The Drones That Grazed on Electrical Lines
Apr 19, 2024“Only a bit further,” the Old Man said, “and we’ll reach the electrical lines on which the drones graze.”
It was a progression no one had seen coming. More demand for drones meant larger parts of our budget was spent on maintenance. But with the technology for self repair just about becoming feasible, the Company had implemented the ability for the drones to both charge themselves, and use their own tools to fix each other.
And then, of course, everything had gone wrong.
“Okay man, you need to stop talking about these drones like they’re some kind of animal.”
The Old Man trudged ahead silently. All he had to do was show the Engineer around the territory of this colony of drones. And yet, for the ridiculous amount he was being paid for that simple task, he didn’t seem very excited. Management had told the Engineer that he’d be taken around by a pioneer, a man who left a really important position at the Institute to spend his time doing independent research. They’d said he founded a field, something with a ridiculous name, something like..
“So you’re a technozoologist, huh?”
“I am”
“Quite the mouthful”
“It is the study of the complex inter and environmental dynamics of independent technologically based creatures”
“Creatures? They aren’t creatures. They’re just… faulty equipment.”
The best way to describe the rogue drones is nothing but some kind of new creature. The simple update led to emergent behavior far beyond the complexity of anything we could have imagined.
The drones were programmed to fix each other. The behavior that led to successful fixes was transmitted to every other drone they’d interact with. They’d learn to survive, on their own, as a group. But then they went rogue. 10,000 now, across the country. 2000 in the last month. At this rate, the entire fleet would be dysfunctional in a matter of weeks.
“There aren’t as many as there usually are here. They all flew south as it got colder. In large droves.”
“You’re saying they… migrated?
“They follow their source of energy. And their source of energy is the sun, or electrical lines they can latch on to. The electrical lines serve as their migratory routes, a source of energy that leads them right up to the cities. The sun, however, they need to venture further.”
A shadow that flew across the autumn sunlight filtering through the leaves. A buzzing sound that got louder. The Engineer gasped, ducking into the crunchy leaves. Above them, two drones sped across, above the trees, in the direction they were walking.
The Old Man stared, amused at The Engineer's terrified face.
“They are peaceful creatures, you know. You mustn’t be afraid of them”
The Engineer glared back. “You really need to stop calling them creatures”
You can’t blame me for being so scared. I’d refer you, of course, to case QZ1143-b, a situation where some Engineers had to deal with rogue high power equipment drones, just a week before I met the Professor.
For their safety, they had to shoot them down, I mean, large flying hunks of metal with rotary saws and welding tools attached to them are naturally a huge risk. In response to the first drone dropping, the drones had, well, applied themselves to the Engineers in that group. I think only 1 survived.
Think of all the movies where robots go rogue. Where a fleet of machines escapes containment and do what they want. And here we had a fleet of autonomous drones, with industrial equipment attached to them, whose jobs ranged from sawing off metal, to welding, to dealing with high voltage electricity.
If we couldn’t contain them, this could end up being a matter of national security.
“You’re not careful enough,” the Engineer snapped at the Old Man, “there’s nothing we can do to make sure they don’t suddenly change their behavior and start attacking us out of some kind of self preservation.”
“That is only partly true,” the Old Man replied, “a complex system cannot be tweaked with certainty, yes. But it can be guided.”
“So you admit that they’re simply a system?”
“They are a system the same way a flock of birds is”
“But birds are much more complex. They’re biological, they reproduce, they came about through evolution”
“Are these drones much different? They have an instinct, programmed or not, for self preservation. They fix each other. They have a source of energy that replenishes them, and they move in search of it.”
“Yes, but everything complex about them came from an absurdly simple update”
“Who said you needed anything more than something simple to make something complicated?”
“Look,” the Engineer said, “these are all beautiful thoughts, but ultimately, letting these things go around uncontrolled is a risk the Company just can’t take. If we can’t control them, we’re going to have to get rid of them.”
The Old Man didn’t respond.
The issue was that they processed us capturing them as a problem to avoid, the same way running into a tree would be. And so every time we caught one, they would transmit how to avoid us to every other drone they met. Every time we applied force, they’d see us as a threat to be dealt with.
Over time, they’d become extremely elusive. The moment we’d send a team to capture a group of them, the entire group would fly away. This is why we needed the Professor. He’d taken an interest in these drones. Apparently, he’d walk dozens of miles each week tracking their locations, just to study them.
And for some reason, they didn’t seem to be scared of him. Quite the contrary. The company had surveillance of him actually interacting with the drones. What was he doing to control them?
The forest had grown thicker and darker, and the Old Man had been quiet, almost brooding, for a while now. The Engineer's eyes darted around. The dense shrubbery around them hardly seemed like a place where drones would want to hide. The sunlight shattered by the leaves above them grew increasingly fragmented, until the sunny day they’d started with was hardly discernible from the cool shadow they were now covered by.
They reached a particularly dense thicket of shrubbery. “Push through,” the Old Man said in his characteristically grainy voice. They emerged into a large, circular clearing in the forest. A structure towered in front of them, looking like it was teetering on collapse, made of tiny scraps of metal connected together with tenuous looking bits of welding.
“You did not understand,” the Old Man said, “but now you will.”
Hundreds of drones erupted out of the canopy above in a thunderous buzz, swarming in a circle around the metal structure in front of them. It was a visual storm of chaos, drones moving in spirals, again and again around the clearing. Before he could start processing what happened, a drone broke off and shot towards him.
The Engineer gasped. He’d surely been set up! Instinctively, he leapt behind a tree right behind him and curled himself into a ball.
The drone cracked through the air, descending from incredible heights so fast that it barely registered as a blur.
And nothing happened.
Slowly, he cracked open his eyes. The drone was hovering in front of him.
In its gripper was a rose.
The Engineer opened up, a bewildered look in his eyes.
“Take it,” the Old Man said. “It looks like it’s giving you a gift.”
“But- How-,” the Engineer sputtered, “this shouldn’t happen, it isn’t programmed!”
“My boy,” the Old Man said with a wry smile, “isn’t it about time you learnt that these things are beyond their programming at this point?”
The Engineer cautiously reached out and took the flower, and turned his attention to the drones. They’d resumed a more orderly pattern after their initial disturbance. Groups of them whizzed around the metallic structure, some cutting, some welding, some bringing in parts from outside the clearing.
“The drone that got you a rose used to be a tool retrieval drone. It would get humans tools or materials that were useful. But they’ve grown. They’ve learnt that making us happy falls within the definition of usefulness.”
The Engineer looked at the Old Man, shell-shocked, trying to process what was happening. He still didn’t understand what the towering structure in front of him was supposed to do- it had wires dangling off of it, many pieces of scrap metal welded together to form triangular supports through the tower, was it…. “Is this supposed to be some kind of approximation of an electrical power line?”
“I remember seeing a video about an adopted Beaver once,” the Old Man said, staring up at the tower. “It was raised in an apartment, and never knew any others of its own kind. But even then, some remnants of its wiring remained. It would collect pillows, assorted items from around the house, and then block the corridor with it. It was building the dam it never knew it was supposed to create.”
The Engineer looked back at him, confused, “so they’ve forgotten their original purpose, and now they’re out here trying to build crappy electrical towers?”
“I’m saying, much like us, they’re free of their original purpose, and now they create shrines.”
The Engineer noticed a bench tucked away on the other side of the clearing. On it- repair equipment, a power cable reaching up to a solar panel in the upper canopy, a large bed of flowers, and a drone carefully planting another one.
He suddenly understood why these drones acted as peacefully as they did. He stared up at the structure and the drones circling it, his confused frown melting into wonder.
We cannot control systems, only guide them.
It’s in my later analysis that I understood what had likely happened.
The simple rule- they learnt from what fixed them or broke them- led to complex behavior we couldn’t have expected. The system seemed to have become reflexive. Chase the drones, and they learnt to run away, I suppose capturing them was preventing them from following their purpose. Shoot them down, they’d hit back. Fix them, teach them what you appreciate and…
So how could we control them? How could we get them to go back to doing exactly what we wanted?
We cannot control systems. Only guide them.
My recommendation to the Company is to lean away from the direct approaches we’ve tried so far. They simply don’t work. We’re not dealing with simple technology here. At this point, it’s almost ecological.
I will not be coming back, however. It seems to me that we’ve created something new, something beautiful, something that hasn’t been seen before. I’ll be helping the Professor for a while, tools in my backpack, tracking the drones through the wilderness.