Lifeboat Foundation

In the last decade, thanks to advances in AI, the internet of things, machine learning and sensor technologies, the fantasy of digital twins has taken off. BMW has created a digital twin of a production plant in Bavaria. Boeing is using digital twins to design airplanes. The World Economic Forum hailed digital twins as a key technology in the “fourth industrial revolution.” Tech giants like IBM, Nvidia, Amazon and Microsoft are just a few of the big players now providing digital twin capabilities to automotive, energy and infrastructure firms.

The inefficiencies of the physical world, so the sales pitch goes, can be ironed out in a virtual one and then reflected back onto reality. Test virtual planes in virtual wind tunnels, virtual tires on virtual roads. “Risk is removed” reads a recent Microsoft advertorial in Wired, and “problems can be solved before they happen.”

All of a sudden, Dirk Helbing and Javier Argota Sánchez-Vaquerizo wrote in a 2022 paper, “it has become an attractive idea to create digital twins of everything.” Cars, trains, ships, buildings, airports, farms, power plants, oil fields and entire supply chains are all being cloned into high-fidelity mirror images made of bits and bytes. Attempts are being undertaken to twin beaches, forests, apple orchards, tomato plants, weapons and war zones. As beaches erode, forests grow and bombs explode, so too will their twins, watched closely by technicians for signals to improve outcomes in the real world.

WASHINGTON, March 19 (Reuters) — SpaceX has started selling satellite lasers, which are used for speedy in-space communications, to other satellite firms, company President Gwynne Shotwell said at a conference on Tuesday.

SpaceX’s thousands of Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit use inter-satellite laser links to pass data between one another in space at the speed of light, allowing the network to offer broader internet coverage around the world with fewer ground stations.

Shotwell, speaking on a panel at the Satellite industry conference in Washington, said SpaceX as a supplier will sell that technology to other companies.

The Los Angeles Police Department is warning residents that burglars are using WiFi jammers to easily disarm “connected” surveillance cameras and alarms that are available for cheap on marketplaces like Amazon.

As LA-based news station KTLA5 reports, tech-savvy burglars have been using WiFi jammers, which are small devices that can confuse and overload wireless devices with traffic, to enter homes without setting off alarms — a worrying demonstration of just how easily affordable home security devices from the likes of Ring and Eufy can be disarmed.

As Tom’s Hardware reported last month, instances of WiFi jammers being used by criminals go back several years. Jammers are not only easily available to purchase online, they’re also pretty cheap and can go for as little as $40.

Bellevue, Wash.-based Lumen Orbit, a startup that’s only about three months old, says that it’s closed a $2.4 million pre-seed investment round to launch its plan to put hundreds of satellites in orbit, with the goal of processing data in space before it’s downlinked to customers on Earth.

The investors include Nebular, Caffeinated Capital, Plug & Play, Everywhere Ventures, Tiny.vc, Sterling Road, Pareto Holdings and Foreword Ventures. There are also more than 20 angel investors, including four Sequoia Scouts investing through the Sequoia Scout Fund. “The round was 3x oversubscribed,” Lumen CEO and co-founder Philip Johnston told GeekWire in an email.

Johnston is a former associate at McKinsey & Co. who also co-founded an e-commerce venture called Opontia. Lumen’s other co-founders are chief technology officer Ezra Feilden, whose resume includes engineering experience at Oxford Space Systems and Airbus Defense and Space; and chief engineer Adi Oltean, who worked as a principal software engineer at SpaceX’s Starlink facility in Redmond, Wash.

There’s a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIs help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs. In recent years, the devices have even gone wireless. If mind-reading computers become part of everyday life, we’ll need doctors to install the tiny electrodes and transmitters that make them work. So if you have steady hands and don’t mind a little blood, being a BCI surgeon might be a job for you.

Shahram Majidi, a neurosurgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, began operating in clinical trials for a BCI called the Stentrode in 2022. (That’s “stent” as in a tube that often sits inside a vein or artery.) Here he talks about a not-too-distant future where he’s performing hundreds of similar procedures a year.

Brain-computer interfaces have been around for a few decades, and there are different kinds of implants now. Some have electrodes attached to your brain with wires sticking out of your head and connecting to a computer. I think that’s great as a proof of concept, but it requires an engineer sitting there and a big computer next to you all the time. You can’t just use it in your bedroom. The beauty of a BCI like the Stentrode, which is what I’ve worked with, is that nothing is sticking out of your brain. The electrodes are in blood vessels next to the brain, and you get there by going through the patient’s jugular. The receiver is underneath the skin in their chest and connected to a device that decodes the brain signals via Bluetooth. I think that’s the future.

There is a lot we can learn about social media’s unregulated evolution over the past decade that directly applies to AI companies and technologies. These lessons can help us avoid making the same mistakes with AI that we did with social media.

In particular, five fundamental attributes of social media have harmed society. AI also has those attributes. Note that they are not intrinsically evil. They are all double-edged swords, with the potential to do either good or ill. The danger comes from who wields the sword, and in what direction it is swung. This has been true for social media, and it will similarly hold true for AI. In both cases, the solution lies in limits on the technology’s use.

The role advertising plays in the internet arose more by accident than anything else. When commercialization first came to the internet, there was no easy way for users to make micropayments to do things like viewing a web page. Moreover, users were accustomed to free access and wouldn’t accept subscription models for services. Advertising was the obvious business model, if never the best one. And it’s the model that social media also relies on, which leads it to prioritize engagement over anything else.

SpaceX is closing out the weekend with a pair of planned Falcon 9 launches from Florida and California while also preparing for the undocking of Crew Dragon Endurance from the International Space Station.

The Falcon 9 rocket supporting the Starlink 6–43 mission lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 7:05 p.m. EDT (2305 UTC). It will add 23 Starlink satellites to the growing low Earth orbit constellation.

Continue reading “SpaceX launches Starlink mission, prepares to undock a Crew Dragon from ISS Monday” »

Amazon is listing products in which even the title was generated using OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Can the internet survive?

In fact, the Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron predicts 95% odds of “go for launch” weather conditions.

SpaceX announced the Starlink 6–43 launch is targeted for 7:05 p.m. EDT Sunday from Launch Complex 40, with backup opportunities available if needed until 11:03 p.m.

The Falcon 9 rocket will deploy another payload of 23 Starlink broadband satellites into low-Earth orbit, adding to SpaceX’s growing constellation.