Weapons on planes are everyday normality. We can’t ban them all.

I noted earlier that you can make a pretty dangerous Gauss rifle using a few easily available and legal components, and you could make a 3D-printed jig to arrange them for maximum effect. So I suggested that maybe magnets should be banned too.

(Incidentally, the toy ones you see on YouTube etc. typically just use a few magnets and some regular steel balls. Using large Nd magnets throughout with the positions and polarities optimally set would make it much more powerful). 

Now I learn that a US senator (Leland Yee of San Francisco), HT Dave Evans for the link http://t.co/REt2o9nF4t, wants 3D printers to be regulated somehow, in case they are used to make guns. That won’t reduce violence if you can easily acquire or make lethal weapons that are perfectly legal without one. On the ground, even highly lethal kitchen knives and many sharp tools aren’t licensed. Even narrowing it down to planes, there is quite a long list of potentially dangerous things you are still very welcome to take on board and are totally legal, some of which would be very hard to ban, so perhaps we should concentrate more on defence and catching those who wish us harm.

Here are some perfectly legal weapons that people carry frequently with many perfectly benign uses:

Your fingers. Fingernails particularly can inflict pain and give a deep scratch, but some people can blind or even kill others with their bare hands;

Sharp pencils or pencils and a sharpener; pens are harder still and can be pretty sharp too;

Hard plastic drink stirrers, 15cm long, that can be sharpened using a pencil sharpener; they often give you these on the flight so you don’t even have to bring them; hard plastics can be almost as dangerous as metals, so it is hard to see why nail files are banned and drinks stirrers and plastic knives aren’t;

CDs or DVDs, which can be easily broken to make sharp blades; I met a Swedish ex-captain once who said he always took one on board in his jacket pocket, just in case he needed to tackle a terrorist.

Your glasses. You can even take extra pairs if the ones you’re wearing are needed for you to see properly. Nobody checks the lenses to make sure the glass isn’t etched for custom breaking patterns, or whether the lenses can be popped out, with razor-sharp edges. They also don’t check that the ends of the arms don’t slide off. I’m sure Q could do a lot with a pair of glasses.

Rubber bands, can be used to make catapults or power other projectile weapons, and many can be combined to scale up the force;

Paperclips, some of which are pretty large and thick wire;

Nylon cord, which can be used dangerously in many ways. Nylon paracord can support half a ton but be woven into nice little bracelets, or shoelaces for that matter. Thin nylon cord is an excellent cutting tool.

Plastic zip ties (cable ties), the longer ones especially can be lethally used.

Plastic bags too can be used lethally.

All of these are perfectly legal but can be dangerous in the wrong hands. I am sure you can think of many others.

Amusingly, given the Senator’s proposed legislation, you could currently probably take on board a compact 3d printer to print any sharps you want, or a Liberator if you have one of the templates, and I rather expect many terrorist groups have a copy – and sometimes business class seats helpfully have an electrical power supply. I expect you might draw attention if you used one though.

There are lots of ways of storing energy to be released suddenly, a key requirement in many weapons. Springs are pretty good at that job. Many devices we use everyday like staple guns rely on springs that are compressed and then suddenly release all their force and energy when the mechanism passes a trigger point. Springs are allowed on board. It is very easy to design weapons based on accumulating potential energy across many springs that can then all simultaneously release them. If I can dream some up easily, so can a criminal. It’s also easy to invent mechanisms for self assembly of projectiles during flight, so parts of a projectile can be separately accelerated.

Banned devices that you could smuggle through detectors are also numerous.  High pressure gas reservoirs could easily be made using plastics or resins and could be used for a wide variety of pneumatic projectile weapons and contact or impact based stun weapons. Again, precision release mechanism could be designed for 3D printing at home, but a 3D printer isn’t essential, there are lots of ways of solving the engineering problems.

I don’t see how regulating printers would make us safer. After hundreds of thousands of years, we ought to know by now that if someone is intent on harming someone else, there is a huge variety of  ways of doing so, using objects or tools that are essential in everyday life and some that don’t need any tools at all, just trained hands.

Technology comes and goes, but nutters, criminals, terrorists and fanatics are here to stay. Only the innocent suffer the inconvenience of following the rules. It’s surely better to make less vulnerable systems.

3D printable guns are here to stay, but we need to ban magnets from flights too.

It’s interesting watching new technologies emerge. Someone has a bright idea, it gets hyped a bit, then someone counter-hypes a nightmare scenario and everyone panics. Then experts queue up to say why it can’t be done, then someone does it, then more panic, then knee-jerk legislation, then eventually the technology becomes part of everyday life.

I was once dismissed by our best radio experts when I suggested making cellphone masts like the ones you see on every high building today. I recall being taught that you couldn’t possibly ever get more than 19.2kbits/s down a phone line. I got heavily marked down in an appraisal for my obvious stupidity suggesting that mobile phones could include video cameras. I am well used to being told something is impossible, but if I can see how to make it work, I don’t care, I believe it anyway. My personal mantra is ‘just occasionally, everyone else IS wrong’. I am an engineer. Some engineers might not know how to do something, but others sometimes can.

When the printable gun was suggested (not by me this time!) I accepted it as an inevitable part of the future immediately. I then listened as experts argued that it could never survive the forces. But guess what? A gun doesn’t have to survive. It just needs to work once, then you use a fresh one. The first prototypes only worked for a few bullets before breaking. The Liberator was made to work just once. Missiles are like that. They fire once, only once. So you bring a few to the battle.

The recently uploaded blueprint for the Liberator printable gun has been taken offline after 100,000 copies were downloaded, so it will be about as hard to find as embarrassing pictures of any celebrity. There will be innovations, refinements, improvements, then we will see them in use by hobbyists and criminals alike.

But there are loads of ways to skin a cat, allegedly. A gun’s job is to quickly accelerate a small mass up to a high speed in a short distance. Using explosives in a bullet held in a printable lump of plastic clearly does the job on a one-shot basis, but you still need a bullet and they don’t sell them in Tesco’s. So why do it that way?

A Gauss Rifle is a science toy that can fire a ball-bearing across your living room. You can make one in 5 minutes using nothing more than sticky tape, a ruler and some neodymium magnets. Here’s a nice example of the toy version using simple steel balls:

http://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/magnets/gauss.html

The concept is very well known, though a bit harder to Google now because so many computer games have used the same name for imaginary weapons. In an easily adapted version, where the steel balls are replaced by neodymium magnets held in place in alternately attracting and repelling polarities, when the first magnet is released, it is pulled by strong magnetic force to the second one, hitting it quite fast, and conveying all that energy to the next stage magnet, which is then pushed away from the one repelling it towards the one attracting it, so accumulating lots of energy. The energy accumulates over several stages, optimally harnessing the full repulsive and attractive forces available from the strong magnets. Too many stages result in the magnets shattering, but with care, four stages with simple steel balls can be used reasonably safely as a toy.

Some sites explain that if you position the magnets accurately with the poles oriented right, you can get it to make a small hole in a wall. I imagine you could design and print a gauss rifle jig with very high precision, far better than you could do with tape and your fingers, that would hold the magnets in the right locations and polarity orientations.  Then just put your magnets in and it is ready. Neodymium magnets are easily available in various sizes at low cost and the energy of the final ball is several times as high as the first one. With the larger magnets, the magnetic forces are extremely high so the energy accumulated would also be high. A sharp plastic dart housing the last ball would make quite a dangerous device. A Gauss rifle might lack the force of a conventional gun, but it could still be quite powerful. If I was in charge of airport security, I’d already be banning magnets from flights.

I really don’t see how you could stop someone making this sort of thing, or plastic crossbows or fancy plastic jigs with stored energy in springs that can be primed in an aircraft toilet that fire things in imaginative ways. There are zillions of ways to accelerate something, some of which can be done in cascades that only generate tolerable forces at any particular point so could easily work with printable materials. The current focus on firearms misses the point. You don’t have to transfer all the energy to a projectile in one short high pressure burst, you can accumulate it in stages. Focusing security controls on explosives-based systems will leave us vulnerable.

3D printable weapons are here to stay, but for criminals and terrorists, bullets with explosives in might soon be obsolete.

Killing machines

There is rising concern about machines such as drones and battlefield robots that could soon be given the decision on whether to kill someone. Since I wrote this and first posted it a couple of weeks ago, the UN has put out their thoughts as the DM writes today:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2318713/U-N-report-warns-killer-robots-power-destroy-human-life.html 

At the moment, drones and robots are essentially just remote controlled devices and a human makes the important decisions. In the sense that a human uses them to dispense death from a distance, they aren’t all that different from a spear or a rifle apart from scale of destruction and the distance from which death can be dealt. Without consciousness, a missile is no different from a spear or bullet, nor is a remote controlled machine that it is launched from. It is the act of hitting the fire button that is most significant, but proximity is important too. If an operator is thousands of miles away and isn’t physically threatened, or perhaps has never even met people from the target population, other ethical issues start emerging. But those are ethical issues for the people, not the machine.

Adding artificial intelligence to let a machine to decide whether a human is to be killed or not isn’t difficult per se. If you don’t care about killing innocent people, it is pretty easy. It is only made difficult because civilised countries value human lives, and because they distinguish between combatants and civilians.

Personally, I don’t fully understand the distinction between combatants and soldiers. In wars, often combatants have no real choice but to fight or are conscripted, and they are usually told what to do, often by civilian politicians hiding in far away bunkers, with strong penalties for disobeying. If a country goes to war, on the basis of a democratic mandate, then surely everyone in the electorate is guilty, even pacifists, who accept the benefits of living in the host country but would prefer to avoid the costs. Children are the only innocents.

In my analysis, soldiers in a democratic country are public sector employees like any other, just doing a job on behalf of the electorate. But that depends to some degree on them keeping their personal integrity and human judgement. The many military who take pride in following orders could be thought of as being dehumanised and reduced to killing machines. Many would actually be proud to be thought of as killing machines. A soldier like that, who merely follow orders, deliberately abdicates human responsibility. Having access to the capability for good judgement, but refusing to use it, they reduce themselves to a lower moral level than a drone. At least a drone doesn’t know what it is doing.

On the other hand, disobeying a direct order may save soothe issues of conscience but invoke huge personal costs, anything from shaming and peer disapproval to execution. Balancing that is a personal matter, but it is the act of balancing it that is important, not necessarily the outcome. Giving some thought to the matter and wrestling at least a bit with conscience before doing it makes all the difference. That is something a drone can’t yet do.

So even at the start, the difference between a drone and at least some soldiers is not always as big as we might want it to be, for other soldiers it is huge. A killing machine is competing against a grey scale of judgement and morality, not a black and white equation. In those circumstances, in a military that highly values following orders, human judgement is already no longer an essential requirement at the front line. In that case, the leaders might set the drones into combat with a defined objective, the human decision already taken by them, the local judgement of who or what to kill assigned to adaptive AI, algorithms and sensor readings. For a military such as that, drones are no different to soldiers who do what they’re told.

However, if the distinction between combatant and civilian is required, then someone has to decide the relative value of different classes of lives. Then they either have to teach it to the machines so they can make the decision locally, or the costs of potential collateral damage from just killing anyone can be put into the equations at head office. Or thirdly, and most likely in practice, a compromise can be found where some judgement is made in advance and some locally. Finally, it is even possible for killing machines to make decisions on some easier cases and refer difficult ones to remote operators.

We live in an electronic age, with face recognition, friend or foe electronic ID, web searches, social networks, location and diaries, mobile phone signals and lots of other clues that might give some knowledge of a target and potential casualties. How important is it to kill or protect this particular individual or group, or take that particular objective? How many innocent lives are acceptable cost, and from which groups – how many babies, kids, adults, old people? Should physical attractiveness or the victim’s professions be considered? What about race or religion, or nationality, or sexuality, or anything else that could possibly be found out about the target before killing them? How much should people’s personal value be considered, or should everyone be treated equal at point of potential death? These are tough questions, but the means of getting hold of the date are improving fast and we will be forced to answer them. By the time truly intelligent drones will be capable of making human-like decisions, they may well know who they are killing.

In some ways this far future with a smart or even conscious drone or robot making informed decisions before killing people isn’t as scary as the time between now and then. Terminator and Robocop may be nightmare scenarios, but at least in those there is clarity of which one is the enemy. Machines don’t yet have anywhere near that capability. However, if an objective is considered valuable, military leaders could already set a machine to kill people even when there is little certainty about the role or identity of the victims. They may put in some algorithms and crude AI to improve performance or reduce errors, but the algorithmic uncertainty and callous uncaring dispatch of potentially innocent people is very worrying.

Increasing desperation could be expected to lower barriers to use. So could a lower regard for the value of human life, and often in tribal conflicts people don’t consider the lives of the opposition to have a very high value. This is especially true in terrorism, where the objective is often to kill innocent people. It might not matter that the drone doesn’t know who it is killing, as long as it might be killing the right target as part of the mix. I think it is reasonable to expect a lot of battlefield use and certainly terrorist use of semi-smart robots and drones that kill relatively indiscriminatingly. Even when truly smart machines arrive, they might be set to malicious goals.

Then there is the possibility of rogue drones and robots. The Terminator/Robocop scenario. If machines are allowed to make their own decisions and then to kill, can we be certain that the safeguards are in place that they can always be safely deactivated? Could they be hacked? Hijacked? Sabotaged by having their fail-safes and shut-offs deactivated? Have their ‘minds’ corrupted? As an engineer, I’d say these are realistic concerns.

All in all, it is a good thing that concern is rising and we are seeing more debate. It is late, but not too late, to make good progress to limit and control the future damage killing machines might do. Not just directly in loss of innocent life, but to our fundamental humanity as armies get increasingly used to delegating responsibility to machines to deal with a remote dehumanised threat. Drones and robots are not the end of warfare technology, there are far scarier things coming later. It is time to get a grip before it is too late.

When people fought with sticks and stones, at least they were personally involved. We must never allow personal involvement to disappear from the act of killing someone.

Towards the singularity

This piece was originally written a year ago for ACM proceedings but got lost in their review process, so rather than waste it, here it is before it passes its use-by date. A recent powerpoint presentation highlighting the potential of the singularity but setting that against some of the dangers that we may instead be dragged into a dark age is here.

http://futurizon.com/articles/singularitydarkage.pdf

Anyway, here is my article:

Towards the singularity

About 25 years ago, inspired by the invention of field programmable gate arrays, many engineers recognised that in principle these could be used as the basis of an evolving machine, using a biomimetic approach.  Starting with an array of FPGA-like machines and evolutionary algorithms, clearly the hardware would be able to evolve to its physical limits. It wasn’t long after that before the first simple evolving software and then hardware was achieved. The early 90s saw an explosion in evolutionary development, with evolutionary software as the prime focus due to low range of reconfigurable circuitry. While evolutionary computing got bogged down in biomimetic integrity and genetic algorithms, those of us engineers with futurist mindsets looked towards the far end of the development wedge. We saw that positive feedback across the wider science and technology R&D system would cause development eventually to race ahead of Moore’s Law, as smarter machines enabled faster development and faster discovery in every field. What we now call the singularity is a simple extrapolation of ongoing positive feedback in technology development.

We know that evolution works in nature, and have already proved that we don’t have to fully understand stuff to develop it, just point it in vaguely the right direction and let it evolve and find its own way. Whether via evolution or design, computers will eventually surpass human intelligence, amplify positive feedback still further, and that will lead to the extremely rapid invention with the familiar almost vertical development curve. That is inevitable. Even without evolutionary computing, the singularity will still come, but will be slower, since it would be limited by human knowledge, squandering the potential contribution of machine assistance.

The singularity initially is appealing, inspiring visions of potential technotopia, and the potential would be real if mankind was ready to deal with it, but problems are starting to show through and realisation of them and the consequential actions will slow it down.

Firstly, invention is only the first stage of development, and there are limits on how fast physical development can take place, even with all the self-replicating machines we may expect, however smart they get. So the way the singularity manifests itself at best will be as a rapidly growing gap between creativity and realisation. It will be as if advanced ETs had landed and given us a manual on how to build all their technology. But we still wouldn’t be able to have it all instantly and would have to decide on a priority list.

This isn’t just a theoretical problem. We already have a large creativity gap (i.e., the pile of spare inventions that have been thought up but haven’t yet been developed) – and that indicates that the impact of the singularity will be restricted. If you go to the R&D department of any large technology company, you will find a huge pool of ideas backed by a relatively small pot of funding. Most engineers will be familiar with the frustration of brainstorms where most of the ideas they scribble on post-its get thrown away. Ideas are two a penny even today, but only so many can be developed. If the singularity is to have any real economic significance, it needs to be about more than just quantity of ideas. Even an infinite creativity gap isn’t valuable per se; it needs to be about quality and purpose too. By focusing on the near vertical invention curve, perhaps we miss the point. If you are offered anything you want this afternoon, you still need to ask yourself what it is you want, and that introduces another hurdle to jump over. Clearly, while humans control the allocation of resources and permission to build things, we will hold back development to our human imagination and cultural limits. The singularity could theoretically arrive around 2025, but the practical implications of it will arrive much more slowly.

Secondly, the decisions on what to build depend on our economic culture. In a pure capitalist system, if a new technology allows cheap automation, fewer employees will be needed, and wealth moves towards capital owners. While new jobs are created sufficient quickly, this is just a retraining issue and the economy as a whole can grow, but when automation exceeds the rate at which new jobs can be created, it becomes a problem. If too few people have enough money to buy output, demand falls and the economy spirals downwards. Consequently, many people are already looking at new designs for capitalism to make it economically and socially sustainable (environmentally sustainability is moving quickly towards third place). We don’t have to wait for the singularity; again, signs of this downward spiral are already starting to appear.

In a world eager for the next pad, it is easy to be enthused about future technology if your future income is secure. As technology catches up with human intelligence and even people in well-paid professional jobs start to be replaced, it is easy also to imagine a backlash building, especially if new technologies are used to increase government control of our lives, as they often are. The potential backlash would build until politicians are forced to deal with it, one way or another. Capitalism can’t properly exploit the singularity in its current form, and will have to be redesigned. But how? It will take time to decide.

Thirdly, the singularity presents many existential threats and thereby another reason to force powerful restrictions on scope and rate of development. These could and may well force very different development paths and delay it very significantly, perhaps by decades. It is likely that the military will want to push for powerful new weapons, but a singularity-based arms race could tip the balance rapidly and greatly increase temptation for first strike action. Laser and plasma rifles already exist, at least in experimental form (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Star). Terawatt solar wind deflector ray-guns and zombie viruses are within the scope of the 2025 singularity technology (http://futurizon.com/articles/madscientists.pdf). Many more can be listed. Starting with only six known ways that life on earth could be wiped out back in 2000 (nearby supernova, major solar storm, asteroid or comet strike, GM accident, or global nuclear war), my own studies suggest that the number increases exponentially to over 100 by 2050. If each optimistically has a 1 in 10,000 chance of occurring in a single year by accident or deliberate action, the probability of extinction rises to 1% per annum and continues to grow exponentially. Do the sums and you end up with an ETA for extinction of 2085, hardly the technotopian future promised by the singularity up front. To avoid such a result, we will be forced to intervene. But how? At the very least we need more time.

Fourthly, we are becoming more and more vulnerable. In a world containing many people who wish to harm us, our dependence on highly complex technology systems is already a significant known military risk, as well as social and economic. Asymmetry is the key word here. But it isn’t just deliberate harm we need to worry about. Recently, solar storms brought our dependency problem into sharp focus. We no longer have the old systems as a backup, nor even people who knew how they worked. As we engineer in ever more complexity and systemic interdependence, we surely build our prosperity on sand. A failure of any part of our critical systems for any reason could quickly lead to cascade failures, and riots for the last bottles of water. Before we rush to grab hold of the singularity, we need first to get a hold of failsafe design and the practice of keeping a backup, not just for our computers but for our whole life support system. I don’t worry about complexity or whether I understand how the system works. I worry about how I and my family will manage when it fails.  But complexity isn’t the only vulnerability.

One of the well-known scenarios that results from all of this is the Terminator scenario, and I am not convinced at all that we have solved this problem yet. (For the uninitiated, the Terminator Scenario is thus called after the Terminator series of film. In this series, the US military develops a powerful satellite-based computer system called Skynet to control their missiles so that they could respond faster to a threat, but the computer system achieves consciousness, decides that humans are actually the threat, and sets about wiping out humanity).  Machines already do most of the design work on the next generation machines. Human engineers make some of the key decisions and tell the machines what to design, mostly, but the proportion of human input is falling. Particularly when we use evolutionary design, the human understanding of the technology that results can be very low indeed. Imagine a scenario where a few smart students plan a prank, and use an off-the-net virus pack to infect millions of machines with an algorithm. The algorithm is very crude but attempts to achieve elements of consciousness or thinking, just for fun, to see what happens, to see how far they can get. Some of the students are in IT, some from bio-tech and nano-tech, some from neuroscience, and a few others. The algorithms are crude but designed as well as they can, using all their latest knowledge of how the neural networks in the brain work. And so they spawn them, on a million machines, each with 1% of the raw processing power of the human brain. And they use evolution in that huge aggregated processing pot to experiment with variants of the algorithm. Over time, the system accumulates a toolbox of different algorithms and circuits that achieve a wide variety of neural functions to some degree to achieve key components of mind or consciousness or awareness. By experimenting with automatically linking these together in many combinations, the students hope to achieve larger and larger degrees of AI. And they might as well harness that AI to refine the evolutionary algorithms too, and make the virus better at infecting even more machines and adapting better, and hiding better. All automatically. Can we be sure that such a prank would always fail? Or could it work, and achieve consciousness in a distributed machine, just like the Skynet from Terminator?

But if you go to singularity timeframes, there are even further dangers. Some people already belong to hobbyist genetic engineering groups or play with 3d printing – and some of those mess with printing electronics too. Circuits can harvest energy from changes in the environment or passing radio waves and so won’t necessarily need batteries. People will try to push the boundaries via those routes too and 2025 is a good way off so lots of progress will occur in all these fields by then. With feedback among all these bio-nano-info-cogno technologies, it is not hard to imagine how students or a terrorist group could make good progress even without proper funding, even while staying anonymous, based anywhere. As hidden net-based programs become smarter and more autonomous, they could notionally get to the point where they interact with genetic assemblers and printers and design biological and electronic devices in a feedback loop. When thinking of a grey goo scenario, forget little micro-mechanical machines. Think bacteria, think GM assemblers, think AI-led environmental adaptation and think of a distributed organism that is part in the machine world and part in the ecosystem. Much of that is achievable long before we get the singularity and the rest very soon after. Transhumanists forget that transbacteria may not allow them to proceed. Smart bacteria may link together into super-smart organisms that think of humans merely as competition for resources. We could be building the engines of our own destruction, even while aiming for technotopia.

I am no doom monger, and I always manage to convince myself that we will muddle through. Sure, we’ll do it badly and get half of the benefit at twice the price and twice the mess. We already know the problems above. They are being addressed in organisations such as the Lifeboat Foundation, there are often conferences or symposia along singularity lines. Government is even starting to react. Studies covering NBIC (nano, bio, info, cogno) convergence issues were initiated by the EU before 2000. The US and Canadian governments have bother run conferences debating ways that mad scientists could use future technologies to cause great harm. So the problems won’t come unexpectedly. Where do we end up?

The problems above are possibilities and even likely if we take the default path of ongoing unfettered development. Positive feedback would deliver on some of the promises, and some of the problems would appear along the way. In the real world, it won’t happen like that. Social and political feedback loops, educated by many ongoing debates such as this symposium, will ensure that regulation is implemented that slows it down, restricting what can legally be done, what can be developed, what can be bought, and by whom. It has to. What we can also be sure of is that much of the regulation will be reactive and badly thought out. So it will be a mess, we will barely muddle through, but muddle through we will. What we can hope for is that it might be a relatively safe mess and the reward at the end is worth it. But let’s start by acknowledging that what we call the singularity is only a theoretical concept, and it can’t be achieved in its pure form. The real world development path will surely be very different, constrained and forced down different paths by physical, cultural and economic limits and forced to comply with a wide range of legal precautions.

UK crime and policing

The news that the level of reported crime in the UK has fallen over the last decade or two is the subject of much debate.  Is it because crime has fallen, or because less is being reported? If crime has actually fallen, is that because the police are doing a better job or some other reason? Will crime fall or rise in the future?

My view is that our police are grossly overpaid (high salaries, huge pensions), often corrupt (by admission of chief inspectors), politically biased (plebgate, London riots) and self serving, lazy, inefficient, and generally a waste of money, and I don’t for a minute believe they deserve any credit for falling crime.

I think the crime figures are the sum of many components, none of which show the police in a good light. Let’s unpick that.

Let’s start from the generous standpoint that recorded crime may be falling – generous because even that assumes that they haven’t put too much political spin on the figures. I’d personally expect the police to spin it, but let’s ignore that for now.

Recorded crime isn’t a simple count of crimes committed, nor even those that people tell the police about.

Some crimes don’t even get as far as being reported of course. If confidence in the police is low, as it is, then people may think there is little point in wasting their time (and money, since you usually have to pay for the call now) in doing so. Reporting a crime often means spending ages giving loads of details, knowing absolutely nothing will happen other than, at best, that the crime is recorded. It is common perception based on everyday experience that police will often say there isn’t much they can do about x,y or z, so there is very little incentive to report many crimes. In the case of significant theft or vandalism someone might need a crime number to claim on insurance, but otherwise, if there is no hope that the police will find the criminal and then bother to prosecute them, many people won’t bother. So it is a safe assumption that a lot of crimes don’t even get as far as being mentioned to a police officer. I have seen many that I haven’t bothered to report, for exactly those reasons. So have you.

Once a crime does get mentioned to the police, it still has to jump over some more hurdles to actually make it into the official books.  From personal experience, I know some cases fall at those hurdles too. As well as the person telling the police, the person has to persuade the police to do something about it and demand that it is recorded. Since police want to look good, they resist doing that and will make excuses for not recording it officially. The police may also try to persuade the crime reporter to let them mark a case as solved even when it hasn’t been. They may also just sideline a case and hope it is forgotten about. So, some reported offences don’t make it onto the books and some that do are inaccurately marked as solved.

This means that crime levels exceed recorded crime levels. No big surprise there. But if that has been the case for many years, as it has, and recorded crime levels have fallen, that would still indicate a fall in crime levels. But that still doesn’t make the police look good.

Technology improvement alone would be expected to give a very significant reduction in crime level. Someone is less likely to commit a car theft since it is harder to do so now. They are less likely to murder or rape someone if they know that it is almost impossible to avoid leaving DNA evidence all over the place. They are less likely to shoplift or mug someone if they are aware of zillions of surveillance cameras that will record the act. Improving technology has certainly reduced crime.

A further reduction in crime level is expected due to changes in insurance. If your insurance policies demand that you have a car immobiliser and a burglar alarm, and lock your doors and windows with high quality locks, as they probably do, then that will reduce both home and car crime.

Another reduction is actually due to lack of confidence in the police. If you believe for whatever reasons that the police won’t protect you and your property, you will probably take more care of it yourself. The police try hard to encourage such thinking because it saves them effort. So they tell people not to attract crime by using expensive phones or wearing expensive jewellery or dressing in short skirts. Few people have so little common sense that they need such advice from the police, and lack of confidence in police protection is hardly something they can brag about.

More controversially, still further reduction has been linked recently to the drop in lead exposure via petrol. This is hypothesised to have reduced violent tendencies a little. By similar argument, increasing feminisation of men due to endocrine disrupters in the environment may also have played a part.

So, if the police can’t claim credit for a drop in crime, what effect do they have?

The police have managed to establish a strong reputation for handing out repeat cautions to those repeat criminals they can be bothered to catch, and making excuses why the rest are just too hard to track down, yet cracking down hard on easy-to-spot first offenders on political correctness or minor traffic offences. In short, they have created something of an inverted prison, where generally law-abiding people live expecting harsh penalties for doing anything slightly naughty, so that they can show high clear-up stats, while hardened criminals can expect to be let off with a slight slap of the wrist. Meanwhile, recent confessions from police chiefs indicate astonishingly high levels of corruption in every force. It looks convincingly as if police are all too often on the wrong side of the law. One law for them and one for us is the consistent picture. Reality stands in stark contrast with the dedication shown in TV police dramas. A bit like the NHS then.

What of the future? Technology will continue to make it easier to look after your own stuff and prevent it being used by a thief. It will make it easier to spot and identify criminals and collect evidence. Insurance will make it more difficult to avoid using such technology. Lack of confidence in the police will continue to grow, so people will take even more on themselves to avoid crime. The police will become even more worthless, even more of a force of state oppression and political correctness and even more of a criminal’s friend.

Meanwhile, as technology makes physical crime harder, more criminals have moved online. Technology has kept up to some degree, with the online security companies taking the protector role, not the police. The police influence here is to demand every more surveillance, less privacy and more restriction on online activity, but no actual help at all. Again they seek to create oppression in place of protection.

Crime will continue to fall, but the police will deserve even less credit. If we didn’t already have the police, we might have to invent something,  but it would bear little resemblance to what we have now.

Could graphene foam be a future Helium substitute?

I just did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to work out what size of sphere containing a vacuum would give the same average density as helium at room temperature, if the sphere is made of graphene, the new one-size-does-everthing-you-can-imagine wonder material.

Why? Well, the Yanks have just prototyped a big airship and it uses helium for buoyancy. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2257201/The-astonishing-Aeroscraft–new-type-rigid-airship-thats-set-revolutionise-haulage-tourism–warfare.html

Helium weighs 0.164kg per cubic metre. Graphene sheet weighs only 0.77mg per square metre. Mind you, the data source was Wikipedia so don’t start a business based on this without checking! If you could make a sphere out of a single layer of graphene, and have a vacuum inside (graphene is allegedly impervious to gas) it would become less dense than helium at sizes above 0.014mm. Wow! That’s very small. I expected ping pong ball sizes when I started and knew that would never work because large thin spheres would be likely to collapse. 14 micron spheres are too small to see with the naked eye, not much bigger than skin cells, maybe they would work OK.

Confession time now. I have no idea whether a single layer of graphene is absolutely impervious to gas, it says so on some websites but it says a lot of things on some websites that are total nonsense.

The obvious downside even if it could work is that graphene is still very expensive, but everything is when is starts off. Imagine how much you could sell a plastic cup for to an Egyptian Pharaoh.

Helium is an endangered resource. We use it for party balloons and then it goes into the atmosphere and from there leaks into space. It is hard to replace, at least for the next few decades. If we could use common elements like carbon as a substitute that would be good news. Getting the cost of production down is just engineering and people are good at that when there is an incentive.

So in the future, maybe we could fill party balloons and blimps with graphene foam. You could make huge airships happily with it, that don’t need helium of hydrogen. 

Tiny particles that size readily behave as a fluid and can easily be pumped. You could make lighter-than-air building materials for ultra-tall skyscrapers, launch platforms, floating Avatar-style sky islands and so on.

You could also make small clusters of them to carry tiny payloads for espionage or terrorism. Floating invisibly tiny particles of clever electronics around has good and bad uses. You could distribute explosives with floating particles that congeal into whatever shape you want on whatever target you want using self-organisation and liberal use of EM fields. I don’t even have that sort of stuff on Halo. I’d better stop now before I start laughing evilly and muttering about taking over the world.

Casual displays

I had a new idea. If I was adventurous or an entrepreneur, I’d develop it, but I’m not, so I won’t. But you can, before Apple patents it. Or maybe they already have.

Many people own various brands of pads, but they are generally expensive, heavy, fragile and need far too much charging. That’s because they try to be high powered computers. Even e-book readers have too much functionality for some display purposes and that creates extra expense. I believe there is a large market for more casual displays that are cheap enough to throw around at all sorts of tasks that don’t need anything other than the ability to change and hold a display.

Several years ago, Texas Instruments invented memory spots, that let people add multimedia to everyday objects. The spots could hold a short video for example, and be stuck on any everyday object.These were a good idea, but one of very many good ideas competing for attention by development engineers. Other companies have also had similar ideas. However, turning the idea around, spots like this could be used to hold data for a  display, and could be programmed by a similar pen-like device or even a finger touch. Up to 2Mb/s can be transmitted through the skin surface.

Cheap displays that have little additional functionality could be made cheaply and use low power. If they are cheap enough, less than ten pounds say, they could be used for many everyday purposes where cards or paper are currently used. And since they are cheap, there could be many of them. With a pad, it has to do many tasks. A casual display would do only one. You could have them all over the place, as recipe cards, photos, pieces of art, maps, books, body adornment, playing cards, messages, birthday cards, instructions, medical advice, or anything. For example:

Friend cards could act as a pin-board reminder of a friend, or sit in a wallet or handbag. You might have one for each of several best friends. A touch of the spot would update the card with the latest photo or status from Facebook or another social site. Or it could be done via a smart phone jack. But since the card only has simple functionality  it would stay cheap. It does nothing that can’t also be done by a smartphone or pad, but the point is that it doesn’t have to. It is always the friend card. The image would stay. It doesn’t need anything to be clicked or charged up. It only needs power momentarily to change the picture.

There are displays that can hold pictures without power that are postcard sized, for less than £10. Adding a simple data storage chip and drivers shouldn’t add significantly to cost. So this idea should be perfectly feasible. We should be able to have lots of casual displays all over our houses and offices if they don’t have to do numerous other things. In the case of displays, less may mean more.

Nuclear weapons + ?

I was privileged and honoured in 2005 to be elected one of the Fellows of the World Academy of Art and Science. It is a mark of recognition and distinction that I wear with pride. The WAAS was set up by Einstein, Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russel and a few other great people, as a forum to discuss the big issues that affect the whole of humanity, especially the potential misuse of scientific discoveries, and by extension, technological developments. Not surprisingly therefore, one of their main programs from the outset has been the pursuit of the abolition of nuclear weapons. It’s a subject I have never written about before so maybe now is a good time to start. Most importantly, I think it’s now time to add others to the list.

There are good arguments on both sides of this issue.

In favour of nukes, it can be argued from a pragmatic stance that the existence of nuclear capability has contributed to reduction in the ferocity of wars. If you know that the enemy could resort to nuclear weapon use if pushed too far, then it may create some pressure to restrict the devastation levied on the enemy.

But this only works if both sides value lives of their citizens sufficiently. If a leader thinks he may survive such a war, or doesn’t mind risking his life for the cause, then the deterrent ceases to work properly. An all out global nuclear war could kill billions of people and leave the survivors in a rather unpleasant world. As Einstein observed, he wasn’t sure what weapons World War 3 would be fought with, but world war 4 would be fought with sticks and stones. Mutually assured destruction may work to some degree as a deterrent, but it is based on second guessing a madman. It isn’t a moral argument, just a pragmatic one. Wear a big enough bomb, and people might give you a wide berth.

Against nukes, it can be argued from a moral basis that such weapons should never be used in any circumstances, their capability to cause devastation beyond the limits that should be tolerated by any civilisation. Furthermore, any resources spent on creating and maintaining them are therefore wasted and could have been put to better more constructive use.

This argument is appealing, but lacks pragmatism in a world where some people don’t abide by the rules.

Pragmatism and morality often align with the right and left of the political spectrum, but there is a solution that keeps both sides happy, albeit an imperfect one. If all nuclear weapons can be removed, and stay removed, so that no-one has any or can build any, then pragmatically, there could be even more wars, and they may be even more prolonged and nasty, but the damage will be kept short of mutual annihilation. Terrorists and mad rulers wouldn’t be able to destroy us all in a nuclear Armageddon. Morally, we may accept the increased casualties as the cost of keeping the moral high ground and protecting human civilisation. This total disarmament option is the goal of the WAAS. Pragmatic to some degree, and just about morally digestible.

Another argument that is occasionally aired is the ‘what if?’ WW2 scenario. What if nuclear weapons hadn’t been invented? More people would probably have died in a longer WW2. If they had been invented and used earlier by the other side, and the Germans had won, perhaps we would have had ended up with a unified Europe with the Germans in the driving seat. Would that be hugely different from the Europe we actually have 65 years later anyway. Are even major wars just fights over the the nature of our lives over a few decades? What if the Romans or the Normans or Vikings had been defeated? Would Britain be so different today? ‘What if?’ debates get you little except interesting debate.

The arguments for and against nuclear weapons haven’t really moved on much over the years, but now the scope is changing a bit. They are as big a threat as ever, maybe more-so with the increasing possibility of rogue regimes and terrorists getting their hands on them, but we are adding other technologies that are potentially just as destructive, in principle anyway, and they could be weaponised if required.

One path to destruction that entered a new phase in the last few years is our messing around with the tools of biology. Biotechnology and genetic modification, synthetic biology, and the linking of external technology into our nervous systems are individual different strands of this threat, but each of them is developing quickly. What links all these is the increasing understanding, harnessing and ongoing development of processes similar to those that nature uses to make life. We start with what nature provides, reverse engineer some of the tools, improve on them, adapt and develop them for particular tasks, and then use these to do stuff that improves on or interacts with natural systems.

Alongside nuclear weapons, we have already become used to the bio-weapons threat based on genetically modified viruses or bacteria, and also to weapons using nerve gases that inhibit neural functioning to kill us. But not far away is biotech designed to change the way our brains work, potentially to control or enslave us. It is starting benignly of course, helping people with disabilities or nerve or brain disorders. But some will pervert it.

Traditional war has been based on causing enough pain to the enemy until they surrender and do as you wish. Future warfare could be based on altering their thinking until it complies with what you want, making an enemy into a willing ally, servant or slave. We don’t want to lose the great potential for improving lives, but we shouldn’t be naive about the risks.

The broad convergence of neurotechnology and IT is a particularly dangerous area. Adding artificial intelligence into the mix opens the possibility of smart adapting organisms as well as the Terminator style threats. Organisms that can survive in multiple niches, or hybrid nature/cyberspace ones that use external AI to redesign their offspring to colonise others. Organisms that penetrate your brain and take control.

Another dangerous offspring from better understanding of biology is that we now have clubs where enthusiasts gather to make genetically modified organisms. At the moment, this is benign novelty stuff, such as transferring a bio-luminescence gene or a fluorescent marker to another organism, just another after-school science club for gifted school-kids and hobbyist adults. But it is I think a dangerous hobby to encourage. With better technology and skill developing all the time, some of those enthusiasts will move on to designing and creating synthetic genes, some won’t like being constrained by safety procedures, and some may have accidents and release modified organisms into the wild that were developed without observing the safety rules. Some will use them to learn genetic design, modification and fabrication techniques and then work in secret or teach terrorist groups. Not all the members can be guaranteed to be fine upstanding members of the community, and it should be assumed that some will be people of ill intent trying to learn how to do the most possible harm.

At least a dozen new types of WMD are possible based on this family of technologies, even before we add in nanotechnology. We should not leave it too late to take this threat seriously. Whereas nuclear weapons are hard to build and require large facilities that are hard to hide, much of this new stuff can be done in garden sheds or ordinary office buildings. They are embryonic and even theoretical today, but that won’t last. I am glad to say that in organisations such as the Lifeboat Foundation (lifeboat.com), in many universities and R&D labs, and doubtless in military ones, some thought has already gone into defence against them and how to police them, but not enough. It is time now to escalate these kinds of threats to the same attention we give to the nuclear one.

With a global nuclear war, much of the life on earth could be destroyed, and that will become possible with the release of well-designed organisms. But I doubt if I am alone in thinking that the possibility of being left alive with my mind controlled by others may well be a fate worse than death.

Blocking Pirate Bay makes little sense

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9236667/Pirate-Bay-must-be-blocked-High-Court-tells-ISPs.html Justice Arnold ruled that ISPs must block their customers from accessing Pirate Bay. Regardless of the morality or legality of Pirate Bay, forcing ISPs to block access to it will cause them inconvenience and costs, but won’t fix the core problem of copyright materials being exchanged without permission from the owners.

I have never looked at the Pirate Bay site, but I am aware of what it offers. It doesn’t host material, but allows its users to download from each other. By blocking access to the Bay, the judge blocks another one of billions of ways to exchange data. Many others exist and it is very easy to set up new ones, so trying to deal with them one by one seems rather pointless. Pirate Bay’s users will simply use alternatives. If they were to block all current file sharing sites, others would spring up to replace them, and if need be, with technological variations that set them outside of any new legislation. At best judges could play a poor catch-up game in an eternal war between global creativity and the law. Because that is what this is.

Pirate Bay can only be blocked because it is possible to identify it and put it in court. It is possible to write software that doesn’t need a central site, or indeed any legally identifiable substance. It could for example be open-source software written and maintained by evolving adaptive AI, hidden behind anonymity, distributed algorithms and encryption walls, roaming freely among web servers and PCs, never stopping anywhere. It could be untraceable. It could use combinations of mobile or fixed phone nets, the internet, direct gadget-gadget comms and even use codes on other platforms such as newspapers. Such a system would be dangerous to build from a number of perspectives, but may be forced by actions to close alternatives. If people feel angered by arrogance and greed, they may be pushed down this development road. The only way to fully stop such a system would be to stop communication.

The simple fact is that technology that we depend on for most aspects of our lives also makes it possible to swap files, and to do so secretly as needed. We could switch it off, but our economy and society would collapse. To pretend otherwise is folly. Companies that feel abused should recognise that the world has moved on and they need to adapt their businesses to survive in the world today, not ask everyone to move back to the world of yesterday so that they can cope. Because we can’t and shouldn’t even waste time trying to. My copyright material gets stolen frequently. So what? I just write more. That model works fine for me. It ain’t broke, and trying to fix it without understanding how stuff works won’t protect anyone and will only make it worse for all of us.

More uses for 3d printing

3D printers are growing in popularity, with a wide range in price from domestic models to high-end industrial printers. The field is already over-hyped, but there is still room for even more, so here we go.

Restoration

3D printing is a good solution for production of items in one-off or small run quantity, so restoration is one field that will particularly benefit. If a component of a machine is damaged or missing, it can be replaced, if a piece has been broken off an ornament, a 3D scan of the remaining piece could be compared with how it should be and 3D patches designed and printed to restore the full object.

Creativity & Crafts

Creativity too will benefit. Especially with assistance from clever software, many people will find that what they thought was their small streak of creativity is actually not that small at all, and will be encouraged to create. The amateur art world can be expected to expand greatly, both in virtual art and physical sculpture. We will see a new renaissance, especially in sculpture and crafts, but also in imaginative hybrid virtual-physical arts. Physical objects may be printed or remain virtual, displayed in augmented reality perhaps. Some of these will be scalable, with tiny versions made on home 3D printers. People may use these test prints to refine their works, and possibly then have larger ones produced on more expensive printers owned by clubs or businesses. They could print it using the 3D printing firm down the road, or just upload the design to a web-based producer for printing and home delivery later in the week.

Fashion will benefit from 3D printing too, with accessories designed or downloaded and printed on demand. A customer may not want to design their own accessories fully, but may start with a choice of template of some sort that they customise to taste, so that their accessories are still personalised but don’t need to much involvement of time and effort.

Could printed miniatures become as important as photos?

People take a lot of photos and videos, and they are a key tool in social networking as well as capturing memories. If 3D scans or photos are taken, and miniature physical models printed, they might have a greater social and personal value even than photos.

Micro-robotics and espionage

3D printing is capable of making lots of intricate parts that would be hard to manufacture by any other means, so should be appropriate for some of the parts useful in making small robots, such as tiny insects that can fly into properties undetected.

Internal printing

Conventional 3D printers, if there can be such a thing so early in their development, use line of sight to make objects by building them in thin layers. Although this allows elaborate structures to be made, it doesn’t allow everything, and there are some structures or objects that would be more easily made if it were possible to print internally. Although lasers would be of little use in opaque objects, x-rays might work fine in some circumstances. This would allow retro-fitting too.

Cancer treatment

If x-ray or printing can be made to work, then it may be possible to build heating circuits inside cancers, and then inductive power supplies could burn away the tumours. Alternatively, smart circuits could be implanted to activate encapsulated drugs when they arrive at the scene.

This would require a one-off exposure to x-rays, but not necessarily similarly damaging levels to those used in radiotherapy.

Direct brain-machine links

Looking further ahead, internal printing of circuits or electronic components inside the brain will be a superb means to do interfacing between man and machine. X-rays can in principle be focused to 1nm, easily fine enough resolution to make contacts to specific brain regions. Obviously x-rays are not something that people would want to be exposed to frequently, but many people would volunteer  (e.g. I would) to have some circuits implanted at least for R&D purposes, since greater insights into how the brain does stuff will accelerate greatly the development of biomimetic AI. But if those circuits were able to link parts of the brain to the web for fast thought based access to search, processing, or sensory enhancement, I’d be fighting millions of transhumanists to get to the front of the long queue.