Tag: technology

Ukraine Unveils New AI-Generated Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman

On Wednesday, Ukraine unveiled its new AI-generated Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, who will now make official statements on behalf of Ukraine’s foreign ministry.

The new AI-generated spokeswoman’s name is Victoria Shi, and the AI-bot is modeled after Ukrainian singer Rosalie Nombre.

Ukraine released a teaser of their new AI spokeswoman on their Ministry of Foreign Affairs YouTube page.

In the AI-generated spokeswoman’s first announcement, the digital representative stated, “My name symbolizes our main goal – the victory of Ukraine, and my last name – the artificial intelligence that created me. My work will consist of reporting operational and verified information of the consular department of the MFA of Ukraine to the public.”

Keep reading

Genocide profiteer IBM wins big on EU funding

Israel’s use of artificial intelligence to select targets in Gaza during the current genocide has garnered many headlines.

Few who have paid close attention to how Israel tests new technology on Palestinians can be surprised. Israel had previously signaled that its May 2021 attack on Gaza gave it an opportunity to experiment with AI.

The proper response to those signals would have been to halt any funding of AI research involving Israeli firms and institutions. The European Union has taken the opposite approach.

In September 2023, the EU authorized a project aimed at realizing a future in which collaboration between humans and AI “takes center stage.”

Participants in the project include IBM Israel – a subsidiary of the US-based giant.

IBM has a long and ignoble history of providing technology to abusers of human rights. Among its past clients were the German government during the Nazi era and South Africa’s apartheid regime.

More recently, IBM has been awarded a series of contracts to run technology support centers for the Israeli military. Robotics are a core feature of the latest such center.

It is a near certainty that IBM products can be found in Israel’s toolbox during the current genocide.

No questions about IBM’s ties to the Israeli military seem to have been asked by EU officials before they rubber-stamped the aforementioned project in September.

I have seen a copy of an “ethics check” carried out on the project – named HumAIne – at the EU’s request.

The exercise was one of box-ticking.

It came to the conclusion that HumAIne had an “exclusive focus on civil applications.” The only significant recommendation was that “an independent ethics adviser must be appointed with the relevant accumulated expertise” so that the project could be monitored.

The recommendation did not address IBM’s connections to Israel’s military. It merely referred to “ethical concerns” surrounding the project, particularly “the involvement of humans in the evaluation of AI systems.”

While HumAIne was signed off by the Brussels bureaucracy before the genocidal war on Gaza was declared in October, the EU has okayed a huge number of new research grants to Israel since then.

IBM Israel is among the recipients of those new grants. It is taking part in a project on data-sharing innovations, which the EU authorized in mid-November.

Keep reading

Report Sounds Alarm Over Growing Role of Big Tech in US Military-Industrial Complex

The center of the U.S. military-industrial complex has been shifting over the past decade from the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area to Northern California – a shift that is accelerating with the rise of artificial intelligence-based systems, according to a report published Wednesday.

The report – entitled How Big Tech and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex – was authored by Roberto J. González, a professor of cultural anthropology at San José State University, for the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs.

The new paper comes amid the contentious rise of AI-powered lethal autonomous weapons systems, or killer robots; increasing reliance upon AI on battlefields from Gaza to Ukraine; and growing backlash from tech workers opposed to their companies’ products and services being used to commit or enable war crimes.

“Although much of the Pentagon’s $886 billion budget is spent on conventional weapon systems and goes to well-established defense giants such as Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, and BAE Systems, a new political economy is emerging, driven by the imperatives of big tech companies, venture capital (VC), and private equity firms,” González wrote.

“As Defense Department officials have sought to adopt AI-enabled systems and secure cloud computing services, they have awarded large multibillion-dollar contracts to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle,” he added. “At the same time, the Pentagon has increased funding for smaller defense tech startups seeking to ‘disrupt’ existing markets and ‘move fast and break things.’”

Keep reading

AI Chatbots Refuse To Produce ‘Controversial’ Output – Why That’s A Free Speech Problem

Google recently made headlines globally because its chatbot Gemini generated images of people of color instead of white people in historical settings that featured white people. Adobe Firefly’s image creation tool saw similar issues. This led some commentators to complain that AI had gone “woke.” Others suggested these issues resulted from faulty efforts to fight AI bias and better serve a global audience.

The discussions over AI’s political leanings and efforts to fight bias are important. Still, the conversation on AI ignores another crucial issue: What is the AI industry’s approach to free speech, and does it embrace international free speech standards?

We are policy researchers who study free speech, as well as executive director and a research fellow at The Future of Free Speech, an independent, nonpartisan think tank based at Vanderbilt University. In a recent report, we found that generative AI has important shortcomings regarding freedom of expression and access to information.

Generative AI is a type of AI that creates content, like text or images, based on the data it has been trained with. In particular, we found that the use policies of major chatbots do not meet United Nations standards. In practice, this means that AI chatbots often censor output when dealing with issues the companies deem controversial. Without a solid culture of free speech, the companies producing generative AI tools are likely to continue to face backlash in these increasingly polarized times.

Keep reading

COMPANY CLAIMS ITS ‘DIRECTED EVOLUTION’ MICROBIOME-ENHANCED PLANTS LITERALLY EAT POLLUTION FOR BREAKFAST

Bioengineering R&D company Neoplants says its ‘directed evolution’ houseplants can clean the air inside your home 30 times more efficiently than an ordinary houseplant. This is due to genetically engineered bacteria that convert some of the most common and dangerous indoor air pollutants, known as Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC), into biodegradable components like sugar that the plant ultimately consumes as food.

This means harmful pollutants Benzene, Toluene, and Xylene, which can reach as much as five times (or even up to 100 times) the concentration indoors as they do outdoors, are not only filtered out of the air, but their breakdown products are used to feed the plant itself, thereby “turning a harmful and commonly found chemical in your home into a healthy source of fuel for the plant.”

“It harnesses the power of nature to purify indoor air from 3 of the most carcinogenic pollutants we find in every home, up to 30 times better than any regular houseplant,” explained Lio Mora, Neoplants CEO, and co-founder, in an email to The Debrief.

Keep reading

Russian Journalist Calls Out The EU As A Technocracy

Lenin famously defined communism as Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country. In other words, the ideological project of building communism was supplemented by the technocratic project of electrification, the latter being an important source of legitimacy for the new regime.

The present-day European Union is engaged in its own expansive electrification project – the energy transition – that similarly inhabits ground where ideology meets technocracy and underpins legitimacy.

Yet in the past year or so, something has gone badly wrong, and a backlash against the climate agenda and its technocratic enforcers has been spreading across Europe. The energy crisis – far from catapulting the continent further along the path toward a carbon-neutral future as it should have – has exposed just how elusive the goal is, as Europe has scrambled to sign expensive LNG deals and even restart coal-fired plants. Farmers dissatisfied with EU policies that they regard as devastating to their livelihoods have been grumbling for years, but recently their protests have reached a crescendo, and built up political weight. Right-leaning and far-right parties, meanwhile, are gaining ground by the day. Standards of living are dropping and industry is shutting down or moving elsewhere.

Discontent with suffocating bureaucracy and regulation is widespread. A recent survey among German small and medium-sized companies – has registered a massive shift in sentiment against the EU. This is particularly concerning because the so-called German Mittelstand used to be among the strongest pillars of support for European integration.

What is embroiling Europe is deeper than a political crisis – it is approaching what can be called a crisis of legitimacy for the ruling elite. This can be thought of as a metaphysical event that precedes political upheaval, the latter being merely confirmation that such a crisis has taken place. Legitimacy is, of course, a rather nebulous concept, and it defies objective measurement.

Ruling classes throughout history have always advanced various claims about their own legitimacy, without which a stable political order is impossible. In tracing the contours of the current crisis, it’s important to establish what exactly the claims Europe’s technocratic elite have put forth and how they are becoming increasingly difficult to believe.

Ostensibly, the EU’s ruling elite has staked out the green transition as its raison d’être. They claim to have the mandate, vision and competence to see it through and have set clear targets to measure their success.

Keep reading

Appeals Court Upholds Police Right to Compel Biometric Device Unlocking

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has issued an opinion in a case involving the police forcing a suspect to unlock their phone via a biometric feature on the device.

The court said this practice, at least in the case it considered, is not unconstitutional.

The appeal was lodged by Jeremy Payne, a defendant in a drug distribution case, who was forced (“compelled”) by the police to unlock his phone with his thumbprint.

We obtained a copy of the opinion for you here.

Payne was hoping to have his motion to suppress evidence accepted – after this was previously denied by a district court – but the Court of Appeals found that obtaining evidence in this way does not mean that the police violated his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.

And while the appellate court said that other circuits and the Supreme Court are yet to rule if the forced use of a biometric to unlock a device is “testimonial” – in this case, the forcible use of the suspect’s thumb “required no cognitive exertion, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking.”

The three-judge panel was satisfied that the police could have accomplished the same task “even if Payne had been unconscious” – so they saw no evidence of the suspect and later defendant being driven to engage in self-incrimination.

Namely, the physical action of forcibly pressing the thumb onto the device “did not intrude on the contents of Payne’s mind.”

Another reason the judges sided with the police is that Payne was not made to “acknowledge the existence of any incriminating information” – he was “merely” forced to provide access “to a source of potential information.”

Keep reading

Meteorologist warns of ‘weather wars’ between countries after Dubai floods were blamed on ‘cloud seeding’ – with ‘catastrophic’ consequences

A meteorologist has warned of looming ‘weather wars’ between countries if ‘cloud seeding’ gets out of hand – after flooding in Dubai spawned concerns about artificially manipulating the rainfall.

Johan Jaques, a senior meteorologist at environmental technology company KISTERS, warned there could be ‘unintended consequences’ to using the relatively young technology, potentially leading to ‘diplomatic instability’.

‘Any time we interfere with natural precipitation patterns, we set off a chain of events that we have little control over,’ he said.

‘Interference with the weather also raises all kinds of ethical questions, as changing the weather in one country could lead to perhaps unintended yet catastrophic impacts in another. After all, the weather does not recognise international borders.’

Extreme weather, and concerns about climate change and possible manipulation, have received attention in recent days with flooding in Dubai causing widespread disruption and damage to infrastructure.

Keep reading

US Air Force secretly develops missiles that could obliterate Iran’s nuclear facilities by zapping their electronics – without harming civilians

The US Air Force has quietly deployed missiles that could destroy the electronics of Iran‘s nuclear facilities with high-power microwaves, rendering them useless, without causing any fatalities, DailyMail.com has learned exclusively.

Known as the Counter-Electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP), the missiles were built by Boeing’s Phantom Works for the US Air Force Research Laboratory and first tested successfully in 2012. They were deployed—meaning installed in various locations around the globe—and became operational in 2019.

This comes as Israel has conducted strikes in Iran in retaliation for Tehran’s unprecedented drone-and-missile assault earlier this week, defying US President’s warning that more attacks could plunge the Middle East further into conflict.

Mary Lou Robinson, then chief of the High Power Microwave Division of the Air Force Research Lab at Kirtland Air Force Base, previously confirmed to DailyMail.com that 20 CHAMP missiles were operational and ready to take out any military target, including nuclear facilities.

When asked for comment, Othana Zuch, an Air Force Research Laboratory public affairs officer, said that while ‘operational security precludes us from discussing specific operational applications for our technologies,’ the CHAMP missiles were considered a demonstration program and ‘we have since continued to develop advanced HPEM (High Power Electromagnetic) technologies’ building on the original demonstration.

Keep reading

NASA VETERAN’S PROPELLANTLESS PROPULSION DRIVE THAT PHYSICS SAYS SHOULDN’T WORK JUST PRODUCED ENOUGH THRUST TO OVERCOME EARTH’S GRAVITY

Dr. Charles Buhler, a NASA engineer and the co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies, has revealed that his company’s propellantless propulsion drive, which appears to defy the known laws of physics, has produced enough thrust to counteract Earth’s gravity.

A veteran of such storied programs as NASA’s Space Shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), The Hubble Telescope, and the current NASA Dust Program, Buhler and his colleagues believe their discovery of a fundamental new force represents a historic breakthrough that will impact space travel for the next millennium.

“The most important message to convey to the public is that a major discovery occurred,” Buhler told The Debrief. “This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force onto an object and allow center-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass.”

“There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,” Buhler added. “It will be this force that we will use to propel objects for the next 1,000 years… until the next thing comes.”

Keep reading