team to work with, and we’re disappointed we won’t get the chance to fly them to the Moon.”

NASA said it will consider “expressions of interest” submitted by US industry and international partners by August 1 for use of the existing VIPER rover at no cost to the government. If NASA can’t find anyone to take over VIPER who can pay to get it to the Moon, the agency plans to disassemble the rover and harvest instruments and components for future lunar missions.

Scientists were dismayed by VIPER’s cancellation.

“It’s absurd, to be honest with you,” said Clive Neal, a planetary geologist at the University of Notre Dame. “It made no sense to me in terms of the economics. You’re canceling a mission that is complete, built, ready to go. It’s in the middle of testing.”

“This is a bad mistake,” wrote Phil Metzger, a planetary physicist at the University of Central Florida, in a post on X. “This was the premier mission to measure lateral and vertical variations of lunar ice in the soil. It would have been revolutionary. Other missions don’t replace what is lost here.”

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