Drones Vs. Man

I took this photo of this man and drone in Florida. 

Look how close this machine is flying to his head!

Aside from the surveillance capabilities and offsetting privacy issues, these are bringing some dangerous fighting capabilities anywhere and everywhere.

Just today, I read about how the U.S. shot down an armed Syrian drone--presumably made and deployed by Iran!

I guess it's not proprietary technology anymore!

As drones and robots become better, faster, and cheaper and ubiquitous on the battlefield and on main street, who will be (relatively) safe anymore? 

Unless of course, my drones are stronger than your drones!

It's going to be a war of technology and machines more than ever before. 

Small ones like insects, swarms of them like engulfing locust, and large ones like Godzilla. 

What was once human flesh against a steel blade, arrow, and then bullet is now going to be an superfast artificially intelligent, armed to the hilt "man of steel" (and they don't miss) against just regular everyday people.

Don't hurt your hand punching that Robot in the face. ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Drones Vs. Man

Killer Bots--Massive and Nano

There are big deadly weapons to worry about, such as weapons of mass destruction that come on an ICBM or even in a suitcase bomb to frightening armies of massive killer robots.

And then there are small nanobot weapons to worry about--which don't sound like much, but they could be the ultimate killer machines.

About 10 nanometers make up the width of a human hair, so we are talking about microscopic or bug size weaponized drones. 

Nanobots can be manufactured or scarily can be self-replicating. 

They can fly alone or in massive swarms. 

They can surreptitiously enter/exit and carry out their missions virtually undetected. 

Whether surveillance or delivering a mini-nuke or a toxin.

Nanobots could function like a biological weapon killing millions--targeted or indiscriminately. 

Cambridge University forecasts a 5% chance that nanotech weapons could cause a human extinction level event by the year 2,100. 

Soon wars will not be fought by people any longer--by rather by robots and nanobots.

People are too fragile for fighting and war against ruggedized and militarized bots that are designed for one purpose only...to kill, kill, kill. 

Terminators are coming--from massive to nanoscale--and mere humans will be dogmeat to these killing machines.

Add in a cyber warfare component that will turn off 21st century civilization leaving us to fend as if we were back in the stone ages, and overpopulation is the last and funniest joke any of us will ever tell. 

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Killer Bots--Massive and Nano

Ex Machina Will Even Turn The Terminator

So this was a really cool display at the Movie theater yesterday...

They had this head of the Terminator in a enclosed case and roped off. 

Shiny metal alloy skull, buldging bright evil red eyes, and really grotesque yellowed teeth. 

This certainly gets the attention of passerbys for the upcoming new movie, Terminator Genisys (coming out July 1). 

Anyway, Terminator is the ugly dude especially when compared with the robot/artificial intelligence of Ava in Ex Machina that we saw yesterday. 

The Turing test is nothing for Ava!

She can not only fool them as to her humanity, but also outmanuever them with her wit, sexuality, and a good dose of deceit and manipulation. 

Frankly, I think AI Ava could even turn the terible Terminator to her side of things--my bet is that movie to come in 2017. 

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Ex Machina Will Even Turn The Terminator

Robots Reach The Clouds

So robots have reached the clouds before many of our government agencies have--who would've thought? 

Bloomberg Businessweek reports how robotic activities are being stored in the cloud and are then accessible to other robots to learn from and repeat as necessary. 

The "cloud servers essentially [are] a shared brain" where memories and experiences are uploaded and accessed by other robots with a need to know the same thing. 

The cloud is the means of transfer learning from one robot to the other.

It serves like a master neural network where the Internet provides the how-to for everything from serving juice to patients in a hospital to functioning as autonomous warbots in battle. 

Like the Borg on Star Trek with a collective brain, the cloud may become the mastermind for everything from day-to-day functioning to taking over the species of the universe. 

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Robots Reach The Clouds

Robot Fighters Coming Soon

I love keeping up with the latest in robotics, especially when it comes to battlefield versions.

The Wall Street Journal (19 August 2011) featured QinetiQ's Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System (MAARS) today as "America's Newest Soldiers."

MAARS features tank treads, days and night vision cameras, a 4-barrel 40mm high-explosive grenade launcher, and a M240B 7.62mm machine gun.

"It can stand sentry at a checkpoint and warn people away with a police style hailer, a nonblinding laser, tear gas or smoke grenades. As a last resort, it can fire lethal rounds."

Watching this thing, I imagine the D Day landings in Normandy would've looked a lot different with a swarm of these fellows landing on those bullet-riddled beaches.

The nature of the fight is changing and whoever stands in front of one of these armed robots (and even better next generation versions to come) better be prepared to say "bye bye, it was nice knowing you." ;-)

(Source Photo: here)

Robot Fighters Coming Soon

Hollywood Sees The Future and It Is Shapeshifting

Ever since watching Star Trek, I’ve been fascinated by shapeshifting’s potential uses for military and law enforcement.

Now, The Economist (11 December 2010) reports that shapeshifting material, or “liquid armor,” is being tested by BAE for high-tech body armor.

Traditional body armor contains about 30 layers of protective Kevlar; however, by using the new material between the protective fibers, BAE is able to reduce the layers of Kevlar to just 10, making for lighter and more comfortable protection.

The secret to the liquid armor is that it is made of “shear-thickening fluids” from nano-engineering particles of silica, which provide the shapeshifting properties: “The molecules in such liquids are closely packed, but loosely arranged. The material behaves like a liquid in normal conditions…[but] if subjected to pressure though [like from a projectile], the molecules lock together and behave like a solid.”

In the body armor, when the fluid sandwiched Kevlar is struck by a bullet, the molecules in fluid lock together and spread the impact, thereby absorbing it more effectively.

This seems like an exciting development applying chemical engineering to protecting the warfighter and law enforcement officers.

What is also so cool is that the concept of shapeshifting being a potent force showed up almost two decades ago in movies and television—and once again we have life imitating art (so to speak)!

Hollywood captured the shapeshifters in both the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series (1993-1999). In Terminator II, a shapeshifting cyborg is sent back in time to try and kill John Connor, the leader of the resistance against the cyborgs. The shapeshifter takes on the form of the various people and things to try and get Connor, but ultimately in thwarted by the original Terminator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger). Similarly, in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Otto is a shapeshifting constable on the space station that protects the station and the Star Fleet command making frequent use of his abilities to shift forms, but always returning at rest to his liquid state to rejuvenate.

I’ve got to say that I applaud Hollywood and continue to see it as not only a creative core for our entertainment, but also a prescient forbear to technology and events to come.

Hollywood Sees The Future and It Is Shapeshifting

Seeing things Differently with Augmented Reality

One of the most exciting emerging technologies out there is Augmented Reality (AR). While the term has been around since approximately 1990, the technology is only really beginning to take off now for consumer uses.

In augmented reality, you layer computer-generated information over real world physical environment. This computer generated imagery is seen through special eye wear such as contacts, glasses, monocles, or perhaps even projected as a 3-D image display in front off you.

With the overlay of computer information, important context can be added to everyday content that you are sensing. This takes place when names and other information are layered over people, places, and things to give them meaning and greater value to us.

Augmented reality is really a form of mashups, where information is combined (i.e. content aggregration) from multiple sources to create a higher order of information with enhanced end-user value.

In AR, multiple layers of information can be available and users can switch between them easily at the press of a button, swipe of a screen, or even a verbal command.

Fast Company, November 2009, provides some modern day examples of how this AR technology is being used:

Yelp’s iPhone App—“Let’s viewers point there phone down a street and get Yelp star ratings for merchants.”

Trulia for Android—“The real-estate search site user Layar’s Reality Browser to overlay listings on top of a Google phone’s camera view. Scan a neighborhood’s available properties and even connect to realtors.”

TAT’s Augmented ID— “Point your Android phone at a long-lost acquaintance for his Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube activity.”

Michael Zollner, an AR researcher, puts it this way: “We have a vast amount of data on the Web, but today we see it on a flat screen. It’s only a small step to see all of it superimposed on our lives.”

Maarteen Lens-FitzGerald, a cofounder of Layar, said: “As the technology improves, AR apps will be able to recognize faces and physical objects [i.e. facial and object recognition] and render detailed 3-D animation sequences.”

According to Fast Company, it will be like having “Terminator eyes,” that see everything, but with all the information about it in real time running over or alongside the image.

AR has been in use for fighter pilots and museum exhibits and trade shows for a number of years, but with the explosive growth of the data available on the Internet, mobile communication devices, and wireless technology, we now have a much greater capability to superimpose data on everything, everywhere.

The need to “get online” and “look things up” will soon be supplanted by the real time linkage of information and imagery. We will soon be walking around in a combined real and virtual reality, rather than coming home from the real world and sitting down at a computer to enter a virtual world. The demarcation will disappear to a great extent.

Augmented reality will bring us to a new level of efficiency and effectiveness in using information to act faster, smarter, and more decisively in all our daily activities personally and professionally and in matters of commerce and war.

With AR, we will never see things the same way again!

Seeing things Differently with Augmented Reality

Cutting the Budget the Easy Way

Arnold Schwarzenegger , "the Terminator", definitely knows how to cut the budget--with a 2 foot long knife. Yikes!

But all kidding aside, while many critical services were cut to resolve a $42 billion budget deficit in the state of California, Governor Schwartzenegger manages to keep his cool. He posted this video of himself--combining some unique star humor with crowdsourcing--engaging people on new ideas to solve the crisis.

For The Total CIO, this is a great lesson in humility, working on difficult problems (no, not with a knife!), and reaching out to people with humor and passion to get the job done.

Good job Terminator!

Cutting the Budget the Easy Way

Cybots to the Rescue

In the Star Trek series Voyager, the (cyb)Borg wants to assimilate everyone (literally every species and they are given numbers to keep track of them) throughout the galaxies into their collective. They are an existential threat to humankind. And it makes for some great science fiction entertainment.

In real life though, the cybots are coming not to harm, but to help people.

Government Computer News, 23 February 2009, reports that Oak Ridge National Lab is working on developing cybots (software robots) to defend us in cyberspace.

Cybots are “intelligent enough to cooperate with one another to monitor and defend the largest networks.”

What makes cybots more effective than the software and hardware security we have today?

“Instead of independent devices doing a single task and reporting to a central console, the cybots would collaborate to accomplish their missions.”

The end state is a virtual cybot army deployed so those seeking to do us harm in cyber-warfare will themselves be the ones for whom “resistance is futile”.

Could cybots end up like the the Cylones in Battlestar Galactica or the machines in Terminator that turn on humans?

The Cybots have a programmed mission such as “network monitoring and discovery, intrusion detection, and data management.” So the hope is that they stay true to those things.

However, to me it seems completely plausible that just as cybots can be developed for defensive capabilities, they can also be programmed for offensive cyber warfare. And if they can be used offensively, then we can end up on the wrong side of the cybots someday.

Where does this leave us?

It seems like cyberspace is about to get a whole lot more complicated and dangerous—with not only human cyber-criminals and –warriors, but also cyber robots that can potentially wreak Internet havoc.

In terms of planning for future IT security, we need to stay technologically on the cutting edge so that we stay ahead of our adversaries as well as in constant control of the new defensive and offensive cyber-weapons that we are developing.

Cybots to the Rescue

The Evils of Computers and Enterprise Architecture

Computers and information technology have revolutionized how we do just about everything in our lives. Yet some people have demonized technology either out of fear, ignorance, or a belief that we will not be able to control the awesome power of the technology we are developing.

The Wall Street Journal, 15-16 March 2008, reports that during the 1960s and 70s, Joseph Wiezenbaum, an MIT professor, was a gifted computer programmer who later came “to preach the evils of computers.”

Wiezenbaum created a “computer program called Eliza that was designed to simulate a psychiatrist…but after test subjects told him the program really empathized with their problems, Mr. Weizenbaum became a digital Jeremiah, and spent decades preaching the computer apocalypse.”

Surely Wiezenbaum isn’t alone in predicting the concern that computers could become smarter (and stronger) than people and could pose a dire threat to humankind’s very existence. These fears have been portrayed by Hollywood in 2001: A Space Odyssey, iRobot, Termininator, War Games, and other such hit movies.

Weizenbaum “soured on computers and condemned automated decision making as antihuman.”

“He raised questions that are as relevant today as they were when he first raised them” about 40 years ago.

As an enterprise architect, my job is to align technology solutions to business problems and requirements. Am I to consider the potential for the malevolent information system, database, storage server, or network router when trying to use technology to help achieve mission results?

OK. Maybe the question is a little too facetious. The truth is computer processing power is reaching ever greater potential, and at accelerating speeds, based on Moore’s Law. Computers now can process at speeds in trillions of calculations a second. Who can even imagine?

Is it possible, at some time that a computer or robot will go loony and do the unthinkable? Of course it is. Don’t some people have pit bulls that are friendly to their owners and then go nutty and attack the neighbor’s poodle or the neighbor himself? Don’t we all drive cars that are wonderful transportation mechanisms, but also hurt and kill thousands of people a year?

We raise and develop things that have tremendous capability to improve our way of life; however, they also have the potential to hurt us if not properly controlled.

A time will soon come with technology that we will have to worry about controlling the very machines that we have created to help us do our everyday tasks. We will have to architect safeguards for people from the very technologies that we developed and deployed to aid them.

The Evils of Computers and Enterprise Architecture