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‘Google should not be in the business of war’: Over 3,000 employees pen letter urging CEO to pull out of the Pentagon’s controversial AI drone research, citing firm’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto…


More than 3,000 Google employees have penned an open letter calling upon the internet giant’s CEO to end its controversial ‘Project Maven’ deal.

Calling the deal ‘business of war’, they said Google boss Sundar Pichai should ‘cancel this project immediately’.

It was revealed last month that Google is allowing the Pentagon to use some of its artificial intelligence technologies to analyze drone footage.

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In summary — “I am cautiously optimistic about the promise of tDCS; cognitive training paired with tDCS specifically could lead to improvements in attention and memory for people of all ages and make some huge changes in society. Maybe we could help to stave off cognitive decline in older adults or enhance cognitive skills, such as focus, in people such as airline pilots or soldiers, who need it the most. Still, I am happy to report that we have at least moved on from torpedo fish” smile


In 47 CE, Scri­bo­nius Largus, court physi­cian to the Roman emper­or Claudius, described in his Com­po­si­tiones a method for treat­ing chron­ic migraines: place tor­pe­do fish on the scalps of patients to ease their pain with elec­tric shocks. Largus was on the right path; our brains are com­prised of elec­tri­cal sig­nals that influ­ence how brain cells com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er and in turn affect cog­ni­tive process­es such as mem­o­ry, emo­tion and attention.

The sci­ence of brain stim­u­la­tion – alter­ing elec­tri­cal sig­nals in the brain – has, need­less to say, changed in the past 2,000 years. Today we have a hand­ful of tran­scra­nial direct cur­rent stim­u­la­tion (tDCS) devices that deliv­er con­stant, low cur­rent to spe­cif­ic regions of the brain through elec­trodes on the scalp, for users rang­ing from online video-gamers to pro­fes­sion­al ath­letes and peo­ple with depres­sion. Yet cog­ni­tive neu­ro­sci­en­tists are still work­ing to under­stand just how much we can influ­ence brain sig­nals and improve cog­ni­tion with these techniques.

Brain stim­u­la­tion by tDCS is non-inva­sive and inex­pen­sive. Some sci­en­tists think it increas­es the like­li­hood that neu­rons will fire, alter­ing neur­al con­nec­tions and poten­tial­ly improv­ing the cog­ni­tive skills asso­ci­at­ed with spe­cif­ic brain regions. Neur­al net­works asso­ci­at­ed with atten­tion con­trol can be tar­get­ed to improve focus in peo­ple with atten­tion deficit-hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty dis­or­der (ADHD). Or peo­ple who have a hard time remem­ber­ing shop­ping lists and phone num­bers might like to tar­get brain areas asso­ci­at­ed with short-term (also known as work­ing) mem­o­ry in order to enhance this cog­ni­tive process. How­ev­er, the effects of tDCS are incon­clu­sive across a wide body of peer-reviewed stud­ies, par­tic­u­lar­ly after a sin­gle ses­sion. In fact, some experts ques­tion whether enough elec­tri­cal stim­u­la­tion from the tech­nique is pass­ing through the scalp into the brain to alter con­nec­tions between brain cells at all.

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Autonomous weapon bans (previously) are currently being debated, but in the meantime, the US Department of Defense continues work with its Perdix Micro-Drone project. Ostensibly for surveillance, it’s clear these could easily be modded with lethal weaponry.

F/A-18 Super Hornets deploy the drones, which can then perform a series of tactical maneuvers based on post-launch commands.

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“We don’t have any defense that could deny the employment of such a weapon against us,” Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of U.Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

“Both Russia and China are aggressively pursuing hypersonic capabilities,” Hyten added. “We’ve watched them test those capabilities.”

Researchers and engineers at Rand explain what a hypersonic weapon is, which countries are developing them and how the U.S. could look to defend against them.

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The US military likes to stay at the forefront of the cutting edge of science — most recently investigating ways they can ‘hack’ the human brain and body to make it die slower, and learn faste r.

But in an unexpected twist, it turns out they’re also interested in pushing the limits of quantum mechanics. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced it’s funding research into one of the strangest scientific breakthroughs in recent memory — time crystals.

In case you missed it, time crystals made headlines last year when scientists finally made the bizarre objects in the lab, four years after they were first proposed.

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JERUSALEM (Reuters) — Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile shield was launched on Sunday against Palestinian machine gun fire originating in the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip, and not against incoming militant rockets, the Israeli army said.

Flaming streams of about 10 Iron Dome rockets could be seen rising into the night sky in a spectacular light show, but there was no indication that Islamist militants in Gaza had fired rockets, a military spokeswoman said.

A subsequent army statement said: “Following reports of sirens sounding in southern Israel, unusual machine gun fire towards Israel was identified. No rocket launches were identified. The (military) is looking into the circumstances which led to the activation of the Iron Dome system.”

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Considering how often lasers show up in science fiction, it’s interesting that the concept of “talking lasers” might show up in reality before eventually finding their way into sci-fi.

But the United States’ military Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWP) is getting close to creating one, according to a new report in Defense One. The device in question will soon be capable of reproducing human speech as a means of scaring off trespassers or enemies, making announcements, or just sending discrete messages to somebody who dropped their phone or walkie talkie.

It’s not quite there yet, because while it does sound like a garbled human speaking, it still speaks only gibberish for now. See it below, but don’t turn up your headphones too loud, for reasons that will immediately become clear — like many people who speak gibberish, the laser speaks loudly:

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