The Future of Drones

Usually when I write on a topic too long readership falls off, with the notable exception of “The Hot Dog Blog” which I ended only because I was tired of writing about wieners, while genuinely amazed at the widespread and growing interest in the variety of ways they are cooked and served.  Usually though I find hits to the blog page decrease the longer I write about the same thing.  The cross country road trip blogs proved that.  You can drive a good thing into the ground.

Nevertheless, I’m persisting on this topic of drones.  I cannot shake the thought of killer drones, and the more I find out about them the more terrified I become.  It may be irrational.  Has that stopped writers before?  I think you know the answer to that.

60 Minutes did a sub fifteen minute video on the latest in drones.*  Actually, the Pentagon invited them in to film.  I get a little edgy when the Pentagon collaborates with network media, wary of their motives.    However my interest in drones goes back to 1976.   My brother Denny was an USAF officer stationed at Alamogordo, New Mexico, a town near the White Sands Missile Base where they developed the atomic bomb.  I stopped there on my way back from a long trip south.  Up the road was Ruidoso, a nice little mountain town with horse racing, skiing, and good bars with music.  But Alamogordo was flat beautiful desert.  Think lots of clear days good for flying, large chunks of desert with few people, and restricted areas. 

“What’s the air force doing out there now Denny?” 

“From what we hear they have pilotless airplanes flying around and crashing into the ground.  They say they’re trying to fly them from by remote control from far away.  Hard telling what we’re up to really.  But we don’t hear much.  It’s all classified.”

Apparently they’ve been at it ever since. 

That’s why I was surprised the Pentagon allowed CBS to shoot film and work up a drone piece for national viewing.  That doesn’t always turn out well for the military.  But then I guess it depends on how you look at it.  Here is the gist of the 60 minutes story narrated by CBS National Security reporter David Martin. 

The Pentagon has taken the wraps off a secret project, with an annual budget of about $3 Billion a year, headed up by Dr. Will Roper.  He’s been working for some time on air and ground drones that talk to each other and reach solutions using Artificial Intelligence.  The flying drones, named Perdix after a figure in Greek mythology who was a nephew and student of Daedalus, look like toy model planes.  No matter, they are only prototypes to test the concept which is this.

Drones released on a mission, given a general command, can figure out how to carry it out through their mutual conversations, faster and more efficiently than humans without further instruction or human involvement.  Virtually any military vehicle can be autonomous.  That’s important because it opens the possibility of war being waged at many levels without putting American servicemen in harm’s way.  Many or few of these drones, working together, can communicate with each other while flying or otherwise moving about, talk to each other in effect, and carry out general preprogrammed commands.  They let 60 minutes film a live test of this capability. 

The cameras panned across an unnamed location in the desert, with a camouflaged tent full of cameras, computer equipment, and men with binoculars.  One of them was Dr. Roper, who was visibly nervous.  In an earlier shot, calm behind a desk, he reported thinking letting 60 minutes film this first of its kind live test of the Perdix’s capability was “a terrible idea” but there he was about to witness for the first time if they could do what they claimed, risking failure on camera.  He looked upward as F-15 fighters streaked across the sky and dumped their cargo into the sky, 104 of the tiny plastic autonomous drones.  He had his hands on his head, then pressed together as if praying, and then he became elated as the tiny flying things came into view.  It was like a breeder of homing pigeons seeing his beloved birds winging coming back to the coop.  He laughed out loud with relief.

“Look, see?  The sun flashes off their wings.  Yes and now you can hear them hum, it’s like a swarm of locusts in a way.”

He received a report in an ear piece, then announced triumphantly:

“It’s a hundred swarm.  That was our goal, and we got all 104.” 

Relief flooded his face.  He sighed, smiled, shut his eyes and shook his head.  If you’ve been working for years on a project that costs $3 Billion a year I imagine there is a fair amount of pressure to succeed.  And he had succeeded.

The little drones had been given the simple job of ‘following the road.”  There was pavement out there stretching straight through the desert.  The drones, equipped with cameras and the ability to communicate, first began to form a tighter and tighter cluster and then lined up in a straight line that corresponded to the path of the road.  All this could be seen on computer monitors with red and green dots representing the drones.  They did this much faster, according to Dr. Roper, than humans could, and more efficiently; quicker, with less movement, and all data driven.  No trial and error of which humans are so fond.  Nobody controlled the drones with a joystick in a trailer somewhere.  They were on their own.

 After a time the drones began to run out of power, their little batteries exhausted, and landed, some smoothly in a net on the road, others missing the net and crashing into the desert in a puff of smoke.  But no matter.  The Pentagon says they’re inexpensive.  I think when you have a $3 Billion budget inexpensive is likely a relative term.  Their mission was accomplished and by the looks on their faces it was a wild success. 

60 minutes then switched the segment to a mock up village constructed inside a building at a Marine Corp base in Quantico, Virginia. There they paired a ground device on wheels, a robot I guess, with a slow moving drone akin to a tiny helicopter with the ability to hover.  They had loaded the ground device with images of the 60 minutes reporter’s face.  David Martin’s face is pretty well known and available.  They fed 50,000 such images into the memory of the robot on wheels.  You could get like images of anyone off Face Book or YouTube for example.  David Martin strolled around the fake village, the robot glided around on wheels, and suddenly the machine recognized the human.  It locked onto him, followed  him around, and relayed his position to the flying drone, which came to hover above him.  David Martin was made.  Either machine, with the information it possessed, could have greeted him by name.  If armed, they could have killed him, or if previously commanded to do so, employed another means, a missile or some other system nearby, to take out David Martin.  Officials involved in the project claimed the odds of the robot making the wrong identification were 1 in 10,000, a much higher certainty than humans are able to achieve.  One official, in charge of the facial recognition software, said that if they had more time they could have done a better job, improving those odds.

The final segment of the 60 minutes piece was an interview with an official higher up the chain, General Paul Selma, a Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  He sat down with David Martin of 60 minutes to talk about the policy implications of all he had learned from doing his story on the once secret project.  Having been outed by a robot and experiencing a machine being sic’ed on him like a mechanical dog, David Martin had some questions for the General Selma.

“Are machines better at identifying individual than humans?”

“From everything I’ve read, machines surpassed human ability at image recognition, which includes facial recognition, about five years ago.”

“Could I have protected myself with a disguise?”

“Disguise doesn’t help.  One of the most individualized factors in facial recognition is the distance between your pupils.  If your eyes are exposed, if you need to see, that characteristic is in view and the information is available to the robots.”

I’m familiar with pupillary distance.  On our I Care missions in Latin America I sometimes measure the distance between a patient’s eyes when we are ordering glasses to be made in special cases, often children with unique visual problems and prescriptions.  The eye docs taught me how and gave me a little ruler.  I hold it up to their face, my finger resting on their nose, tell them to look directly into my eyes, and eyeball the distance between their pupils in millimeters.  It doesn’t have to be perfect and its not, but glasses work better when the center of the corrective lens falls at the center of the eye.  I’m guessing those camera equipped drones do it a lot faster and more accurately than me.

The policy regarding this new autonomous technology now in force at the Pentagon is this:

“Autonomous…systems shall be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.”

David Martin’s simple question to the general was “if the machines you have developed can perform better than humans, if their judgment can be safely predicted to be more accurate, why not let them do it themselves without humans?”

“Well, that hits to the ethical question around this technology.  Do you allow a machine to take a human life without the intervention of humans?  So far we haven’t gone there.”

Now there’s a question for you.  People grapple with ethical questions all the time and as they do policies change.  How long do you suppose before the Pentagon’s policy on the use of autonomous technology is reviewed and modified?

At the end of the piece the 60 minutes reporter went back to Dr. Roper, they guy who was so excited about his swarm of plastic drones, and worked this angle.

“I’ve heard it said that the development of autonomy could be the biggest thing in military warfare since the atomic bomb.  Would you agree with that?”

“I think I might have to agree with you on that.  If by the biggest thing you mean a development that has the ability to change everything, then yes, autonomy can change everything.“

So far my thinking on this technology has gone only as far as driverless cars.  I have imagined going to the garage, setting the Buick’s GPS for Clark and Addison, climbing in the back seat, finishing my crossword puzzle and taking a nap on my way to Wrigley Field. I’m all in for that.  I am confident a machine will drive better than I.  But I hadn’t extended that thinking to wars waged by government employees behind desks directing machines on deadly missions around the globe.  Think about putting that in the hands of our current commander in chief.  Worse yet, consider North Korea getting a copy of the software.

I don’t know where we’re headed, but I don’t think I want to go there.

*To see the video go to www.CBS.com and view the 60 minutes segment “The Coming Swarm.”