People get lost in the woods all the time. Image a swarm of 100 of these drones, 200, 500, all flying at 40km/h in a coordinated sweep, searching with multi-spectrum cameras and image recognition.
Somehow the idea of autonomous winged cameras flying around all over the place does not make me feel safe.
A network of tiny cameras paired with wifi, can identify everyone all the time. You also carry your phone on you and now with Apple’s latest improvements it won’t really be “off” when you turn it off.
They can hear through windows, lip read, and anything else. All that’s missing is a database that will cross compile all this information to reconstruct everywhere youwere and everything you’ve been doing, and your health characteristics at every moment. From there it’s pretty trivial AI to make sure to do precrime and nip “undesirable” gatherings or movements in the bud before they have a chance to take root.
Ironically, the one place you MAY have privacy would be end to end encryptednetworks online.
Did you forget about this[1]?
https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/31/wifi_devices_monitori...
The more you look into it the more messed up it gets. Complete with a Huawei guy chairing the group developing it.
Now imagine those machines chasing down a thought criminal desperately trying to hide in the woods in order to avoid execution.
Clearly doable for a dedicated nation, given that US lost the war, lost the 20 years, and with their botched withdrawal handed the country back to the very same political power they wanted to drive out in the first place.
In comparison, spending less than the cost of a lost war and having a guaranteed result of being able to walk into an empty territory sounds like a bargain.
0: https://theconversation.com/calculating-the-costs-of-the-afg...
"Now imagine an angry mob chasing down a thought criminal desperately trying to hide in the woods in order to avoid execution."
This isn't any less frightning, in my opinion.
Technology also allows for more leverage. Hitler need an entire modern nation state with millions of people, semi-autonomous robots may give this power to a group of thousands.
To control them you need one- or even none.
You could program a ethereum smart-contract virus, which hires people to scam money, produce slaughterbots, ship them to a city and strategically hit the soft underbelly aka airports, roads and railways and communication.
If you stack the attack into waves and have the slaughterbot parcels piled into flats by gig workers, you can have a ideology free terror attack that kills millions.
Such ATTAC-CELLs without members, are part of my games lore.
Here is a picture of a standardized factory, made from standardized components, making "slaughterbots" made from standardized components.
https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&id=1...
https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&id=1...
PS: The main building block is a sort of hangrenadesized fuel-container, with a fuelcell useable fuel that can be chemically primed to be a explosive. A standardized battery that could be exploded would do too..
My point is, you don't need technology to achieve bad things and it is the wrong thing we are focusing on when trying to prevent these things. Nukes can already annihilate billions yet here we are, not being annihilated by nukes.
Nazis had census data on millions of people reaching back decades, to sort trough that data, and search it for "undesirables", they employed computation tech that was cutting edge for its time [0], just like the methods of killing millions of people saw quite some industrialized innovation.
As such it's a rather blatant example for the whole new levels of cruelty technology can enable humans to do.
The progress also didn't just stop there, what the Gestapo and Stasi did, is child's play compared to the amount and details of data that can nowadays be trivially collected on whole population scales [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
[1] https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html
Vast majority of Jews before WW2 lived in small mostly-Jewish towns and villages in eastern Poland and western USSR. It would be inefficient to move them to death camps, also you could steal from them when you murdered them. Win-win.
There was no need for technology, nazis weren't checking the papers or bothering with recording anything. There are thousands of mass graves near formerly-Jewish towns. Non-Jewish population was mostly helping to point the Jews because they were competing for food and resources during harsh occupation conditions, and besides Germans were mass-murdering non-Jews too, just as a lower priority. And if you protested you were Jewish too, right?
According to Timothy Snyder the main difference between countries where high or low percentage of Jews survived nazi occupation wasn't antisemitism but how much pre-war institutions were preserved. In countries where the nazi occupation was negotiated and the rule of law was preserved - it took months to confirm these people were Jews, move them to camps, sort them, etc.
In places like eastern Europe - where Germans just destroyed everything and law was practically non-existant - why would you bother with all of that? It was basically 4 years of the Purge. 1/6th of the population disappeared in Poland between 1939 and 1945. Jews were about 10% of pre-war population.
The involvement of IBM was shameful, but it wasn't necessary. The only technology nazis needed was firearms. And they could probably do it with knives and sticks if they really wanted - like in Rwanda. Or like in USSR or Communist China for that matter.
Most of what you said is true, except for this part. Nazis did make actual recordings(as in - videos) of exterminations conducted in eastern Poland, especially in the area that is now Ukraine, conducted both by themselves as well as the local population(threatened with death otherwise of course), all to show back in Third Reich as proof fo barbarism in the countries they were conquering. I really recommend reading Stanislaw Lem's biography on that topic, since he lived in pre and in-war Lwów.
>>The involvement of IBM was shameful, but it wasn't necessary.
I mean, that's a bit of a weird argument to make. Yes, places like Auschwitz could have exterminated as many people as they did even without IBM's help, but the whole point is that Nazis liked efficiency and the tech allowed them to keep track of what they were doing(in the concentration camps, like you said outside of them Nazis didn't bother to track much of anything)
The Nazis did census data to sort out all kinds of undesirables, one of the more infamous examples being the Pink List; Since the German Kaiserreich police made lists of homosexuals and those suspected of being homosexuals.
These lists made it trough the Weimarer Republic, and once the Nazis took over the Gestapo already had most of their work done for them, because these pink lists were only one of many lists Germans liked to keep about the population.
It's one of the reasons why Germany to this day tries to be somewhat careful about large collections of personal data because after the Nazis, there then was the GDR with the Stasi, who once again took it to a whole new level.
These are relevant and well known historical examples for data collections being abused, making the Nazis out as mere "Dudes with guns" is vastly underplaying the levels of sophistication and effort that were put into "sorting trough people" on population size scales.
In that context, whatever point you are trying to make about numbers of victims in territories is kinda besides the point.
The point being that even in occupied Poland everybody had to register for the census, Polish people that were found without their registration form were shot on the spot.
In addition to that the Nazis also got Polish population data from the Deutscher Volksverband in Poland.
And it wasn't just Poland where that happened, it happened in pretty much every territory occupied by the Nazis because that's what the Gestapo was created for.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ICISEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT298&lp...
If a G7 state were to change in that way again, they would almost certainly achieve their eradication goals
Because it reduces the costs of doing it.
If you're hiding in a forest and they know where you are within 30 minutes of flying time - you've already lost. If they don't have drones they can just use dogs.
The problems with this situation to solve, sorted by priority:
- don't have a totalitarian state
- don't let them know your thoughts
- escape to a different country while you can
- don't let them know in which forest you're hiding
- don't let them know where exactly
Drones only change the last point, and only marginally at that. Meanwhile we're collectively helping the internet overlords with the first 4 points by carrying smartphones everywhere and using google and facebook and whatsup etc.
Governments can change for the worse pretty quickly, if you have one competent charismatic guy with the wrong ambitions. So we would better not give such people the tools to keep their power, if it ever comes to that.
I imagine it is much cheaper maintain 100 drones, truck them to where they are needed and have them swarm with some level of facial or gait recognition than the equivalent operation would be with dogs.
Also this could be centrally coordinated with cameras a lot more cheaply over a wider area than at any point in the past, with fewer people and less requirement for locals to dob people in.
> ...don't have a totalitarian state...
After COVID, I'm not sure how feasible this step is. "People should be allowed to leave their homes without first having the required paperwork" does not even appear to be a consensus view. And speaking from Australia even that would be a step up from what we have had recently.
That's the important difference between dogs and drones: you can't substantially bring down the price of trained dogs with handlers. The costs of drones on the other hand are guaranteed to go down with scale, both in terms of capital costs and operating costs. So if your dystopian goal can't be achieved by a couple drones, just deploy more of them.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw
With this:
Camps were for undesirables that for whatever reason couldn't be killed immediately. Mostly because there were too many of them in one place.
Except that democracies can and do slip into totalitarian rule by autocrats who declare themselves the winner of elections and then obliterate their political opponents.
> - don't let them know your thoughts
Uh, whoops, they just know everything you ever searched for, watched, or bought online, who your friends and lovers are, where you live, what music you listen to, and what your genetic history is!
> - escape to a different country while you can
Except COVID and visas drying up, and anti-immigration sentiment rising everywhere.
> - don't let them know in which forest you're hiding
Better disable GPS on every device near me then! As well as disable every "CC" camera that's just for "security". Better also shoot down any surveillance drones or satellites!
> - don't let them know where exactly
The solution is almost never technology, it's usually politics and legislation.
It's much easier not to ban something than to ban it, especially when the state is hostile.
But the problem to me with that vision is the existence of "thought crimes" and not the method by which such criminals are being chased.
The government isn't waiting to pass thought crime laws because they just don't quite yet have the ability to search a forest for people. That's not the big barrier here.
But people are still lost in the woods.
Or in other words, should we slow or stop technological advances because they may get into the wrong hands?
And, for part 2, who decides what's wrong?
2: Everyone. It's sort of a planetary wide, group decision.
Lots of people do die in the woods. It's a daily thing. What is much rarer is to know that someone is dying in the woods. The scenarios whereby these drones are lifesavers are only those where a search has been launch and the lost person is still alive but in peril of death. And even with 100+ drones you still need to know the area of the person. The woods can be very big.
The more efficient method, by far, is to have a device on the person from the start. Better coordination between search and cellular providers would do much in reducing search areas, at least when looking for people carrying cellphones.
The big picture is, if you give the rescue team a good tool, their success rate will then increase, sometime by a big number.
There is a documentary about children missing in the woods called Missing 411 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEA9-mEOZtA). If you take look their search efforts, it is not hard to realize how many weight can be lifted by an automatic area scanning system.
In the documentary, the search and rescue team had to walk step by step doing almost blind searches. If you have an automatic system, you can just launch a scanning array of say 50 drones, very quickly the data will come in and provide indications on where the search effort should be prioritized.
Bottom line is, such system is better than the current (human manual search) one. If the technology can be properly developed and utilized, it can help save more lives.
Then maybe let each drone carry a Teddy Bear or/and a Rainbow Pony. I mean I would totally grab the wild drone for it's micro controllers.
Now, the truth is, we don't know how people would actually react to drones. Maybe a kid would hide even deeper, but that's an edge case here. The important thing is, this tool can generate real benefit for a rescue operation that no other tool can provide. How to use it properly is the responsibility of the rescue team.
Another thing is, with information provided by drones, the search and rescue operation itself can become safer. Which also enables a load of new possibilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-indicating_...
"Mr Burns, we've lost 20% of our drones"
"Well then... Send more drones!"
But honestly, if the drones are operating as a swarm then a downed drone could report it's last known location to it's peers for easier recovery.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-06-07/thousand...
> As many as 2,000 elegant tern eggs were abandoned on a nesting island at Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach after a drone crashed, scaring off the would-be parents.
autonomous drones can clearly be very useful.
I have an older gen drone and they are amazing dust cleaners when you launch them in your appartment. Only slightly irratates they eyes.
But honestly I think power is still the technical barrier and the reason we don't yet have drones for package delivery. They won't fail because of sensory or software.
With good equipment you can scan large areas using only one helicopter.
A swarm of drones would allow a rapid search of an area with similar coverage statistics as a manned ground search. But a drone going 40 km/h could miss subtle clues like footprints or freshly broken branches.
The trick is to get out soon enough to find people alive.
That said, if hypothermia has gotten so far that one is hard to spot on thermal camera I am afraid there isn't much hope left anyway.