Over the past few years Google has made strides into robotics, artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles... and that's just the secret projects we know about. Watching the pieces fall into place, it's hard to not see a certain pattern emerge. One that matches a familiar sci-fi world that filmmaker James Cameron first envisioned 30 years ago. One in which AI, robotics, and autonomous vehicles all unite in a winner-takes-all battle against humanity itself.
Google’s DC office is crammed to the brim with former spooks, intelligence officials and revolving door military contractors.
Think the NSA is scarry ? Watch this..
Snowden can drive his in-office telepresence system with his keyboard’s arrow keys at around two miles an hour. It has an eight hour battery life before it needs to dock into a $950 charging station, and even comes with a “party mode” that activates more ambient microphones and elevates the volume of its speaker.
The audio-recognition feature works similar to the app Shazam, which also can identify music and television programming using the built-in microphones in mobile phones.
"What's happening is if you have a great idea and the technical skills to implement it you can create disproportionate wealth very quickly," he said. "That's good by itself except it increases disparity." That disparity, Khosla said, will only continue to grow as machine learning and big data technologies improves. Eventually, software will have the ability to replace everything from farmworkers picking lettuce to law clerks.
“We’re nowhere near Skynet today. That’s way the heck out there. That’s not close to anything that’s possible today.”
The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years..
Engineers say the robot is also equipped with a sophisticated audio command program that recognizes and subsequently ignores such phrases as “Stop” and “I give up” and is programmed to apply pressure to a prostrate suspect’s neck with a force of up to 500 PSI both before and after he’s stopped moving. Its operating system is also reportedly loaded with advanced visual recognition software that allows the robot to identify nearly any object in the subject’s hand as a weapon, prompting it to rapidly empty the clip on its extendable .40-caliber firearm.
Right now the most significant consequence has been the knowledge that has fueled the debate. A lot of what we have read from these NSA documents isn't surprising, but the details make them real in a way that speculation doesn't.