It’s a big protest in Poland – I don’t think the drone is a police one… the uploader has other videos – it looks like one of these
And is not in fact DIY… they’re made by a Polish company
I can see how these things would be invaluable on either side – being Kettled? No problem – there’s 10000 of us and only 400 of you. I bet repressive regimes like England or America make them illegal. I bet we wind up with anti microcopter microcopters (or jets or jammers or whatever). That’s what happened with planes… firstly they were used only as surveillance… then as “nuisance-bombers”… then for fighting other planes… and then as a primary tactical piece on the board. It’s a kind of inevitable progression… from herbivore to predator.
I think it’s really interesting that this first one of these flying over a protest (in one country at least) is not in fact owned by the forces of old and evil… but by someone else. An entrepreneur? A hobbyist?
I had kindof imagined that these were going to be used for tourism… that you’d be able to hire one in Prague… sitting at home in (where ever it is) and cruise about looking at the sights etc. I guess we have better things to do. Still… welcome to Poland… cobbled streets, old buildings etc. God I miss Europe.
And you know… if you can hire these… in “trouble spots”, journalism is never going to be the same again – which is no bad thing. Mind you – if you could hire these in “trouble spots”, then there’s nothing to say that they couldn’t be armed, and joining in. In the 1930s people from the UK went to fight the fascists in Spain. Armchair-drones may allow us to do the same thing again – without getting out of our armchairs.
Erm… what the fuck is that music? It sounds like 1950s propaganda music, or the theme from Lassie or something. It sounds… like something from the past, and by that I mean a past that we really should have learned from, and clearly someone, somewhere hasn’t.
Are you really sure you want to get into this? Really? Low-tech/high-tech militarised robotics? Because what this is, is a radical lowering of the bar… think of it as aerial-propelled IEDs. The technology here is not a whole lot different to what you can find in your average smartphone.
The thing about high-tech weapons, is that once you get the vitamin parts out of the way, they’re not actually that high-tech.
Weaponry
DIY drones showing up in real combat scenarios is absolutely inevitable… and (as is always the case) it’s an economic battle as much as anything. It’s only a matter of time before a DIY drones start destroying “Official” drones – Predators and the like. You cannot deploy new weapons without creating an arms-race. People catch on fast.
The Robotic Invasion continueth, from small beginnings… it comes. From multiple angles it comes.
Do we know what it’s for yet? Do you know what it is yet? Nope. Not really. A weird revolution that seems to be driven not by necessity, but fantasy – and other people’s fantasies at that.
Dancebots – a little bit cute, a little bit spooky. Who said white guys can’t dance? Well… me basically. Still.
A video of a star-wars walker thing, that’s been made to do all the things that make dogs so annoying.
DIY Drones have a new quadracopter, that looks to me like they’ve gone a bit mainstream – into the zone where the price nose-dives, and they turn up duty-free at Hong Kong Airport, costing next to nothing. Although right now, this one is $400.
I haven’t gone on about the relationship between toys and weapons for a while – there is a connection though, and it’s becoming more and more entangled. Fantasies of violence, the distancing of the warrior from his victim, the distancing of the public from the wars they fight. Toys, people, people, toys. Nothing is real.
This is the most interesting thing I’ve seen in a while
Which is to say, it overlaps with a bunch of things that I find interesting, ie:
a)
The flirtation/vacillation/onion-skin-layers of reality… in love, war, fiction, art. Sex, Fighting – the more primal ends of the human condition. Because reality is not enough… but fantasy can’t sustain interest.
Apparently monkeys masturbate… ok you knew that… and (I’m never going to find a cite for this) they even masturbate to monkey porn… but unless there are real monkeys (presumably of the “required” sex) around, after a while, they give up and stop. They need stimuli from reality to keep their fantasies going.
I think a similar sort of thing happens with humans – but it’s not just sex, it’s also violence and art. The Shock of The Real. Prostitutes are not enough – not even goddesses from Eastern Europe, so there’s an entire genre “Girlfriend Experience”. Punk swept Prog-rock into the water and suddenly pop music was about describing people’s actual lives, rather than going on about Lord of the Rings etc. The only way to top Avatar is to make something real. In fact the mere fact that a movie has cost $300 million dollars, and is about sexy tree-smurfs should be ringing out as an opportunity in the minds of… people who can make it real.
Because that’s the other thing… when things are real, more people get to participate. Or at least it feels that way.
b)
Alternative currency
Although this one is harder than it looks… and I think the way he’s describing it here is a bubble waiting to happen. Any currency which isn’t a linear function of value being created, is a recipe for fuckup.
But what in this context is the value being created? At it’s rawest, I tend to see value as the reversal of entropy. I don’t think advertising creates value – aside from the occasional cultural icons/input. At best it transfers value… so I don’t think a currency which is based upon gaining points from looking at adverts in the long term, is sustainable. I mean basically you’re paying people to look at your ads. You can’t base an economy on this.
ie: everything has a tamagochi inside – hijacking human powers of empathy, anthropomorphism, competition etc to get them to do… chores.
d)
Stuff we didn’t see coming.
Yup. I wouldn’t have picked Guitar Hero. I wouldn’t have picked Wii. There are all sorts of things that I’ve got flat wrong… and for some reason, having this pointed out to me fills me with a sense of relief.
What it is, is… a system that you attach to a… thing (like the truck above) and it senses high-speed incoming projectiles, blows them up in mid-air and directs a hail of bullets at wherever the projectile came from…
… all in a microsecond, and without human intervention. Automated killing machine etc. I can imagine a bird flying through the air – trips the system and is vapourized, at exactly the same time as it’s nest, some distance away is turned into a small cloud of spiralling feathers and bits of straw.
It’s one of those things that once it’s invented, it can’t be uninvented… and it can’t not be used. “It saves lives”. It also represents a quantum (being too small a word) leap in whatever arms-race is headed this way – for systems that fight and kill at faster than human reaction speeds.
And I don’t think we’ve ever seen that before – except maybe with landmines… and I’m not sure that it’s not a genie that one day we might wish we could put back in the bottle. But we can’t… What Darpa (for it is they) have done here is (merely) throw a hell of a lot of money and expertise at a “toy” that you can find umpteen dozen variations of on youtube. People are already making their own automated paintball weapons systems in their backyards. Not good enough to shoot down incoming shells of course (and maybe that will never come), but probably good enough to splatter an armoured car with paint, before being shot to kingdom come.
I’ve got this weird vision of war… which is played entirely as a game (in other people’s countries) where people actually pay to fight, remotely. The manufacturing of the weapons is outsourced to local sweatshops etc… and the weapons are all a bit shit (plastic toys really) – but it doesn’t matter because if you can mobilise 150,000 bored teenage video-game ninjas who don’t actually die when you shoot them down, but simply launch the next drone… then things like aircraft-carriers or helicopters might be… well, as effective as a battle-axe against a swarm of bees. A physical denial-of-service attack. You probably don’t need that many bees.
… a turning point to look out for, is the first anti-drone drone.
We know that this will happen, because we’ve seen it happen before – the first WWI warplanes (which are still made here in NZ as it happens) started out as reconnaissance, then they started dropping bombs, then they found they needed to fight each other… and that’s about as far as it goes. It’s part of the military flying-machine life-cycle.
The WWI scenario was always about more or less equally matched machines for some reason. I’m guessing that the drone-on-drone scenario won’t be like this. It will be ultra cheap against ultra expensive.
The little chopper above is for sniffing out roadside bombs, rendering (presumably) the people we attack even more incapable of defending themselves than they already were. The accompanying article gushes “Roadside bombs are a a source of fear for both soldiers as well as their worried families at home. Thankfully the Pentagon is working on projects such as Yellow Jacket, unmanned helicopters which detect electromagnetic emissions from potential IEDs”
I know I keep harping on about this… but the purpose of these things is not to “protect the children of worried parents in the US” or even to “kill the children of worried parents elsewhere”. It’s to make money… that is what weapons are for. They’re for making money – and the way they can really, really make a hell of a lot of money is if there’s a war going on… and if there’s not a war going on, then just make one up.
A billion, squillion, zillion, fillion, illion, willion dollars is going on… fighting handfuls of religious freaks with beards. Every wonder why the Taliban have taken twice as long to defeat as the Nazis?
It’s like that game where you turn away for a bit… then quickly look back… and all the people who were there before are now a little bit closer.
I think robots are a bit bloke-orientated to be honest… but we’re in the beginnings of this revolution, another one – and right now it’s in the stage where things are interesting – in the phase where to compete (for what? attention?) the innovations are just as likely to be disruptive than incremental-economy-of-scale type things. The interesting stuff is being done by universities and hobbyists rather than major corporations. And although big money is behind this as well, we are still in the space where tinkerers can get in on the ground floor.
So anyway, I’ve been out of commission for a week or so… here are a random bunch of bots that have snuck up in the meantime, with vague thoughts etc.
1) hoppybot
“Leaping Robot Hops Closer to War” enthuses Wired’s Danger room, only we don’t really have “wars” as such any more. We have massively destructive (and expensive) attacks on people who haven’t a shit-show of defending themselves, and then massively expensive occupations – all for reasons that are not adequately explained (and are usually clear lies)… with the one clear result, and that is trillions of dollars flowing from taxpayers (many of whom are not yet born) to… who? People who make hoppybots I suppose.
As someone pointed out in the comments, this is similar to a remote controlled toy that you could buy in the duty-free section of Singapore Airport about 15 years ago.
And that’s another thing. A lot of things are being called robots, when actually, they’re just remote-controlled toys. Some of these are pretty cool – particularly the first-personism aspect where you can see through their eyes… but there’s this gradient… where at one end are amazingly sophisticated bits of kit – essentially remote-exoskeletons… and at the other… remote-controlled toys, pretending to be something that they’re not.
2) Here’s a neat example of a toy warbot:
It’s a toy robot battle-bot kit from Lynxmotion… with airsoft guns rather than real ones… but it wouldn’t take too much to take the brain of this and put it into some serious hardware. Only they’ve left the electrics exposed…
… so it won’t be able to stand up to anything that squirts conducting liquid at it, like this:
Still… Lynxmotion… Hexapods. Oh fuck yes:
3) Remember that scene in Goodfellas where they’re in prison cutting garlic with a razer-blade so finely that it disintegrates in the pan? (I love the way in Italian Gangster movies, the gangsters are so often really good chefs)… well someone’s made a lego one:
Brilliant. Cheating maybe, maybe not. Willow Garage (who are in the throes of making an open-platform for robotics) have made a system where if a robot can’t succesfully identify what it’s looking at, it pays someone on Mechanical Turk, a couple of cents to do it for them.
And why not? The Universal Mind is the Universal Mind… and we are all symbiotic nodes within it. True it’s not exactly autonomous… but then how often does the average screen-bound web-inhabitant ask google something every day. This is just a different type of googling.
Anyway (5) this is not a video of it. This is a video from the same place, of a robot changing tools:
Changing tools is a vital part of robotery I think. When I watch this video I find it impossible not to anthropomorphise the slight trial/error way the robot tries to get the parts to fit.
Which brings me to
6) Paper Wall-E, that lets you know when email has arrived
That’s not a collection of wires and paper, it’s a little creature, and you know it.
7) Parliamentry Writebot
That looks a lot like the Biblebot from last year.
8 ) Flying Roomba
Apropos of nothing. Again it’s not so much a robot as a remote-controlled toy… and (from the look of their website) firmly back into warbot land, although they do also say that they could potentially use it to herd sheep.
Once more with feeling, from the wonderful world of people who’s imagination is entirely proscribed by the thought “Gee, that’s cool. How can we weaponise that?”.
Or monetise it – because… as they say, these are cheap. Only $5000 each. I wonder if that includes postage and packing?
Really though – why not just insert an iphone into a nerf-baseball? That way you can also use it to ring your Mom.
Why not stop pretending you have enemies and realise that what you really have is victims? The militarisation of everything is… probably an even bigger heist than the bank bailout. What is it now… 40% of the US budget? 50%? Over 50%?
The little $5000 spybot is actually a type of parasite.
Is it possible for an empire to stupid itself to death?
Unbefuckinglievable. Still, there it is. The touch-screen interface is much nicer and more together looking than the 1980s style version that the real “Iraqi Freedom Fighters” use, safe in their offices in Nevada.
It’d be like shooting thunderbolts out of your fingers. Everything’s a simulation. Nothing is real.
