DARPA’s Brave New World

DARPA’s Brave New World

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What the world will be like in 30 years, according to the US government's top scientists

The world is going to be a very different place in 2045.

 

by Paul Szoldra 

Predicting the future is fraught with challenges, but when it comes to technological advances and forward thinking, experts working at the Pentagon's research agency may be the best people to ask.

Launched in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is behind some of the biggest innovations in the military — many of which have crossed over to the civilian technology market. These include things like advanced robotics, global positioning systems, and the Internet.

So what's going to happen in 2045?

It's pretty likely that robots and artificial technology are going to transform a bunch of industries, drone aircraft will continue their leap from the military to the civilian market, and self-driving cars will make your commute a lot more bearable.

But DARPA scientists have even bigger ideas. In a video series from October called "Forward to the Future," three researchers predict what they imagine will be a reality 30 years from now.

Dr. Justin Sanchez, a neuroscientist and program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, believes we'll be at a point where we can control things simply by using our mind.

"Imagine a world where you could just use your thoughts to control your environment," Sanchez said. "Think about controlling different aspects of your home just using your brain signals, or maybe communicating with your friends and your family just using neural activity from your brain."

According to Sanchez, DARPA is currently working on neurotechnologies that can enable this to happen. There are already some examples of these kinds of futuristic breakthroughs in action, like brain implants controlling prosthetic arms.

Stefanie Tompkins, a geologist and director of DARPA's Defense Sciences Office, thinks we'll be able to build things that are incredibly strong but also very lightweight. Think of a skyscraper using materials that are strong as steel, but light as carbon fiber. That's a simple explanation for what Tompkins envisions, which gets a little bit more complicated down at the molecular level.

She explains:

"I think in 2045 we're going to find that we have a very different relationship with the machines around us," says Pam Melroy, aerospace engineer, former astronaut, and deputy director of DARPA's Tactical Technologies Office. "I think that we will begin to see a time when we're able to simply just talk or even press a button" to interact with a machine to get things done more intelligently, instead of using keyboards or rudimentary voice recognition systems.

She continues: "For example, right now to prepare for landing in an aircraft there's multiple steps that have to be taken to prepare yourself, from navigation, get out of the cruise mode, begin to set up the throttles ... put the gear down. All of these steps have to happen in the right sequence." 

Instead, Melroy envisions an aircraft landing in the future being as simple as what an airline pilot currently tells the flight attendants: "Prepare for landing." In 2045, a pilot may just say those three words and the computer knows the series of complex steps it needs to do in order to make that happen.

Or perhaps, with artificial intelligence, a pilot won't even be necessary.

"Our world will be full of those kinds of examples where we can communicate directly our intent and have very complex outcomes by working together."

DARPA wants to build a personal assistant that can read your mind

 

 

by Guia Del Prado

It’s the age of the smart device. From Apple’s Siri to the Amazon Echo, helpful personal assistants are being built into the world around us.

While we are still waiting for Siri to get a little better, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants to go a step further — they want to build personal assistant machines that can anticipate your needs by reading your mind and body signals.

In a talk at June’s DARPA Biology is Technology conference in New York City, DARPA program manager Justin Sanchez explained that the data from our smart watches and trackers actually ends up being pretty meaningless, since these devices can’t put data in any sort of context or output a recommended action in response.

“Many of you are just getting things back like ‘this is what your heart rate is right now’ or ‘you took 6,000 steps today,'” he said during a talk. “Who cares about that stuff? What you really want to do is use that information to help you interact with machines in a much deeper way … today we don’t typically aggregate those signals together and do something with it.”

With the proliferation of these sensors in smart watches and trackers, Sanchez says it’s the right time to develop a smart device that can read these mind and body signals, connect to an external device that makes sense of the information, and then use that information to anticipate what you need and make recommendations.

“We have the pieces,” Sanchez told Business Insider. “These sensors are starting to be everywhere. Not only are they in the environment, they’re also on our bodies … we’ve got the computing power to take the information out of those sensors and we’ve got the mobile platforms so we have that interface at every step of our everyday lives.”

For Sanchez, the possibilities of this technology would be endless.

He points to the Nest Learning Thermostat, which can make changes to the temperature throughout the day based on your past settings, as an example. The Nest Thermostat puts machine learning to practical use, ensuring that after a few days, you may never have to set the thermostat again. Machine learning is a subfield of AI science focused on taking past patterns and making predictions based on those patterns.

Sanchez imagines a “physiological computer” that can read body and mind signals like heart rate and temperature and be able to tell, if you’re hot, cold, sleepy, frightened, or bored.

“You could interact with your environment, your architecture,” Sanchez said. “Let’s say you’re having a low point in your day in terms of productivity so what if you had an interface that could say ‘how about doing this? maybe this could spark your productivity?'”

Sanchez’s talk was called “Brain-Machine Symbiosis,” and he suggested that this seamless communication could one day happen directly between the brain and our devices through the use of implantable sensors.

But implants that can detect the brain’s electrical signals still have a long way to go.

For one thing, scientists still have yet to design devices that can stay in the brain for a long time without causing damage or losing functionality — the body simply doesn’t like them. Surgery to place implants is invasive. Surgeons drill small holes through the skull and “insert long thin electrodes” deep inside the brain,” according to a 2012 article in The Scientist.

The implants are often made of stainless steel or other types of metal — useful for conducting electric signals, but problematic for biological purposes.

“If you look at implanted electronics in the brain over the past 10 to 20 years, all suffer from a common problem which is the implant’s electronic probes … create scarring in brain tissue,” said Charles Lieber, a chemist from Harvard University who is working on a tiny mesh brain implant.

Lieber Research Group, Harvard University

When the body’s immune system senses an implant, the brain’s defence mechanism creates scar tissue around it to protect the brain. When a probe becomes too engulfed in glial scarring, it loses functionality.

But that doesn’t stop Sanchez. However we get to this “brain-machine symbiosis,” he’s open to it.

“There are many different futures that can stem from what we and others are doing,” he said. “There are a lot of technologies that could potentially get us there, which one is the right one? We can’t say. We’ve just got to try.”

Watch Justin Sanchez talk about his ideas at the conference, uploaded to YouTube by DARPAtv:

From Tech Insider @ http://www.techinsider.io/darpa-world-predictions-2015-12 and Business Insider @ http://www.businessinsider.com.au/darpa-wants-to-build-personal-assistant-machine-mind-reading-2015-7

Acoustic Holograms that Levitate Particles

A team of researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Sussex in collaboration with Ultrahaptics have built the world’s first sonic tractor beam that can lift and move objects using sound wave.

Holographic acoustic elements for manipulation of levitated objects by Asier Marzo, Sue Ann Seah, Bruce W. Drinkwater, Deepak Ranjan Sahoo, Benjamin Long and Sriram Subramanian is published in Nature Communications.

Acoustic holograms are projected from a flat surface and contrary to traditional holograms, they exert considerable forces on the objects contained within.

The acoustic holograms can be updated in real-time to translate, rotate and combine levitated particles enabling unprecedented contactless manipulators such as tractor beams.

If we talking about the latest holographic techniques then watch this video of an amazing hologram technology show hold in Dubai last year showing spectacular holographic projections of animals, flying dragons and other out of this world creatures.

From UFO Sightings Hotspot @ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/acoustic-holograms-that-levitate.html

For more futuristic concepts see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/futurism

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