Due to advances in technology and miniaturization, it is conceivable that drones will one day be the size of flies, or even smaller, and could perhaps also be disguised as flies or other flying bugs.
How will this affect society in the future, with regards to issues such as security and privacy?
Will futuristic houses have flypaper hanging by the windows to capture potential fly-sized drone intruders?
That was an interesting video about some of the military or terror-related applications, and it all seemed plausible.
On a more prosaic note, would open windows, without some kind of mesh or force field, be a thing of the past? Maybe by that time, one would be able to buy defensive drones for one’s home or business to detect and deal with any intruding micro-drones, as well as spiders and other creepy-crawlies.
What about if you’re walking down the street, and some kid a couple of blocks away has a wasp micro-drone and is impersonating an angry wasp and attacking you as you walk along? Perhaps the wasp micro-drone has AI that enables it to mimic the erratic flight of a wasp, and the only way to tell it apart from a real wasp is to crush it and reveal its mechanical parts.
Maybe the brain-computer interface, that we will probably be wearing at that time, will also be able to detect drones. But what if there are undetectable stealth micro-drones? Maybe in the future, we will carry cans of micro-drones, like people carry pepper spray or bear spray today, to guard against any attacking micro-drones or angry wasps.
The future holds many potential known and unknown unknowns.
That is…impressive? Worrying? Shocking?
Yeah, the main terrifying thing is how indefensible these drones are - you can’t stop them from coming at you. We’ll be seeing a lot of assassinations. Wonder if some military will have them programmed to kill enemy personnel (the trick being how to program an effective way to identify enemy personnel - maybe kill anyone wearing certain patches on their uniform, or a particular uniform - or maybe, have your own personnel wear something akin to Identify Friend or Foe (IFF) beacons or patches, and program the drone swarms to kill anyone in a certain geographical area *not *wearing those IFF devices.)
It’s pretty amazing what they can do now with drones, almost indistinguishable from magic. Check out these butterfly drones.
I think that’s already a thing of the past. Just about every house already has some type of mesh over it’s windows specifically to keep fly sized things out.
I know that window screens used to be pretty rare in Europe. Is that no longer true?
I don’t think that’s the case everywhere. In any case, a determined human controlling a flying insect micro-drone would have a good chance of getting into any enclosed space undetected when a door is opened.
Maybe in the future people will wear cork hats, like they do in Australia, to ward off all the flying micro-drones (and possible futuristic radioactive mutant angry wasps).
Air travel is clearly a major potential danger area for drone attack, as it is today already. Aircraft being grounded after elderly Chinese passengers have thrown coins into the jet engines for good luck shows the havoc that be caused by relatively small objects.
And, just like with the floating lightbulb, it is a trick. Those butterflies need to be surrounded by an array of infrared cameras to track their positions, the data is sent to an external computer that then sends the instructions to the butterflies how to move.
Let’s look at some of the issues of a drone “the size of a fly or smaller.”
Sensors: The reason that modern drones seem easy to fly is–like with the butterflies–computers are doing lots of work in the background. Modern drones contain multiple types of sensors that feed into internal processors that adjust the flight dynamically moment by moment. A “fly or smaller” sized drone would have to contain these sensors, too.
Cameras: The light-collecting ability of a camera decreases as the lens size decreases and as the CCD/CMOS cell size decreases. This means that any near-microscopic camera sensor is going to have a very low resolution and need bright light.
There are (at least) two imaginable operation modes for the drones.
1.) A fully autonomous one wouldn’t need to have a radio transceiver built in, but it would have to contain all the processing power to handle the flight stabilization, image recognition and image processing. It would also need enough memory to store all those programs plus store mission instructions and captured photos/video.
2.) A remotely controlled one wouldn’t need nearly as much processing and storage because the sensor data could be constantly streamed back to the controller, which would send back flight instructions dynamically like with the toy butterflies. However, it would require radio transceivers with enough bandwidth and range to reach the operator (and think of ranges measured in tens of feet.)
Power: You will have to have some internal power supply to power the flight, the positional sensors, the camera, whatever processors, memory, and radios installed.
Keep in mind that we are already very near the physical limit of how small transistors as we know them can be manufactured–current transistors can be made at the 7nm scale, 5nm transistor circuits are projected to be in production by 2021, and that may be it. Maybe a practical 3nm design will be developed that doesn’t leak electrons like a sieve and can be cheaply mass-produced, but there is no guarantee of that. There is a very high chance that we will be at the end of transistor shrinking in less than 10 years–and that will still leave the circuits orders of magnitude too large to stuff everything needed into a “fly or smaller” size.
Tl;dr: I don’t think you should be holding your breath expecting to ever see these things.
In the future, one could envisage missiles sending hives of drones into enemy territory. Then swarms of drones would exit the hive to cause mayhem, and then return to the hive to recharge and rearm.
Yeah, there’s some issues. Potentially, there could be a “mothership” drone which streams back to, and is controlled by, the controller, and then a fleet of AI drones which accompany, and are controlled by, the mothership drone. There could even be an intermediate layer of “officer” drones that do the sensor work, act as the eyes or do the processing for a “squad” of drones, thus further lightening the load on the lowest-ranking “grunt” drones.
I was also wondering how close we are to building a replica artificial fly? So this artificial fly wouldn’t have any capabilities or be able to accomplish any tasks beyond what a fly could do. It would just fly around doing fly stuff.
Why so? We can make computers and jet fighters, so why, if humankind set its mind to it, could we not build an electro-mechanical fly? How well do we understand the fly brain - could we recreate one with a circuit board? Are there any parts of a fly that would be beyond our technological capabilities?
We need much, much better batteries. And, probably more efficient propulsion.
Neither is looking very promising right now.
Why could we not recreate a real fly’s digestive system and get the mechanical fly to eat what real flies eat, and convert it into energy? So its “battery life” would be however long a real fly can survive without food.
Surely we would be able to recreate a real fly’s propulsion technique if we intensively studied and tested it?
Even the simplest brains in the animal kingdom (far simpler than a housefly brain) aren’t understood well. And brains are orders of magnitude more energy efficient that current computer technology, and produce orders of magnitude less waste heat. And brains are agressively 3D, each neuron connecting to up to thousands of others and communicating not only through electrical pulses but through multiple types of chemical signals. Modern computers are good at crunching numbers but the best of them look like an abacus compaired to the total of what a brain can do. So a circuit board fully recreating the brain of a fly would be far too big to fit into a fly sized body, consume far too much electricity, and produce far too much waste heat. And as I have said earlier, transistors are not going to get much smaller than they are right now because we are pushing against fundamental limits of physics. The age of constant huge improvements in integrated circuits is over.
You say “we can make computers and jet fighters”, but I fail to see computers runing at 100 GHz and jet fighters crusing at Mach 50. That’s because there are limits to what the matter in this universe is capable of being shaped into. That includes limits on how small electronic components can be made.
It is concievable that in the future (several decades from now) we will know enogh about brains and genetics to make a fly sized drone from a fly (wherther or not it will have the capacity to store enough orogramming and data to be useful for anything is a different question) but it isn’t going to be made with the crude cludge of a technology that we call electronics.
This article is about the human brain, but you can imagine that even scaled down to a fly brain the power and computing used aren’t going to be especially tiny. The mistake is in thinking that transistor-based computers are something especially effecient, when actually using them to “think” is sort of like using a rocket motor to lift an elevator.
I suppose it could take care of the anti-vaxxing problem.