Gadgetory

hi everyone welcome to reporters roundtable I am Rafe Needleman in San Francisco and today on the show it's drones under the Christmas tree in the deadly skies over Afghanistan soon perhaps replacing traffic helicopters unmanned aerial drones are showing up everywhere a combination of technological advancement and necessity has led to the creation of military-grade unmanned flying vehicles all most affordable toy grade quadcopters and a growing commercial hobbyist industry in between to build new increasingly cheap and increasingly smart robotic flying vehicles of course we're all familiar with the stories of remote-controlled drone airplanes that perform reconnaissance and increasingly carry lethal weapons for our armed forces these drones are primarily remote-controlled but many have a measure of smarts that enables them to fly parts of their missions with complete autonomy how smart can flying robots get just ask your neighbor the geek he or she may be one of the tens of thousands of community members of DIY drones working on improving the state of the art of the autonomous aerial drone using open-source hardware like the arduino microcontroller and the quadcopter architecture that's becoming ubiquitous what are the privacy and legal implications of a world in which governments businesses and private citizens can buy or build smart and perhaps silent reconnaissance vehicles welcome to the future it's being built today okay so for this great topic which I'm really really excited to do today we have two great guests that I bet you have heard of first they're both here in the studio with us first chris anderson who is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine perhaps you've seen this issue here come the drones he is also the founder of DIY drones the community site of people who are building these things and of 3d robotics the manufacturing arm of that community Chris thanks for coming in thanks good beer also joining us Daniel Suarez who is the author of this book kill decision a thriller which I highly recommend this is a book about Chris's drones gone bad oh not not specifically but yes drones ganda drones gone evil and is a really really fun read Daniel is also the author of demon and freedom to other great techno thrillers that I highly recommend before that he was a systems analyst so he knows of which he speaks thank you for coming in thanks for having me um well we've got just a ton of things to talk about now I want to start with this about a year ago on right after we took out bin Laden we did a show with wired Danger Room writer Spencer Ackerman on the role of the unmanned vehicle in in that particular campaign and in the military overall that was may of last was it was it last year yeah it was last year um what has changed in the world of the unmanned and autonomous vehicle since then and I used those words separately because I know you have a point of view on that yeah well you know this is like technology of any sort which is to say that it starts with big companies in the military the internet started that way mainframe started that way computers in general and then and you pay attention to that you think that's the only way it can happen then and then slowly and quietly in the undergrowth the hobbyists and the home brewers and the hackers start fiddling with it and they start burbling up from you know from the grassroots and that's been what's happening over the last year the grassroots drones movement has now exceeded the military drone world in terms of just numbers of drones out there in terms of number of physical Jones there are or diversity or in what way as it is it exceeding the military so a little bit definitions a drone is as you mentioned before is at an aircraft capable of autonomy sometimes it's flown remotely but it can fly by itself takeoff landing gps waypoints cameras all that kind of stuff it can be just anything as simple as a radio-controlled model airplane the kind of you'd see in your part flown by children and then somebody adds this this is a this is an autopilot it's a it just a little box that has computers sensors GPS lots and lots of software and then suddenly gives the plane a brain or the cop a brain that means that all those toy airplanes out there are just one box away from becoming drones now these costs two hundred dollars as opposed to the military military ones which can cost tens or hundreds or millions of dollars so as a results what you're seeing out there was a lot of basically what formerly we're ready to control toys being turned into drones at a very low cost which is why there's so many more of them than the military ones Daniel it is it this particular movement that gave rise to the central tenant of your book of these autonomous swarming armed relax line drones it's the ubiquity of it it's you know as is mentioned in this wired article that's this whole industry that is you know made accelerometers and the specific chips that empower this so cheap has brought the price point down to the point where many different entrance have come into the industry and just created this sort of Cambrian explosion of drone species and and now even very very small groups can use this in conflict that's what I thought was interesting it's almost a miniaturization of war to the extent that hobbyists are taking this these larger drones and turning them into toys that they can use or for civil use cameras and so forth it's also occurring to people in conflict that they can take these larger drones and shrink them down and we were just talking about in this missile that's only two feet long that they're designing to put on smaller drones now and the idea is having a swarm of much smaller drones is more survivable it makes war more personal less collateral damage all of that stuff so you carefully target the person you're looking for with a small drone so it's this Venn diagram there's a slight overlap between the the hobbyists drone and the wardrobe and it's not going to be the same people using them but the technology is going to be similar in many ways you know what's interesting to me about this is that it was literally just slightly more than a year ago that we were talking about drones and what we were discussing then were big flying primarily fixed-wing machines and that that we're getting we were seeing them getting bigger and bigger and bigger the phantom ray I believe as a several million probably 100 million dollar delta wing aircraft that flies that 40,000 feet completely I don't know if it's completely autonomously but that's that's a scary aircraft and now we seem to have gone in the corset in the space of 15 months completely the other direction well it is what happened it's an ecosystem you're going to have different different species doing different things you're going to have the global Hawks that are going to set up there at 60,000 feet stay persistent eye on the sky looking down and then acting perhaps an information will be smaller drones or a whole constellation of smaller drones doing various things I mean 85 percentage of drones are I think less than 24 pounds in the military's fleet you know they're still that they're they only represent four percent of the cost eighty-five percent of the drums but then you have the much bigger ones that do you no connection to satellite very high detailed imagery from high up that type of thing so it's different they have different purposes so if you go out right now to the San Francisco Bay and watch people surfing odds are that increasingly you'll see something that looks like this flying overhead with a camera on board this is a drone and it's a drone being used to film extreme sports and probably autonomously might be that someone is having actually having we have one of these follow it while the person is as they're doing stunts just kind of positioning itself above and behind that's a that you know that's the kind of thing that's cheap and possible and fun it's a complete non-military I'm application and it's not what people thought of as drones but increasingly will as these become much more common you know I find that almost hard to believe thinking but just because what I know about this which is my parrot ar.drone this is a you don't even call this a drone because it's not fully autonomous however it is a very intelligent airplane frame you know you control it with an iPhone and no matter which way it's pointing the direction that you tilt your phone is a direction it goes which is cool now granted that's just a simple algorithm but I happen to think that's cool no no these vehicles work but this thing in a two mile an hour wind becomes almost unplayable I are you saying that that that device can handle winds on the bay of san francis i mean that's that's the difference between these two i mean we do small ones as well but that's really designed for indoor use this is this is a quadcopter but they come in six and eight as well these have quite powerful brushless motors big big in polymer batteries this can handle I would say 15 knots is it is about optimal I've seen it go in 20 but 1550s about right in other words this is designed for outdoor use as opposed to a parrot ar.drone which is really designed for indoor use I see and oh okay so we talked briefly about using these things as kind of flying spotter BOTS some measure of autonomy you know maybe it's following a beacon or on a on a sailboard or something all right I guess it could be with those things are so brightly colored probably just lock onto the sale I you could you could do I mean typically what happens is you you carry a little GPS device again that little box that looks like this it has a GPS device in a little radio and then it just transmits your position to the drone the drones positions itself behind you now Daniel in your book you talk about swarms of drones being used for assassination and taking out ships with laser cutters Chris your hobbyists clan out there you're twenty-five thousand strong communities members of DIY drones what are they doing with these other than just doing it because they can because it's cool yeah this is very much like the homebrew computing club in the 70s and if you'd asked jobs and wozniak what's a computer for they'd say so you can program it you know and that was a sufficient answer for a lot of people for a long time and then people thought of word processing and spreadsheets and video games and ultimately email on the internet and all that um we're a little bit further along than the because you can program at stage but but by and large the application and most people are doing it for just coolness now I'm interested so it's a fun education platform aerial robotics taking robotics from the 2d world to the 3d world and all that increasingly is being used as a camera platform not just for hobbyists but also for mapping barriers like Google Maps for agriculture to look at you know croplands through different filters that can tell you how the water fertilizer is going Hollywood's using it a lot so right now if you're watching a car commercial and there is a camera following a camera in the air that used to always be a manned aircraft a helicopter typically increasingly that's an unmanned aircraft is doing the same thing cheaper less dangerous you can get it up in the air any time any time you want a scientific sensing is another good application you know that that whole zone that's sort of 400 feet below the clouds so satellites are great but they're far away and they're above the clouds airplanes can get low the clouds but they're expensive and hard to get in the air and notion of anytime anywhere access to the sky is what a drone can offer for anybody from farmers to scientists whoever you want anytime anywhere access to the sky has so interestingly put it well do we have I I assume we wouldn't know because you know over a couple thousand feet these things are pretty much inaudible are their drones flying over our cities right now doing Google Maps or watching our traffic I wouldn't think by official entities they'd be concerned about permitting and things like that there are there are none I can pretty much guarantee they're none flying over San Francisco right now for commercial purposes I think there is one flying over San Francisco right now for a man I think I don't know one of my team members is flying right now over San Francisco you wouldn't know that they're flying below 400 feet so it's not like you know why Novartis a line of sight but the the way the FAA you know the national regulations work is that they're say amateur category where basically anything goes as long as below 400 feet within visual line of sight so you can avoid if there's that manned aircraft that comes by you can take control get it out of the way away from built-up areas people airports things like that if you're a commercial entity it's almost impossible there's a long permitting process that you can't you can't get through and so ironically my nine year old can fly drones but the San Francisco Police Department can't I have to think about whether that's good or not look at that i relieved or worry Daniel a you know as somebody who looks on the dark side of what these uh these platforms can do is that make you feel good or bad well actually that parts in different and i have to say that I look at like I of necessity look at the dark side in this I actually am very excited about drones myself because they're going to happen anyway I think soon the fááá is going to rule on this around 2015 we were talking about and then I think you'll see lots thousands of permits approved for various uses of drones and I just hope that what's put in place is some sort of system by which if you see I drone you can go to a Google map type thing and find out what it is the oats the Department of Water and Power they're inspecting lines something like that so there's some visibility some transparency there but I look at the dark side principally because I techno-thriller that's happy and ends on a happier note is not very exciting so I always look at the really dark stuff and plus it'd be unbelievable yes and it's easier to believe that these things are being used for these purposes now I got an email from from I'm not going to read his name my name is donzo and I'm a drone operator for and builder for new vero flight systems you know them just so you're aware drones for commercial use are illegal in most countries here in canada we require permits for every flight and must provide detailed flight plans and info about every job most companies that attempt to turn drones into a business especially in the USA where national security is such a scary topic either go out of business or get shut down within the first year for now probably that's right I just don't see flight plans being I mean these things are ad hoc aerial vehicles I don't see fly commercial one though go on if you're going to be inspecting power lines let's say over a hundred mile long stretch and again their potential to interfere with the manned aircraft to go haywire it is going to be some sort of transparent transponder on it that will tell it if it goes off couldn't you build a database of no-fly zones into the little GPS you can I'm the way it works is that there are absolutely no fly zones and where we get emails about in text about those so we know about that what if your commercial you have to fly what's a file for what's called a certificate of authorization from the FAA and you need to say where are you going to be and you know what what zone you're going to be in when and it basically clear the airspace and the reason they do that is because the number one rule of the national airspace is sense and avoid the ability to see other aircraft and avoid them so even if the you know you can't count on air traffic control to keep you apart you need to be able to have eyes in the you know eyes in the cockpit these things don't have eyes in the cockpit and so because they can't avoid a manned aircraft you have to keep manned aircraft away from them so with amateurs we do that by staying 400 feet that manned aircraft basically stopped at a thousand feet there's a 600 foot buffer and there's 400 feet which is where kites and balloons and toys go so we do it with this vertical segmentation beer so bass but commercial ones typically want to go beyond that and with that you need to notify the FAA and have them clear the airspace someday we'll have sense and avoid technology on board whether it's going to be transponders as you say but that would require you know all manned aircraft to have the same transponders and there's some political opposition to say nothing of economic opposition to that or whether they're going to have just onboard sensors that can achieve what eyes can achieve which is spotting any potential potential manned aircraft out there and getting out of the way so what's the future look like I mean these platforms are so inexpensive the cost of failure if it doesn't involve you know flying into some other aircrafts manned aircraft and windshield or engine is very low and one of the things falls out of the sky it could it could cause damage but not nearly as much damages or helicopter are we going to 10 years from now look up in the sky and see you know delivery drones zipping back and forth like the pneumatic tubes of the 30s and 40s you know delivery drones which is what everybody always goes to they go straight to pizza I don't know why um that's actually one of the hardest AI problems there is I mean think about it you know you have to navigate a urban environment you know telephone lines trees buildings in street signs pigeons people you know all that kind of stuff you need to you know inner in GP you know your GPS multipath bouncing off wallets it's a terrible environment and then you have to get to the right place you have to find place to land and have to be safe that's my happen in my lifetime maybe a much more likely one would be like an Africa delivering medicine right you know there you have a case where the roads are very poor and the end the thing you're delivering is actually quite light that's a perfect application for it but this son you know the taco copter there's a there's a video on in your story about this yeah I mean we did it we for fun we delivered a pizza but we did it manually and i would say that you're not going to see delivery vehicles overhead anytime soon i do think you'll see drones overhead frequently in the next 10 years simply for the kind of things that Google Map aircraft do right now which is you want your traffic helicopters you know updated view of the you know the land the houses the you know the urban environment right now that Google plane comes by once a year mm-hmm you know it wouldn't it be nice if it was up there all the time you know if you had a live view wouldn't it be nice if there was a Google platform with cameras looking down on my house all the time I leave that question as an exercise for the reader would you like your google maps would you like your google maps to be real time or six months old I'm not sure depends I see your point but I'm still not sure okay you know I mean well that is it that society's questioned answer me this way you only have to keep your backyard tidy once a year but I'm telling you guys just as a little side note the business I'm going into if this publishing thing doesn't work out for me is urban camouflage nets for backyards I shouldn't have said that because I know there's no matter this gonna be a big business am i right like that netting they have a match that type it's totally accept a student is gonna be of a clean backyard with an empty swimming pool well you know it's interesting that with the privacy rules are actually not enshrined you know specifically on a federal level it's based on reasonable expectation what working what kind of privacy can you reasonably expect in your backyard and once upon a time when we are houses far apart it was Infinite then we got closer together and they were fences and they were senses and then we had satellites overhead but they only had certain resolution that we had planes overhead they had a certain resolution you know you could probably nude sunbathe in your backyard and assume that no one's going to be able to recognize you but how much longer is that true as the cameras get closer and closer to Earth you know that's that's a fascinating topic in Germany for example when the google street view camera goes by and takes a picture of your house here i mean i think that the culture says it's my house it's facing the public street somebody takes to make sure but there's very little I can do Germany is like no I can have anything as Germany I can have that blurred um so there are different cultural expectations uh where is this going to go I mean are we going to walk out of a door and immediately expect that any sense of privacy what we're doing what we're wearing what we look like is completely blown away you're including a better we're there yeah it's just whether my luck on my walk over here I walk two blocks I probably five cameras I'm saying I let me check yeah oh yeah yeah now that that's that's done you know between camera phones and you know public surveillance you know once you're outside of your house it's it's it's fair game purchase records everything geolocation yeah now but the backyard is still sacred space in some sense and the question is how is that you know reasonable expectation changing now I want to talk about the technology a little bit we've probably all seen those videos of drones at various research universities doing amazing things flipping over perching on walls flying through thrown hula hoops cooperating with each other to build things there's a great one of a bunch of drones playing the James Bond theme or a bunch of oversized instruments how of course that's research being done by smart people in universities and eventually they're going to leave the university and productize some of that stuff but where are we right now what is the state of the art for the autonomous or remotely piloted a quadcopter yeah so that's a great question there's a really important distinction between those videos which you see which are all done in a motion capture room so those what it's called a Vikon room basically what happens there's cameras around here it's like it's like motion capture where you have little dots will sort of like ping-pong balls on the device itself and cameras looking around it and they then they they're watching and ascertain the position of the copter because the room figures out where the copter is the copter doesn't know anything and then the room the room controls the copter so it's basically a big it's a room making the decisions now you take it outside and they don't know anything anymore so none of them is there's a half dozen of these Vikon rooms around the world they cost like five hundred thousand dollars so that is a that's unobtainium you can't do that once you go outside you're dealing with GPS much lower resolution so maybe you know a few meters rather than a few centimeters um you're looking at wind you're looking at sort of difficult radio in environments you know it's a much tougher problem so the state of the art right now in the outside world is that for for two hundred dollars this is rj pilot which is the ones that that our community DIY drones community created sold by three robotics my company so this cost two hundred dollars and it's got GPS and all those other sensors inside and this will do full autonomy take off waypoints you know you point and click on a map and you just tell it where to go and you press go and off a dozen it does its thing probably plus or minus about you know about a meter which is about as good as GPS yeah it gets and it'll work you know almost all the time but you know things things can go wrong it's still kind of leading-edge technology the you know swarming is the next where you get multiple ones communicating with each other and these things all have these special radios on board which are designed to communicate with it base station ground station telemetry but can also communicate with each other so you know the algorithms to let them work collaboratively are going to come out and and and they're going to get smaller and lighter and cheaper and all that the indoor stuff is is is still kind of a research exercise it's a good way to test algorithms we haven't found any particular useful applications for it indoors yet but someday perhaps we will now Daniel I don't want to give spoilers to your book but I'll leave that to you you want to but knowing full well of the limitations of the current technology you develop I don't know how much you invented or extracted from public materials a technology to for cooperative from the for autonomous drones to to reinforce each other's behavior do you want to talk about a little bit is really interesting idea I based it of course on social insects the hymenoptera Weaver ants and it is it relates to a concept called stigma G which means modifying the environment basically to communicate between members agents in a system so that they can iteratively interact with that and navigate and read messages from each other so it's sort of like a swarm can upvote something that they discover in importance so that more of the agents converge on that point all of them up voting as they go and that's how it sort of manifests itself as intelligent reaction i would say i extrapolated you know I i took some poetic license but really it's sort of just an over the horizon thing it's not completely beyond the realm of possibility mmm but that's you know what i wanted to was I wanted to look a little further ahead to say if things keep going in this direction and one word devoid of ethics one could do this and and again designing a system that's not perfect that has lots of casualties that makes lots of mistakes but the fat part of that bell curve gets it right and and although the extremes on either side might get it wrong whatever goal the swarm has can be achieved and it depends on how important that goal is so if that goal is attacking an important political target I mean how much is it worth somebody 22 for a political reason to send a thousand dollar a hundred-thousand-dollar drones to get rid of somebody I mean that's not a very big investment especially if attribution is difficult that was one of the key things here autonomous drones could give you anonymous warfare the idea that it would be very difficult to determine who is attacking you particularly in a world that has a profusion of drones everywhere Oh many of them off the shelf and again I'm not trying to be negative this is going to happen we're going to have drones everywhere they're going to have manifold civilian uses and it's going to be great but I always look at what groups that are in conflict how they might use cheap technology and again we were talking about this earlier this is sort of bringing the price point for an Air Force down to sort of the boy scout troop level of course I own Boy Scouts doing this but let's say narco I'm going to get the badge look at narco traffickers I think of this let's say they're moving I don't know what the cost is for a kilo of cocaine but the point is let's say it's thirty thousand dollars if you're sending a swarm of drones over the border with a half kilo each and you lose half of them you still made a lot of money and you didn't endanger anybody on your team and in other words things like that could be driving in illicit market in drones and it would make financial sense and then there's warring parties and all these things so I had to look at this dark territory because to me conflict human conflict in particular is always an early adopter they're always going to take whatever technology comes down the line that gives them some advantage and use it and I thought that was fascinating how you could use these again extrapolate a little in the technology try to use them cooperatively and it's it's amazing when you look at it as a swarm if you have modern weapons it's still very difficult to knock down a swarm going to crissy as the editor of Wired this is a topic the shrink ification of technology in the distribution of technology from say a hundred million dollar platform to ten thousand ten thousand dollar platforms I don't know if I didn't I know yeah whatever yeah but is that you seen that happen not just in drones but in every other technology is it is that what is happening here are we moving away from the big vulnerable aircraft carriers in the sky to a swarm of PT boats yeah um the secret is this oh I'm going the smartphone revolution yeah and you know may not think about this but inside your phone you have all the sensors necessary to fly to fly blank it's got gyros and accelerometers and magnetometers and GPS and wireless and cameras and processing and memory and all that kind of stuff and thanks to the economies of scale of Apple and Google and others what used to be super expensive technology to make an autopilot is now pennies so so absolutely we now by circo tailing on the smartphone industry you know this is these are the same things just in different form factors and as a result this which would have cost you know a hundred thousand dollars ten years ago now is gonna be one hundred fifty dollars and ultimately they'll be disposable and disposable drones I mean we were going from from commercial drones in military drones to personal drones and now disposable drones that's when you get into the kind of you know statistical approaches that Daniels talking about Daniel one of the things you talk about in your book is a government reaction to the obvious proliferation of potentially dangerous vehicles under the control of people who are uncontrollable and an outlawing a bam on this technology well yeah I had to show that that is sort of knee-jerk reaction yeah that do you think we're in danger of that though well as one of the reasons I put it in there yeah to kind of I don't want to say market but it would be an absurdly ineffective thing to do because this is going to happen it's perfect that I was reading recently the LA Times mentioned that there is a 1987 agreement that the u.s. government signed to limit that that limits our Expo tation of drone technology I think it's got to have the name of it it's a missile technology control regime and drone manufacturers in the United States we're complaining that that's the reason they can't sell drone technology overseas what they're doing is pointing to the fact that all of this stuff is happening in the civilian space but that we shouldn't be restricted from doing this and that sort of shows that that that restricting it if we don't embrace and understand and and meaningfully regulate drones they're going to happen everywhere else and and then they're going to come in from the outside so again there's really no stopping this way I think we have to be reasonable about it I wanted to show it or dramatize it such that that's the first thing they would do is just well we'll just retract this this license to use this for hobby use and that'll protect us and no no it won't protect them the cool thing is I didn't get a license to get this thing yeah just bullet yeah I'm air you actually they sent to me but yeah you just would you what would you ban I mean you know again the cheek and by the chips in a radio check is that you know the software was developed on the internet and it's open source it's getting away for free that via their frames or toys so uh to get away from you know the the doom and gloom here and under the stuff that we can all enjoy and participate in you you have a inexpensive autopilot autonomous pilot there what else is happening in the approachable world of these products I mean you've got batteries motors sensors who wears the state of the art right now in this yeah so so there's sort of three breakthroughs that allows something like this the first is I mean these are these are this is called Archer copter and it's a it's an Arduino base this is rj pilot which is the autopilot and this is the copter version of it there's planes and others these are in unstable platforms it's impossible for a human being to fly them basically the way the way they work is that you just speed up or slow down the various props to go in one direction to go in the other direction and it goes 200 times a second that can only be done by a computer so we had to invent three things first of all the ability to put sensors and computers on a really small platform this required MEMS sensors these are microelectronic mechanical devices which are found in your phones and started with things like airbag sensors the second is these motors are called this motors and these were kind of it first invented for DVD drives and the third is that high efficiency batteries I didn't bring one but lithium polymer batteries which again are the kind of thing to have in phones and laptops so what's interesting is that all three of them came out of the computer industry these came out of DVD drives the lithium polymer batteries came out laptops and phones and the sensors again came out of phones etc so ten years ago not possible is that why we didn't see quadcopters until now because they're inherently unstable platform exactly i had a regular helicopter with it with a big road or in care order that's human control day early but yeah exactly they need a compute thing to be flown by computer or flown by wire which is in other words the human beings controls they autopilot the autopilot controls the aircraft fascinating so when it comes to autonomy which is one of the things that you're working under your group your community members are working on how autonomous are these I mean can I so say you know drone make me a sammich or I mean how what can we do exactly so so what you do is there's a piece of software that runs on your on your laptop it's got a mission planner and you called up and it opens up a Google map and you 0 and 0 in every area you want is you just click and you say go here go there go there at each at each waypoints you can as even say loiter you look at a certain point of interest change your altitude whatever it's just you just click and pick from any items and you just click your way into a mission and then you upload the mission to this which includes an automatic takeoff and landing and then you just press go and and that is full autonomy you look at the lat you look at the laptop and watch maybe the cameras view in real time but the aircraft flies itself a year or so ago I think we heard about a group of protesters in in a country I forget which it was forgiving me who were using drone technology to monitor approaching dangerous force of military or police I think I think it's been a number of places but the home was the first war song possibly so r is this technology changing the I mean I guess an obvious question but how is this technology changing the equation of you know government versus people when that happens so look what happens when you know we've seen a lot of videos that this people trying to film the police which is a legal activity and then getting arrested going to be much harder if you're filming them from a drone it's probably safer and again there's that attribution thing like well somebody's filming us and then I know that there's been some talk about getting police drones I don't know what they would do with them other than film protesters other for legal reasons but I think it's only a matter of time and still until they start to put together some sort of countermeasure to knock down protesters drones it's gonna get pretty weird will that work if these things are autonomous oh yeah no it's it you know there was a pita group was protesting a bird hunt I think was a pigeon shoot or something and set up and set out drones to film the hunters and so the hunters simply took the shot doesn't pointed that in shines and shot them down yeah turned out they were sitting to access if you will so the there's something called drone journalism which is the notion that journalists what you know in their in their function is or you know being a an oversight and the authorities would use drones to do this um I think it's a good idea I want to be really really cautious about the use of it putting a flying lawnmower you know with spinning blades over the head of a crowd operated possibly by amateurs is a really really bad idea and it's illegal in most countries so I you know I'm and I think that people who are responsible about promoting drone journalism are very very quickly recognize that that's particular examples is a poor one you know among other things you really should keep multicopters away from people an airplane a foam airplane would have been a much better choice even though that is also technically illegal and most in most countries so it's easy to get too ahead of ourselves and sort of start to think that it's going to be you know occupy wall street with their air force versus the police with their Air Force and the drone battling over the skies um I think that would be kind of dangerous we've talked about quads and I guess octocopters or whatever they hexacopter copters of course we're all familiar with flying fixed-wing autonomous or unmanned vehicles are there other form factors that are emergent here we we focus on for in our communities there's the multicopters which range from traditional helicopters with one blade all the way up to eight or more blades aircraft as you mentioned and typically relatively small ones they can be to foam light really wouldn't actually hurt a plane if they hit it or wouldn't do much damage and we have Rovers which are autonomous ground vehicles which are also supported to see any put with the box and a RC car and a rover and then we have blimps and blimps are a lovely platform for for teaching autonomy inside the home with children a completely safe space this also votes in submarines although we haven't gone as much in that direction and and the flying in the wired store you talk about bug box a little bit briefly yeah those are those lemos mostly research efforts and you know right now this I should have brought in but right now the smallest sort of quad copters are about this big once you get smaller you're dealing with kind of basically power management issues you know it's it's really hard to get enough power insects use use chemistry you know they get food in the environment they converted into glucose and to power their very efficient muscles we're nowhere near sufficient is that with electric motors and batteries and so you end up with some as you get smaller the aerodynamics get harder and the power issues get harder and you know your weight power wait thrust ratio gets all wrong so we're not there yet I suspect that something more biologically inspired it Daniel were there are other form factors that you look that get left on the cutting room floor mean there's this great scene there's this great scene in your book where you have blue bots yes um swarming yeah yeah and you can buy those I've seen them in start-up offices around great fun with mine it upsets my cat though it's noisier than you think it is it upset you that sounds like a good reason to get one to me but anyway go ahead you know but there's many different form factors also the as far as the submarines I know that there are some universities using them for doing environmental monitoring basically to set them on some sort of pattern to measure things in the deep ocean which is a really it's a great use for it I'm submarines are a lovely as for autonomy so what robots do is jobs that are dull dirty and dangerous right so so you know dull is actually the most interesting ones just go out and watch something forever right and and then maybe great thing about the submarines is that they can just say just these gliders they just kind of use the curves and the texture gradients in the ocean to to be out there for months at a time I'm the only challenge for for submarines is that you can't get gps underwater so they really don't know where they are at any particular point in time and because they don't have because they're out there for so long they can't carry a lot of energy with them so they tend to kind of go with the currents so they're little they're kind of think of it as a is it kind of a as a kind of a sensor that's out there somewhere you can every now and then it surfaces and you know where it is etc but it's not highly controllable as opposed to these others which are you know pinpoint accuracy they go exactly where you want well let's wrap up uh Chris people watching the show probably is like think are probably thinking I have to try this what's the best way to get started with with this technology so I'm I actually although although everyone's you know loves copters because they're really cool they're actually a little hard to fly for a beginner so I actually recommend that people start with a foam airplane so go to DIY drones com which is the community that does this and you'll see lots of getting started guides etc but I would recommend that someone start with am a foam RC airplane they cost about sixty dollars one there's one that's called a pixel that way that we quite like and just learn to fly it and it's super easy and you'll crash a bunch of times but it's okay they bounce then once you're comfortable with that then get a this is the cheapest auto pilot you know out there it's called it's called autopilot do I get one of these and just put it in there and at that point you've got a drone now you can experiment with mission planning you can you know put a camera on board you can start to do fun stuff ok call ms DIY drones dot DIY drones calm calm uh Daniel I recognize full well that this is a thriller yes and that the conflict is for the sake of the story but you do spend a fair amount of time thinking about this or to come up with these books what are you concerned about or excited about in the realm of autonomous vehicles uh I am both excited and concerned I would say as far as my concern I in particular focus on again the kill decision that is giving drones autonomous drones the authority and the power to pull the trigger on a human target that that crossing that line is very worrisome we have not gone there yet we have not gone yet there yet officially I know there's a couple of systems out there now I think I've talked to you about them before their sniper systems but that that that features turned off right now so in the DMZ between north and south korea none on the Gaza Strip Gaza Strip those are sniper stations those are not flying drones but there is no technical impediment to this so I am glad that people are reluctant to make this this choice although I do know that with 50 other nations developing drones somebody's liable to do this and I'm concerned that we would cross that line very hastily because I think there is a a dangerous concentrating effect of giving that authority to machines because then suddenly you don't need other people's buy-in to have a war you just need some resources some money and you can conduct a very large scale secret war rather invisibly that concerns me in the context of a democracy that concerns me so that's really one of the concerns I had in writing this book now as far as the the hope I mean I think drones can do so much from a civilian point of view from environmental monitoring search and rescue I mean many many tons of uses and we'll find more all these people working on this so they're going to happen I just wanted to do a cautionary tale that was thrilling again that sort of exploded Daniel Suarez is the author of kill decision which is orderable now it's order one out now comes out July 19 really really fun book Chris Anderson is the editor-in-chief of wired and the founder of DIY drones or you can get your own make your own thank you guys for coming in it's been a great show mejor thanks everyone for watching reporters roundtable be back soon with another great episode Thank You Steven for producing we'll see you all later Oh