San Francisco becomes first US city to allow police robots to kill suspects

Police in San Francisco will be allowed to kill suspects using remote controlled robots, in a landmark ruling which campaign groups say sets a dangerous precedent.

The Golden Gate city will become the first in America to legally authorise the use of robots to administer deadly force after an emotionally charged debate and vote by city supervisors.

The San Francisco Police Department said it does not have pre-armed robots and has no plans to arm robots with guns, but could deploy remote controlled machines equipped with explosive charges “to contact, incapacitate, or disorient violent, armed, or dangerous suspect” when lives are at stake, according to spokesperson Allison Maxie.

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Toronto Tesla owners can now use self-driving mode downtown. But safety experts are worried

Tesla drivers can finally use the vehicles’ self-driving feature in Toronto’s downtown core after Elon Musk’s company removed a digital barrier to the technology this week.

Tesla had blocked the use of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software south of Bloor-Danforth back in March, reportedly due to the difficulty FSD had with TTC streetcars stopping and letting off passengers in the middle of the street.


Tesla employee fired for posting video showing Tesla’s self driving tech failing on the road

Here we have a video where a Tesla with FSD engaged hit a bollard while testing.

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San Francisco police propose using robots capable of ‘deadly force’

The San Francisco police department has proposed that it be allowed to use robots with “deadly force” while responding to incidents, according to a policy draft..

The document outlines how the department proposes to use its collection of robots, which number 17 in total although 12 are not operational.

The remote-controlled devices are generally used for area inspection and bomb disposal, a police spokesperson told Mission Local. The department wants to use them for “training and simulations, criminal apprehensions, critical incidents, exigent circumstances, executing a warrant or during suspicious device assessments”, according to the proposal.

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Which Came First? The Chicken or the Laboratory?

The Food and Drug Administration has happily approved Upside Foods’s sale of lab-grown meat for human consumption, simultaneously announcing their openness to other companies with similar approaches to meat production.

Researchers have been working on cloning organs in the lab for years, allegedly always for honorable medical purposes.  Now they want to take cells from biopsies of farm animals, and grow synthetic meat from them in a sterile laboratory, to sell for food.

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Microdrones: the AI assassins set to become weapons of mass destruction

We are entering the much prophesied age of the killer robot – but do we really know what we’re unleashing?

Drones are in the news again, but not as we have come to know them. In August, Britain announced it was sending 850 Black Hornet “microdrones” to Kyiv for use in close-quarters combat.

The idea was (before the spectacular Russian collapse in recent weeks) that they would lend Ukrainian troops a crucial edge in the vicious urban fighting that was expected as they sought to liberate their towns and cities.

These machines are a far cry from the large unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) associated with the war on terror, the ubiquitous Predator and Reaper drones that delivered death from the upper skies with almost god-like insouciance.

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Amazon, Canada’s largest user of low wage foreign labour, employs new ‘Sparrow’ robot to take warehouse worker jobs

Amazon’s new ‘Sparrow’ robot threatens to take warehouse worker jobs

Amazon unveiled its new ‘Sparrow’ sorting robot that could soon replace some human workers in its warehouses.

The robot is designed to identify and sort specific products along Amazon’s fulfillment line, a task that previously could only be done by humans.

“Sparrow is the first robotic system in our warehouses that can detect, select, and handle individual products in our inventory,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement alongside the product’s debut during Amazon’s Delivering The Future conference near Boston on Thursday.


Canada Has Become A Hotbed For Low-Wage Foreign Labour Under Trudeau … Amazon Biggest User

… But since Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals have come to power, the country has doubled down on its use of foreign labour. At the end of 2021, more than 775,000 people from abroad had temporary work permits, an increase of 92 per cent from 2015, and 600 per cent from 2000.

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Asteroids! Solar Storms! Nukes! Climate Calamity! Killer Robots!

A guide to contemporary doomsday scenarios — from the threats you know about to the ones you never think of

A few days before NASA tried to crash a spacecraft into an asteroid as part of what it called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, I talked to Lindley Johnson, the agency’s planetary defense officer. I think we can all agree that this sounds like an important job.

The planetary defense officer focuses on the detection of dangerous asteroids and comets that might threaten the Earth (as in the movies “Don’t Look Up” and “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact”), and explores technologies for preventing such a thing from happening. This job is not to be confused with the NASA planetary protection officer, who is supposed to keep Earth’s microbes from contaminating other worlds or hypothetical alien microbes from coming to Earth, as in “The Andromeda Strain.”

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Loblaw launches driverless trucks for PC Express food delivery

Loblaw Companies Ltd. and Silicon Valley start-up Gatik on Wednesday announced the launch of driverless box trucks to deliver select online grocery orders for Loblaw’s PC Express service.

Drivers will still be on hand to take over if necessary but will be on standby in the passenger seat, Gatik told Global News.


Tell me why we need mass immigration again? Oh yea to fight inflation by depressing wages! Why not just import robots?

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Researchers Say It’ll Be Impossible to Control a Super-Intelligent AI

The idea of artificial intelligence overthrowing humankind has been talked about for decades, and in 2021, scientists delivered their verdict on whether we’d be able to control a high-level computer super-intelligence. The answer? Almost definitely not.

The catch is that controlling a super-intelligence far beyond human comprehension would require a simulation of that super-intelligence which we can analyze (and control). But if we’re unable to comprehend it, it’s impossible to create such a simulation.

H/T DM

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Google Deepmind Researcher Co-Authors Paper Saying AI Will Eliminate Humanity

After years of development, AI is now driving cars on public roads, making life-changing assessments for people in correctional settings, and generating award-winning art. A longstanding question in the field is whether a superintelligent AI could break bad and take out humanity, and researchers from the University of Oxford and affiliated with Google DeepMind have now concluded that it’s “likely” in new research.

h/t DM

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Four vectors of danger for America and the West

It’s not just 1970s-style omens; we’ve got plenty of new problems too

Fifty years ago, everything seemed to be breaking down, kind of like it is now. In fact, it can feel like the 1970s redux. Searing issues of war, ecology, race, and “malaise” have never really disappeared. A silent majority, political schism, limits to growth, and price inflation — all are here.

Yet there are new uncertainties too. Even to optimists, debt-induced fragility clouds the economic horizon. Investor Charles Munger notes that bitcoin actively undermines the Federal Reserve System; any gain comes from trading, not from creating products, crops or rents. As fantastic as non-binary sexuality, cryptocurrency points to additional contemporary follies.

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Video Conversation: ‘Why can’t we be great men?’

James Conway is a Sligoman, father, farmer, sometime builder, occasional election candidate and general activist for the good of his community and nation. He is an example of the kind of person our broken nations might look to now in seeking youthful voices capable of articulating our common situation in its depths, and plotting a new way forward after the horrors of the past few years.

In this conversation, conducted in Sligo, Ireland, on July 14th, 2022, James and I talk about many things of vital concern to our respective communities and our nations at this critical moment in history — with Ireland functioning as the particularity that speaks for the universal — including:

—the coming worldwide catastrophe;

—the incipient land-grab conducted under the cover of environmentalism;

—the ‘new Kulaks’: the farmers and other ‘Able Men’ of the contemporary West;

—the threat to private property from the WEFfer elites:

—the murder of the public conversation that paved the way for the obliteration of democracy necessary to achieve these larcenies;

—the growing psychosis of leftism;

—the state and governmental fear of citizen self-sufficiency — the true locus of the Republic;

—the fragmentation of humanity — young pitted against old, old against young;

—the leveraging of victimologies to undermine democracy —the Wretched of the Earth as battering rams against Western civilisation;

—Covid as nuclear bomb;

—the performative virtue-signalling and neo-colonial intolerance of liberalism: progressivism as reverse gear

—the death of adulthood;

—the enforced lockjaw of modern societies;

—the massacre of the great passions;

—the Woke crusades and their escalating inquisitions;

—Ireland’s mission to abolish itself;

— the calumniation of Ireland Past;

—the infantilisation of Irish humanity;

—the castration of Irish manhood;

—the recurring contagion of genetic memory;

—the potential for hope, in spite of its destruction;

—the potential, too, for amnesia:

‘What if there is no history? What if history is written by others, who have no care for what happened to the Irish people, or what happened in Ireland before a certain time, maybe 2020, or 2015, or 2011 . . . What then? You can scrub Ireland from the blackboard of history, and nobody will know.’  — John Waters

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What ‘The Jetsons’ predicted right — and wrong — about the future

Get ready to meet George Jetson — because he’s about to be born.

The button-pushing, flying-car-riding, iconic future man entered the galaxy on July 31, 2022, according to “The Jetsons” canon. While George is having his first birthday, the show itself is about to celebrate its 60th: it debuted on Sept. 23, 1962, a century before it’s set.

That means we’re supposed to be only 40 years away from the Jetsons’ world of Rosie the Robot, toothbrushing machines and apartment buildings high above the clouds.


Never my favourite toon I nonetheless watched it over and over again.

Parking in front of the TV started between 5 and 7 AM Saturdays and Sundays and lasted until Mom threw some food at you and kicked you out of the house for the day.

Playdates were unheard of, hell we used to play on construction sites.

Unsupervised bliss.

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