Think about: China deploys a whole lot of 1000’s of autonomous drones within the air, on the ocean, and beneath the water—all armed with explosive warheads or small missiles. These machines descend in a swarm towards navy installations on Taiwan and close by US bases, and over the course of some hours, a single robotic blitzkrieg overwhelms the US Pacific pressure earlier than it could even start to battle again.
The proliferation of low cost drones means nearly any group with the wherewithal to assemble and launch a swarm may wreak havoc, no costly jets or huge missile installations required.
The US armed forces are actually trying to find an answer—they usually need it quick. Each department of the service and a number of protection tech startups are testing out new weapons that promise to disable drones en masse.
And one in every of these is microwaves: high-powered digital units that push out kilowatts of energy to zap the circuits of a drone as if it had been the tinfoil you forgot to take off your leftovers if you heated them up. Learn the total story.
—Sam Dean
This text is a part of the Massive Story collection: MIT Know-how Evaluation’s most necessary, bold reporting that takes a deep have a look at the applied sciences which might be coming subsequent and what they are going to imply for us and the world we dwell in. Try the remainder of them right here.
What is going to energy AI’s development?
Final week we printed Energy Hungry, a collection that takes a tough have a look at the anticipated vitality calls for of AI. Final week on this e-newsletter, I broke down its centerpiece, an evaluation I did with my colleague James O’Donnell.
However this week, I need to discuss one other story that I additionally wrote for that bundle, which targeted on nuclear vitality. As I found, constructing new nuclear vegetation isn’t so easy or so quick. And as my colleague David Rotman lays out in his story, the AI growth may wind up counting on one other vitality supply: fossil fuels. So what’s going to energy AI? Learn the total story.
—Casey Crownhart
