I’ve enjoyed Mark Rober’s videos for a while now. They are fun and accessible topics, cute concepts, and decent production value. But this recent video isn’t sitting right with me
The video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrGENEXocJU
In it, he talks about a few techniques for how to take down “bad guy drones”, the problems with each, and then shows off the drone tech by Anduril as a solution.
Anduril aims to sell the U.S. Department of Defense technology, including artificial intelligence and robotics. Anduril’s major products include unmanned aerial systems (UAS), counter-UAS (CUAS), semi-portable autonomous surveillance systems, and networked command and control software.
In the video, the Anduril product is a heavy drone that uses kinetic energy to destroy other drones (by flying into them). Quoting the person in the video:
imagine a children’s bowling ball thrown at twice as fast as a major league baseball fastball, that’s what it’s like getting hit by Anvil
This technology is scary for obvious reasons, especially in the wrong hands. What I also don’t like is how Mark Rober’s content is aimed at children, and this video includes a large segment advertising the children’s products he is selling. Despite that, it is showing off military technology with serious ethical implications.
There’s even a section in the video where they show off the Roadrunner, compare it against the patriot missiles, and loosely tie it in to defending against drones.
Roadrunner-M is a high-explosive interceptor variant of Roadrunner built for ground-based air defense that can rapidly launch, identify, intercept, and destroy a wide variety of aerial threats — or be safely recovered and relaunched at near-zero cost.
If you want to see some fucking crazy engineering (and I don’t mean crazy impressive…) one of his variations of his glitter bomb used 4 Samsung phones hidden in a 3d printed enclosure. If you’re ever in a spot where you are building a box and shoving 4 phones inside, you have fucked up.
I mean, he chose them because they already include a camera, mic, battery, gps, and the ability to record and send data to cloud storage without a wifi connection. Yeah, you could individually buy all those components and get them to work, but why bother when you can grab a few $100 phones that do the same thing? Engineering is a much about practicality as it is design and fabrication.
I’m not trying to go up to bat for Mark Rober, I get a little bit of the ick from weaponry videos, too (and the dude clearly doesn’t need my help, anyway). I just think the reaction to him is a bit overblown.