Robots Receive Internet Brain For Machine Learning

Nicholas West
Activist Post

A new system called Robo Brain is being funded by the usual suspects in the military-industrial-surveillance complex.

The initiative to merge robotics with artificial intelligence continues to expand its vision. I recently wrote about an internal cloud network program which enables robots to do their own research, communicate with one another, and collectively increase their intelligence in a full simulation of human interaction. It has been dubbed "Wikipedia for Robots."

A parallel project in Germany went further by seeking to translate the open Internet into a suitable robot language that would prompt accelerated, autonomous machine learning.

Now researchers at Cornell are presenting Robo Brain – "a large-scale computational system that learns from publicly available Internet resources." Evidently it is learning quickly:

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Let’s reimagine the way we connnect with food: The Open Food Network

C4SS

We are the Open Food Foundation and the Open Food Network is our first project. It is a free and open source project aimed at supporting diverse food enterprises and making it easy to access local and sustainable food.

The Open Food Foundation is a non-profit, registered charity established in October 2012, to develop, accumulate and protect open source knowledge, code, applications and platforms for fair and sustainable food systems.

While established in Australia, we support global collaboration on open projects for food system transformation. We want to build and support communities that bring the people who need the software together with those who can develop it. We are currently working with communities in the UK, Europe, US and Canada on developing OFN pilots.

The Open Food Network is being brought to life by many wonderful people and organisations. Special thanks to VicHealth, WiCreate, Matt Arnold, Random Hacks of Kindness, DiUS computing, City of Casey and Stroudco and other members of the Online Food Hubs Network. Amazing tech guys: Rohan Mitchell, Rob Harrington, Raf Schouten, Andrew Spinks, David Cook, Alex Serdyuk, Will Marshall, and Yin Shen. Early adopters and trial partners: Amoro Foods, Earth and Sky, East Food Hub, Eat Local Eat Wild, Eaterprises Australia, Farm Hack, Fife Diet, Folk Labs, Food Connect Brisbane, Food Coop, Greenhorns, Kildonan Uniting Care, Local Organics, Northcote Bulk, Grow Lightly Connect, Jonai Farms, Mildura Healthy Food, South East Food Hub, StroudCo Food Hub, and other Food Hubs networks around the world.

Open Source Everything

Comment: I missed this one. Ordinarily I wouldn't trust an ex-CIA spy to come up with anything substantive at all but this guy clearly represents something other than your usual spook. In fact, the wisdom and pragmatic spirituality of the man leaps off the pages of his book:  The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust, which is more than inspiring - it actually gives you hope.  There are a few buzzwords in there that may initially raise your hackles such as "hive mind" and collective consciousness which smacks of collectivism harking back to the capitalist-corporate-communist hybrid of control. But you'll not find this a cover for anything other than the sensible use of technology supporting human emancipation as a tool not as a Master. Transhumanism it is not.  But the open source nature underpinning his visions mean that this isn't a wish to dispense with individualism or a return to some new centralised system of technocracy, quite the reverse. 

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Earth Insight/Guardian
19 June 2014

Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, is a man on a mission. But it's a mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its core.
With 18 years experience working across the US intelligence community, followed by 20 more years in commercial intelligence and training, Steele's exemplary career has spanned almost all areas of both the clandestine world.

Steele started off as a Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer. After four years on active duty, he joined the CIA for about a decade before co-founding the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, where he was deputy director. Widely recognised as the leader of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) paradigm, Steele went on to write the handbooks on OSINT for NATO, the US Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Special Operations Forces. In passing, he personally trained 7,500 officers from over 66 countries.

In 1992, despite opposition from the CIA, he obtained Marine Corps permission to organise a landmark international conference on open source intelligence – the paradigm of deriving information to support policy decisions not through secret activities, but from open public sources available to all. The conference was such a success it brought in over 620 attendees from the intelligence world. 

But the CIA wasn't happy, and ensured that Steele was prohibited from running a second conference. The clash prompted him to resign from his position as second-ranking civilian in Marine Corps intelligence, and pursue the open source paradigm elsewhere. He went on to found and head up the Open Source Solutions Network Inc. and later the non-profit Earth Intelligence Network which runs the Public Intelligence Blog. 

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