Will Your Future Be Full of Robot Assassins and Spy Aircraft?

With Its “Roadmap” in Tatters, The Pentagon Detours to Terminator Planet

A Drone-Eat-Drone World

At the end of World War II, General Henry “Hap” Arnold of the U.S. Army Air Forces praised American pilots for their wartime performance, but suggested their days might be numbered.  “The next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all,” he explained.  The future of combat aviation, he announced, would be “different from anything the world has ever seen.”

alternet.org | Jun 2, 2012

By Nick Turse

Today’s armed drones are actually the weak sisters of the weapons world.  Even the Reaper is slow, clumsy, unarmored, generally unable to perceive threats around it, and — writes defense expert Winslow Wheeler — “fundamentally incapable of defending itself.”  While Reapers have been outfitted with missiles for theoretical air-to-air combat capabilities, those armaments would be functionally useless in a real-world dogfight.

Similarly, in a 2011 report, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board admitted that modern air defense systems “would quickly decimate the current Predator/Reaper fleet and be a serious threat against the high-flying Global Hawk.”  Unlike that MQ-1000 of 2030, today’s top drone would be a sitting duck if any reasonably armed enemy wanted to take it on.  In this sense, as in many others, it compares unfavorably to current manned combat aircraft.

The Navy’s even newer MQ-8B Fire Scout, a much-hyped drone helicopter that has been tested as a weapons platform, has also gone bust.  Not only was one shot down in Libya last year, but repeated crashes have caused the Navy to ground the robo-copter “for the indefinite future.”

Even the highly classified RQ-170 Sentinel couldn’t stay airborne over Iran during a secret mission that suddenly became very public last year.  Whether or not an Iranian attack brought down the drone, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board report makes it clear that there are numerous methods by which remotely piloted aircraft can potentially be thwarted or downed, from the use of lasers and dazzlers to blind or damage sensors to simple jammers to disrupt global positioning systems, not to mention a wide range of cyber-attacks, the jamming of commercial satellite communications, and the spoofing or hijacking of drone data links.

Smaller tactical unmanned aircraft may be even more susceptible to low-tech attacks, not to mention constrained in their abilities and cumbersome to use.  Sergeant Christopher Harris, an Army drone pilot and infantryman, described the limitations of the larger of the two hand-launched drones he’s operated in Afghanistan this way: the 13-pound Puma was best used from an observation post with some elevation; it only had a 12-mile range and, though theoretically possible to take on patrol, was “a beast to carry around” once the weight of extra batteries and equipment was factored in.

Terminators of Tomorrow?

As for the future, the Air Force’s 2011-2036 Roadmap has already hit a major detour.  In 2010, Air Force magazine breathlessly announced, “Early in the next decade, the Air Force will deploy a new, stealthy RPA — currently called the MQ-X — capable of surviving in heavily defended airspace and performing a wide variety of ISR [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance] and strike missions.”

Indeed, the 2011 Roadmap lists the MQ-X as the future of Air Force drones.  In February 2012 however, Lieutenant General Larry James told an Aviation Week-sponsored conference: “At this point… we don’t plan, in the near term, to invest in any sort of MQ-X like program.”  Instead, James said, the Air Force will be content simply to upgrade the Reaper fleet and watch the Navy’s development of its Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike or UCLASS drone to see if it soars or, like so many RPAs, crashes and burns.

The Holy Grail of drone ops is the ability of an aircraft to linger over suspected target areas for long durations.  But ultra-long-term loitering operations still remain in the realm of fantasy.  Admittedly, the Pentagon’s blue skies research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is pursuing an ambitious drone project to provide intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and “communication missions over an area of interest” for five or more years at a time.  The project, dubbed “Vulture,” is meant to provide satellite-like capabilities “in an aircraft package.”

Right now, it sounds downright unlikely.

While the Air Force has had a hush-hush unmanned space plane orbiting the Earth for more than a year, much like a standard satellite, the longest a U.S. military drone has reportedly stayed aloft within the planet’s atmosphere is a little more than336 hours.  Plans for ultra-long duration flights took a major hit last year, according to scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and defense giant Northrop Grumman.

In an effort to “to increase UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] sortie duration from days to months while increasing available electrical power at least two-fold,” according to a 2011 report made public by the Federation of American Scientists’Secrecy News, the Sandia and Northrop Grumman researchers identified a technology that “would have provided system performance unparalleled by other existing technologies.”  In a year in which the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster turned a swath of Japan into an irradiated no-go zone, the use of that mystery technology, never named in the report but assumed to be nuclear power, was deemed untenable due to “current political conditions.”

With the Pentagon now lobbying the Federal Aviation Administration to open U.S. airspace to its robotic aircraft and ever more articles emerging about dronecrashes, don’t bet on nuclear-powered, long-loitering drones appearing anytime soon, nor on many of the other major promised innovations in Drone World to come online in the near term either.

From Dystopian Fiction to Dystopian Reality

Until recently, drones looked like a can’t-miss technology primed for big budgetincreases and revolutionary advances, but all that’s changing fast.  “Realistic expectations are for zero growth in the unmanned systems funding,” Weatherington explained by email.  “Most increases will be in technical innovations improving application of delivered systems on the battlefield, and driving down the cost of ownership.”

Major Jeffrey Poquette of the Army’s Small Unmanned Air Systems Product Office talked about just such an effort.  By the late summer, he said, the Army planned to introduce more sophisticated sensors, including the ability to track targets more easily, in its four-pound Raven surveillance drones.  Put less politely, what this means is no roll-outs of sophisticated new drone systems or revolutionary new drone technology: the Army will simply upgrade a glorified model airplane that first took flight more than a decade ago.

Sci-fi it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean that nothing will change in the world of drone warfare.

The Terminator films weren’t exactly original in predicting a future of unmanned planes dominating the world’s skies.  At the end of World War II, General Henry “Hap” Arnold of the U.S. Army Air Forces praised American pilots for their wartime performance, but suggested their days might be numbered.  “The next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all,” he explained.  The future of combat aviation, he announced, would be “different from anything the world has ever seen.”

The most salient and accurate of Arnold’s predictions was not, however, his forecast about drone warfare.  Pilotless planes had taken flight years before the Wright Brothers launched their manned airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, and drones would not become a signature piece of American weaponry until the 2000s.  Instead, Arnold’s faith in a “next war” — a clear departure from thesentiments of so many Americans after World War I — proved accurate again and again.  Over the following decades, American aircraft would strike in North Korea, South Korea, Indonesia, Guatemala, Cuba, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq (again), Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen (again), Libya (again), and the Philippines.  New technologies came and went, air strikes were the constant.

In Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and the Philippines, the U.S. deployed pilotless planes as per Arnold’s other prediction.  From Afghanistan onward, all of the countries that have experienced American air power have also experienced lethal drone attacks — just how many is unknown because figures on drone strikes are kept secret “for security reasons,” the Air Force’s Spires recently told TomDispatch.  What we do know is that drone attacks have increased radically over the years.  “More” has been the name of the game.

Still, barely a decade after our drone wars began, dreams of Terminator-esque efficiency and technological perfection are all but dead, even if the drone itself is increasingly embedded in our world.  Fantasies of autonomous drones and submarines fighting robot wars off the coast of Africa are already fading for any near-term future.  But drone warfare is here to stay.  Count on drones to be an essential part of the American way of war for a long time to come.

Air Force contracting documents suggest that the estimated five Reaper sorties flown each day in 2012 will jump to 66 per day by 2016.  What that undoubtedly means is more countries with drones flying over them, more drone bases, more crashes, more mistakes.  What we’re unlikely to see is armed drones scoring decisive military victories, offering solutions to complex foreign-policy problems, or even providing an answer to the issue of terrorism, despite the hopes of policymakers and the military brass.

Keep in mind as well that those global skies are going to fill with the hunter-killer drones of other nations in what could soon enough become a drone-eat-drone world.  With that still largely in the future, however, the Pentagon continues to glow with enthusiasm over the advantages drones offer the U.S.

Regarding the importance of military robots, for instance, the Pentagon’s Dyke Weatherington explained, “Combatant commanders and warfighters place value in the inherent features of unmanned systems — especially their persistence, versatility, and reduced risk to human life.”

On that last point, of course, Weatherington is only thinking about American military personnel and American lives.  Tomorrow’s drone warfare will likely mean “more” in one other area: more dead civilians.  We’ve left behind the fiction of Hollywood for a less high-tech but distinctly dystopian reality.  It isn’t quite the movies and it isn’t what the Pentagon mapped out, but it indisputably provides a clear path to a grim and grimy Terminator Planet.

Read More

Starship dreamers launch 100-year mission with DARPA grant

USS Enterprise Wikimedia Commons

Washington Post | May 22, 2012

By Brian Vastag

Humanity’s journey to the stars is beginning with . . . a modest government grant.

The dreamers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency last week announced an award of $500,000 to a former astronaut to launch an effort to — someday — send explorers to another star system.

It’s a huge job, impractical with existing technology. That’s why the 100 Year Starship Study project will start by building a community of space enthusiasts, engineers, technologists, futurists, scientists and dreamers to chip away at a panoply of technical, financial and social challenges — while seeking funds to keep the effort afloat.

“The first step is to get the seed money to grow into something more while also getting the public engaged,” said Mae Jemison, the former astronaut whom DARPA chose to head the effort. “It has to become something that has its own momentum.”

In 50 years of space exploration, humans have hardly made it out of the driveway of our home planet. NASA’s trips to the moon took three days each way. Mars, the next planet over, is nine months distant by robotic flier. At the speeds attained on those trips, the journey to the nearest neighboring star would take tens of thousands of years.

A starship, then, will need giant engines that draw more power than we know how to produce, said Les Johnson, a NASA scientist who has worked on designs for robotic probes to travel outside our solar system. “There’s no law of physics that says it won’t work,” he said. “Maybe if we get creative in our engineering we can do this.”

In its grant solicitation, DARPA wrote that it wants to “foster a rebirth of a sense of wonder” while encouraging research that will pay dividends here on Earth.

In Jemison, the agency tapped not only a space traveler — in 1992 she became the first woman of color to leave Earth, on the space shuttle — but a physician, engineer, entrepreneur and champion of science education. Her vision: Generate excitement for a grand human ad­ven­ture.

“It’s got to be a global aspiration,” said Jemison.

Her first organizational challenge is getting a 100 Year Starship conference off the ground in Houston this September. Within a century, she wants the project to fund and foster the technologies needed to build a starship.

As a girl, Jemison was entranced with space journeys, real and imagined. She was 12 when she watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, and she counts Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura on the original “Star Trek” television series, as one of her heroes. (Jemison herself appeared on an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”)

“I’ve always thought the public never lost fascination with space,” Jemison said of the post-moonshot era. “They just felt left out.”

Johnson said a small but dedicated set of space enthusiasts has been mulling starships for decades. Most notably, the British Interplanetary Society published plans for a notional starship called Project Daedalus in 1978.

Paul Gilster, a writer and futurist who keeps close tabs on such work in his blog Centauri Dreams, likened the 100 Year Starship to megaprojects such as European cathedrals and Egyptian pyramids, whose construction spanned generations. “We need to acknowledge we won’t see the end [of the project] ourselves,” he said.

Public interest is sure to grow, Gilster added. He pointed to the discovery of hundreds of planets outside our solar system. “We’re entering what I call the golden age of exoplanets,” he said. “We should know within two years whether there are rocky worlds around Alpha Centauri,” the star nearest our sun.

Finding these alien worlds naturally leads to the next question: How do we get there?

In beating out 20 competitors for the grant, Jemison tapped a group of scientists and engineers already studying how to travel to the stars. They call themselves Icarus Interstellar, and one of their advisers, planetary scientist Ralph McNutt of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, called the 100 Year Starship “an opportunity to get beyond the realm of science fiction.” He likened our current space vehicles to “dugout canoes.” But someday, he said, we’ll have the equivalent of ocean liners in space.

“I think it’s a great idea,” NASA’s Johnson said. “If we’re ever going to get to another star, we’ve got to start sometime.”

Facebook co-founder Peter Thiel: some people will live for centuries, rely on robots and take trips to the moon

Tech visionary Thiel sets out to spark a biotech revolution

fiercebiotech.com | Apr 17, 2012

By John Carroll

Peter Thiel, an early venture investor in Facebook and FierceMarkets, has handed out a round of grants of up to $350,000 to a slate of 6 startup biotech companies, each of which promises a game-changing approach to medicine. And he’s hoping that handing out checks to these startup dreamers will help ignite some radical thinking on the possibilities of our collective “amazing future.”

The list of radical “visionaries” includes Longevity Biotech, which is working on artificial protein technology to develop potent oral drugs; Arigos Biomedical, which is developing new technology to allow the long-term storage of organs; Immusoft, which is reprogramming human immune cells; Inspirotec, which is working on a low-cost device to gather and identify airborne agents; along with 3Scan and Positron, which are advancing new medical imaging technology.

“In the past, people dreamed of the future as a radically better, more technologically advanced place: You might live for centuries, delegate work to your robots, and take your vacations on the moon,” said Thiel, who established and funds the Thiel Foundation. “Now, many people expect their children to inherit a world worse than today’s. With Breakout Labs, we want to rekindle dreams of an amazing future. That’s why we’re supporting researchers who dream big and want to build a tomorrow in which we all want to live.”
Sign up for our FREE newsletter for more news like this sent to your inbox!

Thiel set up Breakout Labs to fund early-stage research work, backing teams of radical thinkers working outside traditional academic and industry circles. And he says more companies can earn his backing throughout the year. The new venture is currently focused primarily on the intersection of biology and technology, though Thiel plans to expand the focus as time goes on.

Military wants better “Mind’s Eye” vision for smarter robot surveillance cameras

venturebeat.com | Apr 9, 2012

by Dean Takahashi

Computer vision works much better than it once did, and that could enable a diverse range of machines to see and understand their environments. Such machines could be useful in everything from military scouting to self-driving cars.

That’s why the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is doing research into vision in a program known as Mind’s Eye. James Donlon (pictured right), program manager for the Mind’s Eye project, said at the recent Embedded Vision Alliance summit in San Jose, Calif., that vision systems being tested now aren’t that bad at recognizing patterns such as a person about to be hit by a car that is backing up. But they still make mistakes that are sometimes comical, like mistaking a stationary object for a person or focusing on the wrong thing in a scene.

The Mind’s Eye research has been going on for about 18 months and is about half-way complete. After three years, the various vision projects will lead to lab prototypes that can eventually be brought to market. The systems being developed will do things like recognize someone walking, touching an object, or taking other actions. If the research pans out, we could see robots and other machines getting much better at the vision-based tasks that humans are best at.

“The difference between how a machine can describe a scene and how a person would describe that scene is quite vast still,” Donlon said. “Solving this is what the Mind’s Eye program is about. So far, humans are still best at this.”

The program has about 15 teams working on various approaches. Donlon spoke to the Embedded Vision Alliance, which has a lot of chip makers as members, because technologists still need to make vision much more computationally feasible. But the task also requires a lot of software smarts aimed at making the hardware smarter. The technology starts with recognition, description, prediction and filling gaps in information, and anomaly detection.

To teach machines how to filter out useless information, the Mind’s Eye researchers are showing all sorts of scenes to the computer-driven machines so that they can understand what is happening. Tracking people moving in a parking lot is doable today.

“What we need to be able to do to make truly robust systems is to enable the systems to recognize anything without advance training,” Donlon said. “I’m absolutely thrilled at the progress we have made, but we are nowhere near where we need to be in the informativeness of the vision analysis or the efficiency of the computing. There are plenty of ludicrous results that go along with the good results.”

In military situations, better vision systems could enable more sensors on a battlefield to interpret meaningful actions, such as an enemy troop movement. Right now, that information is funneled to a command center like the one pictured. But DARPA wants to be able to move the intelligence to the edge of the network, so a camera sensor can send information directly to a soldier that needs it, Donlon said.

Soldiers looking at command screens spend so much time looking at them that they may miss what is important and fail to pass on that information to soldiers in the field.

Right now, the military uses scout robots like those made by iRobot, pictured left, to do reconnaissance ahead of troops so that it can warn them of ambushes or other dangers. The robots have cameras on board, can point at an area, and remain concealed. They can then send back video footage that can be understood by human interpreters. But sending out the right video at the right time is critical.

“This takes some human scouts out of harm’s way and creates more situational awareness,” Donlon said. “It ought to be possible to put the intelligence on the sensors, on the edge. The soldier can then be on the look out for anomalies.”

These kinds of technologies could have both military and civilian applications. You could, for instance, use the vision systems with surveillance cameras for private corporations. Vision could also be useful in car safety. Google is working on a self-driving cars project, for example, in hopes of reducing the more than a million car accidents a year.

“DARPA has a [history] of pioneering technologies that have become important applications,” said Jeff Bier, chief executive of market research firm BDTI and founder of the Embedded Vision Alliance, which has 19 corporate members from Analog Devices to Texas Instruments. “We hope that’s going to happen in this category as well.”

Developers for the Mind’s Eye program include: Carnegie Mellon University, Co57 Systems, Colorado State University, Jet Propulsion Lab/Caltech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, SRI International, SUNY at Buffalo, Netherlands Organization for Applied Sceintific Research, University of Arizona, UC Berkeley, USC, General Dynamics Robotic Systems, iRobot, and Toyon Research.

iBrain can ‘read your mind’, upload it to computers

yahoo.com | Apr 9, 2012

By Eric Pfeiffer

 

Dr. Philip Low wearing the "iBrain" (Misha Gravenor/TechnologyReview.com)

A team of California scientists have developed the world’s first portable brain scanner, and it may soon be able to “read a person’s mind,” playing a major role in facilitating medical breakthroughs.

“This is very exciting for us because it allows us to have a window into the brain. We’re building technology that will allow humanity to have access to the human brain for the first time,” said the project’s leader, Phillip Low.

KGTV reports that the device, created by San Diego-based NeuroVigil, and dubbed the iBrain, fits over a person’s head and measures unique neurological patterns connected to specific thought processes.

Low says the goal is to eventually have a large enough database of these brainwaves that a computer could essentially read a person’s thoughts out loud. One person who has already tried out the iBrain is famed physicist Dr. Stephen Hawking.

“We’d like to find a way to bypass his body, pretty much hack his brain,” said Low. This past summer, Low traveled to Cambridge, England, where he met with Hawking, who was asked to think “very hard” about completing various tasks while wearing the device.

NeuroVigil says the device could be used at home by individuals and worn during sleep. It comes equipped with a USB port for transferring the recorded data to a local computer.

Beyond so-called mind reading, the device has potential medical applications, such as enlisting the iBrain to help doctors prescribe the correct levels of medication based on a person’s brainwave responses.

“This is the first step to personalized medicine,” Low said.

Billionaires should be allowed to BUY up planets, claims expert

Could billionaires buy the moon? An American space expert claims that a loophole might allow investors to buy other planets

dailymail.co.uk | Apr 5, 2012

By Rob Waugh

Private companies should be able to buy land on The Moon or other planets for tourism, mining or even to sell property, a space policy expert has said.

Rand Simberg said that if governments started to provide property rights then entrepreneurs and billionaires might pile in and invest – and added that the ‘time is ripe’.

He has proposed a law that would circumvent the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which states no individual or government can have sovereignty over any body in space.

But such a move would mark a huge change in how mankind sees space and could open up the galaxy to a debacle akin to the Colonial era ‘Scramble for Africa’.

One government going alone might also incur the wrath of other nations who all remain signed up to the Outer Space Treaty.

Mr Simberg, who is based in the US, says that the law is open to challenge and does not explicitly forbid anybody from owning chunks of planets, so needs clearing up anyway.

Wired.com reported that his plan is called the Space Settlement Prize Act and was unveiled earlier this month at US conservative think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Any new law would have to work around the 1979 Moon Treaty Act which stops any nation from claiming sovereignty over The Moon, though major countries like the US and Russia have not ratified it.

Mr Simberg’s states: ‘The ratification failure of the Moon Treaty means there is no legal prohibition in force against private ownership of land on the Moon, Mars, etc., as long as the ownership is not derived from a claim of national appropriation or sovereignty (which is prohibited by the Outer Space Treaty)’

Another hurdle that would have to be overcome would be how people get to the moon – Richard Bransons’ Virgin Galactic has yet to even make its first commercial flight into orbit, let alone another planet.

But Mr Simberg said: ‘There are people who believe that rocks have rights; I’m not one of them’.

US space law lawyer Michael Listner told Wired.com that ownership of The Moon and other planets was a ‘very touchy issue’.

Northern lights shine through a ‘crack’: “Like something blew a hole into Earth’s magnetic field”

Finland’s Aaro Kukkohovi saw an aurora of a different color burst forth on Feb. 27 in the skies over Lumijoki. “I’ve never seen anything close to this,” Kukkohovi told SpaceWeather.com. “What a fantastic burst of energy – like something blew a hole into Earth’s magnetic field just above us.” For more from Kukkohovi, check out the gallery at the LumiSoft website. Aaro Kukkohovi

“What a fantastic burst of energy – like something blew a hole into Earth’s magnetic field just above us.”

MSNBC | Feb 29, 2012

Northern lights shine through a crack

By Alan Boyle

A “crack” in Earth’s magnetic field has opened the way for yet another thrilling display of the northern lights near the top of the world.

We’re in the middle of an upswing in the sun’s 11-year activity cycle, leading up to an expected peak in 2013. If solar storms get too intense, there could be a heightened risk of outages in satellite communication and electrical grids. But fortunately, the only significant effects from the solar outbursts so far have come in the form of heightened auroras, occasionally ranging as far south as Nebraska.

Auroras arise due to the interaction of Earth’s magnetosphere with electrically charged particles streaming from the sun. That interaction energizes atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen in the ionosphere, causing ripples of greenish and reddish light between 60 and 200 miles up in Earth’s polar regions.

SpaceWeather.com’s Tony Phillips reports that the interplanetary magnetic field tipped south this week and opened a crack in our planet’s magnetic shield to fuel a minor G1-class geomagnetic storm. The Space Weather Prediction Center said the storm was sparked by particles sent out from the sun during an eruption last Friday.

You can see the atmospheric physics at work in the picture above, captured by Andrei Penescu in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, on Feb. 27. Fittingly, Kangerlussuaq is home to the Sondrestrom Upper Atmospheric Research Facility, a project that studies the aurora and other atmospheric phenomena.

Here are a few other photos from this week’s auroral displays, plus two video extras. One is “Temporal Distortion,” a time-lapse tribute to the aurora and other wonders of the night sky by Dakotalapse photographer Randy Halverson. It includes some of the auroral imagery we featured back in October, and features original music by Bear McCreary, the award-winning composer for TV shows such as “Walking Dead” and “Battlestar Galactica.”

The other is David Peterson’s compilation of time-lapse videos captured by astronauts on the International Space Station, including some primo views of the aurora from above. Here’s what NASA’s Mike Fossum, a former space station resident, had to say about the clip: “This is the best video I’ve seen from photos we took on ISS! Stunning!!”

Science Fiction or Fact: Could a ‘Robopocalypse’ Wipe Out Humans?

LiveScience.com | Feb 24, 2012

By Adam Hadhazy

If a bunch of sci-fi flicks have it right, a war pitting humanity against machines will someday destroy civilization. Two popular movie series based on such a “robopocalypse,” the “Terminator” and “Matrix” franchises, are among those that suggest granting greater autonomy to artificially intelligent machines will end up dooming our species. (Only temporarily, of course, thanks to John Connor and Neo.)

Given the current pace of technological development, does the “robopocalypse” scenario seem more far-fetched or prophetic? The fate of the world could tip in either direction, depending on who you ask.

While researchers in the computer science field disagree on the road ahead for machines, they say our relationship with machines probably will be harmonious, not murderous. Yet there are a number of scenarios that could lead to non-biological beings aiming to exterminate us.

“The technology already exists to build a system that will destroy the whole world, intentionally or unintentionally, if it just detects the right conditions,” said Shlomo Zilberstein, a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts.

Machines at our command

Let’s first consider the optimistic viewpoint: that machines always will act as our servants, not the other way around.

“One approach is not to develop systems that can be so dangerous if they are out of control,” Zilberstein said.

Something like Skynet – the computerized defense network in “The Terminator” that decides to wipe out humanity – is already possible. So why has such a system not been built? A big reason: Nuclear-armed nations such as the United States would not want to turn over any of the responsibility for launching warheads to a computer. “What if there is a bug in the system? No one is going to take that risk,” said Zilberstein. [What If There Were Another Technologically Advanced Species?]

On a smaller scale, however, a high degree of autonomy has been granted to predator drones flying in the Middle East. “The number of robotic systems that can actually pull the trigger autonomously is already growing,” said Zilberstein.

Still, a human operator monitors a drone and is given the final say whether to proceed with a missile strike. That certainly is not the case with Skynet, which, in the “Terminator” films, is given control of America’s entire nuclear arsenal.

In “The Terminator,” the military creates the program with the objective of reducing human error and slowness of response in case of an attack on the U.S.

When human controllers come around to realizing the danger posed by an all-powerful Skynet, they try to shut it down. Skynet interprets this act as a threat to its existence, and in order to counter its perceived human enemy, Skynet launching America’s nukesat Russia,  provoking a retaliatory strike. Billions die in a nuclear holocaust.Skynet then goes on to build factories that churn out robot armies to eliminate the remainder of humankind.

In a real-life scenario, Zilberstein thinks simple safeguards would prevent an autonomous system from threatening more people than it is designed to, perhaps in guarding country’s borders, for example. Plus, no systems would be programmed with the ability to make broad strategic decisions the way Skynet does.

“All the systems we’re likely to build in the-near future will have specific abilities,” Zilberstein said. “They will be able to monitor a region and maybe shoot, but they will not replace a [human] general.”

Robots exceeding our grasp

Michael Dyer, a computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, is less optimistic. He thinks “humans will ultimately be replaced by machines” and that the transition might not be peaceful. [Americans Want Robots, and They're Willing to Pay]

The continued progress in artificial intelligence research will lead to machines as smart as we are in the next couple hundred years, Dyer predicts. “Advanced civilizations reach a point of enough intelligence to understand how their own brain works, and then they build synthetic versions of themselves,” he says.

The desire to do so might come from attempts at establishing our own immortality – and that opportunity might be too much for humanity to resist. (Whowouldn’t want to spend their ever-after with their consciousness walking around in a robot shell?)

Maybe that sort of changeover from biology to technology goes relatively smoothly. Other rise-of-the-machines scenarios are less smooth.

Dyer suggests a new arms race of robotic system could result in one side running rampant. “In the case of warfare, by definition, the enemy side has no control of the robots that are trying to kill them,” Dyer said. Like Skynet, the manufactured might turn against the manufacturers.

Or an innocuous situation of overdependency on robots spirals out of control. Suppose a factory that makes robots is not following human commands, so an order is issued to shut off power to the factory. “But unfortunately, robots happen to manage the power station and so they refuse. So a command is issued by humans to stop the trucks from delivering necessary materials to the factory, but the drivers are robots, so they also refuse,” Dyer says.

Perhaps using the Internet, robotic intelligences wrest control of a society that depends too much on its automata. (“The Animatrix,” a 2003 collection of short cartoons, including some back stories for “The Matrix” movies, describes such a situation.)

Overall, a bit of wisdom would prevent humankind from falling into the traps dreamed up by Hollywood screenwriters. But the profit motive at companies has certainly engendered more automation, and the Cold War’s predication on the threat of mutually assured destruction points out that rationality does not always win.

“Doomsday scenarios are pretty easy to create, and I wouldn’t rule out that kind of possibility,” said Zilberstein. “But I’m personally not that worried.”

Plausibility rating: Military leaders and corporations probably will not be so stupid as to add high levels of programmed autonomy to catastrophically strong weapon systems and critical industrial sectors. We give the “robopocalypse” two out of four Rocketboys.

24 hour shifts, suicide nets, toxic exposure and explosions: Inside the Chinese iPad factories

Unpleasant sight: Nets to prevent workers from jumping to their deaths are pictured outside one of the Foxconn factory buildings in the township of Longhua, in southern Guangdong province

‘Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow’

- Banner in Chengdu plant

•     ‘Working excessive overtime without a single day off during the week’
•     ‘Living together in crowded dorms and exposure to dangerous chemicals’
•     Two explosions in 2011 in China ‘due to aluminum dust’ killed four workers
•     Almost 140 injured after using toxin in factory, reports New York Times

‘Forced to stand for 24 hours, suicide nets, toxin exposure and explosions’: Inside the Chinese factories making iPads for Apple

Daily Mail | Jan 27, 2012

By Mark Duell

Working excessive overtime without a single day off during the week, living together in crowded dormitories and standing so long that their legs swell and they can hardly walk after a 24-hour shift.

These are the lives some employees claim they live at Apple’s manufacturing centres in China, where the firm’s suppliers allegedly wrongly dispose of hazardous waste and produce improper records.

Almost 140 workers at a supplier in China were injured two years ago using a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens – and two explosions last year killed four people while injuring more than 75.

The California tech giant had allegedly been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant in southwest China before the explosions at those plants, reported the New York Times.

‘If Apple was warned and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,’ Massachusetts Institute of Technology work safety expert Nicholas Ashford told the New York Times.

‘But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that,’ the former U.S. Labor Department advisor added.

Banners in the Chengdu plant gave a warning to the 120,000 staff: ‘Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow’. Workers who arrived late often had to write confession letters.

The newspaper’s report comes hot on the heels of Apple announcing whopping $13billion profits on $46billion sales in its last quarter – but the firm still wants its overseas factories to produce more.

Apple executives claim it has improved factories in recent years and issues a supplier code of conduct on labour and safety – but problems still exist, according to employment advocacy groups.

More than half of the suppliers audited by Apple have broken at least one part of its conduct code each year since 2007 and have even broken the law in some cases, according to company reports.

A Foxconn employee jumped or fell from a block of flats after losing an iPhone prototype in 2009 – and 18 other workers apparently tried to commit suicide in two years, reported the New York Times.

Suicide nets were installed to prevent workers from jumping to their deaths and Foxconn began providing better mental health treatment for its staff.

Li Mingqi worked for Apple manufacturing partner Foxconn Technology until last spring and helped manage the Chengdu plant which had the explosion. He is now suing Foxconn over his dismissal.

‘Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,’ Mr Li told the New York Times. ‘Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests.’

The fatal Chengdu explosion came from an aluminium dust build up three weeks after the iPad came out. Despite Apple’s probe, seven months on there was a further, non-fatal, explosion in Shanghai.

A former Apple executive claimed that the company has had knowledge of labour abuses in some factories for four years – ‘and they’re still going on because the system works for us’.

Suppliers are only allowed the smallest margins on what they produce for Apple, and executives at the Cupertino company always ask them for details on part costs, worker numbers and salary sizes.

But workers at a factory of Apple partner Wintek went on strike after rumours that employees were exposed to toxins because they evaporated three times faster than alcohol when rubbing screens.

Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs, who died last October, said two years ago that Apple is a worldwide leader in ‘understanding the working conditions in our supply chain’.

He said many of the factories have restaurants, cinemas, hospitals and swimming pools. While staff say they appreciate these facilities, the working conditions are still seen as relentless.

Foxconn said conditions are ‘anything but harsh’, just one in 20 workers assembly line workers must stand to do their jobs and the firm has a ‘very good safety record’, reported the New York Times.

But the Mail on Sunday visited a Foxconn factory making iPods in Shenzhen, China, in 2006, and our reports on long hours, crowded accommodation and punishments shocked Apple executives.

‘We’re trying really hard to make things better,’ one former Apple executive told the New York Times. ‘But most people would still be really disturbed if they saw where their iPhone comes from.’

Our Frightening Future, Brought to You by Microsoft

Motley Fool | Jan 18, 2012

By Alex Planes

Hey, look! Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT  ) found a way to squeeze more functionality from the motion-sensing Kinect. Since many news-driven writers (including yours truly) are rushed and lazy, we often repeat pop culture references: You can open your files in Windows 8 by pointing at them aggressively, just like Tom Cruise in Minority Report!

But get this: Microsoft isn’t only jumping on board the Tom Cruise future-semaphore bandwagon. One new Kinect application is a creepy foot forward into the film’s more troubling technological advancements — specifically, its omnipresent and ominously precise biometric sensors. It might be good for the company’s bottom line, but quite threatening to the average person’s privacy.

A great algorithmic leap forward

The Kinect needed a certain level of hardware precision to work — but its software was the real breakthrough. That bleeding-edge programming package is so detailed that the Kinect’s next iteration is rumored to read lips and detect emotional cues when paired with more accurate sensors that track nuanced facial movements. The device is already accurate enough for Microsoft to use it to create a mall advertising system that that changes content based on who it thinks you are.

Why does that sound so familiar?

Aggressively targeted advertising

In the video, everything Tom Cruise passes changes to what it thinks he wants based on his personal information, which is accessed with eye scans. We might cringe at the unflattering personalized ads on Facebook. The filter bubble — a term for what you miss when Google (Nasdaq: GOOG  ) customizes its search results based on what it knows about you — has the potential to keep us in the dark. But as intrusive as these systems are, you can still opt out.

The only way to “opt out” of Microsoft’s individualized ads is to avoid places that use it. As long as these locations are on the fringe this isn’t a problem, but by 2054 (when Minority Report is set) things might look quite different. To build interest, Microsoft will do everything it can to further the personalization for passerby. Kinect-ed advertisements could send more detailed info to ad viewers’ Windows Phones. This might be done with devices that are enabled with near-field communication, raising major privacy issues — though the privacy issues raised by using biometric scanning in public for marketing purposes are probably somewhat larger.

Not quite science fiction

It’s hard to swallow the idea that biometric tracking could be this good this soon, but we’ve already seen plenty of signs that the film’s other signature technologies are fast becoming reality:

• Responsive gesture-based computing is already on its way. Microsoft built Kinect compatibility into Windows 8 and has lent support to a Kinect-centric start-up accelerator.
• Personalized ads? You’ve been reading this article, I hope.
• An eye-scanning system developed by nonprofit research firm SRI International can read irises from up to three meters away, and can process up to 1,800 people per hour.
• MIT and the University of Arizona created a semi-real-time holographic video system late in 2010. One of its key components was, unsurprisingly, a Kinect camera.
• Google’s already proved that automated cars work well enough to be street-legal.
• Electronic paper pioneer E Ink earned a billion dollars in revenue last year, and Universal Display‘s (Nasdaq: PANL  ) flexible organic LEDs featured prominently at Samsung’s CES booth earlier this month.

Many of the real-world analogues to Minority Report technologies could trounce Spielberg’s imagination by 2054. But Minority Report wasn’t really about any of these things. They were well-designed window dressing to the film’s main theme: Grievous crimes can be predicted and stopped with perfect accuracy before they happen.

There’s nothing to fear if you’ve got nothing to hide

“Precrime” technology might be furthest away from reality, but not due to any lack of trying. IBM (NYSE: IBM  ) boasts of its predictive crime-fighting solutions, which include blanketing a South Korean city with cameras and hooking them up to analytical programs. Data mining software from the jack-of-all-tech-trades also helped Richmond go from the fifth-most-dangerous American city to the 99th. It’s easy to imagine IBM upgrading from cameras to Kinects, or at least pairing visual cues with biometric analytics. It’s not a trio of all-seeing telepaths, but it’s a start.

Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. already use predictive analytics to reduce crime rates, but none of these work on an individual level. Scale up the resources, though, and solutions start to look more menacing. The Department of Homeland Security’s secretive pre-crime system uses biometric readings to detect potential ne’er-do-wells based on (among other things) emotional cues and physical attributes. Government researchers could probably save some taxpayer money by grabbing a few Kinects for the next build.

Why are we running?

Microsoft’s only doing what any sensible self-interested company would by seeking out new business opportunities. Combining Kinect capabilities with advanced analytics on a widespread scale could help the company overcome the PC’s slow decline and present a major recurring revenue stream, given significant global adoption. But how much intrusion will consumers — citizens, really — accept?

I found enough evidence to predict that targeted advertising will get pushier this year, and it looks as though Microsoft is going to prove me right. I can’t say I appreciate, from a privacy standpoint, the way this prediction is coming true, but such applications should have seemed inevitable. Without understanding how it works, the Kinect is essentially a magical stick that knows exactly what you’re doing and can tell if you’re sad. How could that not have wound up as a powerful marketing tool? I only hope it doesn’t become something much more dangerous in the name of security. By the time we find ourselves in that web, it’ll be much too late to opt out.