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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.
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!
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.
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
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 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.
"Great, now you're going to tell me how guns, missiles, tanks and nuclear weapons save millions of lives."
;)
They have and do, but sometimes (when deterrence fails) at the cost of other lives.
WWII is an excellent example. It took killing millions of Germans, Japanese, Italians, and other Axis types to halt their enthusiastic killing of others. There not being a non-violent option for dealing with such folk (non-violence just meant surrender to extermination) it was perfectly logical and reasonable to save Allied lives by killing heaps of Axis humans. Those who snivel about it now are conveniently distant from having to actually deal with any similar problems.
It worked superbly, like it or not.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
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!
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.
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.