 Bingo, we're back, two o'clock rock here on a given Tuesday. And today we're going to do Think Tech Tech Talks with our Chief Scientist, Ethan Allen. Welcome to Chief Scientist. Glad to be here, Jay. Nice to be here again. And we thought we'd follow on a discussion, took place on 60 Minutes on CBS on Sunday night with about swarms of drones. So we're calling this show, Drones at the Frontier. Now we do have a regular show, you know, on Friday afternoon with Ted Ralston, and it's called Where the Drone Leads. So this is, you know, like compliments that because drones are a big technology these days. In fact, let me say that drones are an accumulation, an intersection of many technologies. And I'll name the ones that come to mind. Let's see. You've got material science, for sure. You've got aeronautics, you've got that. You've got avionics and radio transmissions and all kinds of things around that. You've got computers and artificial intelligence right up at the foreground, and you know, and you can take a lot of software and put it in a little tiny chip. And they do sensor technology, which in science, you know, everything, you've got sensors that do the most remarkable things in all areas of science. And certainly they're very relevant in drones. And of course, last but not least, last but not least at all, last but the biggest one of all, weapons technology, right? Well, not necessary part of drones, but not necessary, but it's certainly an intersection and it helps to fund their development. I'm sure Donald Trump will want to continue the development of drones, if for no other reason than weapons technology. And so there are lots of issues that come up, and we certainly have to settle down on them. But I would like to discuss with you, Ethan, exactly how these various technologies and sciences are playing together and whether we have the tiger by the tail or whether the tiger is running away from us. Because, you know, although we don't hear about in the newspaper, drones play a big role in battlefield experiences all over the world. And although the U.S. has Silicon Valley, a lot of smart guys with those disciplines, the fact is that people copy them and sometimes beat them. And then they do counter drone technology, which is also relevant, and I remember reading about the Israelis. I'll tell you one very clever thing the Israelis did, they have a rope technology. And one drone flies on top of the other drone, drops a little piece of rope. Guess what? It gets caught in the rotors and the one below goes down. Now, that's clever. That's neat. Very simple. Very simple. Elegant, yeah. Anyway, there's all kinds of things happening now. We don't necessarily know about them. And what was revealed in the 60 minutes piece on Sunday, you know, two days ago was that we have learned how to fly drones in swarms where they talk to each other and they are ready, autonomous. So when I say drones at the frontier, I include autonomous technology where you send them on a mission, they do the mission, and you don't really have any control. You have an override on it, but basically they do what you program them to do. This is different. A flock of a dozen or a hundred drones all just operating on their own. Well, the demonstration there was that it was hundreds and little ones, about that big, and they operate together. And they don't collide and they fly like the geese, you know, all together in a flock. Right. And they can do really incredible things. And if one gets knocked out for some reason, the others are still up there. And their, you know, their duplications of each other, except that the software makes them act as one. Right. Right. It's very interesting. Flucking technology. I mean, flucking as a strategy is a very good strategy. It's clearly widely used by fish, by birds, by a lot of different animals. It's a way to both survive when you're being hunted and also to hunt more effectively. Yeah. Hunt. Being the operative. I'm sure that'll interest Donald Trump. So if I gave you this problem scientifically, I'd be interested in how you would do it. My problem that I'm giving you, Ethan, is how do I build software that will, A, make the drones not hit each other, not collide with themselves or anything else, and, B, you know, to fly as a flock. So that each drone is aware of not only the one next to him, but all the drones in the swarm. How do you do that? Well, actually, and again, biologists have been thinking about this question for a long time. How do fish school? How do birds fly in flocks? They move all synchronously and all. And it turns out there are some fairly simple rules that can be used, you know, one rule being you never let yourself get closer than X distance to your neighbor, your nearest neighbor, basically. And if everyone sort of has that same rule, they'll tend to, you know, not collide, right? The other sort of counterpart to that rule is you don't ever want to be further away than X from your nearest neighbor. And so that will tend to keep them together, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, if they all have this rule, they'll all be sort of jockeying trying to stay, ideally of course, an animal flock wants to stay in the center of the flock because it's safe there, basically, if you're a prick, if you're a prey animal, right? Yeah. And I don't know how they set these drones up, but I'd imagine they're doing some rules somewhat like that. I don't believe that every drone is tracking instantaneously the position of all the other drones. Oh, I think they are. That was mentioned in the program, where each drone reads out his own position, you know, in space, exact position, I don't know, maybe it's a GPS, and each drone then broadcasts its position to all the other drones. That's not radar. That's not radar. So no matter getting too close on a radar kind of analysis, it's a matter of all the drones know where all the other drones are. They're all tracking all the hundreds or thousands of drones, and then they make sure that they don't get too close and that they fly together in the same direction. What I don't know, and maybe this is obvious, not to me though, is do you need to have a central brain here? Right. You're just on a sort of collective basis, just like the geese, can you do it collectively? Geese fly in Vs, and geese clearly do have a leader, and the leader typically is the sort of the senior member of the flock, the biggest toughest group around, because being the start of the V is the tough place to fly, you're breaking away from everyone else and everyone else is riding off your turbulence basically. So are you telling me that these drones, say a hundred drones, will sort of designate a leader, the one out in front? No, with big flocks of birds, when you watch flocks of birds that just circle and stretch out into a long flock and then collapse into a little, there is no obvious leader, and it's a very different situation there, and yeah, how do they make the decision, like we're going to go this way, or we're going to go that way, or we're going to go up, or we're going to go down, and it's supposed to be autonomous, right? There's nobody, they get a mission to go and do this thing, and there's nobody down on the ground controlling it except maybe in an override, but you know, the ordinary course, no. And so how do they act as a collective brain? This must be artificial intelligence. Yes, and it's again, it's one of these odd sort of systems phenomena, right, where one drone or two drones wouldn't do this, but when you get enough of them together, this emergent property of apparent intelligence just comes out and they start behaving in very sensible ways now. I wanted to digress for a minute just to broaden the inquiry. Now in this 60 minutes, they also had a drone ship. It was a ship that was fairly narrow with pontoons. It was a ship that didn't carry anybody, but had lots of weapons on it, and the Navy is actually building the ship, you can see pictures of it. And I remember, you know, there was there were harbor boats, harbor defense, harbor security boats designed a few years ago. A friend of mine was actually selling them. And these guys were also drones, and you gave them a mission, patrol the harbor, and you know, they had guns on them, and you really wondered if this was going to work or somebody was going to get murdered. But the Navy already has a ship like this, and it's not ready for, you know, prime time, but they're developing it. And so I take the swarm idea from the 60 minutes piece, and I say, well, how about a fleet of ships? Okay. Well, for that matter, how about a fleet of submarines? I don't know if the technology would be the same, but I think it's hardly possible. And how about, you know, a fleet of things on the ground? This is out of a sci-fi movie, where they're all a drone, and they're all remote, and they all have a mission, and they're all pre-programmed. Sort of like an army of army ants, right? Army of army ants. They move again as a big coordinated swarm, basically, and are capable of doing incredible things when they get together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we're there. Right. You know, it's one thing to have all the drone technology, all the stuff, you know, all the science coming together and all that. And we're going to talk about the evolution of that science. But it's another thing to have a swarm of them. That's the miracle. Right. And it's one thing to have a drone flying, you know, with some human operator running it, or at least running its weapons, letting it do a lot of local control of flying, but basically being ready to push the button. It's another thing if you turn that level of control over to the drone or the flock of drones, as it were. That's if you've crossed an interesting line there, letting the machines make the choice to release weapons. Yeah. And those were two points. Those two points were made in the piece. Number one is this is truly disruptive technology. When you put it all together, it crosses the line now. They act together. They act on a pre-programmed basis. And I guess when you add into that mix, you add the fact that they can be programmed to use weapons and kill people. Okay. So when you put all that together, that's really disruptive, could change. And one guy on this piece said, this is going to change things. This is, you know, this is really going to change things. We're going to see this flower out. It's going to have a big effect, not only on the battlefield, but in everything. Sure. I agree with him. And we, and let your mind fly. We can do that. The other thing is that, you know, a point you made is that these things are capable of being running autonomously and killing people. So are you going to have them kill people autonomously? Don't we need to have another human being involved in that decision before you send out? This is how to sci-fi. It's a B movie before you send them out to kill people all by themselves. And that's pretty scary, isn't it? You would think you'd want some human operator involved in that because otherwise, for one, you risk the idea that if you have a good hacker, they can sort of turn them around and send them back at you. Excellent point, excellent point. And hacking, you know, whatever you design is always subject to the possibility of hacking. And Vladimir Putin wouldn't hesitate to turn our drone army right back on us. So you shoot me, huh? I shoot you. Ah, so this is going to, this is going to be, and now you can't afford, you know, to make a mistake. I remember early on in Afghanistan, there was a really funny incident about one of those aerial surveillance drones and somebody, he was a part, they got out of, you know, a hardware store, figured out how to, how to bring it down or change its path or neutralize it. I forget why. It was really very clever and the, the enemy, you know, dismantled, I mean, just neutralized our drone for us with parts from a hardware store. For Don 98, they did it. Okay, well, if you had a swarm of drones and then you had an army of programmers and hackers, you could turn it around. I'm sure you could turn it around. And then what you programmed would come back on you. And one of the issues with the drones, they typically being small, they're relatively cheap to build and the technology while sophisticated is now pretty widespread, which means sort of any yahoo can start building these things, more or less. It's not like an atomic bomb that takes some serious sophistication that you need to get materials that are very hard to get. You need to, you know, have a good deal of fancy equipment. You know, you can't really build an atomic bomb in your garage, particularly. But you can build a drone. You can build a drone. And you can build a swarm of drones. Right now, pretty much in your garage. You know, we're going, we're going to the National Association Broadcast show in April. We went last year. And what, what I noticed was that there was an enormous number of drone products there for cameras, right? Should take video for movies and the like. And indeed you say, well, a lot of money not using a helicopter, use a drone about that big and take, you know, brilliant, brilliant photo or video. Every year it's a bigger deal. So instead of having fixed cameras mounted at all or intersections and building on buildings in the cities, we'll just have drones patrolling the cities in organized fashion. So basically every street is being covered at all times. Right. And so cameras, you know, cameras are a big thing. Cameras control society, observe society, give government a lot of power, whoever, whoever owns them a lot of power. But dwelling on that and thinking we'll come back and talk about the evolution of these various, you know, interconnecting technologies, we'll take a short break. That's Ethan Allen. He's our chief scientist. Hi, I'm Donna Blanchard. I'm the host of Center Stage, which is on Wednesdays at two o'clock here on Think Tech. On Center Stage, I talk with artists about not only what they do and how they do it, but the meat of the conversation for me is why they do it, why we go through this. A lot of us are not making our livings doing this, and a lot of us would do this with our last dying breath if we had that choice. And that's what I love to talk to people about. I hope you enjoy watching it, and I hope you get inspired because there's an artist inside G2. Join us on Center Stage at two o'clock on Wednesdays. Bye. What are you doing? It's me, Angus McTech, wishing you a welcome and join us to see us on Think Tech away. Join my co-hosts. Go out with the techs out and enter the security guy every Friday from 1300 to 1345. We look forward to see you. We'll talk tech, and we'll have some weeb of fun. And remember, let your wing gang free, where area be. Aloha. Ah, there we have some drones. Look at that. Drone's on the front here. And the swarm, it looks like. Anyway, so I made a little list, Ethan, of the kinds of things, you know, the drones that we know drones can do. One, cameras. And I think cameras, as I said, the NAB show, big deal, big deal. Huge drones, expensive drones. Drones very highly capable. And this kind of technology is being built for cameras but can be used for other things. Point. Okay, disasters. Well, I guess that's cameras too. There are guys, including guys at UH who go around in the Department of Geography, go around to disasters, and they help people on the ground by giving them an aerial shot of what happened. You could never get there because it's a disaster. Though what the drone can tell you what you have and what's cooking and what to do. Agriculture. If you want to see how your field is doing in one fell swoop, go right up, take a look, and you can see, and then you can use infrared or ultraviolet, whatever, and you can tell exactly what's going on with the grown-up plants. The smart yield folks here are doing. Yeah, here. No, that's good. Okay. Glad we're doing that. And on all this, you're really just putting out to all of us, is you really wonder whether the FAA is keeping up with us. Because, you know, it's very exciting. You can buy drones on the internet. You can buy all kinds of stuff. Yeah, one of them gets sucked in the engine of a 747. Right. It's a real problem. That's going to be bad. And is the FAA really the right agency for this? I'm not sure it is, because this is so, you know, ubiquitous all around Hawaii and everywhere. We're a test site under the FAA regulations, but, you know, I think drones are, what's the word, really provocative. Everybody wants it. For good and commercial reasons. Sure. But they're not. The regulation hasn't settled down. Okay, then we got the delivery, you know? Just a week ago, Amazon made its first delivery with a drone. They weren't kidding. They only announced this idea a year ago, now look. Now, you know? And that gets us in that whole issue that technologies are turning around so fast. The half-life between when a technology is developed and when it gets into widespread circulation is shrinking just so rapidly now. Yeah. And yes, probably three years ago, no one thought about flocks of drones going places and now they're out there. Yeah. And by the way, flocks of cars, too. Autonomous cars like Google. Right. So you can have a highway full of cars that act like a swarm in order to get from A to B. I mean, it's easy, the software, from where we are now. Of course, as I mentioned, weapons and weapons are, you know, that's the black box. We don't know the kinds of weapons that are being developed here. It's not just that we're doing surveillance on the bad guys, but that we can shoot them out and blow them up with drones that are. And the thing about drones is they don't die. They just fall out of the sky. It's not a big deal if you lose one. Right. Yeah, exactly. So that's really creepy. So you don't put anybody at harm's way except the victim. And hopefully you got the victim identified properly. So in terms of the technology, seems to me that within the next year or two or three, because of the huge market for drones, a huge need, you know, for government surveillance and weaponry, we're going to see, you know, incentives to develop technology. For example, material science, those things are this big now. And A, they'll be lighter. Okay. Something in material science will find some material to make some lighter and therefore greater range. B, their engines will be more powerful. And therefore faster and higher. And C, their batteries will be better. You know, batteries are everything now, especially with a photovoltaic. You know, everybody wants batteries. So a lot of people are researching batteries in the right composition for batteries. And graphene is a possibility, right? We talked about graphene batteries. Exactly. So if we do just those three things, we can get to the others too. That will change the way drones work. Right, right. They will become longer lived, able to do more things, smaller later, therefore cheaper to produce basically. Yeah. And in a way, that's great, because it'll be more and more uses for them that they can do search and rescue for missing people and cover far more ground and more effectively than a person could equip with an infrared camera. And it can spot a person who can keep searching during the night. You know, when people surf surfers or paddlewaters get lost, our waters here, right? Search and rescue and send the drones out. Send the drones out. Yeah. Drop flares around them, let them know that they've been spotted, you know, radio back, exact positions of open, come out and rescue them. Yeah. Things like if you have a collapsed building, you can get a drone that can go inside of it basically where you don't have to risk somebody's life climbing through a collapsing structure or a fragile structure. Send in a drone to check out, put different sensor technology on it. It can check for carbon dioxide, or again, have infrared heaters, whatever, to check for other survivors. Where are they, you know? Yeah. There was a movie out. It was about some, oh, some terrorist thing in the Middle East, so many movies like that. I can't remember the name, but the drone they used for surveillance, for spying, for espionage in advance of an attack, the American drone, was that big. It was the size of a grasshopper. Right. And it really was. I mean, this is not fiction. This really was about that big and it had a camera and it could fly into a building through a window and then it could spy on the people, you know, it found a perch and it would just sit there and spy on the people and send signals back across the world with radio technology and internet and all that. So there in Central Asia, you know, the guys in Washington are watching what is amazing, yeah? Yeah. I mean, there's very interesting things as you shrink objects down below some the size. They behave very differently aerodynamically and scientists have been trying for years to make sort of flying artificial insects and they're actually now beginning to succeed. You get little tiny things like that scale to fly. You know what I find very interesting is the cameras they're using with these drones, the little ones, I don't know about the big ones. Maybe they got bigger cameras. I don't think they need bigger cameras because why? Because the cell phones, the iPhone and the Android phones, they got great cameras. Right. And I read recently that the iPhone and Apple, there are 800 people on their permanent payroll just refining their cameras. Okay, so it's not a surprise that these drones use cell phone cameras in order to take their pictures. They're so light, so powerful, so focused. So mass-produced, they become cheap. You know, again, that's what you want for drones. A lot of cheap stuff. You can stick into it. Yeah. So I mean, this is really, it's really interesting what they can do. And I, you know, I certainly agree that if the bat, if it's light and the battery is, you know, a long-lasting battery, you can go much further. Recharges from solar power as it's in flight. Yeah. Maybe they got another big drone that comes by and this is like the old bombers, right? Refueling station. Refueling station. Or, you know, and or don't forget, you could have better technology in photovoltaic cells and you could have a recharging while it's flying. Exactly. Just trickle charge. Right. So it keeps going a little longer. Right. You know, I mean remarkable what's possible here. So I think, I think there's going to be all kinds of new uses coming up. Sensors, for example, you know, they're changing while you watch. They're smaller. They're more powerful. Yeah. Sensors for now for different chemicals you can get. So the, you know, one molecule in trillions they can, they can pick it up, pick it out. So yeah, again, if you want to start searching for either specific chemicals as in explosives, trees of explosives that somebody may be carrying, or probably in this day and age, they'll be able to start searching for individuals by smell, right? Like a dog. Yeah. Exactly. You put the tell us clothing under the drone. Drone smells it and then he goes looking for it. Exactly. Exactly. You know, the funny thing is that the FAA regulations now require individuals, I mean, up to this point, require individuals not to lose sight of their drones. I mean, have to have line of sight control in the drone. And I mean, that's pathetic. That's ridiculous. These drones are capable, even now before the technology is really robust, of flying, you know, miles in seconds. Right. Why in the world would you try to limit that? You know, we've got to find a better way to regulate them. Yeah. They need to be regulated. Yeah. You don't want them flying into airports. I mean, that's just begging for trouble. That's a concern. Yeah. They can really disrupt an airline. Yeah. Very badly. And of course, they could be made into weapons. Yeah, it could disrupt an airline with no extra weapon. We're on just flying into engine. Yeah. Well, I you know, I would you invest in a company that is building from there must be a lot of them around. I suspect there must be. Yeah. Which one again, it's sort of like classic internet problem. There's too much information out there. How do you know who's building the technology that's gonna really come out on top? I think you did research on the web, you find the leaders. And I think you'd find companies that would sell them to you, you know, with all kinds of technology that that would surprise you. I think there must be a lot of police departments looking for them to surveil cities. Oh, absolutely. Cameras are so popular, but this is better than the camera on the on the light post because this can, you know, go down and focus. Right. Rural police departments out in the boonies. Huge boom rather having the cop get in his car and drive 40 miles to the little town, send the drone over there to sort of see what the trouble is, you know, undisposable. Yeah, it's like the drone that the what's with the Chinese picked up off underwater underwater drone. They picked it up and the US wanted it back. So the Chinese held it for three days and looked at everything. And then they give it back. Smart move actually. But can you see in five, 10 years, this is going to be ubiquitous everywhere. Everybody's going to have them. And regulation will be very difficult. Oh, yeah, everybody will add, you know, there was a kid in New England about six months ago who outfitted a drone with a gun. And he was flying it on a gun. I didn't hear about that. Not that hard. God knows what can happen now. So so on Friday, every Friday at four o'clock, you know, right, we have this where the drone leads with Ted Ralston. And actually, it's a sort of an organization. These guys started it here on TinkTek, like three years ago, maybe, and after a program, we did a downtown forum about drones. It now has real legs, and it's flying high, so to speak. And he has people coming in from all over the country, flocking in the other. Right, right. So what would you what would you say to somebody who is in high school or college about whether to get into drones and how you get into drones and how you, you know, can be excited by this technology and advance it and have a living a career of it. This camera one, tell them tell them what they can do. Well, again, I mean, the many, many different fields of science that you mentioned at the start, suggest huge entry points through engineering through any sort of science aeronautics, you know, fuel cells, batteries, solar power, almost any of these ways you can get into this technology and begin to contribute to that field. And yes, I can't help but think that drones are going to be an expanding business opportunity for people around the world, every country that wants to do things. I mean, their potential to do good is huge. Harm is equally big, but yeah. Oh, be great, great career choice for a student today. Yeah, if you don't want to do drone technology, that's okay, you can do anti drone technology.