Tag: technology

San Francisco police consider letting robots use ‘deadly force’

The San Francisco Police Department is proposing a new policy that would give robots the license to kill, as reported earlier by Mission Local (via Engadget). The draft policy, which outlines how the SFPD can use military-style weapons, states robots can be “used as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option.”

As reported by Mission Local, members of the city’s Board of Supervisors Rules Committee have been reviewing the new equipment policy for several weeks. The original version of the draft didn’t include any language surrounding robots’ use of deadly force until Aaron Peskin, the Dean of the city’s Board of Supervisors, initially added that “robots shall not be used as a Use of Force against any person.”

However, the SFPD returned the draft with a red line crossing out Peskin’s addition, replacing it with the line that gives robots the authority to kill suspects. According to Mission Local, Peskin eventually decided to accept the change because “there could be scenarios where deployment of lethal force was the only option.” San Francisco’s rules committee unanimously approved a version of the draft last week, which will face the Board of Supervisors on November 29th.

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Lab-grown adrenal glands could help treat hormone-related conditions

Tiny human adrenal glands similar to those found in 4-month-old fetuses have been grown from stem cells in the lab for the first time. The achievement may help to develop treatments for conditions in which these glands don’t function properly.

Adrenal glands are located in the kidneys and make molecules that are involved in our metabolism, our response to stress and the production of sex hormones.

Previous attempts to grow small versions of the glands from induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells – adult cells that have been coaxed to revert to a form where they have the potential to develop into almost any cell type – have failed to create something similar to the glands found in the body.

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Killing By Drone: Hunting Enemies In Urban Combat

A new drone from Israel’s Elbit Systems called Lanius combines a number of technologies that put it at the forefront of how drones are transforming war.

At the same time, reports about the drone may raise questions about how this technology may make war more controversial as “robots” play a larger role in it.

The more armies and defense companies invest in new technology that enables combat to take place remotely — without soldiers interacting with civilians, for instance — the more it seems like “robot wars.”

Elbit Systems has said that Lanius is “part of the Legion-X robotic and autonomous combat solution.” Elbit is one of Israel’s three largest defense companies and is at the forefront of defense technology.

Its website says the drone “is a highly maneuverable and versatile drone-based loitering munition designed for short-range operation in the urban environment.”

The drone can scout and map buildings, flying around small corridors and through doorways. This means it can help a user find “points of interest for possible threats, detecting, classifying and syncing to Elbit Systems’ Legion-X solutions. Lanius can carry lethal or non-lethal payloads, capable of performing a broad spectrum of mission profiles for special forces, military, law enforcement, and HLS.”

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Mind-Controlled Wheelchairs: Study Shows Promising Possibilities For Paralyzed People

Promising work in the field of machine learning indicates that people with severe tetraplegia will have a new way to navigate the world with mind-controlled wheelchairs.

Researchers have found that tetraplegic users can navigate natural, and even cluttered, environments with a powered wheelchair using brain signals communicated to a brain-machine interface (BMI), SciTechDaily reported. The primary aim of the study was to demonstrate the reciprocal learning process between users and the BMI algorithm.

“We show that mutual learning of both the user and the brain-machine interface algorithm are both important for users to successfully operate such wheelchairs,” said José del R. Millán, the corresponding author of the study from the University of Texas at Austin. “Our research highlights a potential pathway for improved clinical translation of non-invasive brain-machine interface technology.”

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Reminder: Microsoft Has a Patent for a ‘Cryptocurrency System Using Body Activity Data’ and It’s Just as Creepy as It Sounds

Here is an overview of Microsoft’s “Cryptocurrency System Using Body Activity Data” patent, which calls for using a person’s bodily functions—including everything from their heart beat to their brain activity—as a way to perform so-called “proof-of-work” for “mining” various cryptocurrencies. The patent, number WO2020060606, even outlines how real-time imagining of individuals’ brain activity could be used for the scheme.

In June of 2019 Microsoft—the tech company that makes laggy, buggy software and has a monster market cap of approximately $1.8 trillion—filed a patent for a “Cryptocurrency System Using Body Activity Data.” The patent, which was published in March of 2020, outlines how, in essence, a person’s bodily functions—including everything from their heart beat to their brain activity—could be used as a way to perform so-called “proof-of-work” for “mining” various cryptocurrencies; whether they be decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, or centralized ones, like central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

The patent number for Microsoft’s creepy cryptocurrency system, as conspiracy theorists like to point out, is WO2020060606.

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FDA Announces LAB GROWN MEAT That Was Served at COP27 Climate Conference Is ‘SAFE TO EAT’: ‘The World Is Experiencing A Food Revolution’

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved lab-grown meat, a product grown from animal cells, for human consumption for the first time.

The FDA announced Wednesday that laboratory-grown chicken developed by Upside Food, is “safe to eat,” clearing the way for the California-based company that creates cell-cultured chickens to begin selling its products.

To manufacture its meat, Upside Foods harvests cells from live animals, chicken tissue, and uses the cells to grow meat in stainless-steel tanks known as bioreactors.

The agency issued a statement Wednesday announcing it evaluated Upside Food’s production and cultured cell material and has “no further questions” about the safety of its cultivated chicken filet.

“The world is experiencing a food revolution,” stated FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf. “Advancements in cell culture technology are enabling food developers to use animal cells obtained from livestock poultry, and seafood in the production of food with these products expected to be ready for the US market in the near future.”

“The FDA’s goal is to support innovation in food technologies while always maintaining as our first priority the safety of the foods available to US consumers,” he added.

Upside Foods founder and CEO Uma Valeti heralded the FDA’s approval.

“I’ve been looking forward to this day for a long time. UPSIDE has received our “No Question Letter” from the FDA. They’ve accepted our conclusion that cultivated chicken is safe to eat, meaning UPSIDE is one step closer to being on tables,” Valeti tweeted.

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Raising the steaks: British scientists grow fillet steak in a LABORATORY that looks and smells just like real meat – and it could be coming soon to a plate near you

British scientists have successfully grown fillet steak in a laboratory – and it could be available to buy as early as next year.

3D Bio-Tissues (3DBT), a spinoff from Newcastle University, produced three small prototype fillets, each weighing just 5g each.

According to the team, when pan fried, the fillets seared easily and showed heavy caramelisation, with aromas ‘identical to those of barbecued meat’.

Che Connon, Chief Executive of 3DBT, said: ‘We are extremely pleased with the results of our first prototype which has exceeded our expectations in terms of integrity, aroma, texture and more.

‘We believe our prototypes to be some of the first fillets of cultivated meat in the world, representing a ground-breaking development for the industry.’

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Strange New Organ Transplant Methods Raise Urgent Questions

If you or a loved one has needed an organ transplant, you know the problem firsthand: There are not enough organs for those who need them and there is a long waiting period.

That desperate need, and potential profits, have fueled a Frankenstein-like effort to find or create organs to give recipients a longer lease on life.

The need for organs can be a matter of life or death. In the United States, more than 105,000 people sit on the national waiting list, and every nine minutes, a new name is added. Seventeen people die every day while waiting for an organ transplant in the United States, according to the government’s organ donor website.

The most common transplant operations are for hearts, kidneys, livers, pancreases, lungs, bone and bone marrow, skin, and intestines; some such transplants come from living donors, but most are obtained after a donor is deceased.

Different organs remain viable for different amounts of time after the patient has died, or after the organ has been taken from the deceased.

According to Donor Alliance, the liver can remain viable for transplant for up to 12 hours, and kidneys for up to 36 hours. But for other organs, such as the heart or lungs, that window is much shorter, in the range of 4 to 6 hours.

With so few organs available for so many in need, there’s tremendous pressure on scientists and industry to push the boundaries of medical ethics with products and procedures that can sound like mad science.

These vanguard developments raise fundamental questions about human life, the commodification of the human body, and the very definition of “human.”

Let’s put aside the obvious horrors of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China, including Tibetans, Uyghurs, and, most notably, Falun Gong practitioners, “the primary victims of this cruel practice,” according to the U.S. Human Rights Commission.

Everyone can agree that this practice is abhorrent, but there are other new practices that raise more complex questions, including a new practice that some fear is being used to curb the dead donor rule.

That rule requires that a patient be dead, and often for several minutes, before their organs are taken. This ensures organs only come from the deceased.

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Former Content Moderator Claims AIs Are Using Fake Conspiracy Theories To Silence Real Ones

It sounds like something out of the X-Files, but a former content moderator claims that AIs are generating conspiracy theories and flooding online platforms with fake images, videos, and text in order to manipulate human society, and to discredit real conspiracy theories.

The moderator-turned-whistleblower, who calls himself Scott Chatsalot — and whose real name was withheld on request in the interest of their safety— says that he personally witnessed AI-generated conspiracy content being published onto tech platforms at a “massive scale.” He went on to claim in an email to a major news network: “There are definitely no humans behind these campaigns, which are by orders of magnitude the largest anyone has ever seen, and which platforms are totally covering up. Only AIs have the power to do this…”

After posting his allegations to Twitter in mid-August, Chatsalot alleges that he was fired by his employer for doing so, and subsequently deleted his Twitter account. When contacted, Chatsalot refused to comment and his personal Facebook account appears to have been deleted or shadowbanned, though Chatsalot has since uploaded an apology video to YouTube and has taken to his Reddit account, which still appears active, to make the same allegations.

The author of the alleged email, which was not independently verified claimed that the company that he worked for, referred to by Chatsalot only as Widget, was hired by a large tech company as a content moderation team, whose work he describes as “very sensitive.”

On Reddit, Chatsalot alleged that in 2019 he was promoted to lead a large content moderation team of 2,500 employees tasked with policing posts from “all over the internet, including Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.”

According to Chatsalot, the team’s job was to police “all kinds of posts,” from “pornographic to political to religious to everything in between” and its work was “extremely secretive, and there was no oversight,” meaning there was “no one to tell you what was wrong.” He says they “just made it all up on the fly, and nobody else cared.”

Things changed in late 2021 when their moderation team began seeing a huge influx of AI generated media. Chatsalot claims that the content in question was all “generated by AIs and never human hands,” and that the images “are generated completely by artificial intelligence and machine learning trained off all the worst content from social media platforms, which Widget had unique access to.”

He says he saw the AI generated content via the massive Widget content moderation platform used by major social platforms, and that, “the scale at which this was being generated is insane. Billions per second insane. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He claimed that the platforms “don’t want to talk about it, because it makes them look bad.” He also claimed that whoever is generating these images, text, and videos, “the goal is to generate controversy to get people to click on your content and earn likes and money.” He says the AIs are using A/B testing to see what people respond to most negatively.

He also claimed that Widget itself was using AI to manipulate content across various platforms, and that, “It was using AI to target the conspiracy theories themselves for clicks and revenues.”

“Basically, the AI was teaching itself to know what was a conspiracy theory and what was not. That was its job.”

“The AI could generate a conspiracy theory from nothing and it would always seem real and people would look at it and like it,” he said, “It was actually producing this stuff, and it would use a real photo of something else and alter it, and then post it with a new face or caption that was totally different.” He goes on to claim that “The AI knew that it would make people mad and it would make people click on the image.”

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Lasers Can “Hack” Self-Driving LiDAR Sensors, Creating False “Blind Spots”, New Study Reveals

In what is likely going to be another thorn in the side of Elon Musk, Tesla and Autopilot, it was revealed in a report last week that many self-driving features in vehicles can be “messed with” using lasers. 

A brand new study that was put together and uploaded in late October, called “You Can’t See Me: Physical Removal Attacks on LiDAR-based Autonomous Vehicles Driving Frameworks” made the revelation, which was also reported on by Cosmos Magazine. 

Researchers in the U.S. and Japan found that vehicles could be tricked into not seeing pedestrians (or other objects in their way) using lasers. These cars, which use LiDAR to sense objects around them, send out laser lights and then use the reflection back to judge how far away objects are. 

The study revealed that a perfectly timed laser shone back into a LiDAR system can create “a blind spot large enough to hide an object like a pedestrian,” according to Cosmos. 

The study’s abstract says: “While existing attacks on LiDAR-based autonomous driving architectures focus on lowering the confidence score of AV object detection models to induce obstacle misdetection, our research discovers how to leverage laser-based spoofing techniques to selectively remove the LiDAR point cloud data of genuine obstacles at the sensor level before being used as input to the AV perception. The ablation of this critical LiDAR information causes autonomous driving obstacle detectors to fail to identify and locate obstacles and, consequently, induces AVs to make dangerous automatic driving decisions”

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