MIT Scientists Psyched About Harmful 5G and 6G Wireless, Dangerous AI and IoT Applications, and Their Laser That Remotely Beams Audio Into People’s Ears

By B.N. Frank

Why are MIT scientists so psyched about unleashing biologically and environmentally harmful technology that also creates tremendous public safety and cybersecurity risks? Is it because exposure to wireless radiation has saturated their brains so deeply that impulse control and common sense has been severely compromised? Because they seem to be acting like the mad scientists portrayed in every book, comic strip, movie, and TV show in their enthusiasm to make us all guinea pigs for known-to-be dangerous technology.

Activist Post reported in January about how MIT scientists created a new laser to transmit audio directly into people’s ears. That was freaky enough.

Now they are promoting 5G, 6G, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT) despite the fact that a growing number of credible experts have warned about their biological, environmental, and safety risks as well as their catastrophic and embarrassing failures (see 1, 2, 3). In fact, even the Telecom Industry has stated they have no scientific evidence that 5G is safe. So why are MIT scientists endorsing any or all of this?

From MIT Technology Review: “Ready for 6G? How AI will shape the network of the future.”

The latest technology—the fifth generation of mobile standards, or 5G—is currently being deployed in select locations around the world. And that raises an obvious question. What factors will drive the development of the sixth generation of mobile technology? How will 6G differ from 5G, and what kinds of interactions and activity will it allow that won’t be possible with 5G?

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5G base stations, for example, are designed to handle up to a million connections, versus the 4,000 that 4G base stations can cope with. That should make a difference to communication at major gatherings such as sporting events, demonstrations, and so on, and it could enable all kinds of applications for the internet of things.

Then there is latency—the time it takes for signals to travel across the network. 5G is designed to have a latency of just a single millisecond, compared with 50 milliseconds or more on 4G. Any gamer will tell you how important that is, because it makes the remote control of gaming characters more responsive. But various telecoms operators have demonstrated how the same advantage makes it possible to control drones more accurately, and even to perform telesurgery using a mobile connection.

So how can 6G better that? 6G will, of course, offer even faster download speeds—the current thinking is that they could approach 1 terabit per second.

But what kind of transformative improvements could it offer? The answer, according to Stoica and Abreu, is that it will enable rapidly changing collaborations on vast scales between intelligent agents solving intricate challenges on the fly and negotiating solutions to complex problems.

Take the problem of coordinating self-driving vehicles through a major city. That’s a significant challenge, given that some 2.7 million vehicles enter a city like New York every day.

The self-driving vehicles of the future will need to be aware of their location, their environment and how it is changing, and other road users such as cyclists, pedestrians, and other self-driving vehicles. They will need to negotiate passage through junctions and optimize their route in a way that minimizes journey times.

Of course, this is just one example of the kind of collaboration that 6G will make possible. Stoica and Abreu envision a wide range of other distributed challenges that become tractable with this kind of approach.

These will be based on the real-time generation and collaborative processing of large amounts of data. One obvious application is in network optimization, but others include financial-market monitoring and planning, health-care optimization, and “nowcasting”—that is, the ability to predict and react to events as they happen—on a previously unimaginable scale.

Artificially intelligent agents are clearly destined to play an important role in our future. “To harness the true power of such agents, collaborative AI is the key,” say Stoica and Abreu. “And by nature of the mobile society of the 21st century, it is clear that this collaboration can only be achieved via wireless communications.”

That’s an interesting vision of the future. There is much negotiating and horse-trading to be done before a set of 6G standards can even be outlined, let alone finalized. But if Stoica and Abreu are correct, artificial intelligence will be the driving force that shapes the communications networks of the future.