Why cyberattacks could be war crimes. Cyberattacks are the new normal, but, when they come from abroad, they can raise panic about an invisible cyberwar. If international conflicts are unavoidable, isn’t a cyberwar better than a physical war with bombs and bullets? Sure, cyberwar is better than a kinetic or physical war in many ways, but it could also make war worse. Unless it’s very carefully designed, a cyberattack could be a war crime. Imagine that you’re a political leader and you want to take out an enemy base. We suspect it’s a propaganda machine and financing terrorist activities.
How would you do it? Well, you could go the old fashioned way — call in some airstrikes or send troops to blow up the building — but this would be an open declaration of war, worsening tensions. Now, there is another way: you could launch a cyberattack against the facility. Let’s say you plan to disguise the malware as an official United Nations email to help ensure it’ll be opened by the local leaders. Image: DoD News Share Written by. The US spends more on defence than all of these countries combined. President Trump has announced plans to increase the US defense budget in 2018 by $54 billion dollars in order to "rebuild the depleted military of the United States of America at a time we most need it".
Some have said that this figure is misleading and the actual increase is ‘only’ $18 billion. Whatever the final amount, the increase will take the US even further ahead of the rest of the world in terms of outright military spending. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2015 US defense spending outstripped that of China, Russia, UK, France, Japan, Saudi Arabia and India combined. Image: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute When it comes to spending as a share of GDP, the United States' huge output naturally brings it down the rankings. Of the top proportional spenders, Saudi Arabia is way ahead, with 13.7% of GDP. The USA's military superiority lies in its airpower with 13,400 aircraft, four times as many as China and three times more than Russia. Are we heading for nuclear war? This is what game theory tells us.
A man watches a news program showing photos published in North Korea's Rodong Sinmun newspaper of North Korea's “Pukguksong-2" missile launch at Seoul Railway station in Seoul. (Ahn Young-joon/AP) “Are we headed for a nuclear war?” It’s the question hanging over, well, basically everyone these days, as North Korea flaunts new developments in its nuclear weapons program, threatening the United States, and President Trump promises “fire and fury” in response. Those tensions seem to be easing as of Wednesday, when Trump wrote on Twitter that "Kim Jong Un of North Korea made a very wise and well reasoned decision," possibly referencing a seeming pause in Pyongyang's anti-U.S. threats. But the episode remains frightening, and it's all the more so because making predictions about nuclear war is deeply difficult.
Business wonkblog false after3th true Economy & Business Alerts Breaking news about economic and business issues. That’s where game theory comes in. Elizabeth Winkler: What is game theory? From Sci-Fi to Reality: The Future of Warfare. Science Fiction Futures On October 21, 2015, people revisited “Back to the Future,” comparing the modern world with the world that Marty McFly saw when he time-traveled to 2015 in the second installment of the famous 1980s sci-fi series.
While the movie incorrectly “predicted” several things, it got a bunch of technology right — like those shoes. Or did the world just try to copy the movie? The latter scenario is often the case with science fiction and real science. This is what officers at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory/Futures Directorate in Quantico, Va., had in mind when they launched a sci-fi contest last year.
Months of editing produced the top three stories, which were collected and published online in a sci-fi compilation called “Science Fiction Futures: Marine Corps Security Environment Forecast 2030-2045.” The Military of the Future “We study history, but we’re starting to talk about studying science fiction more,” Brig. The trillion dollar question nobody is asking the presidential candidates. By Frank Wilczek, Max Tegmark/The Conversation As it seeks to modernize its nuclear arsenal, the United States faces a big choice, one which Barack Obama should ponder before his upcoming Hiroshima speech.
Should we spend a trillion dollars to replace each of our thousands of nuclear warheads with a more sophisticated substitute attached to a more lethal delivery system? Or should we keep only enough nuclear weapons needed for a devastatingly effective deterrence against any nuclear aggressor, investing the money saved into other means of making our nation more secure? The first option would allow us to initiate and wage nuclear war. The second would allow us to deter it. These are very different tasks. 2015 Estimated global nuclear warhead inventories.
As physicists who have studied nuclear reactions and cataclysmic explosions, we are acutely aware that nuclear weapons are so devastating that merely a hundred could annihilate the major population centers of any potential state enemy. Clear and present danger to your life as of now from cyberblitzkrieg. Full restoration of electric power could take months to years following a well-planned, well-executed terrorist attack on large transformers like these in Melbourne, according to the National Academy of Sciences (credit: Allalone89/public domain) By Paul Werbos, PhD This week (starting August 15), the immediate risk to our lives through cyberblitzkrieg has suddenly risen dramatically, due to new events in cyberspace. If a cyberblitzkrieg on electric power and other critical infrastructure does occur, the level of damage would be comparable in general to the kind of damage we feared at the height of the Cold War, when something like half the world could be lost suddenly and the rest in a cascade of events.
“Cyberblitzkrieg” is simply a coordinated cyberattack on multiple physical plants, like power generators or large transformers, hard to replace in less than, say, six months (best-case). With any new directions, we naturally ask: “What is the first discrete step we could and should do?”
A Future Without War :: Home. Ultimate attribution error. The ultimate attribution error is a group-level attribution error that offers an explanation for how one person views different causes of negative and positive behavior in ingroup and outgroup members.[1] Ultimate attribution error is the tendency to internally attribute negative outgroup and positive ingroup behaviour and to externally attribute positive outgroup and negative ingroup behaviour. So in other words, ultimate attribution error arises as a way to explain an outgroup's negative behaviour as flaws in their personality, and to explain an outgroup's positive behaviour as a result of chance or circumstance.
It is also the belief that positive acts performed by ingroup members are as a result of their personality, whereas, if an ingroup member behaves negatively (which is believed to be rare), it is a result of situational factors.[2] Overview[edit] The ultimate attribution error is a systematic patterning of intergroup misattributions shaped in part by one's prejudices. China is Preparing for Mind Controlled Robotic Warefare - Futurism. Terminator Robots to Take Over the Battlefield by 2023? Nicholas WestActivist Post The U.S. military's pursuit of killer robots continues to make the news, despite the concerns of major international human rights groups who have launched a campaign to stop the runaway development of robots for war.
Cambridge University has even launched a "Terminator" study program known officially as the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. Nevertheless, the military-industrial complex and their partners in the Congressional "drone caucus" are reaping big profits from machine warfare. Simultaneously, the global economy is becoming increasingly robotized, with some experts predicting that humans will be completely outsourced to robots by 2045.
Additionally, there is an overarching move toward humanoid robots with a goal to establish an emotional connection that current studies reveal is still lacking among the general population. ten years from now, there will probably be one soldier for every 10 robots. Recently by Nicholas West: Robots with machine guns: U.S. Army sees latest gear. DARPA Building Real Life Terminators Military Robots. That's Impossible: Real Terminators. America Building Robots Army for Future 720p HD Discovery & Documentary HD. Terminator Weaponry - Future Weapons. U.S. Air Force developing terrifying swarms of tiny unmanned drones that can hover, crawl and even kill targets. Air Vehicles Directorate at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, is already developing prototypes of tiny drones that can hoverThe Micro Air Vehicles will work in swarms to provide complex surveillance of a battlefieldThey can also be armed with incapacitating chemicals, combustible payloads or even explosives 'for precision targeting capability' By Michael Zennie Published: 00:11 GMT, 20 February 2013 | Updated: 18:25 GMT, 20 February 2013 The U.S.
Air Force is developing tiny unmanned drones that will fly in swarms, hover like bees, crawl like spiders and even sneak up on unsuspecting targets and execute them with lethal precision. The Air Vehicles Directorate, a research arm of the Air Force, has released a computer-animated video outlining the the future capabilities of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). The project promises to revolutionize war by down-sizing the combatants. 'Unobtrusive, pervasive, lethal - Micro Air Vehicles, enhancing the capabilities of the future war fighter.'
The Navy is Preparing To Launch Swarm Bots Out of Cannons. The U.S. Navy will launch up to 30 synchronized drones within one minute, possibly from a single cannon-like device, in what marks a significant advance in robot autonomy. The drones, when airborne, will then unfold their wings and conduct a series of maneuvers and simulated missions with very little human guidance over the course of 90 minutes. Navy officials announced on Tuesday that they intend to stage a key demonstration of the swarm bots from what the Navy is calling a “tube-based launcher,” essentially, a big cannon, next year. The program, which the Navy is called Low-Cost UAV Swarming Technology, or LOCUST, marks a significant advance in applications for robotic swarming software. In August, the Office of Naval Research, or ONR, which is behind the program, demonstrated a swarming configuration of 13 robotic boats on Virginia’s James River.
The boats were able to perform a variety of tasks to protect a high-value ship from incoming craft. Rise of the Drones. Rise of the Drones PBS Airdate: January 23, 2013 NARRATOR: Drones: these aerial robots are replacing manned planes; they're revolutionizing warfare by allowing us to see and kill from half a world away, and they're making science fiction a reality. Now, with unprecedented access to drone scientists, engineers and pilots,… Master arm… NARRATOR: …NOVA reveals the technologies that make drones so powerful and the breakthroughs that are leading us into the future.
Will drones soon replace even the most sophisticated manned planes and become a part of our everyday lives? COREY BRIXEN (Hobbyist): It started out as a toy for my dogs to chase. RAND PAUL (United States Senator, Kentucky): The worry is that we will have 30,000 drones crisscrossing the sky, accumulating all this information. NARRATOR: They generate opposition, both overseas and at home. MEDEA BENJAMIN: I speak out on behalf of the rule of law.
NARRATOR: This is the ultimate melding of man and machine. Sound up: Target acquired… DAVID A. Terminator-Like "Smart Liquid Metal" May Be The First Step In A New Arms Race. DARPA’s new cheap robot is capable of changing apparent shape, color, temperature and more. By End the Lie In nature, some organisms use bioluminescence to communicate. DARPA’s soft robot achieves the same glowing effect by pumping chemiluminescent solutions through channels in the robot’s color layer. (Image credit: DARPA) It seems that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has taken a major step forward in creating an astoundingly cheap and quite small robot that “can change the color, contrast, pattern, apparent shape, luminescence, and surface temperature of soft machines for camouflage and display,” according to a report published in Science.
Along with the DARPA-funded miniature spy computer known as the Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors (F-BOMB), this robot very well could be produced for less than $100 per unit with costs going down even further over time. The research is being performed at Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering under Drs. New 2014 DARPA Building Real Life Terminators Military Robots Documentary & Discovery HD. New 2013 DARPA Building Real Life Terminators Military Robots.
DARPA's Self Steering Bullet Hits the Target Every Time. EXACTO Demonstrates First-Ever Guided .50-Caliber Bullets. Fire and Forget: DARPA successfully tests revolutionary self-guiding bullet (VIDEO) GPS bullets are latest weapon for American police. 29 October 2013Last updated at 12:35 ET The bullet is used during car chases It sounds like something out of a James Bond movie - GPS bullets that can track the location of a suspect's car. The bullet is designed to make high-speed chases safer - enabling the authorities to track suspects without having to risk theirs or others' lives.
And in true spy fashion the system works by hitting a button inside a police car. That triggers a lid to pop up releasing a bullet that shoots out and sticks to the car in front. The system, dubbed Starchase, is already in use in four US states - Iowa, Florida, Arizona and Colorado - and the firm behind it is now keen to get the system into the UK. It costs $5,000 (£3,108) to install and each bullet costs $500 (£312). Privacy issues Once the bullet is connected to a car, the police can stop the chase. They can track and pinpoint a suspect's vehicle location and speed in near real time.
"This is an important tactic for the police. US DoD report: Preparing for war in the robotic age. A recently released US Department of Defense report, DTP 106: Policy Challenges of Accelerating Technological Change, sets out the potential benefits and concerns of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and associated technologies (as well as advances in information and communications technologies (ICT) and cognitive science, big data, cloud computing, energy and nanotechnologies). Calling for policy choices to be made sooner rather than later, the authors, James Kadtke and Linton Wells II indicate that: This paper examines policy, legal, ethical, and strategy implications for national security of the accelerating science, technology, and engineering (ST&E) revolutions underway in five broad areas: biology, robotics, information, nanotechnology, and energy (BRINE), with a particular emphasis on how they are interacting.
The paper considers the timeframe between now and 2030 but emphasizes policy and related choices that need to be made in the next few years. The Changing and Terrifying Nature of the New Cyber-Warfare | Vanity Fair. On the hidden battlefields of history’s first known cyber-war, the casualties are piling up. In the U.S., many banks have been hit, and the telecommunications industry seriously damaged, likely in retaliation for several major attacks on Iran. Washington and Tehran are ramping up their cyber-arsenals, built on a black-market digital arms bazaar, enmeshing such high-tech giants as Microsoft, Google, and Apple. With the help of highly placed government and private-sector sources, Michael Joseph Gross describes the outbreak of the conflict, its escalation, and its startling paradox: that America’s bid to stop nuclear proliferation may have unleashed a greater threat.
I. Battlespace Their eyeballs felt it first. A wall of 104-degree air hit the cyber-security analysts as they descended from the jets that had fetched them, on a few hours’ notice, from Europe and the United States. The data on three-quarters of the machines on the main computer network of Saudi aramco had been destroyed. II. U.S Military's Robot Soldiers by Boston Dynamics BIGDOG Robot. BigDog Weaponized. U.S Army's Cheetah Robot 18mph. Real-life Iron Man armor to be ready by June – US admiral. DARPA seeks high-tech alternatives to armor. DARPA wants to hide naval assets on the sea bottom. USS Zumwalt. DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA - BREAKTHROUGH TECHNOLOGIES FOR NATIONAL SECURITY. 10 Cool DARPA Projects In Development. 15 incredible military technologies.