Month: August 2018

My last blog entry, “Small aerial drones: The future of terrorism and crime?”, proved timely and prophetic, as just five days after I published it, an exploding drone was used in a failed assassination attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Here is the prediction I made:

‘[Weaponized] drones [are inevitable], and it won’t be long before they have super-empowered people who have terroristic or criminal intent. We’ll probably know when this dangerous new era has arrived when a drone is used in an attempted or successful assassination of an important person, like a world leader…’

While this lends chilling support to my more general belief that autonomous machines will be weaponized to highly destructive effect, I think it’s very important to go to pains pointing out how they could also PROTECT humans from such threats. For example, friendly drones could be used to attack and destroy hostile drones on the battlefield, and, by extension, to repel assassination attempts against important humans:
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22223/army-buys-small-suicide-drones-to-break-up-hostile-swarms-and-potentially-more

In the previous blog entry, I also described how human arsonists could use drones to set wildfires, and this threat could also be mitigated by house robots (which can be thought of as “drones” by another name). To explain why, let’s first realize that wildfires aren’t unstoppable forces that destroy everything in their paths. People living in fire-prone areas can actually do a great deal to cheaply fireproof their houses, as shown in this video:

Here’s a summary of the precautions:

• Plant trees and other vegetation in your yard that are fire-resistant and moisture-retaining.
• Within a 30-foot radius of your home’s exterior, only use inflammable mulch (if you use any at all); continuously remove potentially flammable biomass by mowing the grass, raking away dead leaves (be careful not to miss leaves under attached structures such as decks), and disposing of dead wood like fallen branches and rotting logs; and cut down all tree branches that are less than 6 feet above the ground.
• Cut down all tree branches that hang over your home’s roof.
• Regularly clean your gutters and remove any twigs, branches or other debris from your roof.
• Keep outbuildings (sheds), wood piles, other debris piles, and vehicles at least 50 feet away from your home.
• Store containers full of flammable liquids (Jerry cans full of gasoline) at least 30 feet from your home.
• Make sure your chimney has a spark arrestor so embers from your own furnace or heating stove don’t accidentally land on your own roof and set it alight (the devices are required by law in many places).
• Cover all attic vents, soffit vents, and areas below wooden decks with non-flammable mesh.
• Buy a ladder long enough to reach your roof and a garden hose that is long enough to reach any structure on your property.
• Have a water source within 1000 feet of your home (code requirements mean that few houses in the U.S. fall short of this suggestion).
• Remove flammable items from outside the home, like doormats, some types of patio furniture, and brooms.
• The next time you replace your house’s roof, use roofing that is fire-resistant. Standard asphalt shingles are fine.

Looking at the list, it’s striking how many of the prevention tips are just basic property upkeep practices that everyone should be doing anyway (e.g. – mow your lawn, rake the dead leaves…). At the risk of sounding judgmental, it makes me wonder how many people lose their homes to wildfire because they neglected to do simple yard work. It also makes clear that household robots could save thousands of houses from burning down each year by compensating for the indiscipline of their human owners.

When people think about the tasks house robots will do, preparing food, cleaning laundry, and vacuuming floors are usually at the top of the list (and in fact might be all they’ve ever envisioned). That will probably be the actual starting point, but it’s important to remember that ultimately, house robots will be able to do all the same things that humans do. As house robots get more capable over time, they’ll run out of the most obvious daily chores and will move on to also doing more obscure tasks and things they know have been on their owners’ minds for years, like calculating how much the old baseball card collection is worth, greasing the squeaky front door hinge, vacuuming the refrigerator’s coils, or evaluating the fire safety of the yard and house. Thus, through diligence and vigilance, house robots will spot and fix all kinds of household hazards, proactively saving human lives.

A possible “dark side” to this scenario comes in the form of legal or financial liability against humans who ignore the safety recommendations from their house robots and then suffer the consequences. (I touched on this in my blog post about Hurricane Harvey.) For example, what happens if your house robot offers to clean your gutters to lower the risk of fire, you deny it permission and instead order it to do other chores with its time, then your house actually burns down thanks to some drifting embers landing in your kindling-packed gutters, and the fire investigator downloads the robot’s logs and sees what you did? Are you responsible for the damages? Should you go to jail if someone died in the fire? Like so many dilemmas caused by the intersection of new technology and privacy, I think it will be settled in the courts someday.

Returning to the main topic, house robots could further reduce human and material losses from wildfires by staying at their houses and extinguishing flames on the property. This is not as silly as it sounds: most structures destroyed by wildfires aren’t set alight by huge curtains of flames and rendered to ash in minutes, instead they succumb to small fires started by drifting embers, which slowly grow to engulf the house. In normal circumstances, such fires would be noticed early and either put out by the homeowner or by responding firefighters, but they burn unhindered during wildfires since the homeowner has been ordered to evacuate. Australia’s wildfire strategy encourages citizens living in fire-prone areas to remain in their homes during such emergencies and to use garden hoses and tools to aggressively defend their yards and homes from flames. Fire departments provide free training to civilians yearly. The evidence suggests that it’s probably better than the American strategy of mass evacuations and total reliance on professional firefighters.

If we accept my argument that “ultimately, house robots will be able to do all the same things that humans do,” then they should someday be able to defend their houses from wildfires with garden hoses and rakes, just as humans already do in Australia, and they should be able to mitigate wildfire risks by keeping lawns mowed and gutters unclogged, just as humans do everywhere.

This leads to another point that the coming rise of autonomous robots and drones can be conceptualized as an increase in the number of human laborers, up to arbitrarily high levels (likewise, the rise of Artificial Intelligences can be though of as equivalent to a massive increase to the population of smart humans). We can scarcely imagine how the world will be transformed once every household has the robot equivalent of one, two, or ten full-time human laborers that work for free, fix themselves, and are capable of quickly downloading instructions for doing any physical task, though a useful guidepost is to consider the standard of living boost provided by cheap fossil fuels (it would take 204 human slaves pedaling on bicycle generators to make enough energy to support one Canadian’s energy consumption). For sure, it will make human lives more comfortable, safer, and will lead to more, useful work being done, including work that is currently uneconomical to do thanks to human labor shortages. Mowing lawns, cleaning gutters, and spraying water on small fires are just teeny, tiny slices of the pie.

Links

1. https://www.wunderground.com/prepare/wildfire
2. https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/02/26_staydefend.shtml
3. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-05-09/you-and-your-slaves/