THE BILDERBERG GROUP AND THE KOREANS ( Archived) (4)

It is being reported that the nuclear bomb North Korea tested early this month exploded with double the power than first estimated, generating about 17 times more energy than the nuke that destroyed Hiroshima. The estimates for the power of the explosion ranged from 50 kilotons to 160 kilotons. That estimate has been revised to approximately 250 kilotons by 38 North, the newly formed monitoring group run by the U.S.- Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The bomb that devastated Hiroshima had a yield of 15 kilotons. World leaders condemned the test and moved quickly to issue the strictest sanctions to date against North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. He criticized the sanctions, promising “great pain” to the United States as payback. The sixth nuclear test registered on earthquake monitoring equipment with readings ranging from 5.8 to 6.3 in magnitude. The U.S. Geological Society gave the 6.3 reading. Obviously, the new nuclear threats that face us now are even worse than when we worried about the bomb during the Cold War. However, apart from powerful nuclear capabilities from a rogue state, we also have to understand that these weapons have the potential to be launched by autonomous Artificial Intelligence. Stating in a tweet this week that Artificial Intelligence would be the most likely cause of World War III, entrepreneur and tech mogul Elon Musk laid out a warning about the potential for a possible “Skynet” scenario happening sooner than later. Three weeks ago Vladimir Putin announced at a press briefing that the best innovator in AI technologies would be the next global leader.

On the heels of Putin’s assertion, Musk stated that AI is more dangerous than North Korea, this of course, was fanning the flames of doom with the global tensions regarding nuclear ICBMs. Musk’s tweet, which was a response to Putin’s fairly obvious statement, made it clear that he believes the next nuclear strike is more likely to come from a preemptive AI attack than from a nation-state. With all three major superpowers, the United States, China, and Russia are pursuing militarized AI. Musk also asserted that governments, not corporations, would be the ones to control the existential risk presented by AI. Three weeks later Musk goes from being an AI doom monger to a prophet as we are now learning that Artificial Intelligence has already been weaponized by hackers. It was reported by Gozmodo that last July, at Black Hat USA 2017, hundreds of leading cyber security experts gathered in Las Vegas to discuss this issue and other looming threats posed by emerging technologies. In a Cylance poll held during the confab, attendees were asked if criminal hackers will use AI for offensive purposes in the coming year, to which 62 percent answered in the affirmative. The era of Artificial Intelligence is upon us, yet if this informal Cylance poll is to be believed, a surprising number of infosec professionals are refusing to acknowledge the potential for AI to be weaponized by hackers in the immediate future. It’s a perplexing stance given that many of the cybersecurity experts we spoke to said machine intelligence is already being used by hackers and that criminals are more sophisticated in their use of this emerging technology than many people realize.

The funny thing about Artificial Intelligence is that our conception of it changes as time passes, and as our technologies increasingly match human intelligence in many important ways. At the most fundamental level, intelligence describes the ability of an agent, whether it be biological or mechanical, to solve complex problems. We possess many tools with this capability, and we have for quite some time, but we almost instantly start to take these tools for granted once they appear. Wikimedia and wiki commons reports that “Operation Talpiot” is at the center of a lot of new buzz. The premise is that Israel may have “kill switches” on most of the world’s infrastructure. The “Talpiot” program is perhaps the best reflection of the army’s technological drive. The unit, one of the most selective in the military, was formed in the wake of the 1973 war, when Israel was caught off guard and lost some 2,500 men. While the operation is carried out in a place called “Lotem,” it is known this place is just one of a handful of shadowy units that have turned Israel’s military into an electronics warfare powerhouse. Meanwhile, North Korea has also seen the necessity to become a giant in AI warfare: Sophisticated computer hackers, have the ability to generate an EMP effect on our power grid by simultaneously hacking into our grid and in effect, can generate a localized attack that would be like an EMP. The effect would be almost as devastating in terms of the effects of such an attack on local utilities, especially for the providers of our power and water entities. With what we know about the new tech warfare is being reinvented and we may just jump over the idea of World War III and creating Wired War I.

Like a scene out of The Terminator, the future of warfare is destined to include robot soldiers, unmanned aerial assault, and self-driving, weaponized vehicles. An $11 million contract approved by the Pentagon has been awarded to Six3 Advanced Systems. The US Department of Defense is calling on Six3 to “design, develop, and validate system prototypes for a combined-arms squad.” By the year 2025, experts predict that the U.S. military will have more robot soldiers than humans. According to the U.S. Department of Defense directive, the new American fighting squad is meant to combine “humans and unmanned assets, ubiquitous communications and information, and advanced capabilities in all domains to maximize squad performance in increasingly complex operational environments.” The military aims to test a new system prototype by mid 2019. The robotic fleet may include underwater drones and unmanned Army trucks that drive themselves. The Army already has plans to test the unmanned vehicles at the Blue Water Bridge in Michigan. This will be the first time the Army has ever unleashed self-driving vehicles onto public roads. The test will take place on Interstate 69 highway in Michigan. The robot technology will accompany soldiers on dangerous missions and perform other important tasks such as delivering supplies, analyzing legal documents, diagnosing disease, and assisting in the operating room. The robots will also be useful for detecting mines, mapping terrain, and detecting weather hazards.

Nothing is scarier than a fully automated $200,000 robot that can scan terrain, locate humans and decides whether it becomes a red mist as it fires a volley of bullets from 2 miles away. These robot prototypes could be the first vehicles to enter dangerous territories. There’s no doubt that using robots to perform certain stealth missions could spare the lives of soldiers, but using robots to more readily penetrate enemy territory could involve more risk-taking overall, leading to unintended consequences on a grander scale. Many of the new prototypes to be released in the next decade will be weaponized, leading to a new precedent in how wars are fought. The concept of a Robot or even a metal automaton protecting a city or country is as old as the one made famous in Greek Mythology. Robots made to obey commands were engineered by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention and technology. Talos, the gigantic animated bronze warrior programmed to guard the island of Crete, was one of Hephaestus’s creations. You may remember this monster robot in the Ray Harryhausen film, Jason and the Argonauts. While the bronze giant is a rudimentary form of the modern robot rarely talked about, there is also a rudimentary form of AI that the Russians have that we must readdress. The reason the Soviets decided to build the Dead Hand system at all had to do with advancements in American missile technology in the 1980s. Before these advancements, the expectation was that a nuclear war would be initially fought with intercontinental ballistic missiles. in the 1980s, Americans were getting better and better accuracy with their submarine-based missile launch systems, which meant that they could launch precision nuclear strikes close to the Soviet Union, cutting the warning time from when launch was detected down to about three minutes – not enough time to mount a viable counter-attack.

The Soviets needed some way to be sure destruction could be assured mutually, which is where the Dead Hand doomsday device comes in. The Dead Hand/Perimeter system was initially just a backup system for emergency communication, but was expanded to provide a full automatic counterstrike function. The heart of the system is something known as the “commanding rocket.” The commanding rocket was a 15PO11 rocket with a radiation-hardened radio transmitter, instead of a nuclear warhead. The rocket would be launched from a special, very protected silo, and once in flight, the rocket’s transmitter would replace all of the presumably destroyed ground-based communications, sending commands to receiving devices on all land-based ballistic missiles, submarine-based launchers, and bomber aircraft. The rocket’s commands to the nuclear weaponry and installations would be to launch a retaliatory strike to pre-determined targets. Of course, all of this would only happen after it was determined that a first strike against Soviet territory had taken place. An autonomous command and control system was used to determine if the counter-attack should take place, and the entire system is only even activated if a high-ranking human decides to turn it on, ideally long before the actual nuclear strike takes place. So what would trigger the command rocket and send all of the nuclear rockets to the United States in retaliation? The Dead Hand system has a network of sensors to check for seismic disturbances consistent with a nuclear strike, it checks radiation levels, it monitors communications and communication intensity on military radio frequencies, and also determines if people are still alive in various command posts.