I think it’s possible that, at some point, privacy outside of rooms specially designed for it will not exist any more. Conceivably, we could have tiny cameras almost everywhere on Earth, recording almost everything. This would have a very strong deterrent effect on crime, and possibly we’d get to a point in which the only significant crime were impulse and substance-driven crimes.
Basically the plot of Danny Dunn and the Invisible Boy, published in 1983.
…by zapping people with vaccines?
Yeah.
A new article on a hummingbird-scale drone. (Note that it is wired for power–it isn’t specified if processing is external.) Researchers speculate that it could help with search and rescue after disasters.
I can’t really get my head around mind-boggling sentences like this (from the article):
I mean, even if I think really hard about something, I don’t usually accomplish a great deal of thought within that specified timeframe. What is the supercomputer doing that’s taking so much processing power to recreate one second of 1% of human brain activity?
They will probably need to put anti-drone nets around nudist beaches.
Sometimes I see a bug flying around the room and wonder if it’s an alien spacecraft sent to observe humans while trying to remain inconspicuous. Everyone does this, right…? 
We already have cell phones, laptops and digital assistants like alexa and google home around us at all times. These could be used to spy on us. So its not anything new.
The number of microphones and cameras you have around you at home is constantly growing. Just looking at my apartment I count at least 5 microphones and 2 cameras.
Well, I do have a piece of tape over my laptop’s webcam. I don’t know what the risk is of one’s webcam getting hijacked, but I’m not taking any chances. I know I’m not alone in doing this, as I’ve seen it on other people’s laptops.
Simulating reality a lot harder than reality. For instance, any idiot can turn on a flashlight, but rendering a photorealistic ray-traced image takes a lot of code and a lot of processing power.
As for the specifications in the article, if everything scaled linearly–which it wouldn’t, but let’s pretend anyway–to simulate a full human brain in realtime would take 3 gigawatts of electricity and 169 billion CPU cores. Of course, that is trying to simulate the raw chemical and electrical physics of the brain. If we ever fully understand the “rules” of the brain, we may be able to cut corners instead–who knows, someday it may take only a few hundred million CPUs and only a modest dedicated nuclear power plant to simulate a human brain in silicon!
What about first-person video games, which are getting closer and closer to photorealistic? A home games console is not just presenting how we perceive the reality of the game world, through visuals and sounds, but also calculating the reality itself in real time, such as the physical movement of many on-screen AI characters and objects.
Who would want to look at you?
Hillary Clinton and the Deep State!
A process that has taken decades of research and development in developing both the hardware and the software, and who knows how millions of person-hours and billions of dollars to achieve. Because it is very, very hard.
I ran across this article a few minutes ago. A year old, but probably still pretty accuate.
That article notes, correctly, that the economics is the killer, not the technology. They only mention fab costs peripherally, and building a new 3 nm fab is going to be real expensive, especially at a time when Intel can’t keep its fabs full with its own product.
Their claim of design costs seems pretty iffy. Design of what? New processor from scratch at the bleeding edge, maybe. But I was working on 7 nm when I retired and while our masks were damn expensive, they weren’t that expensive, nor was the design. If it had been, we wouldn’t have done it. Our design reused a lot of old design, which helped, but almost all new processor do the same thing.
The time lag between nodes due to economics has been happening for a while now.
But I don’t think you need 3 nm chips to power a fly drone. It’s not going to be run by a standard processor but by custom logic with a processor core. You clearly are going to want to build a ton of them, so they need to be relatively cheap. We’re doing stacking already (I just reviewed a paper where the memories were stacked) so the footprint won’t be much of a problem. Power supply would be a problem, but a lot of these are going to be spending time waiting, when they can recharge. Hell, they might want to fly around lightbulbs to recharge. Now that mimics nature.
The last few laptops I’ve had come with pieces of tape. My laptop is pointed to the back of my monitor, since I use a wireless keyboard, mouse, and a big screen.
I wonder if they can invent some kind of pulse that could zap drones coming through doors, and we could electrify our screens just enough to short the drones out, but not enough to hurt people.
So buy stock in the bug zapper industry.
A couple of things here.
Firstly the “photorealistic” thing is misleading. We have been able to photorealistically render, say, a glass ball on a marble floor for maybe 35 years. What happens over time is the set of environments and conditions we can render photorealistically increases.
There is not going to be a clear line between not / being able to render environments photorealistically: it depends on the environment.
And games necessarily cut out a lot of the detail of the environments they are simulating.
Yes there is a reality inside the computer and graphics card memory, that is being accurately and consistently mathematically modelled.
However it is not the same reality as the one the gamer is associating it with in the real world. A tree in a game is a very different thing to a tree in the real world.
As an aside, flies use modified wings as gyroscopes for stabalising their flights, as do these charming creatures, which have lives straight out of the creepiest SF horror movie you can imagine.
Have none of you folks ever used a flyswatter?
SPLAT!
Humans:1
Flies: 0
No fly-sized drone could survive a splat from a flyswatter from the local hardware store.