DARPA Begins Building Skynet And Its Robots With ‘Real’ Brains Meet Your Future Enemy:


DARPA Begins Building Skynet And Its Robots With ‘Real’ Brains
The next frontier for the robotics industry is to build machines that think like humans. Scientists have pursued that elusive goal for decades, and they believe they are now just inches away from the finish line. A Pentagon-funded team of researchers has constructed a tiny machine that would allow robots to act independently. Unlike traditional artificial intelligence systems that rely on conventional computer programming, this one “looks and ‘thinks’ like a human brain,” said James K. Gimzewski, professor of chemistry at the . Gimsewski is a member of the team that has been working under sponsorship of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on a program called “physical intelligence.” This technology could be the secret to making robots that are truly autonomous, Gimsewski said during a conference call hosted by Technolink, a -based industry group. This project does not use standard robot hardware with integrated circuitry, he said. The device that his team constructed is capable, without being programmed like a traditional robot, of performing actions similar to humans, Gimsewski said.

Next Generation Biometrics To UseBrain Waves
There are many different solutions coming to market aiming to make secure Web and computer login easy and secure. Biometrics have been considered and deployed but adoption right out of science fiction is emerging that would authenticate via brain waves. Students and a professor at the University of California Berkley School of Information is working on a system that would have a user wear a headset equipped with electroencephalograms – EEGs – to measure brain wave activity. Using brain waves for identification is not a new idea but the technology used to read those brainwaves is new, according to a release from the UC School of information. “Traditional clinical EEGs typically employ dense arrays of electrodes to record 32, 64, 128, or 256 channels of EEG data. But new consumer-grade headsets use just a single dry-contact sensor resting against the user’s forehead, providing a single-channel EEG signal from the brain’s left frontal lobe,” the release states.

Are We Paying Enough Attention To Information Technology’s Dark Side?
For centuries, the threat and selective use of brute force has steered the international balance of power. In the last couple decades, the system has increasingly accommodated economic power as a means of non-violent leverage between states. Now, says ’s Marc Goodman, we must add technology into the mix. Technological power is not new, of course, but information technology’s exponential pace and declining cost is changing how the global game is played and who the players are. Control of technology is passing from the richest states and governments to smaller groups and individuals, and the results are both inspiring and terrifying. As Goodman says, “The ability of one to affect many is scaling exponentially—and it’s scaling for good and it’s scaling for evil.”

Pentagon

Meet Your Future Enemy: Pentagon Developing Humanoid Terminator Robots That Will Soon Carry Weapons 
Have no illusions about where this is headed: wants to develop and deploy a robotic army of autonomous soldiers that will kill without hesitation. It’s only a matter of time before these robots are armed with rifles, grenade launchers and more. Their target acquisition systems can be a hybrid combination of both thermal and night vision technologies, allowing them to see humans at night and even detect heat signatures through building walls. This is the army humanity is eventually going to face. You’d all better start getting familiar with the anatomy of humanoid robots so that you know where to shoot them for maximum incapacitation effect. You’d also better start learning how to sew thermal blankets into clothing, hoodies and scarves in order to fool thermal imaging systems.

Computers Can ‘See’ People’s Dreams


A computer can predict what you’re dreaming about based on brain wave activity, new research suggests.

By measuring people’s brain activity during waking moments, researchers were able to pick out the signatures of specific dream imagery — such as keys or a bed — while the dreamer was asleep.

“We know almost nothing about the function of dreaming,” said study co-author Masako Tamaki, a neuroscientist at Brown University. “Using this method, we might be able to know more about the function of dreaming.”

The findings, which were published today (April 4) in the journal Science, could also help scientists understand what goes on in the brain when people have nightmares.

Sleepy mystery

Exactly why people dream is a mystery. Whereas the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud may have thought dreams were about wish fulfillment, others believe dreams are irrelevant byproducts of the sleep cycle. And yet another theory holds that dreams allow the mind to continue working on puzzles faced during the day. In general, most people believe their dreams have meaning.

Scientists have dreamt of being able to look inside the brain’s sleepy wonderland. Past studies had suggested that people’s brain activity can be decoded to reveal what they are thinking about: For instance, scientists have decoded movie clips from brain waves.

Dream reading

So why not try to read dreams?

Tamaki and her colleagues tracked brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of three people as they were sleeping; the researchers woke up the trio every few minutes to have them describe their dreams. In total, the scientists collected about 200 visual images. [7 Mind-Bending Facts About Dreams]

The researchers then tied the dream content that participants described in their waking moments to specific patterns in brain activity (as seen in the blood flow in fMRI scans) and had a computer model learn those signatures.

The computer model then analyzed each person’s dreams. The model was able to pick out the time when each person dreamed of specific objects based on their brain activity when they

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