The accelerated development, deployment and adoption of artificial intelligence systems has been fuelled by the increasing involvement of big tech. This has been accompanied by increasing ethical concerns and intensified societal and environmental impacts. In this article, we review and discuss how these phenomena are deeply entangled. First, we examine the growing and disproportionate influence of big tech in AI research and argue that its drive for scaling and general-purpose systems is fundamentally at odds with the responsible, ethical, and sustainable development of AI. Second, we review key current environmental and societal negative impacts of AI and trace their connections to big tech and its underlying economic incentives. Finally, we argue that while it is important to develop technical and regulatory approaches to these challenges, these alone are insufficient to counter the distortion introduced by big tech's influence. We thus review and propose alternative strategies that build on the responsibility of implicated actors and collective action.

The United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) has released a new report mapping the corporations aiding Israel in the displacement of Palestinians and its genocidal war on Gaza, in breach of international law. Francesca Albanese's latest report, which is scheduled to be presented at a news conference in Geneva on Thursday, names 48 corporate actors, including United States tech giants Microsoft, Alphabet Inc. – Google's parent company – and Amazon. A database of more than 1000 corporate entities was also put together as part of the investigation. "[Israel's] forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech – providing significant supply and demand, little oversight, and zero accountability – while investors and private and public institutions profit freely," the report said. "Companies are no longer merely implicated in occupation – they may be embedded in an economy of genocide," it said, in a reference to Israel's ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip.

Their proposed fleet of'un-crewed' killer aircraft, piloted by'artificial intelligence' and dubbed MQ-28 Ghost Bats, would number in the thousands for the US alone. 'Boeing's track record doesn't seem to indicate that it's necessarily the best one to implement this kind of thing,' as one former State Department official, Steven Feldstein, told DailyMail.com. Boeing's MQ-28 Ghost Bat is an unmanned drone piloted by'artificial intelligence' (AI). It is one of the several robotic fighter jets competing to become the Pentagon's killer AI drone fleet With roughly 53 cubic-feet of storage capacity within its nose for interchangeable payloads, Boeing's Ghost Bats could one day carry a variety of bombs and munitions including multiple tactical nuclear weapons. Currently, three prototypes of the Ghost Bat have been built and flight-tested in Australia for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) with at least one of those delivered to United States for its own tests and integration trials.

With the ever-increasing reliance on digital networks for various aspects of modern life, ensuring their security has become a critical challenge. Intrusion Detection Systems play a crucial role in ensuring network security, actively identifying and mitigating malicious behaviours. However, the relentless advancement of cyber-threats has rendered traditional/classical approaches insufficient in addressing the sophistication and complexity of attacks. This paper proposes a novel 3-stage intrusion detection system inspired by a simplified version of the Lockheed Martin cyber kill chain to detect advanced multi-step attacks. The proposed approach consists of three models, each responsible for detecting a group of attacks with common characteristics. The detection outcome of the first two stages is used to conduct a feasibility study on the possibility of predicting attacks in the third stage. Using the ToN IoT dataset, we achieved an average of 94% F1-Score among different stages, outperforming the benchmark approaches based on Random-forest model. Finally, we comment on the feasibility of this approach to be integrated in a real-world system and propose various possible future work.

The Pentagon will look to develop new artificial intelligence-guided planes, offering two contracts that several private companies have been competing to obtain. The Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) project is part of a 6 billion program that will add at least 1,000 new drones to the U.S. Air Force. These drones would deploy alongside human-piloted jets and provide cover for them, acting as escorts with full weapons capabilities that could also act as scouts or communications hubs, The Wall Street Journal reported. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and Anduril Industries have all taken up the challenge. General Atomics supplied the Reaper and Predator drones the U.S. has deployed in numerous campaigns in the Middle East, and Anduril is a newcomer to the field, founded in 2017 by inventor Palmer Luckey, an entrepreneur who founded Oculus VR.

Lockheed Martin and Red Hat, Inc. today announced a collaboration to advance artificial intelligence (AI) innovation at the edge on …

Lockheed Martin and Red Hat, Inc. announced their collaboration to advance artificial intelligence (AI) innovation on Lockheed Martin's unmanned military platforms. The adoption of newly developed Red Hat Device Edge technology will enable Lockheed Martin's unmanned systems to operate safely in geographically constrained environments and improves the processing of sensor-derived information. In a recent demonstration, Lockheed Martin used Red Hat Device Edge on a Stalker UAS to show how AI-enhanced sensing can advance joint operations across domains. The Stalker used onboard sensors and AI to adapt in real time to a threat environment. As reported by the company, the Stalker was flying an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) mission to detect a simulated military target.

Lockheed Martin and Ayar Labs have formed a strategic collaboration to develop future sensory platforms that leverage Ayar Labs' advanced optical I/O microchips that use light to transfer data faster, at a lower latency, and at a fraction of the power of existing electrical I/O solutions. The new platforms could be used across Department of Defense (DoD) applications to capture, digitize, transport, and process spectral information. "As the complexity and amount of data grows on the battlefield, faster decision-making is essential. New innovative system architectures, coupled with AI and machine learning techniques, are needed for our customers' mission success," said Steve Walker, chief technology officer and vice president, Engineering & Technology at Lockheed Martin. "Ayar Labs' optical interconnect solution provides the necessary technology to process spectral information with greater speed and lower latency for next-generation system designs."

According to the National Interagency Fire Center, wildfires have burned 2,990,255 acres this year (June 17). Adding to firefighters' challenges, using current resources, it often takes hours to map a growing wildfire's perimeter and heat spots. It sometimes takes days using fuel property data – often 3-5 years old – to help predict fire behavior. Time is not on their side and the situation on the ground is always changing. Lockheed Martin is using AI/ML to help get critical data to firefighters faster.

With wildfires becoming bigger and more destructive as the western part of the United States dries out and heats up, agencies and officials tasked with preventing and battling the blazes could soon have a new tool to add to their arsenal of prescribed burns, pick axes, chainsaws and aircraft. The high-tech help could come from an area not normally associated with fighting wildfires: artificial intelligence (AI). Lockheed Martin Space, based in Jefferson County, is tapping decades of experience in managing satellites, exploring space and providing information to the US military to offer more accurate data quicker to ground crews. It is talking to the US Forest Service, university researchers, and a Colorado state agency about how their technology could help. By generating more timely information about on-the-ground conditions and running computer programs to process massive amounts of data, Lockheed Martin representatives say they can map fire perimeters in minutes rather than the hours it can take now.