The threat of swarm robots and their historical background (early 2010s)

The threat of swarm robots and their historical background (early 2010s)

In 2014, a team of Harvard researchers successfully conducted an experiment in which they coordinated and controlled more than 1,000 of these microscopic robots, called "Kilobots," that were a few centimeters in diameter and about the size of a one-cent coin. These robots were able to communicate with each other, adjust their positions, and autonomously form complex patterns such as stars and letters. The swarm robot research was initially intended to verify distributed algorithms that mimic swarm behavior of living organisms (swarms of ants and bees), but the results strongly suggest the possibility of military and surveillance applications.

The background at the time was the rapid development of drone technology. The U.S. military was normalizing attacks using unmanned aircraft in Iraq and Afghanistan, and small drones were beginning to be widely used in the private sector. As an extension of this trend, the idea shifted from "one high-performance drone" to "many inexpensive swarm drones," and swarm-type operations began to attract attention. Swarms may be simple individually, but as a whole they can exhibit powerful behavior, making them an extremely troublesome threat to defenders.

In the early 2010s, military think tanks and security researchers had already published reports that envisioned "unmanned aircraft units flying in like a swarm of bees," and it was seen as only a matter of time before they were operational on the battlefield in the real world. Furthermore, the danger of these swarms being taken over by hacking or malware infection was also discussed, and scenes of simultaneous attacks within cities were imagined.

On the other hand, swarm robots were also considered to have applications in the fields of medicine and environmental research, such as the collection of marine debris and the use of internal medication systems. However, concerns about the "duality" of the technology were emphasized, and how to establish regulations and an ethical framework emerged as an international challenge.

In this way, the "threat of swarm robots" reflected the atmosphere of the early 2010s, when advances in AI and robotics were beginning to have an impact on society at once, and was a case that symbolized the situation in which the possibilities and risks of technology were at odds with each other.