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Electronic Warfare Insects Coming Soon
Mike writes "British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives, and they claim that prototypes could be on the front line by the end of the year. A fascinating development to be sure, but who thinks this won't be misused domestically for spying and evidence gathering?"
Included in the story is a link to a creepy little (scripted, rendered) demo video of these robots in action.
The Locusts of Borg will pwn you.
That video that's mentioned is here. This technology still relies on wireless transmission, so who ever uses it must be in relative close proximity. So when deployed, if you notice them some how, you'll know someone is near by.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
I prefer my spiders to be 20ft tall and wielding giant laser canons of death.... Who needs a covert force when you can have one that kicks ass and takes names?
Yeah, right!
So does the military sue people who step on these things the way we step on eveyr other insect?
That all sounds real dandy, but battery life is the achilles heel: these bugs and critters are only going to last a few minutes. Real insects last longer because they have much more energy-efficient locomotion and control, they have efficient fuel cells, and they replenish their energy supplies constantly by feeding.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
..with a powerful EM blast!!!
It may just be that it is physically impossible to have privacy in the future. If that's the case, then we should accept it and start putting into place the mechanisms to make sure that "transparency" is a two-way street, which is the best case scenario in that case.
Link to the Wikipedia article on his ideas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
expandfairuse.org
"I thought soldiers were on a battlefield precisely to take as many lives as they could..."
No. If a nuclear armed nation wanted to take as many lives as possible, none of their soldiers would be on the battle-field.
Creative Demolition
The idea is that they'll take out money and use it to take enemy lives instead of friendly ones. I think your cynicism meter needs adjusting.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
isnt that how the Gatling gun was pitched?
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
They could drop a bunch of repeaters in the area as well with the bugs, disguised as who knows what, a pile of dog crap, pine cones, whatever. The humans don't have to be right close by with wireless. They fly those predator attack drones from across the planet.
I, for one, welcome our giant insect overlords.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
> I thought soldiers were on a battlefield precisely to take as many lives as
> they could...
They are usually there to take and hold territory by any means necessary. If the enemy resists somebody gets killed but if they run away or surrender that works too.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If this technology ever does prove to save lives on the battlefield, it would only be the lives of the "good guys". The lives of the opposing side would be destroyed with ever-increasing efficiency. Of course, if you believe that the foes that Britain will face in the foreseeable future are intrinsically evil and deserve to be destroyed with ever-increasing efficiency, then this is fine. If you believe that destroying lives full-stop with ever-increasing efficiency is ok, that this is fine. Another way to help save thousands of lives on the battlefield would be not illegally invade sovereign countries with thinly-veiled justifications designed to cover up one's own economic and emperial ambitions.
They can try to bug me.I have several rather low tech counter-measures.
1. I have cats that eat bugs or will roll them under the refrigerator.
2. I have Raid ant traps.
3. I have natural spiders that will capture the cyber bugs.
4. I have toddlers who have nothing better to do but patrol for weird things like that.
5. I have wireless internet; loose wires in PCs, cable TV, lighting; toys; baby monitors; my house was built by the Wal-mart of home builders and cordless phone on the fritz. I have to go outside 10 feet from my house to talk on a cell phone. I am lucky to get clear FM radio.
The bugs may work in less developed areas, but they will not be able to stand up to the food web, shoddy craftsmanship, and a toddlers instinct to put everything in its mouth.
I am a lot less concerned about foreign/military uses for this tech and a lot more concerned with domestic/police use. Does any of us doubt that this will eventually trickle down to the corrupt stupid thug/bullies known as the police? A scary thought. Although I don't think the first generation of mobile surveillance "bugs" are going to be a threat indoors, I do think it will happen eventually.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
The op was decrying war as something that never had to happen, if only we all just got along. WWII is a sterling example of a war that happened because the other side didn't want to get along. The point is that while it is unfortunate that there are aggressors that are willing to go to war, it isn't stupid or war mongering to defend yourself from an aggressor, it is necessary.
The snarky reason why Tonkin and Vietnam and Iraq don't get mentioned is that they aren't wars, but the real reason is that they aren't nearly as morally unambiguous as WWII was, especially after the extent of the crimes against humanity was uncovered.
What it comes down to is that one unjust war doesn't prove that all war is unjust.
The point about the fake incidents not being bilateral is that side B can't do a whole lot about the actions of side A (other than fight back) once side A starts rolling in tanks.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Bullhockey.
Tell THIS girl that she wasn't in a war zone.
Calling it "a police action", "counter-insurgency", or BY any other marginally more "pleasant" euphemism does NOT change the rules of the game.
It's war, plain and simple. Kill them before they have a chance to kill you. Period.
...unless you want to tell me the name really DID change to "Freedom Fries". :P
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
They have to work all the bugs in first.
Thankyouenjoytheveal!
This technology looks really cool(in a fairly creepy sort of way). The versions that they are currently proposing look more or less biomorphic spins on the "RC car with a camera" concept; but should still be useful. Even more interesting, though, will be the possibilities with smaller, more insectlike, mechanisms(which may well end up being cyborgs, not robots. Bugs are already good at what they do, much better than robots are, and DARPA is already playing with cybugs in the lab). Think of the mosquito, for instance. Those little guys essentially spend their lives following subtle chemical gradients to find their food sources and then swarm around them. Modify the chemical gradients they care about, dump a whole lot of them out of a plane, and you have a distributed sensor swarm that'll look for just about anything that has a scent.
The prospect that makes me nervous is what we'll do when we want to go beyond recon/search/surveillance type roles. Conventional weapons aren't going to scale down all that well. Chemical and biological weapons will. This will present an unseemly temptation. Being able to tailor lethally armed cybugs to hunt chemical traces and kill whatever turns up would be very useful. Trying to find that IED factory? Druggies blending into the crowd? Russian ambassador wearing a ghastly brand of aftershave? Actually doing any of this, though, is going really, really far into unpleasant territory. Very Unit 731.
But spreading limits the bandwidth of a signal and would make high def video a challenge.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'll bet there's far more military espionage use being planned. Make a version that uses solar power and has small enough satellite comm chips inside. Even better, design it to allow recharging from electric outlets (which it can connect to at night). Let them lose on a country's borders, millions of them. If they cost a $1000 each, a million bots will constitute a 1 bil $ project. Chump change. They converge on the cities with preprogrammed maps, then start communicating only after they infiltrate major government buildings, intelligence facitilies, military research, terrorist caves...etc.
This (and the butterfly mentioned in TFA) is ultimate espionage. The idea is so cool that I am forced to momentarily disregard big brother threats from the Orwellian-minded.
To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
-- Sun Tzu
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
...couldn't these be used in rescue situations too?
For example when a building collapses in an earthquake. Send in an small army of the creepy crawlies to listen for and pinpoint survivors. Make rescue efforts much faster and efficient. Also depending on how they are set up, they could let rescue workers know which areas aren't safe / stable to be digging around in.
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
Agreed. I was pretty excited till I saw the video (posted above). Some of the moves the bots do in that animation were just pure BS. You can't do anything like that with today's tech.
You ever seen the best of what MIT can do? It's not even 1/4 of what's in the vid.
Battery power to fly, do that crazy jump, wireless communication, etc, etc just does NOT exist yet. These guys are fishing for a government grant and put some CGI pics together... nothing more.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was swallowed by a small dog.
In seriousness, I have a great and very cheap countermeasure against electronic insects, snakes, mice, etc.: cats. DARPA may spend billions developing these tiny surveillance critters, but nature has spent billions of years evolving an efficient hunter to eat them.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.