Tag: military

What is a clean strike?

here we go again: “clean” strikes followed by a quagmire. we have become exceedingly good at it

Missile strikes against Syria could be launched “as early as Thursday” as the White House intensified efforts toward an international response to the suspected use of chemical weapons.

MILF victory

very little reporting on this.

Did you know the US was at war in the Philippines? MILF, perhaps sensing doom in a continued struggle, pounced on the offer. The rebel group renounced its ties to Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah, sparking at least one gun battle between MILF and its former allies. In February this year Aquino visited the rebel stronghold in Mindanao to finalize a peace deal. The treaty promised to finally deprive terrorists of their safe haven in the Philippines.

With the signing of the peace deal, America could tentatively claim victory in its Philippines shadow war.

Inept cyberwar

Alexander runs the nation’s cyberwar efforts, an empire he has built over the past 8 years by insisting that the US’s inherent vulnerability to digital attacks requires him to amass more and more authority over the data zipping around the globe. In his telling, the threat is so mind-bogglingly huge that the nation has little option but to eventually put the entire civilian Internet under his protection, requiring tweets and emails to pass through his filters, and putting the kill switch under the government’s forefinger.

keith alexander is the pro to total information awareness amateur efforts from the early 2000s.

Boston Dynamics

Boston Dynamics is Cyberdyne Systems

2013-11-13:  Combat support

Pfc. Marcus Beedle looks over his shoulder at the robot following him. The machine’s 4 legs are eagerly stamping the grass, its sensor-laden head held high. “LS3, follow tight,” Beedle says to the robot, and the Legged Squad Support System—which stands taller than a dog but smaller than a mule—follows in the exact footsteps of its Marine Corps handler. Beedle’s backpack is outfitted with thick black bands. To follow him, the robot senses this pattern via the flickering laser in its head. LS3 also uses stereoscopic cameras to fix on the Marine’s location and can trace the path he’s taken by following a navigation device strapped to Beedle’s right shoe. As the young private first class strides forward, the LS3 obediently trots after him, exhaust from its gas engine sputtering. “Follow-the-leader is our bread and butter”.

2013-12-14: This is a far more interesting take than all the terminator jokes which are neither insightful, original, or clever.

News broke today that Google acquired my friend Marc Raibert’s company, Boston Dynamics, one of the coolest robotics companies in the world. You know Boston Dynamics because of their work building “Big Dog,” “Bigger Dog,” Cheetah and now Atlas. They’ve been the most impressive functional robots around.

What’s bigger news is that this is their 8th announced robotics acquisition in the last 6 months. Remember that Google is spending over $7B every year in R&D, M&A.

This internal robotics revolution is being led by Andy Rubin, the Google executive who developed and ran Android, the world’s most widely used smartphone software. This is being done with Larry Page’s enthusiastic support, as he and his team continue to display their impressive “moonshot thinking” by investing heavily in the future.

Don’t forget that Google is probably the No. 1 hotbed of research on artificial intelligence with the acquisition of my friend and SU Co-Founder Ray Kurzweil and the recent addition of Deep Learning creator Geoffrey Hinton.

So what do you get when you combine 8 robotics companies, the leading AI creative forces and researchers, the brilliance (and ambition) of Larry Page and a $7B R&D budget?

I think it will be the transformation of our society — how we work, how we learn, take care of our sick, conduct our commerce, explore, handle disasters, fight wars… everything.

If this level of transformation isn’t on your radar, if you are not thinking about how this will change your life, your business and your industry, then you are missing it, big time.

You need to understand the implications of this, and figure out how you are going to surf on top of this tsunami… not be crushed by it.

If you like, on January 9th and 10th, 2014, at the Ritz-Carlton hotel (Marina Del Rey, Los Angeles), I’ll be teaching entrepreneurs about robotics, AI and other exponential technologies, how you can think bold and take action globally, and how to leverage such powerful tools as crowd funding and incentive competitions.

And here are some Boston Dynamics videos, so you can see the robots in action:
Big Dog:

Cheetah:

Atlas:

2016-03-18: Boston Dynamics are an evolutionary dead end

Boston Dynamics are very successful pioneers. But their algorithms are not based on Deep Learning principles. And Google is leading the world in Deep Learning and can apply it to anything they want, including robotics. DL based algorithms do not provide a complete robotics solution today but there is wide agreement that this is the best path forward for the field. Why is this important? The difference is robots that can walk vs robots that can dance ballet. The goal is “graceful locomotion” which will be an order of magnitude more adaptive, more energy efficient, and faster than the current generation of robots.

2019-04-02: Handle

Kinema’s software—which is robot-agnostic, meaning it already works on a range of robots beyond Handle—helps the machine through all these challenges. “Their system is able to look at a stack of boxes, and no matter how ordered or disordered the boxes are, or the markings on top, or the lighting conditions, they’re able to figure out which boxes are discrete from each other and to plan a path for grabbing the box.” That’s a huge part of what Handle, a robot designed to work in warehouses, needs to do.

2023-05-16: Some much needed competition. Boston Dynamics is moving at a snails pace.

Rise of the machines

it seems heartbreakingly obvious that future generations will someday look back upon the last 10 years as the start of the rise of the machines, and they will see many more armed robots on patrol “in space, on land, in the air, and at sea”—robots so advanced that they make today’s Predators and Reapers look positively impotent and antique. These killer robots, though, will share one thing in common with their primitive progenitors: with remorseless purpose, they will stalk and kill any human deemed “a legitimate target” by their controllers and programmers.