Written by: TechAnon

Advancing technology and human’s undying fascination with flight have always been a driving force for anything from kids toys to space travel. In coming times you may be be hard pressed to find a public park or other open space that does not contain some sort of man-made flying contraption. Kites, gliders, RC planes and now multi-prop “drones” with cameras.

Without getting into all the “to do” or the politics and rights of those who own these little gems it seems that mother nature has started to implement her own air defenses per se. In a video published by rt.com. Watch the video here:

Software developer Christopher Schmidt is spending some time in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his quad copter  taking some video footage of the surrounding area . He’s flying along, minding his own business and out of the top corner of the video comes a young Red Tail hawk, in perfect attack pattern. Seeing the impending collision Chris immediately dropped his throttle in hopes of minimizing injury to the hawk and crossed his fingers. It’s kind of startling if you watch the video on a large screen, especially when the slomo starts. You see…talons and then the tumble to the ground.

I’m sure this incident is only one of hundreds around the country and the world. This past year University of Maryland Robotics had similar issues with a research project (coincidentally funded by the US Army) called “robo-raven”. This lil fella is one of the most accurate and real-life, functioning, Radio controlled  reproductions of a bird and in June of 2013, a hawk tried to eat it. Take THAT! secretly funded project!

Is mother nature trying to tell us something?

Today, the internet is littered with videos of wildlife attacking drones and their owners. Hawks, Eagles, Blackbirds… even land animals. How far do we go to protect either side? What do you deem more valuable; your equipment or the wildlife?

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Source: http://on.rt.com/1sknvl

We’ve all seen Terminator – or most of us have. I haven’t, but heard it’s quite the ride. But Stephen Hawking has a different opinion of late. When contemplating the very nature of Artificial Intelligence, Hawking is concerned about the ability for the AI to extend itself into something other than a benign concept we now take for granted. 

Image: “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” Movie (2001)

The technology that assists Hawkings in communicating with the world is the essence of the concern. Where he can think faster than the normal human being with the assistance of the technology that he has around him, the worry is that it may one day surpass those weaker and redesign itself at an increasing if not alarming rate.[1]

The question raised is if there would be such an increase, that we would not be able to detect it. ‘We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can’t know if we’ll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it.’

Image: “Terminator” with Arnold Schwarzenegger 

Hawkings stated earlier this year to the BBC that the ‘development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.’ Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, an electric car manufacturer and co-founder of SpaceX, a commercial space flight company, added his own concerns that AI could potentially be more hazardous to humanity than nukes if developed in specific ways. “If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that… With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories with the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, and he’s sure he can control the demon. It doesn’t work out.” [2]

As Hawking warns, AI may be the biggest advancement in human times, but could potentially be our last.

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[1] Kolodny, C. (2014, 5 May) Stephen Hawking Artificial Intelligence http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/05/stephen-hawking-artificial-intelligence_n_5267481.html (Retrieved 2014, 21 December)

[2] Gaudin, S. (2014, 3 December) Stephen Hawking says AI could end Human Race. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2854997/stephen-hawking-says-ai-could-end-human-race.html (Retrieved 2014, 21 December)