Toys for a better dystopia? Order your in-house drone
Speaking of bad ideas, Amazon has introduced its Ring Always Home cam, an autonomous home security drone that isn’t creepy or invasive in any way. If a sensor on windows and doors is triggered, a thing that looks like a black plastic dragonfly will pop out of its dock and fly around your house while you watch live from your phone wherever you might be.
More technology you don’t need, or didn’t until the drone is finally launched and then suddenly you wonder how you lived without it.
From there you can watch thieves ransack your home, or your teenagers throw a huge, wild party in your absence. It can, um, surveil activities as you do them. You could playfully send it in relentless midnight pursuit of a sleeping family member who then tries to kill it with a fireplace poker, a tennis racquet, mason jars, anything.
Drones are used to kill. In 2011, the U.S. used drones to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and terrorist. Stephanie Carvin, a Carleton University international relations professor, baked a cake possibly mocking the death, such jokes always a means of fending off one’s own worst fears. Police drones hover over U.S. demonstrations. What next?
Technology is helpful right up until it isn’t. The new technology of DNA databases caught the Golden State Killer. But wouldn’t he have been a better serial rapist and killer if he’d had a Ring Always Home cam? He could have spied on a bound-and-gagged husband indoors while raping the wife in another room.
Amazon Ring says the point of the drone is to replace all those indoor security cameras that, darn, are never pointed at the one window you think you may have left open.
And its humming sound? “That’s privacy you can hear,” the Ring sales pitch says.
“I’d be more worried about the camera on your phone than I would be about a drone,” Amazon devices chief Dave Limp told theverge.com.
Really, Dave? I’d be more worried about Alexa recording a quarrel over the dishes while outsourced techies listen in. Or Ring doorbell cameras filming my evening walks in my neighbourhood, safer but still unpleasantly intrusive.
The house’s previous owner might still be controlling your security system, as happened (harmlessly) in Alberta recently, locking and unlocking doors and windows as you scream. The cops will think you’re off your nut. Next time they won’t show up.
Your Apple Watch heart monitor might be hacked. Your hospital records could be held up for ransom. Next up, your pacemaker.
We aren’t thinking about this right now because our paranoia is reserved for the coronavirus drifting indoors. But the home drone is worse because you can see it actually fly toward your head.
It has already been imagined. In Netflix’s “Black Mirror,” the Hated in the Nation episode — a personal favourite — presents Britain having solved the problem of a vanishing bee population by commissioning hundreds of thousands of tiny drones to do the work of bees. It would be called Project Swarm, using autonomous drone insects (ADIs as they are known in the acronym forest we live in).
What if the bees were hacked by a disaffected person in an era when most citizens are by definition disaffected and punitive? What if the bees could track you by your social media posts on your cellphone? Imagine if social media could target people with ADIs rather than just sending them hateful messages?
The Ring Always Home drones will get smaller. Everything does. What if they could fly through keyholes, stove vents and air conditioning ducts?
These are the unintended consequences of technology. As Dezeen points out, China’s communist government has already used drones with loudspeakers during the pandemic, along with disinfecting robots, thermal camera-equipped drones and advanced facial recognition software.
Toronto can’t even cope with Amber Alerts waking people in the night. What if your home drone cam set off a siren in your ear at 3 a.m.?
Ring would call that “safety you can hear.” The drone hasn’t yet been authorized in the U.S. You know it will be.
Toronto can’t even cope with Amber Alerts waking people in the night. What if your home drone cam set off a siren in your ear at 3 a.m.?