It's basically the FREE POINT square on the bingo card at this point. When someone builds a cool robot that they don't know what to do with, it's inevitably for SAR. I've worked on a couple of them myself.
Can't forget having to signal away from military. Accessible drone AI can be used to stop petty crime, man the borders, catch drug smuggling boats & ofc, kill people effectively. These uses are drenched in politics, so have to signal something more palatable.
Truly accessible drone automation software is instant unicorn status. It would've been acquired by Anduril or Dji before it saw the light of day.
We live in an interesting time where the 1st world's biggest problems (illegal immigration, drug smuggling, obesity, effective transportation, solving crimes, infinite energy) are already solved from a technical standpoint. But we artificially limit their use due to dystopian vibes.
Good! The "vibes" are real. We don't live in Star Trek, we live in Black Mirror. We dont have a world where Superman would exist, we would have Homelander.
The ability for an authority to have perfect knowledge of who is in every area of a city, and conversely to have instant access to where every person is, is terrifying.
At no point in human history has society been built on expecting perfect, uniform enforcement of laws and that has gone from "beyond wildest imagination" to technically doable in two generations.
Oddly, the example in the comic is an absolutely awful example of the phenomenon described in the caption. A robot that can induce targeted lightning strikes has obvious military applications. Screw search and rescue.
A lot of the claimed s&r applications are
really a thin cover for military gear.
I remember trying to mentor a hardware startup on an event, and we just couldn’t find the common language with the girl that was
pitching it. I just couldn’t see how the cases would justify the market.
Only later on I figured out that the cases were absurd, and all of them really a cover for military applications.
Finding survivors in a forest = finding partisans, is the most common one.
I wonder how hard this would be. As a joke, I put your comment into Claude and asked for an XKCD comic. Surprisingly, it generated (a very bad) SVG image:
I asked it to instead generate a comic in text form and got the following:
Title: "The XKCD Paradox"
Panel 1: A stick figure is typing on a computer. Above them is a thought bubble: "I bet there's an XKCD about how there's always a relevant XKCD."
Panel 2: The screen shows a Google search result. The stick figure exclaims, "Huh, there isn't one. That's weird."
Panel 3: We see the inside of a Google data center. Servers are labeled "XKCD Generator AI." An alarm is flashing with the text "Paradox detected!"
Panel 4: A stick figure resembling Randall Munroe is shown frantically drawing at a desk. A speech bubble reads, "Must... draw... comic... about... always... having... relevant... comic..."
Panel 5: Back to the original stick figure, now looking at a new XKCD comic on their screen. The comic is titled "Meta-Relevance" and shows a recursive image of stick figures looking at computers.
Panel 6: A wide shot shows both the stick figure and the Randall Munroe character simultaneously saying, "Whew, balance restored."
Footnote at the bottom of the comic: "Plot twist: This comic was generated by an AI trying to convince you it wasn't generated by an AI."
This version plays with the meta-concept of XKCD's relevance, the idea of paradoxes in AI, and adds a layer of self-referential humor typical of XKCD. It also touches on the theme of AI-generated content trying to prove it's not AI-generated, adding an extra layer of cleverness to the concept.
It'd be impossible to limit the use of drones to just recovery, some people would use them for tracking down the animals which is a horrible idea to allow.
Actually that is quite common in Germany, just for the completely opposite purpose - farmers use Mavic 2/3 Thermal drones to scout out for baby deer prior to letting a corn or grain harvester raze a field... because turns out, baby deer just freeze up when they are afraid of the machines and end up getting chopped up by the blades.
> * Find deer after they're shot. Right now you need to hire a blood hound and it takes hours
They tried this exact thing with the kentucky freeway shooter using both helicopter based FLIR system and IR camera equipped drones and failed. Eventually the dudes body was found by a group of ... as far as i can tell, wilderness youtubers working with a police search party.
I'm picturing bumper-to-bumper traffic on a highway with a cloud of drones overhead. Each person in their individual car using their individual drone to all report back the same thing: that everything is moving slowly because there are just too many cars on the road right now. With luck, the drones only crash into each other every once in a while, just like the cars below.
There was a recent story about a medivac helicopter not being able to land to help accident victims because someone had parked their drone over the wreck to check it out/get clicks.
I've worked on 2 (and also for SAR). Not many people working in that field still and there's very little open data.
Thermal is really good in the UK because the ground is rarely that warm. You can easily see a person hiding among rocks, for example. It's basically Cops. In equatorial Africa you can only use it at dawn/dusk (or overnight) because the ground is so hot.
If you google “thermal drone for hunting” you will find some YouTube videos about people solving the first problem.
Pest management is a heck of a good idea. The province of Alberta is officially rat free - if Alberta doesn’t have something like this I bet they would be interested. Especially if it could do double duty for wildlife surveys.
The problem is that night-vision-y technologies are heavily controlled and price inflated. Only few are willing to buy QCIF 30Hz cameras at $500 from AliExpress or from legitimate resellers at $2k.
Tardy add-on: after reading TfA this is not a case of cool robot becomes SARbot. This is a suite of specific tools meant to find people in the mountains. Come on y'all, you can't let me get away with middlebrow dismissal like that!!!
