Robotic Hornets and Big Brother
September 15 2008 / by Jeff Hilford
Category: Government Year: 2008 Rating: 6 Hot
I can feel my relationship with nature changing. The other day a big ass bumble bee was hovering around my face for a prolonged period of time. 
I mean we were having a stare down. I’m relatively sure that it was a real bee, but it spent an unusual amount of time right in my face – flew away and then back several times. It felt like there was some intelligence and intention behind it’s activities. Like it was gathering information.
Now before you label me as paranoid (at least wait until the end of the post), consider all of the increased surveillance activity that we know is going on and think about what we might not (take Bob Woodward’s cryptic interview reference from last week as an example).
Advances in robotics, miniturization and cost reduction in video cameras are transforming the economics and viability of surveillance. The increasing number and granularity of commercial satellite technology platforms, aerial drones, advances in facial recognition and image processing are increasingly enabling visual quantification of everything that happens in outdoor space. This is a trend that will only accelerate, driven primarily by security threats and the increase in destructive capabilities of small groups of people and individuals.
For large metropolitan cities, there really is no choice in the matter. London has already embraced extensive monitoring of public spaces and New York City has undertaken an ambitious project which includes the Ring of Steel. Though interfaces like Google Maps and Google Street View are currently static, they will eventually become real-time as the world moves towards becoming an unscripted 24-7 reality tv program.
So how do I know if that bee was real or surveillance. Well, short of swatting it and finding out for sure, I don’t. But I do believe that pretty soon these will be just another weapon in an increasingly large arsenal of behavior mapping and large scale societal surveillance.
Comment Thread (2 Responses)
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This reminds me of the panopticon, where the prison is built so guards could watch the prisoners unseen and the prisoners would never know when they were being watched, hence limiting their actions because of the possibility of always being watched. Hopefully these bee-drones and other forms of social surveillance will not become as harsh and all-watching as a panopticon, despite the probable reduction of “bad behavior.”
Posted by: jvarden September 16, 2008
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The idea of these guys flying everywhere, including that there could be millions made cheaply, freaks me out.
Posted by: John Heylin September 23, 2008
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