 Okay, it's likeable science on a Friday afternoon, and you know what that means? Ethan Allen. Ho, ho, ho, ho. I'm Jay Fidel. That's Ethan Allen. How about a shot of Ethan? Ethan. Okay, he's a scientist you can always tell, and he's the actual host of the show. So we're going to talk about drones as weaponry today, because it was a really remarkable video that's been going viral on the internet, and we've seen it. We're not going to play it for you, but we're going to describe it, and you will go and play it yourself, and then you will see what we mean. But first, we have a special story from Ethan. Ethan, what's your story? Well, this story, it will seem to have very little to do with our topic, but I'll tie it back in later on, I'm sure. So there's a big aquarium that has dolphins, you know, and dolphins doing shows for people and all. So the trainers decided that they didn't really want to bother so much cleaning out the tank and all, so they trained the dolphins basically whenever something blows in the tank, lands on the surface of the tank, paper plate or a cup or whatever, if the dolphin will grab it and bring it to a trainer, the trainer will give them a fish, you know, pretty soon all the dolphins are keeping the tank clean, right? So then there's one dolphin they found will grab, you know, a paper plate off the surface, take it down under, stick under a rock, tear off a little piece of paper plate and bring up a hand, the trainer, a little piece of paper plate and get a fish and then go down and tear off another piece of the plate and get another fish. What time was it? And she basically had learned that, you know, this was the way to do it. So then at one point, she, a gull landed on the tank. She grabbed the gull and took the gull to the trainers who thought this was pretty cute, right? They gave her a number of fish and she realized this was a big reward. The next time she was being fed and they gave them a number of fish, she didn't eat all her fish. One of her fish took it down and stuck it under the rock in the bottom of the tank. Later on, she brought that fish up to the surface, let it sit on the surface. A gull came down to grab the fish, she grabbed the gull and got more fish, right? Then she taught her calf to do that. Her calf taught the other calves in the pod, basically. And now this whole pod of dolphins basically gullvates, you know? It's, you know, it's a nice thing. I think, you know, the trainers think they're training the dolphins. The dolphins end up training the trainers. It's a true story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This has happened. And it's the same kind of sort of escalation that we're talking about with these drones, right? You know, somebody develops a weapon they think is the ultimate weapon and somebody counters with the ultimate defense to that weapon and, you know, the race goes on, you know? So it's the same kind of thing. I want to do a philosophical setting on the drone's weaponry. This is Hawaii in 1,000 years, that'd be 30, 17, 30, 18. First came the driverless car, then the age of AI. And as work went away with minimum annual living costs stipend, people didn't even have to try to make plowdown, silly on shine. Work went away. The next century, the next century saw the eventual death of the multiplication tables. And in the aftermath, all electrical things shed their cables. We turned on lights without thoughts. We drove to places in our minds. There were no real places left of any kind. All the days had just been too nice. And the Earth Party ran out of ice. And inductive reasoning became a thing of the past. There was no truth left for the press. What a mess. We are all homeless. That's by Dave Roth. It does talk about AI. In fact, AI is sort of the defining part of this somehow. Because AI is, and you and I have talked about it before, sort of taking over. It's got such romance to it that it attracts all these programmers. And a programmer who can do AI right out of the box is worth $100,000 a year in climbing. What is it about AI? And why is AI so central in drones as weaponry? Well, because you want a device like a drone, ideally not just not to be tied to a person in the sense of having a person controlling it. You can get a drone that can think for itself. You have a very powerful device on your hand, right? And when you've got, as the video talks about, the whole swarm of these things that think for themselves, but also stay in touch with the herd, then you've got something that begins to really, I mean, in a sense, colonies of ants are hives of bees. But hey, you have more intelligently than a single one, right? Even though each one has its own little brain, the hive or the colony of ants does things that the single one can't, and makes decisions that the single ant couldn't. Same kind of deal here. There's sort of strength in numbers. Yeah, well, it strikes me that when you have an autonomous vehicle, make call it a vehicle device of some kind, by itself, it can only do so much. It can go out and do its mission and come back. It doesn't really have to coordinate much. But when you have a swarm, you have swarm technology, which is AI gives us swarm technology. You can do multiple of that, logarithmic multiple of that. And so what comes to mind while you were describing that, Ethan, is that you can have a swarm of many kinds of things. You can have a swarm of little things, and the drones in that video are two inches, maybe three. But you can have a swarm of any kind of little things. They could be on the ground only. They could be in the water. They could be almost microscopic. And I guess the natural progression of a swarm is to effectuate a common purpose. And in humankind, that common purpose is more likely to be destructive than constructive. I suppose you could have a swarm of robots that build a house, seen this without swarms, or seen this with autonomous devices that would build a house by pointing concrete at a certain places. And in Russia, they do 24. We talked about this. So you could also have a swarm of labor drones. And they don't belong to the Union either. And they go out and build that house. They don't have to be small. They could be bigger, and they could be all coordinated and build the house overnight. Because it's a problem because no jobs left when you do that. But I mean, I'm just saying that a swarm connotes effectuating a common mission. Right. And in the biological world, there are swarms called herds, or packs, or flocks, that typically are of more prey animals. And these swarms are sort of defensive. That is, they make it harder for predators to spot an individual animal and go after it. Because if you're trying to go after one animal and there are 1,000 of them around, it's a very hard focus on the one. And you end up getting nothing. Yeah. And plus, the swarm gives the animals protection in that sense. There are, of course, pack hunting animals, too. The orcas, the killer whales, often impacts. And have very coordinated attacks with their work together and round up fish or knock seals off ice flows or what have you. Usually, it's aggressive, though, isn't it? Well, for the predators, typically, it's cat food. But then for a lot of the pre-animal, they're actually the ones that do much more swarming. I mean, that's defensive, basically. That's defensive. Well, I'm exposing, in the human experience, right now, we're in phase one, in the sense that we're developing swarms that are predatory and aggressive and destructive. And I suppose the next phase will be to develop swarms that cope with that and that are counter-attack, defensive swarms. Yeah, and that kind of coordination, too. I mean, it can go beyond that. For instance, when you see geese flying in a V. I don't know if you've looked closely at geese flying in a V. Their wings are actually moving in a coordinated pattern. And what they found is that the wings create turbulence. And the geese behind are taking advantage of that. And they're beating the wings perfectly in sync to take advantage of the turbulent flow. So I mean, that's a swarm that's designed for efficient movement. Brilliant, how nature could design something like that. You know, all sort of reminds me of a peloton. When you talk about geese, the peloton, you know, you draft the bicycle in front of you and you get in the V of his airflow. And it makes your life easier. It makes, you know, it's a benefit for you. You don't have to work as hard if you're drafting in his airflow. So I mean, working together, I mean, you know, what did Ben Franklin say? Somebody said you hang together or hang separately. You know, and it's true in so many ways, but now we've learned to do it autonomously by remote control or no control is the case maybe. Right, that's an interesting thing. Once you get AI into a business and have turned over decision making to some autonomous vehicle or vehicles, who's responsible for what they do? Well, I mean, the person who built them, the person who set them loose, you know. But the accountability sort of drops out of the whole equation, right? Well, worse than that, you can kidnap a bunch of misdirect and hijack bunch of swarming things and turn them back on the guy who unleashed them in the first place. It'd be tricky with the ones on that video, right? They're all carrying little shaped charges. How do you sort of grab them without having one of them inadvertently pop onto your head? Yeah, let's talk about the video. It's called drone weaponry and Ethan and I are gonna talk over it now. We're not gonna play it for you because it's already on YouTube and that'll create a problem for us. So this fellow is on the stage and he's describing it and he's got a picture of a drone watching him with a camera and you don't know yet the size of the drone. You can see the drone, it's small but you don't realize that it's only like three inches big and it's watching him, it's watching everything he does and it lands on his hand over there and he's got a camera and it's on his hand. It looks like a friendly insect. It's got all kinds of sensors on it and he's holding it so quietly you don't realize how dangerous it is. And it's on camera, face recognition, shaped explosives, that's the part that catches your attention. So now he's showing you how the drone will go onto someone's forehead, land there, it can do facial recognition and presto-digito, it's got an explosive charge and it blows that explosive charge into the center of the man's head and explodes the head, killing him. This is pretty bad business. Well yeah, if there's a glitch in the programming, right? Yeah, well you don't want it on your head and you may not have any time to get it off your head. The ultimate bug bite. So now they got pictures of people using these as weapons and he's still standing on the stage in one of those tech presentations. Yeah, I couldn't figure out if that was actual real or simulated footage. Yeah, yeah. If it was from real actual use. He claims these things are available, makes you want to hop on Amazon right away and order them up, right? Before your friends and neighbors do. A dozen or so, right? Yeah, so I mean, they refer to drone weaponry in the title of this video. They bring to one kind of weapon. Now so far, they're only talking about a small drone, although they have a picture here of a large drone, as big as a 747, carrying what, thousands, millions of these three inch drones and dropping them in the sky. They call it the X-700K Liberator. There's some stats about it. And you can envision, you know, if you had some person who you wanted to get rid of, some bad guy, and all the drones would recognize him and you would suddenly release a few hundred of them or a few thousand of them somewhere in this vicinity. He's toast. He's toast, yeah. Like one or two of them are mountaineering. Yeah, and I don't see. Yeah, he says, and he's talking about not one person, but a group of people. And all you have to do is establish the characteristics of this group and each one of them will have a headache. Yeah. And so, you know, how do you define that group? Well, he says in the video that the group could be an ideological group. I'm not sure how AI can determine an ideological group, but I mean, that's the point of it. You could, for certain facial features. You could, for instance, skin color. You could look at some kind of clothing they're wearing, you know? Yeah. And yeah. The way they're located, what they're doing at the given moment. Right, yep. AI can do that because it's got the sensors to be able to tell what's going on. You could have them set to only go after people with weapons, basically, who are displaying weaponry, basically. Right. Again, the technology. So theoretically, if I went to Syria and I wanted to just get the ISIS guys, that really wouldn't be a problem. Now, they pretty soon, people would stop carrying weapons. They would stop carrying. They'd be very peaceful, wouldn't they? Well, no. They'd probably lug around IEDs. Well, the Jones could find the IEDs, too, couldn't they? I don't know. That's interesting. The whole, that would require a different level of detection, I think. It's called a policeman at the elbow, except it's the drone at the elbow. It's watching everything you do. And for that matter, watching your phone, I know your phone would be an open channel for them. Gee, I mean, everything about you would be known. You could be identified in almost no time. And if you were identified as somebody the drone was supposed to strike, you know, if the first drone didn't get you the second one or the 27th one would get you. You'd be St. Sebastian if you went to these little. Yeah, I mean, it really is, and sort of that ability to come in so many sort of different ways and locate you through your phone usage, through your appearance, through your actions, through your, you know, future mints. You can use any of these, basically, or all of them to go after someone. Who would have thunk? You know, I mean, it was only what, you know, 10 years ago when Barack Obama was using these things in Central Asia and the Middle East. Now they've gone a whole new level. It's no longer child's play. It's no longer just an assassination tool. It's way more powerful than that. And right after this break, Ethan, we should talk about what it means. What it means for warfare. What it means for peace fair. What it means for you and me, the relationship of government and citizen. Oh, I get a chill down the back of my spine. Let's take a short break so I can recover. I'm gonna come back. Ethan Allen and Jay Fidel doing drones for weapons. Hey, Aloha, Stan Energyman here on Think Tech Hawaii where community matters. This is the place to come to think about all things energy. We talk about energy for the grid, energy for vehicles, energy and transportation, energy and maritime, energy and aviation. We have all kinds of things on our show, but we always focus on hydrogen here in Hawaii because it's my favorite thing. That's what I like to do. But we talk about things that make a difference here in Hawaii, things that should be a big changer for Hawaii. And we hope that you'll join us every Friday at noon on Stan Energyman and take a look with us at new technologies and new thoughts on how we can get clean and green in Hawaii. Aloha. Match Day is no ordinary day. The pitch, hallowed ground for players and supporters alike. Excitement builds, game plans are made with responsibility in mind. Celebrations are underway. Ready for kickoff, MLS clubs and our supporters rise to the challenge. We make responsible decisions while we cheer on our heroes and toast their success. Elevate your Match Day experience. If you drink, never drive. Okay, we're back, but I want to tell you, during the break, I got a telephone call on my Samsung Gear 3 watch and Ethan didn't know what I was doing, talking to my watch. It's an amazing watch. I just got it recently. I really love it. It's an amazing world. I make telephone calls like this, you know, walk around the street and on the phone. Anyway, so, you know, the more you apply, you know, your imagination to these possibilities, the more you can think of about how this could affect everything in our lives. And it's interesting that one of these first applications is warfare and weaponry when there's a lot more potentially positive uses, right? And being first responders in the event of emergencies and natural disasters, right? Find people in buildings that have fallen down. Find people on a battlefield even who have been wounded and actually fixed them. Give them morphine or some of the drugs. Stitch them up. Who knows what? Because it's all trained and you can program to do anything and send them off on a mission. You don't even have to identify exactly where they're going. They'll find their way. They're quite amazing. They have little people, you know, and they're very powerful. And there was a, I can't remember the name of the movie. There was a movie years ago in a book about drones that went into your body and refined bad things in your body and helped you out. Fantastic voyage. Fantastic voyage, yeah, that was stuff. Now that's not science fiction anymore. That's probably a reality. They could make it three inches. They could make it a quarter inch too. Well, yeah, I mean, with nanotechnology, they've already got certain kinds of nanostructures that slightly find tumors. Or way smaller than a quarter inch, yeah. Yeah, they're microns in size, you know? Yeah, so it's all that whole nanotechnology combined with the drone technology and you really got something going. Yeah, yeah. The new element is the AI. The new element is putting a lot of intelligence on the head of a pin and letting it go by itself. Yeah, yeah. So what are the downsides on this? We mentioned before that, you know, if you send a swarm against me, I may be able to crack that code and send it right back against you. Not easy, but it seems to me that it's logically possible, therefore, it must be scientifically possible. Well, I mean, there are lots of downsides, right? If these things, yeah, what happens if they get lost and can't find what their program to do? Are they truly just gonna sort of settle down in the middle of nowhere? And then if they do, I mean, is this gonna be somewhat like the issue of what do you do with a bunch of mines when you're finished your war, you know? And mines just sit in the ground and they keep going off and keep going off and, you know, people will lose limbs and kids are killed and blah, blah, blah. So yeah, if you've released a swarm of 25,000 little drones each with a lethal charge, maybe you can't recall them or if you don't recall them, what happens? Where are they, you know? And then you've got 25,000 lethal little charges sitting around. Yeah, the rebellion of the drones. Well, yes. You know, Hal, I can't do that for you, Hal. They may not listen to you anymore. By definition, they don't listen once you've dispatched them, they're on their own. You're not in communication with these drones. Right, this is, yeah, this is the whole accountability piece that begins, it's one thing to have a drone with a human operator sitting there controlling it and a human operator is more or less responsible for what that drone does because the drone is fundamentally stupid. But once, yeah, once you've sent them out in a flock where they're on their own. Well, they could run out of battery juice. On the other hand, I suspect that as time goes by, the batteries will be better and better and the machines will be so efficient that the batteries less or only watch less two days. They'll have, they'll have. It does a lot of things. Yeah, well, they'll have, they'll be solar enhanced. Solar, sure, solar, why not? Sure, a little solar panel, quarter inch solar panel drive the thing forever. You're scaring me, Ethan. Solar panels on their blades. So now in the early days of drones, the Israelis are so clever, they're so innovative. They came up with this thing with a rope. So you have a drone over here, say at 500 feet. Now you have another drone that's on top of it and senses that there's a drone below it. It drops a piece of rope on the drone below and the rope gets tangled in the rotors before you know it, the one below is dead and gone. And I suspect there's gonna be ways to do that, going forward with the swarms, too. Right, yeah, I mean, again, some friends of mine were talking in the Netherlands, apparently, the powers that be there have trained hawks that go after drones. So with some of these causing a nuisance with their drone, they just send the hawk up and the hawk stoopes down on and grabs it and crunches it. But you can't do that with 25,000 of them. No, no, and you can't do that if the drone is programmed to shoot the hawk out of the sky, but if it touches it, you know, whoop, they'll finish. Right, yeah, it's very low into a million pieces. It's very expensive in terms of hawks. So this is gonna change things. I mean, it seems to me that a, you know, a platoon of soldiers, whatever gear they have, they're not gonna be an easy match. I mean, they're gonna be an easy target for the drones. So I said in 25,000 drones against a dozen people, a dozen people on the battlefield, I know who's gonna win that, can't stop them. So what's the point of sending the troops out? You have to find another way. Warfare changes. Yeah, it really does offer an interesting balance in terms of cost-benefit ratio of what the soldier's life worth and versus a bunch of cheap little drones. The good news is that they're so smart they wouldn't necessarily destroy property. What are you calling about the neutron bomb? Yeah, you know, decimate the population, but, you know, decimate the city, you know? And so when Trump, you know, gets on the line with Kim Jong-un, he doesn't say my button is bigger than yours. He says my swarm is bigger than yours. Oh, I'm sorry, smarter than yours. Smarter than yours, right? And the two, so war is fought by proxy. You know, that one swarm against another swarm. Boy, that would be better than any computer game you ever saw. Well, one could hope, yeah, you could at least harm it. You have a camera drone on the top looking down, you know, giving reports back to the commander in the battlefield. You know, who's winning? Right, right. Well, you know, I mean, this change, if it changes war, if the nature of war is changed, then that changes everything. But it means war is a completely technological experience. And it's no longer blood and guts, really. It's something else. It's my drones against your drones. I don't know how, I don't know the metrics. What would the metrics be? Who wins that war? The one with more drones left? The ones who can march in because the drones kill the people, you know, and there's no defense left or something. Yeah, well, I mean, does this sort of reduce wars back to some fundamental level where it becomes over resources we need? I send my drones out to clear the people out because I want your land, because my water sources have dried up, you know. I need your land, I need your water, you know. Yeah, oh, it's scary. So the drones come out and they get a loudspeaker drone. And he's, you'll have to leave now. If you guys don't leave, so I can get the water, your toast. So they leave because they know they've got no choice to leave. This is different than any warfare or power play we've ever seen because it's by remote control. And then, you know, we haven't really talked about big drones. Like the kind of drones they've been using in the Middle East, you know, big bombs and all that. I think the little drones, you know, can come in and do one job but the big drones can come in and do another job. Yeah, I mean, again, you can envision with putting these things to use in being first responders to an emergency, you probably have a whole set of specialist medical drones, one to stitch people up, one to apply morphine, you know, one to do this, one to do that, you know. And one drone, there'd be a diagnostic drone, basically, a locator drone, diagnostic drones that can have multiple flux, all interacting, sharing information appropriately, you know. It's ridiculous. And in that video, the viral video there, drone weaponry, the aircraft that was dropping these thousands of drones was itself a drone. So, you know, it's sort of like the Russian egg, you take one egg out of the other egg, there's rather a smaller egg, smaller egg. I mean, you could, and then, okay, we're gonna let the aggressive drones go now, then we're gonna let the medical drones go now, and then we're gonna let the communication drones go now. You could control the whole society or destroy it as you like. Little things about that big. And, you know, when they get into the assembly line manufacturing technique, China will do well at this. Do not think that China's not thinking about this very discussion. You could create these for cheap. You know, a little chip about that big, and a little drone, and you know, an assembly line, and you could have millions of them. You know, I like the idea of going out for a walk on a lonely street, right, in a, maybe a neighborhood that was dangerous, and my drones would follow me. Go get them. Go get them. Oh, you wanna fool with me? Boom. Right there. The problem is that at night, you know, you don't get solar power from the drone. They better have good batteries. Right, right. Well, you know, the thing about it also is that it moves fast. This kind of technology moves fast, because it's sexy. Because they, we're not the only ones thinking of these huge possibilities, and somebody with a lot of money, a government agency, perhaps, is gonna sit down and try to take advantage of this. Yeah, somebody will have a chemical cloud that they can release that these drones will screw up these drones. You know what, they'll hit this cloud around you and fizzle out and drop the ground. Yeah, yeah, well, actually it'd be easier and more efficient. What's government efficiency? Instead of landing on your head, well, it could still land on your head, right? And drop the gas right in front of your face. Well, I was thinking defensively, too. Oh, defensively, yeah. We'll develop, so suddenly you realize the drone's running away, you get your pack that releases a defensive cloud around you. Defensive, defensive something. Yeah, so the drones can't get at you. Well, what is the defense anyway? Well, again, you could presumably have a chemical that would either screw up their sensors, screw up their abilities to touchdowns, screw up their explosives, stop their rotors, whatever. But you know, then you have the, may I say, the invasion of the mutant drones. Meaning that you change them every week. You change the intelligence, the AI on them. You change the code so that nobody can crack them so easily. You change the nature of the sensors. Every time you find there's a successful defense, you know, it's that same iteration of weapons. Right, exactly what we're talking about with the dolphins at the start, you know. It's just this sort of endless cycle of, you're figuring out one game and somebody's figuring out how to better your game, basically, you know. Well, it's a good side to this, Ethan, and that is when one lands on your head, and in that millisecond that it takes for it to fire the explosive shell into your brain, there's no pain. You're gone so fast, you don't even know what happened. And just like us, we're gone so fast, we don't even know what happened.