Tag: technology

NYC Expands Use Of Drones To Respond To Crimes

The New York Police Department has launched a new program that will send drones zipping to emergency scenes before officers can get there.

Two drones will be stationed at each of five NYPD station houses, including the one that oversees the 843 acres of Manhattan’s iconic Central Park. Three precincts in Brooklyn and one in the Bronx will also be getting the drones as part of the “Drone as First Responder” initiative.

“New York City is flying into the future as we keep New Yorkers safe,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement Wednesday. “These drones will mean more efficient policing and will help increase the safety of our responding NYPD officers and New Yorkers.”

The drones will be deployed remotely and programmed to autonomously fly to the exact longitude and latitude of emergencies, including missing-person searches, alerts from the NYPD’s ShotSpotter gunfire detection system and crimes in progress, according to the mayor’s office.

Once a drone arrives at the scene, an NYPD drone pilot at police headquarters in Lower Manhattan or another location will take control of the device. High-resolution cameras equipped with night vision technology and high-definition audio microphones will allow pilots to assess situations and send live feeds to the smartphones of officers and supervisors on the ground.

Keep reading

Pokémon Go Player Data Being Used to Train AI & Construct ‘Large Geospatial Model’

Millions of users’ location and imaging data is being compiled to construct a global virtual model of the real world, ostensibly to build new augmented reality experiences, the company behind the popular mobile game Pokémon Go has revealed.

In a blog update Tuesday, Niantic explained they’ve been enlisting Pokémon Go players to participate in efforts to construct a Large Geospatial Model (LGM), which the company says “could guide users through the world, answer questions, provide personalized recommendations, help with navigation, and enhance real-world interactions.”

The company says the LGM constructs a comprehensive AI world model by leveraging its Visual Positioning System (VPS), which was “built from user scans, taken from different perspectives and at various times of day, at many times during the years, and with positioning information attached, creating a highly detailed understanding of the world. This data is unique because it is taken from a pedestrian perspective and includes places inaccessible to cars.”

“The LGM will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation and autonomous systems,” Niantic said. “As we move from phones to wearable technology linked to the real world, spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system.”

“Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on building our Visual Positioning System, which uses a single image from a phone to determine its position and orientation using a 3D map built from people scanning interesting locations in our games and Scaniverse,” the company wrote.

Keep reading

AI can now create a replica of your personality

Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning accuracy.

That’s now possible, according to a new paper from a team including researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind, which has been published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed. 

Led by Joon Sung Park, a Stanford PhD student in computer science, the team recruited 1,000 people who varied by age, gender, race, region, education, and political ideology. They were paid up to $100 for their participation. From interviews with them, the team created agent replicas of those individuals. As a test of how well the agents mimicked their human counterparts, participants did a series of personality tests, social surveys, and logic games, twice each, two weeks apart; then the agents completed the same exercises. The results were 85% similar. 

“If you can have a bunch of small ‘yous’ running around and actually making the decisions that you would have made—that, I think, is ultimately the future,” Park says. 

Keep reading

Transhumanism, the Death of God, and Eternal War

It seems that the idea of transhumanism as a major force in this current global debacle is often put on the back burner and is considered a bit too extreme to really be taken seriously.

But if I was cornered and asked what I thought the three most significant, and horrifying, elements of this present human challenge were, I would say transhumanism (the destruction of humanity as a group of naturally-made humans), the attempt to kill God, and the waging of eternal war in the world. The primary method used to accomplish all of this is global collectivism.

The assault that all three of these things illustrate essentially boils down to the same basic fundamental endeavour—good vs evil. Good is defined as God’s creation (and if you don’t believe in God, just say “nature’s creation”) and evil is defined as the annihilation of God’s creation (or nature’s creation).

All three of these things stated in the title of this article are activities, profoundly human activities, and are all disguised as some necessary element in sustaining the “good” life. Which is about as ironic as you can get.

Transhumanism is disguised as technological progress in the spirit of maintaining a suffer-less life and extending that life as long as possible—improving on a fundamentally faulty creation. The death of God (of course no one or thing can “kill” God, but you know what I mean) is necessary for self-preservation (physical life).

God restricts us, or so they say, and it is inhuman to be beholding to any sort of powerful entity (assuming that God actually fits that limited definition). So clearly God (or the concept of God) must be destroyed if man is to take His place creating medical advancement to avoid the single thing a material human fears the most—death.

Destroying God creates at the same time the notion that physical life is the end-all of existence and that without God we are free to be God and create technology that knows how to sustain life better than God ever did, or ever will.

Never-ending war is more of a current technicality than a philosophical necessity. War is presently necessary to keep the fear of death alive, which is necessary to keep the techno-medical wheels turning, which is necessary to keep the desperation for never-ending life and physical “safety” alive.

War can be a variety of things, it can be the old-fashioned sort of war where men and women run around in open fields and get shot at or blown up in a variety of ways, or it can be the war of disease through pandemics, cancers, poisons a person eats, drinks, is jabbed with, or breathes. War of these sorts creates fears, which creates efforts to stay alive and safe, which creates compliance to the World Order which is calling the shots—no pun intended.

See how smoothly all of this works?

Keep reading

Skynet On Wheels: Chinese Tech Firm Reveals Terrifying Robo-Dog

One of Tesla’s competitors in robotics is the Chinese company Unitree, which is already selling its humanoid G1 robot for $40,000. The company also sells robo-dogs on the Amazon marketplace. Another Chinese robotics company, Deep Robotics, released a new video featuring one of its robo-dogs equipped with wheels, showcasing its ability to scale hillsides and navigate off-road terrain.

Deep Robotics describes itself as a “leader in embodied AI technology innovation and application,” adding it’s “the first in China to achieve fully autonomous inspection of substations with quadruped robots.”

Earlier this week, Deep Robotics posted a short video on YouTube featuring one of its quadruped robots with wheels. The robot’s mobility is absolutely terrifying.

Keep reading

Pentagon ‘Shocked’ By Houthi Arsenal, Sophistication Is ‘Getting Scary’

A top Pentagon official responsible for purchasing arms for America’s defense stockpile has expressed ‘shock’ at the increasingly sophisticated arsenal possessed by Yemen’s Houthis.

Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante spoke at an event hosted by Axios on Wednesday, where he said that Houthis are displaying and deploying advanced weaponry, especially missiles that “can do things that are just amazing.”

He described that Houthis “are getting scary” in terms of their capability on display for more than a year in the Red Sea, where they’ve gone to war against Israeli and international shipping.

“I’m an engineer and a physicist, and I’ve been around missiles my whole career,” LaPlante said before the summit, called the “Future of Defense” in Washington, DC.

“What I’ve seen of what the Houthis have done in the last six months is something that — I’m just shocked.”

Among the surprisingly advanced capabilities include anti-ship ballistic missiles. Analysts have widely asserted that without doubt Iran is directly supplying these and other capabilities.

The Houthis have also routinely scored direct hits on commercial shipping vessels with both aerial and drone boats.

The Shia group has also claimed many times to have scored hits on US, UK, and other allied warships; however, the US has kept a tight lid on the extent of this, or actual damage, perhaps wishing to not give the Houthis a propaganda win.

Keep reading

US calls on Taiwan to stop supplying AI chips to China

Washington has officially demanded that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturing companies, stop supplying China with chips used in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Reuters reported on November 10. However, Washington’s pressure on China’s semiconductor industry also includes Taiwan once Donald Trump comes to power next year.

TSMC is one of the largest chip producers and cooperates with several technology companies, such as Nvidia and AMD, and specialises in integrated circuit, also known as a microchip, a small device made up of several interconnected electronic components that are etched onto a small piece of semiconductor material.

Taiwan produces about 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, mostly by TSMC, and ensuring these chips do not reach China is a priority for Washington, an effort that will only intensify when Trump becomes president.

“The US ordered Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co to halt shipments of advanced chips to Chinese customers that are often used in artificial intelligence applications,” Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the subject.

Keep reading

Massive Chinese Anti-Drone High-Power Microwave Weapon Emerges

Ahuge truck-mounted system is one of at least three large mobile ground-based high-power microwave directed energy weapons, primarily intended to down drones, at this year’s Zhuhai Airshow. This underscores a global explosion of demand for counter-drone capabilities, as well as China’s steady progress in the development, fielding, and exporting of microwave and laser directed energy weapons.

Officially known as the China International Aviation & Aerospace Exhibition, the Zhuhai Airshow also provides an opportunity for Chinese and foreign companies to showcase ground-based and maritime offerings. Pictures and videos of various aircraft and other systems have been steadily emerging ahead of the event’s formal opening next week.

The imagery that has appeared online already amid the Zhuhai preparations includes a promotional video from state-run firms China South Industries Group Corporation (CSGC) and Norinco that features footage of two high-power microwave directed energy weapons, as well as other air defense systems.

Keep reading

Witnesses Say the Israeli Army Is Using Facial Recognition Technology in Its Assault on North Gaza

Ishaaq al-Daour, 32, was sheltering with his family at the UN-run Abu Hussein School in Jabalia refugee camp when the Israeli army stormed the shelter on October 20, forcing over 700 hundred people out of the school and leading them into a large ditch that had been dug in advance by the military.

“They made all of the men go down into the ditch first,” al-Daour told Mondoweiss from the Remal neighborhood in Gaza City. “Then they ordered us to climb out of the ditch one by one and stood each of us in front of a camera that had been installed nearby.”

The army made the men stand in front of the “camera” for at least three minutes per person, al-Daour said, long enough for the cameras to scan their faces and reveal personal data seemingly already stored in the Israeli military’s system. After the scans, al-Daour said the soldiers would reveal information about each individual, including their “name, age, work, family members and names, place of residence, and even their personal activities.”

“When they suspected someone, they took him away [to an unknown location” al-Daour said. As for those who had relatives who belonged to Palestinian resistance movements or who personally belonged to resistance factions, al-Daour speculated that “their fate was immediate death,” citing stories he had heard from others in Gaza, whose friends and relatives were taken at checkpoints and had not been seen again, or who returned to Gaza in body bags. 

Al-Daour is one of the thousands of people who were expelled from the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza and ordered to move south at gunpoint by the Israeli army. The forced exodus of thousands out of Jabalia is part of an Israeli offensive on northern Gaza that started on October 5. Its objective is to implement a proposal put forward by a group of senior Israeli generals that aims to empty northern Gaza of its inhabitants through starvation and bombardment, the so-called “Generals’ Plan.”

Survivors from Jabalia like al-Daour report that the Israeli army is using facial recognition technology to screen residents in the ongoing assault, often identifying people from long distances and picking them out from a crowd. 

Witnesses say that the Israeli army has set up security checkpoints throughout northern Gaza where the facial recognition technology is being deployed. The military is also reportedly using this technology when it storms shelters for the displaced. Witnesses report that in these cases Israeli forces will corral people in enclosed places, usually ditches dug by military bulldozers, and process them individually.

Keep reading

Are Intelligence Agencies Planning to Make Voters Obsolete?

Here’s something for you to contemplate as you consider concerns about election integrity: Do the algorithms that Andrew Paquette, Ph.D., has found surreptitiously embedded in current state board of election voter rolls suggest intelligence agents have decided to bypass voters to vote election simulations?

As documented on GodsFiveStones.com, Paquette has found secret algorithms in the board of election voter registration databases in New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Hawaii, and Texas, with ongoing examinations underway in Arizona and Georgia.

The algorithms appear designed to hide critical voter attribute information, allowing the people who developed the scheme to create and hide “non-existent voters” capable of being assigned legitimate state voter IDs. Once created, the algorithms can vote certifiable mail-in ballots for enough “non-existent voters” to steal an election from an opponent who won through legitimate votes.

Keep reading