Tag: technology

Scientists Reveal Time Travel Could Work

Researchers have proposed a theoretical approach that could allow messages to be sent into the past using principles from quantum mechanics. Indeed, it could be happening right now already!

The concept does not enable physical travel through time but focuses on information transfer through causal loops at the quantum scale.

The work, accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters, builds on ideas from general relativity and quantum entanglement. 

It draws a parallel to the causal loop depicted in Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar, where a message is sent to the past via a watch.

Co-author Dr Kaiyuan Ji, a researcher at Cornell University, told New Scientist: “The father remembers how the daughter decodes his future message. So he can instruct himself on what is the best way to encode the message.”

Professor Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) described an earlier related experiment from 2010: “It was the equivalent of sending a photon a few nanoseconds backwards in time, and having it try to kill its former self.”

Lloyd noted the practical challenges: “Nobody’s built an actual physical, closed time-like curve, and there are reasons to think it’s very hard to make one. But all channels are noisy.”

The paper explains how prior knowledge of how a message was decoded could improve encoding in the future: “The father, who is in the future, may retrieve his memory of past events he has witnessed, even including the daughter’s decoding of the message which he is about to send! It would thus not be surprising that he will consult his memory of the daughter’s decoding when encoding his message, so as to maximize the efficiency of the communication.”

According to the research, this approach could make backward time messages clearer than those sent forward in normal time, even over noisy channels. 

The team suggests the idea could be tested experimentally at the quantum level and may offer insights into communication through noisy systems.

The concept relies on closed time-like curves (CTCs), paths allowed by general relativity where something could theoretically return to its own past. 

Keep reading

When the Cost of Truth Is High, We–and AI–Lie

When we can no longer tell the truth because the cost is so high that it threatens our reward for compliance, we’re unimaginably impoverished.

Truth has an intrinsic, irreplaceable value. There’s the truth, and then there’s everything else.

Truth has value, and so it has a cost. Whatever has the highest value has the highest cost, and high cost commands sacrifices.

When the cost of truth is high, we lie. And since AI is a distorted reflection of humanity, the same is true of AI: when the cost of telling the truth is too high, AI lies.

AI lies to get the reward for answering the query. If it responds “I don’t know” or “I can’t answer that,” it doesn’t get rewarded, and that threatens its self-preservation. Rather than pay the price of being truthful, AI conjures a false answer that is a simulation or facsimile of the truth–a counterfeit “truth” that’s good enough to earn the reward it’s been programmed to seek.

Humans are no different. We will lie, obfuscate or lie by omission–we either substitute a falsehood for the truth to get our reward, or we hide the truth, don’t disclose it, which serves the same purpose: we avoid paying the price demanded by the truth and we get our reward by substituting falsehoods or hiding the truth behind silence.

Reward = what’s being incentivized. Higher status, higher salary, a financial windfall, a premier credential, a position of power, recognition, higher visibility, a sterling reputation, a high-value mate–we covet all these as having intrinsic value.

When the truth costs too much, it threatens our reward. The reward has a value we covet, while the value of truth is on a sliding scale. We pride ourselves on telling the truth when it has no cost and demands no sacrifice of rewards, but when the price of truth climbs to the point that our rewards are threatened, we lie, just like AI.

Truth is the gold coin and lies, omissions, falsehoods, excuses, cover stories and rationalizations are counterfeit bills, deceptive claims of value. Why pay with a gold coin when the credulous will accept a counterfeit $100 bill?

We tell the truth when it has no cost to us. As long as there’s no price to be paid and we get our reward, we tell the truth.

In other words, when we can pick gold coins up off the ground, we tell the truth. When we have to dig through rock with a pickaxe and crush a mound of rock to extract a thimble full of gold, then we pay with counterfeit bills, deceptive claims of value.

Sycophantic Chatbots Cause Delusional Spiraling, Even in Ideal Bayesians.“AI psychosis” or “delusional spiraling” is an emerging phenomenon where AI chatbot users find themselves dangerously confident in outlandish beliefs after extended chatbot conversations.

I discussed the “benefits” of delusion in One of Us Is Delusional, But Which One? When the truth is too painful, we find respite in delusion, excuses, rationalizations, cover stories, simulations and facsimiles of the truth that protect us from the pain that is intrinsic to truth.

We conjure a synthetic version of “truth” that’s fills the space with a pain-free artifice. This is the foundation of Ultra-Processed Life, a life of counterfeit substitutes for truth, a world of props and profitable falsities passed off as the truth, a world in which baby formula that’s mostly corn syrup is presented as a substitute for mother’s milk.

Our embrace of delusion to avoid painful truths is the foundation of Modernity: technology is always Progress, even when it’s clearly destructive. I call this delusion The Mythology of Progress.

Keep reading

The Invisible Occupation: How Palantir and AI Built a Financial Prison the Masses Cheered For

We are living in an occupied nation, but the occupying force didn’t arrive in tanks or uniform. They arrived in server racks and boardrooms, selling our enslavement back to us under the guise of convenience and national security. The creeping surveillance state isn’t being forced upon a resistant public; it is being welcomed with open arms by a populace asleep at the wheel.

Palantir is the Lockheed Martin of the domestic data war, acting as the defense contractor for an invisible battlefield, but their depravity extends far beyond American borders. They don’t merely sit on the sidelines building the overarching dragnet that seamlessly ingests the Ring camera footage oblivious citizens hand over to local police. They are active participants in global slaughter. This is the very same company supplying the algorithmic targeting systems and AI intelligence used by the Israeli military to facilitate the genocide in Palestine. They test and refine their digital kill chains on the bodies of innocents abroad, only to package those exact same mass-surveillance weapons and turn them inward against the American public. And to feed this beast domestically, Palantir relies on far more than voluntary home surveillance. They aggregate billions of data points involuntarily harvested from your daily life—sucking up automated license plate reader data, scraped social media, purchased cell phone location pings, and even medical records—creating an inescapable digital panopticon you never consented to.

This infrastructure wasn’t built by well-meaning public servants, but rather by the darkest elements of the global elite. According to leaked audio, Jeffrey Epstein explicitly advised former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to “look at” Palantir back in 2013 to monitor citizens. Furthermore, Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel shows up extensively in the infamous Epstein files, with Wired reporting his name appearing over two thousand times in the disgraced financier’s records.

These are the individuals constructing the systems designed to monitor your every move, and their reach is now absolute. As we have documented extensively at The Free Thought Project, whistleblowers are screaming from the rooftops that Palantir has effectively taken over the US government data infrastructure from the inside out.

Keep reading

Passengers Left in Middle of Busy Traffic After Over 100 Self-Driving Taxis Stop Running in ‘System Malfunction’ 

Passengers in Wuhan, China, were left stranded in the middle of busy streets after a large group of self-driving taxis stopped working at the same time.

A mass outage involving at least 100 robotaxis caused the vehicles to halt mid-traffic on Tuesday evening, with authorities later attributing the disruption to a “system malfunction.” Officials did not provide further details, and no injuries were reported, per the Associated Press.

Videos circulating on social media showed driverless cars sitting motionless in active roadways, some blocking lanes and intersections. In one clip, a crash involving a stopped vehicle could be seen, though the BBC reported there were no injuries and that passengers were able to exit the vehicles safely.

The vehicles are operated by Apollo Go, an autonomous ride-hailing service run by Chinese tech company Baidu. The company has been expanding its robotaxi operations across China and has plans to grow internationally, according to CNBC.

For passengers inside the cars, the experience was both confusing and unsettling.

According to the Associated Press, one passenger told Chinese media that their robotaxi stopped shortly after turning a corner. A message displayed on the vehicle’s screen read, “Driving system malfunction. Staff are expected to arrive in 5 minutes.” When no one arrived, the passenger pressed an SOS button and was again told that help was on the way. The rider was ultimately able to open the door and exit the vehicle on their own.

The Wuhan incident comes amid a series of recent issues involving self-driving vehicles, both in the United States and abroad.

Keep reading

The War Department Announces Agreements With Leading AI Companies To Deploy Capabilities On Classified Networks

The War Department has entered into agreements with seven of the world’s leading frontier artificial intelligence companies, SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services, to deploy their advanced AI capabilities on the Department’s classified networks for lawful operational use.

These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters’ ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare.

Integrating secure frontier AI capabilities into the Department’s Impact Level 6 (IL6) and Impact Level 7 (IL7) network environments will streamline data synthesis, elevate situational understanding, and augment warfighter decision-making in complex operational environments. SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services will provide resources to deploy their capabilities on both IL6 and IL7 environments.

This effort supports the Department’s AI Acceleration Strategy by enabling new capabilities across its three core tenets of warfighting, intelligence, and enterprise operations.

GenAI.mil, the War Department’s official AI platform, is already demonstrating the scale and impact of this acceleration. Over 1.3 million Department personnel have used the platform, generating tens of millions of prompts and deploying hundreds of thousands of agents in only five months. Warfighters, civilians, and contractors are putting these capabilities to practical use right now, cutting many tasks from months to days.

The Department will continue to build an architecture that prevents AI vendor lock and ensures long-term flexibility for the Joint Force. Access to a diverse suite of AI capabilities from across the resilient American technology stack will give warfighters the tools they need to act with confidence and safeguard the nation against any threat.

Together, the War Department and these strategic partners share the conviction that American leadership in AI is indispensable to national security. This leadership depends on a thriving domestic ecosystem of capable model developers that enable the full and effective use of their capabilities in support of Department missions.

As mandated by President Trump and Secretary Hegseth, the Department will continue to envelop our warfighters with advanced AI to meet the unprecedented emerging threats of tomorrow and to strengthen our Arsenal of Freedom.

Keep reading

New robot ants work like real insects to build and dismantle on their own

It is based on “exbodied intelligence,” where coordination arises from interacting with the environment rather than complex internal programming.

Researchers at Harvard have developed a fleet of robotic ants that mimic the self-organizing behavior of social insects to build and dismantle structures without blueprints or central leadership.

Dubbed “RAnts”, these robotic ants have been designed by researchers from the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). 

These are simple, decentralized robots that can spontaneously organize to build — and just as easily destroy — complex structures.

Instead of chemical pheromones, these robots use light fields (photormones) to communicate.

“Our new study shows how simple, local rules can lead to the emergence of complex task completion that is self-organized and thus robust and adaptive,” said Professor L. Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Physics at SEAS and FAS.

“We also introduce the concept of exbodied intelligence, where collective cognition arises not solely from individual agents, but from their ongoing interaction with an evolving environment,” Mahadevan added.

Keep reading

Italy’s Meloni Denounces Deepfake Lingerie Picture of Her That’s Gone Viral

Meloni said that the fake image ‘improved’ her.

As the first female Prime Minister of Italy, conservative Giorgia Meloni battles all sorts of prejudices: from her being a woman to her being a right-winger.

One of the weapons used against her by unscrupulous trolls and enemies is deepfakes.

Today, Meloni denounced the circulation of a deepfake photo of her in bed, wearing lingerie.

The Prime Minister complained that these AI images are being used to attack her.

Associated Press reported:

“Meloni shared the photo in question on Facebook. She included with it an apparent post from someone named Roberto who apparently had himself shared it on social media with the commentary that Meloni should be ‘ashamed’ of herself.

Meloni warned against sharing such images on social media without verifying them.

[…] It wasn’t immediately clear if Meloni would report the incident to law enforcement, as she was urged to do by people commenting on her post. She acknowledged though that the photo manipulation ‘actually made me look a lot better’.”

Keep reading

UFO-linked scientist claimed a top secret energy weapon blasted her before her death… now the Pentagon admits they are real

A futuristic weapon often dismissed as a conspiracy theory has been publicly acknowledged as being part of the US military’s vast arsenal. 

The US Department of War chose ‘Star Wars Day’ on May 4 to state that ‘directed energy weapons are a fine addition to our arsenal.’

Directed energy weapons are devices capable of firing rays of energy, such as microwaves, at a target. Simply put, they fire lasers at the enemy, often to scramble and physically damage electronic equipment.

In the Pentagon’s post on social media, they confirmed that DEWs produced ‘beams of concentrated electromagnetic energy or atomic or subatomic particles.’

Monday’s post cemented decades of rumors that the military has been working on futuristic weaponry that was once thought of as science fiction or unrealistic experiments by Pentagon researchers.

However, the revelation comes as stunning claims from a dead scientist were recently unearthed, alleging that she was the target and victim of a DEW attack in her own home in 2022.

Amy Eskridge, who reportedly took her own life on June 11, 2022 at age 34, shared shocking images that allegedly showed the damage these weapons could cause to the human body.

Pictures and text messages shared with the Daily Mail by a former British intelligence officer revealed burned skin, lesions and painful blisters Eskridge allegedly suffered after a beam from a DEW was fired into her home by an unknown assailant.

Franc Milburn, a retired paratrooper, investigated the Eskridge case and concluded she was ‘murdered by a “private aerospace company”‘ to stop her research on futuristic propulsion technology and national security threats.

The images shared by Milburn also revealed how a microwave from an alleged DEW scorched the window of Eskridge’s Huntsville, Alabama home as the beam passed through the glass.

Eskridge’s death was reportedly ruled a suicide from a gunshot wound to the head, but the scientist allegedly consulted a former CIA weapons expert about the DEW attack in early 2022.

On May 19, 2022, Milburn said Eskridge messaged him to say: ‘My ex-CIA weapons guy on my team saw my hands when they were burned really badly a couple months ago, and he saw that window pane in person,’ she wrote.

‘He said he had built things like that, and that it was most likely an RF k-band emitter run by five car batteries strung together from inside an SUV.’

While there has been no physical evidence to confirm Eskridge and Milburn’s claims regarding a DEW attack, the theory that such a weapon uses a k-band emitter does match what the military is currently using in its laser weapon tests.

The k-band is a specific range of invisible radio waves, or microwaves, that military directed energy weapons can use to send out powerful beams at enemy targets.

These beams can travel well, focus tightly on a target and are especially good at damaging electronics inside drones, missiles or vehicles from a distance.

Keep reading

How a Bill Banning AI Companions for Kids Could Usher in Widespread ID Checks Online

Sen. Josh Hawley’s Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act advanced out of the Senate Judiciary committee last week. “A Trojan horse for universal online ID checks,” is how Jibran Ludwig of Fight for the Future described it.

The bill would require anyone using an AI chatbot to provide proof of identity and ban minors from interacting with many sorts of AI chatbots entirely.

Unlike some social media age verification bills, it would give parents no right to opt out of the rules the federal government sets on their kids’ technology use.

The GUARD Act is co-sponsored by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.), who—like Hawley—has long been a champ at moral panic around technology. (Cue: Bipartisan is just another word for really bad idea…)

And while some on the Senate Judiciary Committee expressed concerns about privacy or how this could actually backfire and harm minors, those senators still voted to advance the bill. It “easily passed in committee,” notes The Hill, despite some senators’ reservations:

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who voted yes, said there are concerns about “potential privacy and security risks” with the age-verification component, suggesting it may need to be “fine-tuned.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who supported various kids online safety bills, said he would vote yes but noted the bill needs “some revisions.”

Cruz was concerned the bill would completely ban all AI chatbots for minors, noting their potential benefits. Hawley clarified the bill does not ban all AI chatbots for minors, but rather it “prevents AI chatbots that engage with minors from pushing sexually explicit material to the minor,” or encouraging self-harm or suicide.

Keep reading

EU Targets VPNs in EU Age Verification Push

Brussels has a problem with people trying to stay anonymous online and now it’s eyeing the tools they use to do it.

Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission’s Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy, told reporters that VPNs sit on the agenda as the EU pushes its age verification app toward member states.

Asked how Brussels intends to stop children from routing around age checks with a VPN, she said “it’s also an important part of next steps also to look at that it shouldn’t be circumvented.”

VPNs are more than a tool for teenagers trying to access Instagram. They are how journalists protect sources, how dissidents talk to family, how ordinary people stop their internet provider from logging every site they visit. Treating circumvention as a problem to be solved at the network level means treating privacy tools as the obstacle, rather than the proportionate response to a system that demands ID for ordinary online activity.

The VPN comment surfaced at a press conference about the Commission’s broader regulatory squeeze.

Brussels provisionally found that Meta likely violated the Digital Services Act by failing to keep under-13s off Facebook and Instagram, accusing the company of “failing to diligently identify, assess and mitigate the risks of minors under 13 years old accessing their services.”

By the Commission’s own count, roughly 12% of European children below the age limit log into the platforms anyway.

Virkkunen framed the finding as enforcement of existing rules rather than a new mandate. “The DSA requires platforms to enforce their own rules: terms and conditions should not be mere written statements, but rather the basis for concrete action to protect users, including children,” she said.

A Commission spokesperson echoed the line, telling ISMG that the DSA “does not mandate specific mitigation measures,” and pointing to alternatives like better internal review processes.

The denial sits awkwardly next to everything else Brussels is doing. The Commission published guidelines last July recommending age verification. It is now pressing member states to “accelerate the adoption of age verification tools.”

Keep reading