The Enlightened Despot

The one thing that science-fiction his proved most prescient about is the importance of robots. (On the other end of the spectrum are flying cars. How ’bout it, science?) If you aren’t in one of a few narrow subfields within the military services or the sciences, you probably don’t have much contact with robots, but that won’t be the case for long. Since the military is absolutely dominating the field of robot research for now, you will no doubt see a rise of robot activity in news coverage of international affairs before you start seeing more actual robots in your daily lives - the drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan are just the tip of the iceberg. The bad news about all this is that, presumably, these robots will eventually become self-aware and reduce humanity to a slave race. The upside is that they’re really cool. In any case, it’s best to be informed. So here’s a scattered round-up of robot activity:

Whatever happens in the ongoing debate over drone strikes into Pakistani territory, you are going to hear more and more about those drones, as the military’s use of unmanned aircraft is increasing rapidly. How rapidly? This rapidly:

Of course, you don’t rack-up 375,000 flight hours with the occasional attack on key Taliban leaders. So what exactly are flying robots doing with all their time? So far their most important function is surveillance, which is intuitive enough. Flying around monitoring things seems like just the sort of mission for which you wouldn’t want to waste a human’s time. Existing drones are already doing a great job for us in this department, but nothing compared to what we will be able to do within a few years when our A-160 T Hummingbird robot helicpoters will be fitted with the Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous - Surveillance - Imaging System (ARGUS-IS), a 1.8 gigapixel cluster of cameras and the processing power to sort through all that data and transmit what the mere mortals on the ground need or want to see:

The Hummingbird is unique in its ability to hover at high altitude (over 15,000 feet) and its endurance of over 20 hours. This means it can park high in the sky and scan a wide area. Robo-chopper camera-maker BAE Systems says that its imager will be able to cover an area of over a hundred square miles. The refresh rate is fifteen frames per second and a “ground sample distance” of 15 centimeters –- this means that each pixel represents six inches on the ground. (The Darpa diagram, above, suggests a smaller area of coverage, 40 square kilometers or 15 square miles, at that resolution.)

The volume of data is too great to be completely transmitted, but users will be able to define at least sixty-five independent video windows within the image and zoom in or out at will. The windows can be set to automatically track items of interest such as moving vehicles. In fact, the resolution is good enough for it to offer “dismount tracking” or following individual people on foot.

In addition to the windows, ARGUS will provide “a real-time moving target indicator for vehicles throughout the entire field of view in real-time.” Basically, nothing can move in the entire area without being spotted. Unlike radar, ARGUS can zoom in and provide a high-resolution image.

The camera is pretty impressive, but it’s the processing and the software behind it that will make this such a capable system. It would take a human a very long time to scan the whole area under surveillance if they were looking for something – but this is exactly the type of task which the swarming software we looked at last week excels at. Luckily enough, that just happens to be a Darpa program too. The technique of looking at small windows of interest also means that it may be possible to speed the frame rate up considerably – we previously looked at a windowing system so fast it could follow speeding bullets.

What’s not to love, other than the terrifying prospect that your every outdoor action could soon be monitored? This is all very expensive relative to, say, buying that new hybrid you’ve been looking at, but in the scheme of defense spending, drones can be cheap. Russia is considering buying ’several’ new drones from Israel for a mere $100 million dollars. Several! As if you needed any more evidence that spending tens of billions per unit on stealth bombers in the hopes that an alien civilization comes along and offers to come down and fight a good old-fashioned conventional war with us.  And on the low-end, drones get so cheap that terrorists can afford them. Hezbollah has already flown a drone over Israeli territory, and Al-Qaeda has robot dreams of its own, though no actual history of deploying robots. Yet.

This is another downside to robots. Even if ours don’t turn on us, other people might use theirs to kill us:

They are small, cheap and you could buy one tomorrow. Short-range versions with video cameras are common, but thanks to GPS and Google Earth you can also put one to within a few yards of your aim point from long range. Very long range. In 2003 a TAM-5 UAV with a six-foot wingspan was flown over 1880 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. One scenario features a mass drone attack launched from a tanker or freighter well out in international waters.

Eugene Miasnikov of the Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies at MIPT, calls the UAV a suicide bomber on steroids, basically. Unlike a suicide bomber, a drone can easily penetrate security and threaten otherwise safe areas (eg the Green Zone) or reach crowded public places like spots stadiums. Dense crowds would lead to large numbers of casualties from fragmentation bombs, and an attack by multiple UAVs could cause panic and further injuries in the crowd. And don’t even get us started about chemical, biological or dirty bomb radioactive payloads.

Yikes. How can we protect ourselves against OPR (Other People’s Robots)? Lasers, of course. Don’t you feel silly for asking now? Actually, so far we’ve had a hard time getting a workable anti-drone laser weapon up and running, but we did manage to take out a small drone with a Humvee mounted-laser under thoroughly rigged test conditions, so there’s hope.

At this point you’re probably asking yourself two questions: has the military looked into building some of this technology into living insects to create cyborg spy bugs, and can we build a robot chair that can rebuild itself if we blow it up in exactly the right way? The answers to your questions are ‘yes‘ and ‘yes‘.

The immediate goal of all this technology (well, maybe not the chair), as with any defense technology, is to increase our own military might. But there is a utopian dream here too: perhaps robo-centric militaries could reduce the human cost of war. Especially if we shoot what human soldiers remain with pain beams, rather than bullets. Probably not, but it’s a nice thought, no?

So, be nice to any robots you bump into, as they’re here to stay, and will only be gaining more clout going forward. I’ll leave you with a video of an Israeli kamikaze drone (the technical term is ‘loitering missile’) which flies around for hours at a time, in co-ordination with up to 53 of its buddies, looking for enemy radar systems to blow up: