Smithsonian.com

There are as many as 7,000 drones in service; apparently manufacturers are struggling to keep up with demand. Courtesy of Department of Defense.

Last spring, when he was still Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates told cadets at the Air Force Academy that they needed to “shed the nostalgia” for “air-to-air combat and strategic bombing.” Not that they were surprised, but they weren’t exactly tickled, either. Because in all the times they had watched “Top Gun,” not once did Tom Cruise turn into a “joystick pilot.”

It’s one of the not-so-affectionate terms they have for someone who remotely operates an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), otherwise known as a drone. That’s in the cards for more and more  pilot wannabes these days, now that drones have become the muscle in the war on terrorists.

There are now as many as 7,000 drones in service; apparently manufacturers are struggling to keep up with demand. Most are used for surveillance, but increasingly they’re the weapon of choice for killing suspected terrorists, and not just in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also in Somalia and Yemen.

This has raised all kinds of questions–from whether targeted killings from the sky, in any country we choose, are legitimate, to whether drones make war too antiseptic, to when do we start selling them to other countries. And once you begin to talk about where drone warfare is headed, things get a whole lot dicier.

It’s inevitable, say some experts, that drones and other military robots will become autonomous to the point where they’ll be making decisions in combat. What kind of decisions? A recent Washington Post article laid out a scenario in which drones search for a human target, make an identification based on facial-recognition software, then finish the job with a missile strike.

This is known as “lethal autonomy,” a concept that conjures up images of swarming Terminators without the accent. Not necessarily, argues Ronald Arkin, a scientist who has actually done a study for the Defense Department on whether robots can learn battlefield ethics. He thinks it will one day be possible to program machines to return fire at an appropriate level, minimize collateral damage, even recognize when someone wants to surrender.

Until then, we’re likely to see more robots controlled by fewer humans,  say a convoy of robot vehicles following a lead truck driven by a human, or a flock of aerial robots flying in tandem with manned fighters.

The Navy is taking the plunge, too.  It just ordered 28 helicopter drones that can take off and land on a ship.

Meanwhile, on the homefront

Drones are used for surveillance along the Mexican and Canadian borders, but you won’t see them anywhere else in the U.S. At least not yet.  But the Federal Aviation Administration, which has blocked commercial drones because they can’t sense other aircraft, may soon allow them in a few states on a trial basis.  And that could open the floodgates.

• Sky spies: Police departments are chomping at the bit to get eyes in the sky, although as Brookings Institution researcher Peter Singer puts it,  “That’s a Supreme Court case waiting to happen.”
• Counting cows: Two Montana universities will soon begin a trial project in which drones will be used to track cattle and analyze crops from above.
• Farmer optional: Last month an Iowa company unveiled a tractor that can roll across the fields without a driver.
• Revenge of the paparazzi: Celebrity photo services can’t wait for the day when they can send up drones to snap away at private parties of the stars. Let’s give it up for science.

The Bonus: Take a little sidetrip to DIY Drones, the website of amateur dronians, and watch a homemade robot get airborne.  The soundtrack is a hoot.

Related Article: Drones are Ready for Takeoff

Are you concerned about drone  abuse?  You know, way too many eyes in the sky?

Are these machines making us stupid? Image courtesy of Flickr user aranath

Once upon a time a man did something that made many parents happy. He invented a mobile app. Not  just any mobile app, but a special one that helped adults create bedtime stories that made kids feel their parents were wise and wonderful. And everyone lived happily, at least until the next morning.

This magical app, called “The Infinite Adventure Machine,” is the work of Frenchman David Benque, who figured that if he provided the basic components of any righteous adventure story—the hero leaves home, meets villain, gets tricked by villain, learns lessons about himself or herself, vanquishes villain, basks in hero worship—more parents would try to spin original tales .

This is a good thing, right, a shining example of how a machine can make us more creative? Perhaps. Or you could view Benque’s brainstorm through a darker filter—that it’s another case of machines doing the heavy lifting while humans fill in the blanks.

I know, how diabolical could a fairy tale app be? But it does touch on a worrisome quandary—the more technology does for us, the more we lose our edge.

Late last month ABC News did a report about “automation addiction,” citing a study concluding that automated flight systems and auto-pilot features on commercial aircraft have made pilots less capable of dealing with mechanical failures and emergencies. A few days before that, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how genetically modified crops have made farming so much easier that farmers aren’t nearly as diligent when it comes to battling pests. And Ari Schulman in The New Atlantis has pondered whether GPS, because it separates the acts of driving and navigating, is making us worse drivers.

Inside the shrinking bubble

In his provocative piece in The Atlantic a few years ago, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Nicholas Carr surmised that we’re moving toward a world where “intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured and optimized.” We’ll struggle more with abstract thought, he argued, and view ambiguity simply as something to be fixed. 

And now comes Eli Pariser, who says in his book The Filter Bubble that Google and Facebook are reflecting the world through us-colored glasses. He points out that most people don’t realize that little of what’s fed to us on the Web now is impartial; it’s usually what search engines or social networks assume we want, based on our past behavior. They interpret our interests and, in doing so, skew what they send our way. Together, says Pariser, we and the Web shape the ever-shrinking bubbles in which we live and learn.

In a TED talk earlier this year, Pariser bemoaned the shift from the human gatekeepers of old media to the algorithmic ones of today’s Web. “We really need the Internet to connect us all together, to introduce us to new ideas and new people,” he lamented.  “And it’s not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one.”

Bleak stuff. Of course, not everyone thinks technology is turning us into self-gazing mushheads. Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future, thinks we just need to work out a new division of labor with smart machines. And the key to that, she says, is realizing what we’re uniquely good at.

Predicts Gorbis: “Over the next decade…we’ll enter a new kind of partnership with these machines—one that will shine light on the unique comparative advantages of humans: thinking, creativity, spontaneity, adaptability and improvisation.”

Thanks, Marina, I needed that.

Bonus: Did you realize that almost 70 percent of the trading on Wall Street now is based on algorithms? Kevin Slavin lays out how algorithms, the math of machines, are reshaping the world.

So be honest, do you think the Web is making you a weaker thinker?

Solyndra offices, courtesy of Flickr user Monica's Dad

“Solyndra…

I once made a loan to Solyndra

And suddenly I found

How hideous a loan can be.”

–Sung to the melody of “Maria” from West Side Story

Okay, that’s not quite how Stephen Sondheim wrote it, but as company names go, Solyndra is a pretty sweet sound. Until a few weeks ago. Now it’s the dirtiest word in the clean energy business. It’s also a sure bet that Barack Obama doesn’t break into song when he thinks about it. On the last day of August, Solyndra declared bankruptcy, laid off 1,100 workers and walked away from a $535 million government loan.

A quick refresher: Solyndra was a California outfit that devised an innovative solar panel and the first renewable energy firm to land a big loan guarantee from Department of Energy as part of the 2009 stimulus package. President Obama hailed it as one of the companies “leading the way toward a brighter, more prosperous future.”

Instead, in the past few weeks we’ve seen congressional hearings—with another coming Friday—charges of scandal, countercharges of political hypocrisy and flurries of fact-checking and mythbusting.

A week ago there was another public event in Washington that kinda got lost amid the Solyndra swirl. Big-name CEOs—Bill Gates, General Electric’s Jeffrey Immelt, Xerox’ Ursula Burns, to name a few—said the federal government needs to continue investing in research to develop energy sources because most companies no longer are willing to sink money into ventures that may not pay off for years and years.

It’s a forward-thinking sentiment, but what we don’t know, and won’t for awhile, is whether it will survive the Solyndra stigma.

Clean breaks

That said, there’s still an unusual collection of big players placing bets on renewable energy.  Among them:

• The U.S. military: Last month the Marines invited 13 companies to a base in the California desert to pitch their ideas for solar products and energy efficiency on the battlefield. The Army, meanwhile, is encouraging private companies to build large solar energy projects on land owned by the military, with the hope of eventually cutting its energy costs. And while not funded by the military, another project called SolarStrong will use a $344 million federal loan guarantee to install solar panels on up to 160,000 rooftops at 124 military bases.
• Google: The sultan of search is still saying it hopes to one day make renewable energy cheaper than coal. Last spring it announced a $168 million investment in the giant Ivanpah solar thermal project in the Mojave Desert. A week later it promised to pump $100 million into the country’s largest wind farm, being built in Oregon. Google has even used its flair for analytics to figure out how to make the solar panels on its own buildings twice as efficient.
• Samsung: Early this year the South Korean high-tech giant committed to spending many boatloads of money—almost $7 billion—to build wind turbine and solar module manufacturing plants in Ontario, Canada.
• China: Big surprise, right? It now manufactures 40 percent of the solar panels produced in the world and had $48.9 billion in renewable energy investments last year—almost double the U.S. total. It also now has twice as much installed renewable energy capacity as the U.S. And Chinese companies keep looking for investment opportunities in America. Yesterday the Xinjiang Goldwind Science and Technology Company announced that it will spend $200 million to build a wind farm in Illinois.

A Mightier Wind

Wind power, meanwhile, has managed to stay out of the headlines. But recently there was news from Japan about a new kind of turbine that could be a game-changer. Called a wind lens, it encircles the turbine blades with a brim. Its inventor says it can generate two to three times more energy than the conventional model.

Bonus: Have you hugged an infographic today? Here’s your chance.

Walmart gets into the social media game. Courtesy of Flickr user Walmart stores.

A few days ago Toys “R” Us announced that the holiday shopping season has begun. Usually, I follow these things as closely as I do the Mayan calendar. But this year is different, because this year, deep within the strange and mysterious world of shopping, tectonic plates are shifting.

This is not just about everyone going Apple Store on us, with clerks toting nifty digital tablets and cash registers becoming icons of Christmas Past. This is about Walmart and its embrace of something that would seem to be distinctly unWalmartian—a concept known as the “social genome.”

The undertaking can be traced to last spring, when the retail giant purchased a Silicon Valley company called Kosmix for $300 million. Not many analysts knew what to make of the deal at the time. Kosmix was best known for developing a product that would track and try to make sense of the ridiculous amount of personal flotsam swirling around social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. Which didn’t appear to have much to do with low, low prices.

Except Kosmix’s founders, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, are veterans of Amazon.com, which has left Walmart in the dust when it comes to e-commerce. And evidently Walmart could look beyond the horizon and see the rise of the three-headed beast known as SoLoMo—social media, local retail and mobile phones.

Now Kosmix is called @WalmartLabs and its focus is figuring out how to inject the notion of “social genome”—what your words and interactions on social networks say about you—into the Walmart mindset.

Don’t expect anything too dramatic in the near term—probably refined search results and personalized recommendations on the Walmart website, based on what the company computers have mined from your social-media behavior. But in recent interviews, the brains behind @WalmartLabs have hinted at what may be coming.

• Using data from social-media interactions in the neighborhoods around Walmart stores to help determine how to stock them.
• Providing gift suggestions for your friends and family members based on what they’ve been talking about on Facebook and Twitter.
• Alerts from smartphone apps that flag you while you’re shopping in Walmart about products in sync with your social genome.

Another sign of where Walmart is headed came last week when it bought OneRiot, a company that has focused on real-time search and placing ads in mobile networks.

The edge @WalmartLabs will have over Amazon.com, insists Anand Rajaraman, is that the latter bases its recommendations on past purchases while his firm’s technology has the potential to be more up-to-date, using the latest tidbits gleaned from other sources. Say you raved on Twitter about a concert you saw last night. Or maybe one of your Facebook friends just “liked” a new smartphone. Both pieces of information would become part of your updated social genome, your profile of likes and dislikes. In the new shopping universe, it will all be part of the stew that’s you.

Oh, and if the thought of having Walmart in your head creeps you out, stay calm. You’d have to opt in.

Attention, shoppers!

Clearly, this shopping season could be a watershed. To wit:

• Handhelding: Lowe’s just bought 42,000 handheld devices which will allow its sales clerks to check inventory, pull up the company website and show how-to videos to customers. It’s playing catch-up to its chief competitor, Home Depot, which deployed 30,000 mobile devices last fall. Likewise Urban Outfitters is rolling out point-of-sale (POS) handhelds in time for the holidays.
• Shopping 101: Customers at Macy’s and Bloomingdales will be able to use computer tablets to do a little in-store research on cosmetics, shoes and jewelry.
• Virtual wallets: Soon Citi MasterCard holders will be able to use the Google Wallet app on a smartphone—instead of a credit card—to charge purchases.
• That’s in there?: If you can’t make sense of food labels, you’re not alone. But now there’s an iPhone app that deciphers them.  It’s called “Don’t eat that.”

Bonus: Think food shopping has to be boring? Au contraire.

What kind of smartphone app would you like to have to help you shop?

Apple accused Samsung of copying their tablet design. Courtesy of Frederico Gambarini / Newscom

Let’s talk patent law.

WAIT! I know your head’s telling you to flee and your heart’s telling you to flee, but hear me out. This is a story with trolls and $12 billion deals and even a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It starts with the passage of a law on Capitol Hill, which only adds to the fairy tale quality. Late last week  the Senate passed the America Invents Act, and when President Obama signs it, our patent laws will get their first significant reform in 60 years. Proponents say that by streamlining the process and making it harder for people to sue, more inventions would turn into more innovations, which would turn into—drum roll, please—more jobs.

Simply put, the law would give patent rights to the person who files for a patent first, not the person who claims to have first had the idea. And that, in theory at least, would result in more inventions actually getting to market.  An inventor who spends money to file has more motivation to create something than a businessperson who can sit on an idea and force cash settlements from people who come along later with similar ideas.

That’s where the trolls come in. In this world, trolls are companies that buy up a huge number of patents with the main purpose of using them to get settlements or licensing deals. Software patents tend to be particularly vague and squishy, which is why, in recent years, trolls have become the scourge of Silicon Valley. One Texas-based firm, for instance, has made a business of suing other companies in defense of patents it owns that broadly relate to Web interactions and online payments. To get the lowdown on software squeezes, listen to the recent “This American Life” program, “When Patents Attack!” If you don’t have an hour, here’s the transcript.

The new law should help discourage trolling, but it’s likely too late to stop what has become one of the more corrosive trends among tech companies—stockpiling patents in the event they have to wage war with competitors. Case in point: Last month Google agreed to pay $12.5 billion to purchase Motorola Mobility, with the main prize being the 17,000 patents Motorola owns.

That was in response to a deal made earlier this summer by a consortium led by  Microsoft, Apple and Blackberry maker Research in Motion. The group ponied up $4.5 billion to take over the 6,000 patents owned by the bankrupt telecommunications firm Nortel Networks. That comes to about $750,000 per patent, which is roughly four times the going rate for computer or software patents in recent years.

If you’re a corporate lawyer, this is beautiful thing. It loads up the company with legal grenades. But, as Steve Lohr recently asked in the New York Times, what does it do for innovation? Wouldn’t we be better off if trailblazers like Google were spending $12 billion on something more game-changing than courtroom firepower?

Oh, and 2001: A Space Odyssey? You’ll never guess how that fits into the story. Apple has been suing Samsung in courts all over the world, claiming that the Korean firm’s Galaxy tablet rips off the “unique and novel ornamental appearance” of the iPad. Last month, Samsung finally said enough was enough and countersued in a California court. It boldly claimed that the iPad was not such an original idea, pointing to this scene from the 1968 movie of two astronauts chowing down as they watch an interview with HAL the computer on little video tablets.

Bonus: While we wait for the courts to sort that one out, check out this CNET slideshow of other science fiction objects mimicked in real life.