WHY IS IT WATCHING YOU?

 

Unless you’re a terrorist mountain fighter or a human trafficker working the border of Mexico, this kind of technology probably isn’t watching you. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be soon.

At the moment, aerial observation in the civilian sphere is expensive and labor-intensive, requiring specialized pilots to operate short-endurance craft like helicopters. If someone wanted to keep an eye on you from the air it would be painfully obvious—what with the black helicopters hovering over your house, changing shifts every three hours or so.

Drone aircraft render aerial observation quiet, cheap, and easy. Pilots can work longer shifts and the aircraft need not land to switch crews. A Predator with no weapons can stay in the air for nearly thirty hours, circling miles over you with its military-grade sensor package sending high-fidelity infrared pictures of you in the bath or mowing the lawn back to base.

The current generation of ground-based robots would, like the black helicopters, be a little obvious. Yes, they could use their manipulator arms to hide behind a newspaper, but you would still notice the midget-sized newspaper enthusiast with tank treads trailing you down the street. That’s why DARPA is busy developing things like iRobot’s Chembot—a flexible, semiliquid robot that will someday slither along the ground, through crevices, and up walls like a giant amoeba. Also under development are robots small and cheap enough to be considered disposable—hand-sized fleets of dragonfly-shaped UAVs or pocket-sized ground vehicles armed with the same powerful sensor systems as their larger cousins.

As robots become more autonomous, large-scale deployment will become more feasible. It may be that, as in many other aspects of their lives, people volunteer to be watched by little corporate robots. They will offer up their privacy in exchange for coupons or loyalty discounts. Just as when your friends volunteer their information online they also sacrifice yours, you will be caught in the crossfire of market research perpetrated by smart, palm-sized machines.

When the police begin purchasing older Predators, look to the skies. They will circle our cities constantly, their powerful eyes scanning the ground for any sign of criminal behavior. But you, too, will fall under their gaze. One more sliver of your privacy will be gone, painlessly excised in the name of public safety.