Mind Control Researchers Create Fake Link Between Unrelated Memories

Nicholas West 

Advancements in genetics and neuroscience are undoubtedly leading toward direct methods of mind control, albeit only with good intentions ... if government and establishment science can be believed. However, an array of hi-tech methods have been announced which show clear potential for negative manipulation.

Bold claims have been made by scientists that they now can use "neural dust,"  high-powered lasers, and light beamed from outside the skull to alter brain function and even turn off consciousness altogether.

But it is memory research that might be among the most troubling.

Hello Biometrics: Windows 10 to Add Facial Recognition, Iris Scans and Fingerprint Reader

Source

Nicholas West

After several years of consumer complaints, Microsoft Windows 10 has been getting a lot of attention as of late for many upgrades slated for their new version of the popular operating system.

However, it appears that one feature being added to supposedly consumer-friendly applications is a suite of biometrics called Windows Hello and Windows Passport.

It's all a part of the move toward a full-fledged Smart World where YOU become the password in a matrix of online and real-world activity. 

Scientists Continue Path of Darwinian Evolution for Robots

Source

Nicholas West

Worldwide neuroscience research conducted under Obama's BRAIN project, as well as similar research sponsored by the European Union exceeds $1 billion combined. The goal is nothing short of decoding the human brain. While there are many embedded initiatives associated with this type of research, the production of artificial intelligence that can rival or even surpass humans is at the forefront.

One recent development aims to move beyond mere computational horsepower and incorporate the principles of Darwinian evolution in order to naturalize the process of robot evolution.

3D-Printed Military Drone Takes Flight

An update to the military mission of producing 3D-printed drones

Nicholas West

3D printing offers a range of potential benefits and open-source solutions to free humanity from centralized corporate and police state shackles. Naturally, the good elements are being fought tooth-and-nail, while the aberrant forms are brought to us by the military-industrial complex as an essential security solution.

3D-printed military drones are now being explored, with some successes already being reported. In May of last year, Robo Raven (discussed below) was announced which incorporates 3D-printed components to produce independently flapping wings.

Now the Department of Defense has provided funding to the University of Virginia to develop the first fully 3D-printed UAV called the The Razor that can be created in less than a day with off-the-shelf parts and a smartphone running a customized flight-control app.

Nationwide Biometric Database Goes Live

image source - FBI.gov

Nicholas West

Despite the FBI already having been sued by privacy groups amid plans for a nationwide biometric database, it has officially gone live. The Next Generation Identification system will eventually include iris scans, facial recognition, and a range of other biometric identifiers that are collated into a central database for real-time sharing at all levels of law enforcement and government agencies.

As suspected, what began as a border control initiative has now expanded to include everyone. 

As the video report below highlights, this billion-dollar program was spearheaded by Lockheed Martin, and will invariably include images of even non-suspects in one great sweeping dragnet of digital surveillance. The fact that Lockheed Martin was involved in developing the program should signal heightened concern given their integral role in drone technology. As this database is being rolled out, drones are set to take to American skies in much greater numbers by 2015. One of the latest military-grade systems can now scan 36 million faces per second, or every face in the U.S. within 10 seconds. It is a technology that has trickled down from use in war zones like Afghanistan. The merger between this  FBI database and drone technology would be the next logical step.

There simply has been too much invested in a coming Minority Report world to turn back now. Nevertheless, we at least have reached a critical mass of ideological pushback against agencies like the NSA. Could additional leaks from whistleblowers and the work of digital privacy activists help to thwart plans to enter all of us into the real-time surveillance matrix? Or will this technology expand and reach its full potential?

Artificial Intelligence Could Co-Pilot Future Combat Jets: Navy Official

Boeing's F/A-XX concept

Nicholas West

The Navy continues to make a series of announcements which show that their future combat jets will include artificial intelligence, as well as the incorporation of drones and hi-tech weapons into future missions.

According to an unnamed Navy official in the latest post from U.S. Naval Institute News, "A.I is going to be huge" by 2030. Not many additional specifics were given, but the role of A.I. is currently foreseen "as a decision aid to the pilot in a way similar in concept to how advanced sensor fusion onboard jets like the F-22 and Lockheed Martin F-35 work now." 

More importantly, the post cites an Air Force summit that is being held in phases, called Air Superiority 2030 and Beyond. I have included links at the end of this chronicle to unclassified documents from this summit that highlight a future where artificial intelligence, Big Data, and The Internet of Things all converge into a pervasive war matrix that includes anti-matter, EMP, smart dust explosives, bio dispensers and directed energy weapons among others (1). Add to this documents such as Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025 and we can see the direction we are being taken over the next decade and beyond.

As you will see below, the timeline for development continues to expand, demonstrating that the U.S. military and its corporate war profiteer suppliers are certainly not planning for world peace anytime soon. 

Mind Control Scientists Turn Off Emotional Link to Memories

Nicholas West

It is becoming increasingly clear that advancements in genetics and neuroscience are leading toward direct methods of mind control. An array of hi-tech methods have been announced - magnetic manipulation via "neural dust,"  high-powered lasers, and using light beamed from outside the skull. As a result, scientists are making bold claims that they can alter the brain even to the extent of turning off consciousness altogether.

But it is memory research that might be among the most troubling. As I've previously stated in other articles, our memories help us form our identity: who we are relative to where we have been. Positive or negative lessons from the past can be integrated into our present decisions, thus enabling us to form sound strategies and behaviors that can aid us in our quest for personal evolution. But what if we never knew what memories were real or false? What if our entire narrative was changed by having our life's events restructured? Or what if there were memories that were traumatic enough to be buried as a mechanism of sanity preservation, only to be brought back to us in a lab?

We've already witnessed research into the erasure of memories, the implantation of false memories, and triggering memories of fear when none previously existed. (Source) MIT researchers are now claiming to have found the specific brain switch that links emotions to memory. Once again, the temptation of helping those who have experienced trauma might open doors to very unethical applications.

Robots Receive Internet Brain For Machine Learning

A new system called Robo Brain is being funded by the usual suspects in the military-industrial-surveillance complex. Nicholas West

The initiative to merge robotics with artificial intelligence continues to expand its vision. I recently wrote about an internal cloud network program which enables robots to do their own research, communicate with one another, and collectively increase their intelligence in a full simulation of human interaction. It has been dubbed "Wikipedia for Robots."

A parallel project in Germany went further by seeking to translate the open Internet into a suitable robot language that would prompt accelerated, autonomous machine learning. 

Now researchers at Cornell are presenting Robo Brain – "a large-scale computational system that learns from publicly available Internet resources." Evidently it is learning quickly:

Researchers Achieve First Successful Telepathic Transfer

Nicholas West 

There has been much speculation about what could be achieved in the area of human brain-to-brain transfer of information.

A series of studies have intimated at the possibilities:

• Brain-to-Brain Control Established Between Humans and Animals at Harvard
• Remote Controlled Humans Via Internet Now a Reality
• New Mind Reading Research Aims to Synchronize Humans

Now an international team is declaring a successful brain-to-brain data transfer between a person sitting in India to a receiving person in France.

Cyborg Moth "Biobots" Preparing For Flight

Photo credit: Alper Bozkurt

Nicholas West

The military-science industrial complex continues its pursuit of modeling drones after nature in order to hide in plain sight. While there have been some successes in this area with systems like RoboBee, nature's flight pattern is proving to be difficult to perfectly replicate, as well as providing steep challenges in energy consumption.

Enter cyborgs. While mice have long been tested upon in the areas of direct mind control, it is cyborg insects that are currently leading the way. In October of last year, I wrote about a pet cyborg project called RoboRoach that was essentially open source, mail order neurosurgery for kids. While few people seem to have ethical concerns over insects, we would do well to take a look at how the mechanization of living beings is starting, and where it ultimately might be heading. 

U.S. Navy Integrates Autonomous Drones With Manned Missions

image credit: Alex Millar/U.S. Navy

Nicholas West

"History" was made in mid-May of last year as Northrop Grumman's X-47B unmanned drone made its first launch at sea from the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier. While the Navy says it wasn't intended for the immediate war environment, it was heralded by the commander of the Naval Air Forces, Vice Admiral David Buss, as a monumental achievement:

Today we saw a small, but significant pixel in the future picture of our Navy as we begin integration of unmanned systems into arguably the most complex warfighting environment that exists today: the flight deck of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

This test was followed by the successful landing of the same aircraft upon a moving flight deck at sea to which it returned after being stationed at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md. That event, as you will see below, is thought to have heralded the arrival of the autonomous drones of the future.

The Navy is now announcing the successful integration of autonomous drones alongside manned aircraft for ongoing regular carrier missions. 

Canadian Robot Producer First To Denounce Killer Robots

Take Action HERE

Nicholas West 

One could debate the overall merits or failings of robotic systems, but one area that clearly has become a point for concern on all sides is the idea of "killer robots." According to robotics pioneer, David Hanson, we are on a collision course with exponential growth in computing and technology that might only give us a "few years" to counter this scenario.

Elon Musk is the latest to proclaim the magnitude of the threat following a reading of Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence, stating that robots infused with advanced artificial intelligence are "potentially more dangerous than nukes." Stephen Hawking has said much the same, and universities such as Cambridge have said that "terminators" are one of the greatest threats to mankind according to their study program Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

The above sources do not reflect Luddites and conspiracy-minded individuals. This has led to international human rights groups and concerned citizens to launch a Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. It is a topic being taken up by the United Nations and even the U.S. military itself.

However, it's doubtful that we should expect global bureaucracy and those who profit from war to be the best solution to an imminent problem. For the first time, a robot manufacturer is sounding the alarm and taking a clear stance against the pursuit of these systems. Clearpath Robotics Co-Founder and CTO, Ryan Gariepy, is offering an open letter that is a must-read, as it clearly focuses on ethics - something that consistently has been left out of the equation thus far. Please spread this far and wide so that we can get this debate ramped up as quickly as possible. Once we halt this potential catastrophe, then we can continue debating other aspects of robotics. Please offer your thoughts in the comment section below.

The Era Of Cyborg Nanotechnology Has Begun

Update on the merger of human and machine

Nicholas West

Technology seems to be on a runaway course either to free humanity or to enslave us. On one end we see massive continued investment in replacing humans with robots, both economically and socially.

Parallel to this trend, we are seeing advancements in neuroscience being made from global projects like the BRAIN initiative in the U.S. and its counterpart in Europe, the Human Brain Project. These projects seek to decode the human brain and tailor it for "treatments," as well as to enable the realization of full brain-computer-interface technology. The pace of these developments has increased toward the dizzying, such as a "living" transistor that uses DNA merged with graphene, the advent of quantum computing and nanocomputing, the creation of avatars, DNA nanobots, and a range of neuro applications that are beginning to transform our fundamental relationship with the "real" world.

One respected scientific journal announced earlier this year that the era of cyborgs indeed has begun, as an array of medical applications are merging us with machines and computer systems. This is also happening in tandem with augmented reality applications that have entered the consumer space.

The latest press release states emphatically that we are "On the Frontiers of Cyborg Science." Once again, only the potential benefits are noted, but the funding for the research cited comes from the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Air Force. As you read the full chronicle of the developments to date, how do you believe this science will be used? With funding sources such as these, can you imagine some negative consequences? Your thoughts are welcome in the comment section below.  

U.S. Government Invests in Robot Personal Trainers for Children

Nicholas West

The evolution of humanoid robots continues to quicken with greater strides being made toward applying artificial intelligence to create emotional robots.  

The commitment to reverse engineer the human brain coupled with the exponential increase in computing power is now forcing the discussion toward the social impact robotics is beginning to have as humans and robots begin interacting with greater frequency. 

Consequently, newer robots are being produced with the intention of manipulating emotional triggers that guide human-to-human interaction. It's all part of a move to make robots seem less creepy and more like real members of society. Researchers are taking multiple angles to establish these connections. The U.S. government is now getting involved with a $10 million investment into developing robots that can serve as personal trainers for children with the stated intention to "influence their behavior and eating habits." 

Japan Changes Constitution to Join Global Drone Arms Race

Update on the global drone arms race.

U.S. drone arrives at Japanese air base

Nicholas West

It has been predicted that the development of drone surveillance by the U.S. would spark a global race to develop new drone capabilities, leading to a potentially dystopian future of drone wars where combat and even assassinations can be performed by fleets of insect-like microbots. The Washington Post reported in July, 2011:

More than 50 countries have purchased surveillance drones, and many have started in-country development programs for armed versions because no nation is exporting weaponized drones beyond a handful of sales between the United States and its closest allies. (Source)

The number of countries possessing surveillance drones has now risen toward 90, plus the United Nations itself has launched its own fleet. Armed drones are also proliferating rapidly with at least 20 countries believed to have unmanned weaponized vehicles. Japan is the latest to go full-steam ahead in an effort to keep up - so much so that they actually have rewritten their constitution to ensure more militaristic endeavors.

The Evolution of Non-Lethal Weapons

Dees Illustration

Nicholas West

This is an update to the ongoing look at the technological evolution of supposedly non-lethal weapons.

A lot of attention has been paid recently to the massive buildup of lethal weapons purchased by DHS and the ongoing government secrecy about the stockpile. When combined with the increasing rhetoric against anyone professing a love of independence, there is rightful concern that this weapons hoard will be turned inward upon the American "Patriot."

Many argue that, in the end, most military and police will not wage war on their own, even despite overwhelming evidence that they are training for such a scenario, i.e. using "no more hesitation" pictures of elderly men, pregnant women and even children as target practice. Add to this a letter issued from a retired U.S. Army Captain that DHS is prepping for war on Americans, as well as recent testimony from a Marine Corps Colonel stating the same, and only cognitive dissonance remains for not answering the wake-up call.

The transfer of weapons of war such as drones from foreign to domestic use should be seen as a natural expansion of any imperial government that is actively taking steps to desensitize military, police, and the domestic public to crossing paths in a very hostile manner.