SAN DIEGO – You'll never look at hummingbirds the same again.
The Pentagon has poured millions of dollars into the development of tiny drones inspired by biology, each equipped with video and audio equipment that can record sights and sounds.
They could be used to spy, but also to locate people inside earthquake-crumpled buildings and detect hazardous chemical leaks.
The smaller, the better.
Besides the hummingbird, engineers in the growing unmanned aircraft industry are working on drones that look like insects and the helicopter-like maple leaf seed.
Question: does this make anyone feel safer? It definitely does not make me feel safer. The room for abuse is huge, and I'm afraid the temptation to abuse this technology would be too great for states - or even individuals possessing the means - to resist. Anyone remember the spider robots from Minority Report (2002)?
http://movieclips.com/Vpwa-minority-report-movie-spider-robots/
I think that Americans are being conditioned to equate "security" with the very absence of security. They are - we are - spending tens of billions dollars more (rather than less) every year on "defense." So much that in fact the US spends more on its military than the military expenditures of the entire rest of the world combined: around a trillion dollars if you include our nuclear budget. Stuff like these hummingbird robots. Not cheap. Not necessary (particularly in a time of economic need). But the money for such programs is always abundant. No matter how the rest of America is doing economically. So - to paraphrase MLK - every time a bomb drops in Afghanistan, it explodes in our cities, leaving a great many of our citizens destitute, unemployed, desperate. Without hope.
That's the real crime here.
And how do you even begin to fight that?
Wow. That's very reminiscent of the Hunger Games series that my son and I are reading now, with the Mockingjays, which are a muttation (their word) of mockingbirds and a species of bird created to spy on people and report conversations back to the government. Creepy.
ReplyDeleteI was on the inside of one of these companies that specialized in unmanned drones (and of course there's also the Robin Williams movie "Toys") and it occurred to me that it was very much like the dilemma posed in "Ironman" - the companies have the ability to do it. If they are not doing it FOR the government, would they be doing it on their own? For another government? In light of North Korea's recent threat to attack the US and South Korea, does technology like this simply go to the highest bidder?
Now I've got to check out "Toys" and "Ironman" - two movies that weren't on my list but now I'll see them on your recommendation, Kristen. :)
ReplyDeleteThanks!