SayAlt

Soon there will be no place you can hide, or can't be heard, or watched, monitored, tracked, observed...or even killed. Except for a NSA black room.

Maybe.

But that's only a small part of what is coming.


























Oh, so you want to re-tile your bathroom, eh? Need to mulch your garden beds? Mow your lawn? Rake up the leaves? Clean out the gutters? Re-paint the living room...WITHOUT having to pull the furniture or put drop cloths down? How about some pest control?

Speaking of pest control, need find and take out a terrorist? Or deploy rescue assets (supplies, life saving equip., etc) exactly where needed DURING a hurricane (much less afterward)? How about quickly sweep a house/building during a fire for trapped occupants....ALL of this without putting another life at risk to do it?

What about cleaning up the Fukushima nuclear disaster faster, safer?

Or quickly stopping a deep-ocean rig head from spewing oil (Gulf disaster)?

We've only just begun to see how technology will change life as we've known it.

rickair7777

Or end it. Or the change might not be in a good way...what capabilities will the things have and more importantly, who's in control of them?

This stuff is Pandora's Box, and we need to be very, very careful with it. Google "grey goo".

The probability is very low. But risk is a multiple of probability and severity, and the potential severity is off the-scale-exponential.

rickair7777

Just saw the movie "Ex Machina"...very good flick, and relevant to this discussion.

SayAlt

The little robots in this video can haul things that weigh over 100 times more than themselves.

The super-strong bots – built by mechanical engineers at Stanford University in California – will be presented next month at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Seattle, Washington.

One 9-gram bot can hoist more than a kilogram as it climbs. In this video it's carrying StickyBot, the Stanford lab's first ever robot gecko, built in 2006.

Another tiny climbing bot weighs just 20 milligrams but can carry 500 milligrams, a load about the size of a small paper clip. Engineer Elliot Hawkes built the bot under a microscope, using tweezers to put the parts together.

The most impressive feat of strength comes from a ground bot nicknamed μTug. Although it weighs just 12 grams, it can drag a weight that's 2000 times heavier – "the same as you pulling around a blue whale".

rickair7777

Tiny entities exhibiting feats of (relative) strength are nothing new...bugs do it all the time. It's easy on a tiny scale because your structural material enjoys it's full strength without the need to support much of it's own weight.

But this does not scale up...a model airplane's structure can be designed and assumed to be rigid, but an airliner will flex and must be designed to account for that. A cat and elephant are roughly the same design layout and materials, but an elephant can't make a vertical jump ten times his own height.

FlyJSH

It could, but only once.

UAL T38 Phlyer

You can make anything work in an animated video.

Realities:

1. Tiny motors and wings are way more sensitive to dirt....dust particles are a relative constant size in any geographical area....as the vehicle gets smaller, the size of a speck of dust becomes a relative boulder.

2. The enticing "mosquito" isn't an operational device. But if it were, what would happen if it was hit by ONE raindrop? That's a large relative increase in weight.

3. flapping wings might be best for maneuverability, but not mechanical efficiency.

4. Where do you store the power? Not much room for a battery or solar cell....range be extremely limited.

5. You can miniaturize motors, but radio transmitters require antennas that are some even multiple or fraction of the wavelength of the frequency used. You can make them short....but efficiency and broadcast range goes down. Since one of the key abilities of this idea is video surveillance, where will the receiver be? you'd like it to be a satellite, but even a cell phone only has a range of 1-3 miles. Radio power varies with the cube-root of the distance, ie, to double the range takes 25% more power.

6. How much explosive could this cockroach carry? Enough to carry a 0.22 bullet to take out that sniper? What about the recoil?

7. The animationnhad things the sizes of big moths. Ever heard a big moth fly? I have.

Somebody would swack it with a fly swatter.....or some raid.

It might happen someday. But I think they'll have to be a little bigger than idealized her, and limited in utility and range.

SayAlt

Rick, speaking to your point above...

SayAlt

True.

Except the only animation in those videos was in the 1st one. All the others are real. And, if you take the time to actually watch them, they answer a lot of the issues you bring up.

This is also fascinating...

rickair7777

The upside of mechanical (vice biological) gadgets is that if they weren't designed from the outset to be self-reproducing, odds are exceedingly low that they would spontaneously develop such a capacity (assuming limited/non-intelligent). So you could manufacture as many as needed, turn them loose, and reasonably assume they won't get out of control. It's when you add self-replication that things get dicey.

Biologics, by definition, are far more likely to reproduce...even if you tried to deactivate that, it only takes one goof and the little guys are off to the races