This technology is really awesome, but I have to admit that I am scared to death of anything that can find me by my heartbeat under 6 feet of building rubble. The first thing that came to mind were those robotic octopi from The Matrix.
It would be pretty hard to hide from a totalitarian government in an attic if that government had sufficiently comprehensive residency information and this sort of technology. Count the bodies in each house on a regular periodic basis, and then figure out which ones consistently have more people than their census report indicates.
You could probably come up with some sort of regimen that would have people coming or leaving the house such that the number of people in it always stayed below what was indicated on the census, but it would still be a major concern.
I'm not sure whether you need such sophisticated technology for that. A smart meter will do for this purpose. And the data mining for that can be applied remotely, no need to bring any fancy stuff to the site.
Why is our first response to new technology one of fear? This is a device designed to find alien life, the article is about it being used to save human lives, but all you see is a tool to find and attack you.
This isn't meant personally; you see this "Dystopia ex Technology" in Hollywood movies and popular novels. For every "Pacific Rim" we have, there's several "Matrix" clones ready to tear down our confidence in machines.
It's not the machines we fear. Most people do understand that it's not the tools but the people using them, and we know far too well the sort of people those are likely to be. The dystopian nightmare has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with governments. It's always been so.
There is a new wave of fear of strong AI, based on writings by Nick Bostrom, especially his book 'Superintelligence'. Elon Musk has helped to spread the word.
Unicorns are much the same. From the look of them, you'd imagine they must have gored at least a few people, but then you remember they don't exist. If we feel compelled to fear something, we can probably find more immediate dangers.
I'm not sure that's what Matrix is about. I thought it was turnabout by robotic life for our endless abuse of them - that's what Animatrix showed.
You could argue that the robots symbolized governments and Zion the freedom-seeking people. But that symbolism would be much more apparent in a different story, like Firefly/Serenity.
You realize that there was an article just today about a large spy agency violating the foundational laws of the country it was chartered in and using technology to spy illegally on citizens there, right?
The reason that people have a negative reaction to technologies that can be used for spying is that right now, in real life, spies are committing crimes against citizens using virtually every technical facet of modern society.
The thing is that that technology is being used by a bunch of monkeys. People conflate intelligence with primate social and behavioral quirks all the time because of the long running idea that all human behavior is somehow the product of the abstract idea of "intelligence." This is simply false. Many of the motivations that organizations like the NAS operate under are derived from our primate ancestry and should be name as such. This article is the perfect example that technology and tools are themselves completely amoral and what we are afraid of is not the technology but the other monkeys that we live with. AI etc is unlikely to be constrained by millions of years of evolution in primate social groups which has severely distorted human behavior but not completely stripped it of the ability to use its power for good (again, this article).
The most impressive new technology is often the result of massive spending by entities far more powerful than myself.
Guns are technology which can directly kill me, but I'm not too worried about guns, or even must gun owners. But when you're talking about a technology that (due to massive cost) is only available to governments with questionable oversight, that gets worrying.
In this specific case, I'm not particularly concerned - but you can see how the availability of the tech in question matters. If only people who are already more powerful than me can have it, it's much more likely that its power can be (ab)used to my detriment.
Yeah, the technology seems tailor-made to amplify schizophrenic paranoia; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9507458 for an example saying, "I suspect that this technology was used by an upstairs neighbor to track me around the apartment and electronically harass me using a microwave device. He would use a pulsed RF/microwave device (a Directed Energy Weapon [2]) to irradiate me as I moved around my apartment and also while I slept."
It's going to get harder and harder to reassure delusional people that their delusions are false when they become technologically feasible.
