For the last several years robotics companies such as Norway’s Prox Dynamics AS have been developing tiny, helicopter-like drones for military and law enforcement surveillance. Known as personal reconnaissance systems, this new generation of miniature UAVs hit the mediascape the last few hours, as the British army announced the newish technology.
According to the Economic Times (4 Feb 2013), “British army has unveiled a tiny ‘game-changing’ drone that fits easily into the palm of your hand and may give an edge to troops in the war against the Taliban.”
Given that the annals of technology are littered with pronouncements of “game-changing” developments. In prudence we should examine such claims with skepticism. Yet in my on-going efforts to think about the use of drone tech in warfare and “security” applications, I begin to visualize an altered sensory and cognitive environment of violence and control the consequences of which have only been hinted at in Philip K. Dick stories.
The Black Hornet drones now operational with the British in Afghanistan seem like toys. It must be very play-like to control such a vehicle using a joy-stick or a tablet, or in the near future a goggle set-up that leaves the hands free and overlays the world as seen by human eyes alone with a secondary digital rendering that ands a wealth of data, tagged as information, as friend and enemy, neutral and target and danger.
While the potentials for abuse and invasion of privacy are obvious, what I am most wondering about is the way in which this now actually emergent technology will affect cultural and consciousness, specifically the ways in which it will inflect our sense of interaction with others. The capacity to “see” over horizons, around corners, behind us, above us, expanding our sensory bubble in heretofore unrealized ways will change our sense of the normal, for those using such technologies.
Then what?
Will such capacities be limited and regulated to the battlefield and law enforcement? This seems unlikely. Media corporations, local governments, and private individuals will use versions of this technology in unimaginable proliferation within a decade (I predict)–micro drones that fly, hover, crawl, linger, and otherwise hang-out, feeding streams of video, audio, and data to massively distributed indexing software that will bind us up in a denser and denser cartesian grid from which there will be no escape. Unplugging won’t help, our very physical being, with its “biometric” signature, will identify us, and we will have to learn to dance in this world, and the dances we will dance–it seems that we should all pay close attention to the would-be tune callers!