Airstrikes, explosive vehicles, and bulldozers cause 'insane' destruction in Gaza City, eyewitnesses and civil defense say

Mondoweiss | Tareq S. Hajjaj

The Israeli army is using airstrikes, rigged explosive APCs, and bulldozing operations to level neighborhoods and displacement centers in Gaza City. Eyewitnesses and local officials say it is to cause mass flight and prevent residents from returning.

Ahead of its planned full-scale invasion of Gaza City, the Israeli army is causing widespread destruction in the Strip's largest urban center, forcing residents to evacuate ahead of its publicly declared start date: October 7.

Recent reports from eyewitnesses and the Gaza Civil Defense show that the Israeli army has been using retrofitted armored personnel carriers (APCs) that are sent into dense population centers, including neighborhoods and displacement centers, before they are remotely detonated.

The attacks continue alongside an extensive bulldozing operation in the city and constant aerial bombardment. Between August 12 and August 18, the Israeli army destroyed over 400 buildings in the Zaytoun neighborhood and launched a limited ground incursion at its edges. The army also launched a similar operation in the Sabra neighborhood, west of Gaza City.

Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal told Mondoweiss that the Israeli army destroyed over 1,500 buildings in Gaza City in aerial strikes alone since August 6, largely in Zaytoun and Sabra.

Basal explained that the Civil Defense continues to receive calls from trapped civilians in the two neighborhoods, but that there is no way to reach them due to heavy shelling and bombardment.

"We're afraid that the Israeli invasion will get even deeper into Gaza City and that Civil Defense crews will be unable to reach the places they bomb. Nowhere in Gaza is safe, whether north or south. Bombs chase residents from their homes, from their displacement centers, and even from their tents."

Abdulwahhab Ismail, a resident of the Saftawi area in northwestern Gaza, evacuated his neighborhood on Tuesday after several buildings on his street were detonated by what he described as explosive "robots."  

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Researchers try to recreate human-like thinking in machines

The LGI network’s architecture. Credit: Qi and Wu. 

Ingrid Fadelli
Techexplore.com

Researchers at Oxford University have recently tried to recreate human thinking patterns in machines, using a language guided imagination (LGI) network. Their method, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv, could inform the development of artificial intelligence that is capable of human-like thinking, which entails a goal-directed flow of mental ideas guided by language. 

Human thinking generally requires the brain to understand a particular language expression and use it to organize the flow of ideas in the mind. For instance, if a person leaving her house realizes that it's raining, she might internally say, "If I get an umbrella, I might avoid getting wet," and then decide to pick up an umbrella on the way out. As this thought goes through her mind, however, she will automatically know what the visual input (i.e. raindrops) she observes means, and how holding an umbrella could prevent getting wet, perhaps even imagining the feeling of holding the umbrella or getting wet under the rain.

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Tiny Spies: This Insect-Like Flying Robot is Smaller Than a Penny

Futurism

Tiny Dancer 

A team of engineers from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles built a four-winged flying robot called Bee+, which weighs just 95 grams and sports a footprint smaller than a penny.

Harvard researchers built another tiny flying robot, called RoboBee, in 2013. It weighed only 75 grams.

But RoboBee featured just two wings, which made its flight far erratic and uncontrolled. Four wings gives Bee+ a way to control pitch and its orientation in space. 

Video

Moral Wisdom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Cybernetics Pioneer Norbert Wiener’s Prophetic Admonition About Technology and Ethics

Web Investigator KK.org
Maria Popova

Norbert Wiener “The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”

“Intelligence supposes goodwill,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in the middle of the twentieth century. In the decades since, as we have entered a new era of technology risen from our minds yet not always consonant with our values, this question of goodwill has faded dangerously from the set of considerations around artificial intelligence and the alarming cult of increasingly advanced algorithms, shiny with technical triumph but dull with moral insensibility.

In De Beauvoir’s day, long before the birth of the Internet and the golden age of algorithms, the visionary mathematician, philosopher, and cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894–March 18, 1964) addressed these questions with astounding prescience in his 1954 book The Human Use of Human Beings, the ideas in which influenced the digital pioneers who shaped our present technological reality and have recently been rediscovered by a new generation of thinkers eager to reinstate the neglected moral dimension into the conversation about artificial intelligence and the future of technology. 

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Swarms of Drones, Piloted by Artificial Intelligence, May Soon Patrol Europe’s Borders

The Intercept

Imagine you’re hiking through the woods near a border. Suddenly, you hear a mechanical buzzing, like a gigantic bee. Two quadcopters have spotted you and swoop in for a closer look. Antennae on both drones and on a nearby autonomous ground vehicle pick up the radio frequencies coming from the cell phone in your pocket. They send the signals to a central server, which triangulates your exact location and feeds it back to the drones. The robots close in.

Cameras and other sensors on the machines recognize you as human and try to ascertain your intentions. Are you a threat? Are you illegally crossing a border? Do you have a gun? Are you engaging in acts of terrorism or organized crime? The machines send video feeds to their human operator, a border guard in an office miles away, who checks the videos and decides that you are not a risk. The border guard pushes a button, and the robots disengage and continue on their patrol.

This is not science fiction. The European Union is financing a project to develop drones piloted by artificial intelligence and designed to autonomously patrol Europe’s borders. The drones will operate in swarms, coordinating and corroborating information among fleets of quadcopters, small fixed-wing airplanes, ground vehicles, submarines, and boats.

Developers of the project, known as Roborder, say the robots will be able to identify humans and independently decide whether they represent a threat. If they determine that you may have committed a crime, they will notify border police.

President Donald Trump has used the specter of criminals crossing the southern border to stir nationalist political sentiment and energize his base. In Europe, two years after the height of the migration crisis that brought more than a million people to the continent, mostly from the Middle East and Africa, immigration remains a hot-button issue, even as the number of new arrivals has dropped. Political parties across the European Union are winning elections on anti-immigrant platforms and enacting increasingly restrictive border policies. Tech ethicists and privacy advocates worry that Roborder and projects like it outsource too much law enforcement work to nonhuman actors and could easily be weaponized against people in border areas.

“The development of these systems is a dark step into morally dangerous territory,” said Noel Sharkey, emeritus professor of robotics and artificial intelligence at Sheffield University in the U.K. and one of the founders of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, a nonprofit that advocates against the military use of robotics. Sharkey lists examples of weaponized drones currently on the market: flying robots equipped with Tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and other weapons. He warns of the implications of combining that technology with AI-based decision-making and using it in politically-charged border zones. “It’s only a matter of time before a drone will be able to take action to stop people,” Sharkey told The Intercept.

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For Lower-Paid Workers, the Robot Overlords Have Arrived

Morning Star

It's time to stop worrying that robots will take our jobs -- and start worrying that they will decide who gets jobs.

Millions of low-paid workers' lives are increasingly governed by software and algorithms. This was starkly illustrated by a report last week that Amazon.com tracks the productivity of its employees and regularly fires those who underperform, with almost no human intervention."

 

Amazon's system tracks the rates of each individual associate's productivity and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors," a law firm representing Amazon said in a letter to the National Labor Relations Board, as first reported by technology news site The Verge. Amazon was responding to a complaint that it had fired an employee from a Baltimore fulfillment center for federally protected activity, which could include union organizing. Amazon said the employee was fired for failing to meet productivity targets. 

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before software started firing people. After all, it already screens resumes, recommends job applicants, schedules shifts and assigns projects. In the workplace, "sophisticated technology to track worker productivity on a minute-by-minute or even second-by-second basis is incredibly pervasive," says Ian Larkin, a business professor at the University of California at Los Angeles specializing in human resources.

Industrial laundry services track how many seconds it takes to press a laundered shirt; on-board computers track truckers' speed, gear changes and engine revolutions per minute; and checkout terminals at major discount retailers report if the cashier is scanning items quickly enough to meet a preset goal. In all these cases, results are shared in real time with the employee, and used to determine who is terminated, says Mr. Larkin.

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New Lifelike Biomaterial Self-Reproduces and Has a Metabolism

Singularity Hub

Life demands flux.

Every living organism is constantly changing: cells divide and die, proteins build and disintegrate, DNA breaks and heals. Life demands metabolism—the simultaneous builder and destroyer of living materials—to continuously upgrade our bodies. That’s how we heal and grow, how we propagate and survive.

What if we could endow cold, static, lifeless robots with the gift of metabolism?

In a study published this month in Science Robotics, an international team developed a DNA-based method that gives raw biomaterials an artificial metabolism. Dubbed DASH—DNA-based assembly and synthesis of hierarchical materials—the method automatically generates “slime”-like nanobots that dynamically move and navigate their environments.

 

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Weaponized nanotech - These "Insects" Are NOT What You Think

secureteam10

Cornell scientists create ‘living’ machines that eat, grow, and evolve

The Next Web

The field of robotics is going through a renaissance thanks to advances in machine learning and sensor technology. Each generation of robot is engineered with greater mechanical complexity and smarter operating software than the last. But what if, instead of painstakingly designing and engineering a robot, you could just tear open a packet of primordial soup, toss it in the microwave on high for two minutes, and then grow your own ‘lifelike’ robot?

If you’re a Cornell research team, you’d grow a bunch and make them race.

Scientists from Cornell University have successfully constructed DNA-based machines with incredibly life-like capabilities. These human-engineered organic machines are capable of locomotion, consuming resources for energy, growing and decaying, and evolving. Eventually they die.

That sure sounds a lot like life, but Dan Luo, professor of biological and environmental engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell, who worked on the research, says otherwise. He told The Stanford Chronicle:

We are introducing a brand-new, lifelike material concept powered by its very own artificial metabolism. We are not making something that’s alive, but we are creating materials that are much more lifelike than have ever been seen before.

Just how lifelike? 

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An Ancient Japanese Shrine Debuts a Buddhist Robot

Comment: It's one thing to have the yin-yang symbol now fully commoditized but to usher in a robot to entice younger generations into the philosophy of a transhumanist Buddhism would no doubt have the Buddha turning in his grave...

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The Diplomat

Kyoto, Japan’s ancient former capital, is home to temples, shrines, and imperial gardens. As the birthplace of Japanese tradition, the city attracts some 53 million tourists every year.

Recently, the famed 400-year old Kodaiji Temple in Kyoto unveiled a modern makeover. The world’s first sutra-chanting android deity, modelled after Kannon the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, was introduced to the public last week. Kannon is worshiped by thousands of temples in Japan as a deity who helps people in distress; now the country’s fascination with robotics has made its way into that worship.

Kodaiji Temple Administrator Tensho Goto wanted to spread the word of Buddhism to a younger generation losing touch with the tradition. He enlisted the help of pioneer Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, head of intelligent robotics at Osaka University, who has made a name for himself in robotic research on the world stage.

The resulting android version of Kannon, named “Mindar,” stands on a pedestal at 195 centimeters tall (6 feet, 4 inches), weighs 60 kilograms, and is made with silicon and aluminum. Like many of Ishiguro’s popular telenoid robots, Mindar takes a gender-neutral human form. The appearance is kept to a bare minimum — almost like a naked robot. But as an android embodying the Goddess of Mercy, Mindar had special features designed to evoke both feminine and masculine qualities. With an open head of exposed aluminum wires and a mechanical lower half, Mindar might not be how some would picture a robotic Kannon. However, the plain facial features give room for visitors to use their own imagination in how they’d like the deity to appear.

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See also: Technocracy

The Rise of the Robot Reporter

NY Times

 

As reporters and editors find themselves the victims of layoffs at digital publishers and traditional newspaper chains alike, journalism generated by machine is on the rise.

Roughly a third of the content published by Bloomberg News uses some form of automated technology. The system used by the company, Cyborg, is able to assist reporters in churning out thousands of articles on company earnings reports each quarter.

The program can dissect a financial report the moment it appears and spit out an immediate news story that includes the most pertinent facts and figures. And unlike business reporters, who find working on that kind of thing a snooze, it does so without complaint.

Untiring and accurate, Cyborg helps Bloomberg in its race against Reuters, its main rival in the field of quick-twitch business financial journalism, as well as giving it a fighting chance against a more recent player in the information race, hedge funds, which use artificial intelligence to serve their clients fresh facts.

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Delivery wars: Amazon's new delivery robot vs Starship's college munchie robot

zdnet.com

For those who still doubt the future of last-mile delivery belongs to robots, this must have been a jolting week. First, Starship Technologies, a robotics firm founded in 2014 by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, announced its robots would begin delivering food to dorm rooms at George Mason University in Maryland. Now Amazon, the company with perhaps the most to immediately gain or lose by how it responds to the competition nipping on its heels in the fast delivery game, has announced its own rolling robot.

The Amazon robot is named Scout. As my ZDNet colleague reported, six of them are being trialed in a small testbed in Washington State. Like many other delivery bot trials, Scout will be accompanied by a human chaperone. It will work Monday through Friday during daylight hours and will stick to sidewalks. It will only service Prime customers, of course, and presumably there was an opt-in campaign. 

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HSBC Bank To Staff Branches With Humanoid Robots

Aaron Kesel
Activist Post

HSBC, will test robots created by SoftBank Robotics, in the lobby of their Fifth Avenue branch in midtown Manhattan, CNBC reported.

The robots are not only designed to interact with customers but also take selfies, dance and tell jokes. Pepper, one of the robots equipped with a tablet on its chest at the HSBC Manhattan branch, danced to a techno beat in a demonstration according to CNBC.

This marks the second known test of robots for banking; the first being a bank in China, Construction Bank (CCB), that opened a Shanghai branch run entirely by robots in a testing phase for finance with little to no human involvement, Activist Post reported.

Robots are beginning to take over every aspect of society.  They are also headed for retail businesses delivering freight and eliminating truckers. But, again, robots malfunction. In fact, it sounds quite dangerous allowing a freight truck to drive itself; if the sensors break down on a big rig truck going  60-70 MPH, that’s potentially 40 tons barreling down the highway unattended except by artificial intelligence. As Activist Post reported back in March, Uber had to halt nationwide testing of its A.I. vehicles following the death of a pedestrian in Arizona. And that was a car actually attended by a human back-up operator.

Automation clearly isn’t a foolproof technology, and it can also be exploited by hackers for malicious purposes that could even include programming a bot to kill an individual.

Not even journalists are safe from robot replacements.

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Scientist built 'DNA-robots' remote controlled by magnetic fields

Phil Dooley
Cosmos Magazine

Scientists have built a tiny robot from strands of DNA and devised a way to remote-control it using magnetic fields.

The team from Ohio State University in the US envisage these robots being deployed into human bodies to perform controlled medical procedures such as delivering a drug to a tumour.

"There's a growing interest in interacting with a molecular system in real time," says Carlos Castro, lead author of the team's paper, published in the journal Nature Communications.

"You could do it with a joystick, as if you might be playing a video game."

Castro's team has been perfecting a technique known as 'DNA origami' to assemble strands of DNA into tiny machines. To date they've made levers, rotating parts and sliding joints, even a vehicle to deliver a cancer drug into a leukaemia cell.

So far scientists have designed these machines - including a two-legged DNA robot that walked along a DNA strand sorting molecules - to be triggered by changes in solution or when encountering a specific protein.

But Castro wanted to find a way to control the robots interactively. He teamed up with physicist Ratnasingham Sooryakumar, a colleague at Ohio State University and specialist in magnetic control protocols. Together they devised the system, but it took four years to bring it to reality.  

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Robotic bee could help pollinate crops as real bees decline

Comment: Well, what could possibly go wrong? Er. Everything?

You know something is really amiss when Walmart starts to get involved...

https://futurism.com/robot-bees-drones-walmart/
 

This is going to make a bad situation worse for so many reasons. a) It's the same reductionist mindset that creates such problems in the first place. In other words, mimicking nature in a bid to replace complex biodiversity dynamics doesn't work. b) It will be expensive as well as potentially harmful not just to other insects, making it more likely that it will further reduce the bee population not assist it. (Drone bees have rotor blades and are mechanical, ergo... c) This is a bid to make a big bucks not to solve the problem.

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New Scientist


A drone that can pollinate flowers may one day work side by side with bees to improve crop yields.

About three-quarters of global crop species, from apples to almonds, rely on pollination by bees and other insects. But pesticides, land clearing and climate change have caused declines in many of these creatures, creating problems for farmers.

Pollination is needed for reproduction in flowering plants. Male flower parts, or stamens, produce pollen that fertilises female parts, known as pistils, to make seeds. In self-pollinating flowers, the stamen sheds pollen directly onto the pistil.

Cross-pollination, however, requires the transfer of pollen from one plant to another. This mostly relies on pollen becoming stuck to the bodies of bees and other insects when they feed on flowers, and then being deposited on the next plant they visit. It has advantages over self-pollination, in that it increases genetic diversity and improves the quantity and quality of crops.

Eijiro Miyako at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and his colleagues have used the principle of cross-pollination in bees to make a drone that transports pollen between flowers.

Read more (+video) 

See also:  'Drone Bees' Are Comically Inept, Expensive and Dangerous to Real Bees

New DARPA Program Plans To Patrol Cities With AI Drones

Zero Hedge

On May 10, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unveiled the Urban Reconnaissance through Supervised Autonomy (URSA) program, which addresses the issues of reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition within urban environments.

The primary objective of the URSA program is to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of blending unmanned aerial systems, sensor technologies, and advanced machine learning algorithms to “enable improved techniques for rapidly discriminating hostile intent and filtering out threats in complex urban environments,” said FedBizOpps.

In other words, the Pentagon is developing a program of high-tech cameras mounted on drones and other robots that monitor cities, which enable identification and discrimination between civilians and terrorists through machine learning computers.

DARPA provides a simple scenario of what a URSA engagement would look like: 

“A static sensor located near an overseas military installation detects an individual moving across an urban intersection and towards the installation outside of normal pedestrian pathways. An unmanned aerial system (UAS) equipped with a loudspeaker delivers a warning message. The person is then observed running into a neighboring building. Later, URSA detects an individual emerging from a different door at the opposite end of the building, but confirms it is the same person and sends a different UAS to investigate.
This second UAS determines that the individual has resumed movement toward a restricted area. It releases a nonlethal flash-bang device at a safe distance to ensure the individual attends to the second message and delivers a sterner warning. This second UAS takes video of the subject and determines that the person’s gait and direction are unchanged even when a third UAS flies directly in front of the person and illuminates him with an eye-safe laser dot. URSA then alerts the human supervisor and provides a summary of these observations, warning actions, and the person’s responses and current location.”

The URSA program is a two-phase, 36-month development effort. The first phase of concept/development will begin in the first quarter of FY19 and continue into the second half of FY20. Phase two will start in 3Q20 and continue through 2Q22.

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Bee gone: Scientists turn to technology as declining bee numbers threaten global food security

RT 

The devastating consequences of our declining bee population are being highlighted on the first ever ‘Bee Day.’ Around 80 percent of crops are pollinated by insects. RT asks if there are any alternatives to secure our food future.

According to Greenpeace, some 40 percent of commercial honeybees have been lost across the US since 2006. The decline is attributed to a rise in colony collapse disorder (CCD), a phenomenon that occurs when the majority of a colony’s worker bees suddenly disappear. The cause is unknown, although some experts offer various explanations ranging from infections, increased urbanisation, the loss of habitat, and the widespread use of pesticides.

Whatever the reason, insect pollination directly contributes to the production of a huge portion of the world’s food supply, so the dramatic decline of the honeybee should be a warning: either we get to the root of the problem or develop a technological alternative capable of performing the same function. 

But is a technological solution even viable? 

Research into robotic replacements for bees is being spearheaded by Eijiro Miyako at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. A manually controlled drone, the device is around four centimeters wide and is covered in horse hair treated with a gel designed to collect pollen. 

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Inside A Warehouse Where Thousands Of Robots Pack Groceries

Comment: Another nail in the coffin of employment and community...

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Tech Insider

The first wireless flying robotic insect takes off

Science Daily

Engineers have created RoboFly, the first wireless flying robotic insect. RoboFly is slightly heavier than a toothpick and is powered by a laser beam. 

Insect-sized flying robots could help with time-consuming tasks like surveying crop growth on large farms or sniffing out gas leaks. These robots soar by fluttering tiny wings because they are too small to use propellers, like those seen on their larger drone cousins. Small size is advantageous: These robots are cheap to make and can easily slip into tight places that are inaccessible to big drones.

But current flying robo-insects are still tethered to the ground. The electronics they need to power and control their wings are too heavy for these miniature robots to carry.

Now, engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time cut the cord and added a brain, allowing their RoboFly to take its first independent flaps. This might be one small flap for a robot, but it's one giant leap for robot-kind. The team will present its findings May 23 at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Brisbane, Australia.

RoboFly is slightly heavier than a toothpick and is powered by a laser beam. It uses a tiny onboard circuit that converts the laser energy into enough electricity to operate its wings.

"Before now, the concept of wireless insect-sized flying robots was science fiction. Would we ever be able to make them work without needing a wire?" said co-author Sawyer Fuller, an assistant professor in the UW Department of Mechanical Engineering. "Our new wireless RoboFly shows they're much closer to real life." 

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This DeepMind AI Spontaneously Developed Digital Navigation ‘Neurons’ Like Ours

Comment: Ahh, Google DeepMind - serving our interests by mining our minds for a more efficient society. What could go wrong?

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Singularity Hub

"The research on grid-cells is still very much basic science, but being able to mimic the powerful navigational capabilities of animals could be extremely useful for everything from robots to drones to self-driving cars."

When Google DeepMind researchers trained a neural network to tackle a virtual maze, it spontaneously developed digital equivalents to the specialized neurons called grid cells that mammals use to navigate. Not only did the resulting AI system have superhuman navigation capabilities, the research could provide insight into how our brains work.

Grid cells were the subject of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, alongside other navigation-related neurons. These cells are arranged in a lattice of hexagons, and the brain effectively overlays this pattern onto its environment. Whenever the animal crosses a point in space represented by one of the corners these hexagons, a neuron fires, allowing the animal to track its movement.

Mammalian brains actually have multiple arrays of these cells. These arrays create overlapping grids of different sizes and orientations that together act like an in-built GPS. The system even works in the dark and independently of the animal’s speed or direction.

Exactly how these cell work and the full range of their functions is still somewhat of a mystery though. One recently proposed hypothesis suggests they could be used for vector-based navigation—working out the distance and direction to a target “as the crow flies.”

That’s a useful capability because it makes it possible for animals or artificial agents to quickly work out and choose the best route to a particular destination and even find shortcuts.

So, the researchers at DeepMind decided to see if they could test the idea in silico using neural networks, as they roughly mimic the architecture of the brain.

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