In the latest dystopian horror brought to us by China is the news that bird drones are a real thing now as reported by the South China Morning Post.
These bionic birds are unmanned aerial vehicles that look and act like a real bird. Supposedly they simulate about 90% of a dove's motion and behavior including flapping wings.
This is a quantum leap from a UAV with a gopro camera strapped to the body. Science fiction has featured the fly on the wall spying device for a while now and the development of a bird robot witha high-definition camera is about halfway along that path.
Why is this such a big deal?
It's a big deal because it's pretty much undetectable by both man and machine. Aerial scanning systems routinely ignore bird-sized things and smaller to reduce false alarms and the need for exponentially large processing power. There are about a million insects for every human and probably something like a hundred thousand birds for every human it's just not feasible for defensive systems to include them as part of the threat analysis. Imagine a flock of 10,000 birds flying over your location and trying to analyze each one to determine if it's a drone. The computational resources needed would be enormous for not much benefit. Well, not much benefit until now.
Similarly, your average person wouldn't be able to pick a bird drone out by sight, especially if it is in the middle of a flock. The quadricopter drone that gave us footage of Tesla's joke of a manufacturing facility just the other day could easily be identified by anyone looking at it. But imagine if that had been a bionic bird instead. It could fly in, land on some sort of perch, and spy away to its controller's heart's content.
So essentially what has been reported is an undetectable spying system. Of course, spying is just the first step. Once the technology is developed with sufficient payload capability and flight time, it could be used for more direct explosive or biological attack. Again, with no defense. This could be a huge advancement for China's military.
Before this press release (because all news in China is a press release from some government agency) there apparently had been some development along these lines in the US from an outfit called Prioria Robotics. They developed a bird of prey looking and sized drone. A big difference though was that the Prioria hawk drone looked like a bird but didn't move like one. So the wings didn't flap. That might seem like a small difference but makes a huge difference when trying to identify a threat by pattern recognition.
So yes, this is a game changer.
Of course, being China, this will probably be used against its own people at first. This dovetails (hah, get it?) perfectly with their new social scoring system. In order for the social scoring system to work the administrators need to collect data and video about everyone to feed into the system. But make no mistake, military applications will follow.
I expect the Chinese to develop a serious dislike of birds in general when they figure out that law enforcement visits seem to conincide with birds watching them. It reminds me of Mao's great leap forward plan to kill all the sparrows for meat. That disaster was followed by mass starvation as the bugs that the sparrows normally ate destroyed their crops.
Technology, drone or otherwise, tends to follow a genie-out-of-the-bottle model. Once someone has developed the tech, it doesn't really go away until it is made obsolete. It's terrifying to the cause of individual liberty and safety to think what might make this technology obsolete.