JOURNAL: Robocrime?

This year, the USAF will train more drone "jocks" than fighter jocks.  That's only the start.  The upsurge in drones wasn't coincidental.  It was driven by rapid improvements in Moore's law -- which states that the "power" of computer chips will double every two years.  

The important milestone in that improvement curve is that we just recently passed the computational equivalence of insects (Moravec's scale).  This means that commercial and DIY robots (now with military equipment, although that advantage will fade) will soon be able to handle basic functions required for stability, motion, maneuver, etc. required for operation in complex environments.  The fact that we crossed this milestone explains the rapid uptick in the utility/usage of drones and other robotics.  However, it doesn't mean that these robots can think at a level required for complex tasks, intelligence gathering, and warfare (much of that will arrive by 2020 as we reach rat equivalent intelligence).  As of today, and through the next decade, that capability is delivered to the robot through telepresence (drone "jocks" that rent their brains to robots).

What's next?  Robotic technology will shrink and cheapen quickly.  Applications (driven by open platforms and modular programming) will begin to flow from the commercial and open source sectors until they reach a torrential level. Additionally, robotic and "complex sensor" telepresence will, by the next decade, be as easy as in Internet connection and a Web application.  Add swarm management (the ability to manage massive swarms of micro-robots that work as a single entity, much as we see with software "bots" in the cyber-crime space) to the mixture of inexpensive robotics and simplistic telepresence (accessible to ten/hundreds of millions of people), and you have another technological avenue for open source warfare.  It also likely means that the heady world of cybercrime will soon be able to access the physical sphere ---> robocrime?

DIY drone tech:

AerialRobotics EasyUAV Scenario 1 using RVOSD and FPV from Krzysztof Bosak on Vimeo.

Comments

[Duncan Kinder]

They're already attempting to use remotely controlled zeppelins to break out of jail:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/5736633/Spanish-police-thwart-jail-break-using-remote-controlled-Zeppelin.html

I predict they will use drones to smuggle narcotics. The advantage of using drones would be that you could crash land them anywhere.

[ramsis]

Much of what i've read about Moores law talks about its Fundemental limits, in fact Moore himself declared moores law dead back in 05. http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?newsid=3477
Moore gave it twenty years before we hit the wall but with gains made in both nano and bio engineering have we managed to push those limits back farther?

[gmoke]

Dmitry Orlov:

"Wars take resources; when resources are already scare, fighting wars over resources becomes a lethal exercise in futility. Those with more resources would be expected to win. I am not arguing that wars over resources will not occur. I am suggesting that they will be futile, and that victory in these conflicts will be barely distinguishable from defeat."

At what point does violence and crime become recognizable counter-productive?

[Duncan Kinder]

Here's another:

"A toy helicopter is believed to have been used in an attempt to smuggle drugs into a prison."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1112673/Remote-control-toy-helicopter-used-fly-drugs-prison.html#ixzz0LOaHmHFn

[Pierre]

Can we get s little more about that Moravec scale? Didn't find anything in Wikipedia or google...

[JR]

Sure. http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm

He has some great books too.

The real boost in software/creativity/innovation comes from when the insect/mouse/etc. equivalent processor becomes absurdly cheap and ready for mass consumption (not when supercomputers or high end workstations cross the line).

[dagezhu]

Six comments and no one has mentioned the possible applications of miniature heat-seeking missiles in robocrime?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088024/

Moravec's 1997 paper references NAVLAB, which has delivered awesome results, just a few years past schedule.

"With our conversions, a 100-MIPS robot, for instance Navlab, has mental power similar to a 100,000-neuron housefly. "

The thing is that NAVLAB was, 12 years ago, a huge clunky pile of workstations in a huge clunky SUV.

The issue is when we can get results like those of 1997 NAVLAB in a package the size of a housefly. (Of course, results like 2009 NAVLAB would be even better...)

[g48]

Good God!, where do those companies get their endless supply of truly cheesy soundtracks?!

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OK, so here we go for grassroots air-war. Look forward to the following:

Gangs start using them for fly-by shootings.

Neighborhood watches fight back, using RC helos to spot meth labs and spy on gang hangouts. For a while there is legal wrangling over the admissibility in court of videos from RPVs.

Gangs start shooting the watch-helos out of the sky, and the neighborhood watches respond by building fighter RPVs that can shoot down the gangsters' RPVs.

Urban neighborhoods' night skies begin to look like a scale-model version of WW2 aerial battles, with collateral damage on the ground.

Eventually ET takes advantage of the chaos in the air, as no one notices the increase in flying discs doing close-up data collection. Somewhere in another solar system, exo-sociologists puzzle over the data and remark that it's the first time they've seen a species that has devolved so fast while maintaining its toolmaking abilities.

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Note on "transhumanism." No falsifiable hypotheses = not-science. That's religion for atheists, complete with a nanotech immortalist hereafter. The fatal flaw is the idea that consciousness can be replicated in an algorithmic system. The other fatal flaw is the idea that you can transplant a mind from a brain to another platform. If you can get a mind outside of a brain, what you have there is a soul, and it has no need of a silicon prosthesis.

Those who believe in the materialist-monist theory of mind should have the courage of their convictions and accept the prospect that their minds will cease to exist when their brains die.

Those who refuse to accept nonexistence are welcome to shift to the traditional religious dualist theory of mind, and look forward to a hereafter appropriate to their chosen denomination.

And those who want to take a look at the cutting edge in cognitive science, falsifiable hypotheses included, are welcome to keyword search "Hameroff & Penrose" and "David Chalmers."