P.C. Shannon

I’ve recently become fascinated with Blogdex. The current lead story is this conspiracy theory about exploding RFID tags in $20 bills. This was a rumor when I was in high school, people! That was ten years, and we didn’t call it RFID back then. Some friends were building a potato gun (all the rage in the early 90s) and this guy at the auto parts store told them the government had special gun they could point at you and tell how much cash you were carrying. Of course we believed him because we could hold our twenties up to the light and see the metal strip in it. Is there a simpler explanation that doesn’t stretch the bounds of believability? Yes. The strips are there to protect against counterfeiting and the “magic gun” technology doesn’t exist.

That was ten years ago. Now we have RFID. And if you know anything about RFID, you know that the smallest transmitters are not small enough to be pressed inside a piece of paper, and they cost several dollars apiece. So unless the Treasury’s budget went up dramatically in recent years, this is a hoax.

The best part is, the article comes from a website run by Alex Jones, Austin’s most notorious conspiracy theorist. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good conspiracy theory. But I always found them… lacking. I’ve watched Alex’s show on cable access a couple of times. I especially enjoyed the video footage from when he tried to infiltrate the Bilderbergers meeting. So the number one reason to suspect a story is a hoax: it comes from a website by a conspiracy theorist who has a cable access show.

The real question here is, why did someone burn all those twenties? Hell, maybe it was photoshopped.

I first noticed this phenomenon with the rise of shows like Battle Bots. The combatants on that program are sophisticated remote controlled vehicles, not robots. A robot is an automaton. The word itself, with all of the sci-fi implications behind it, is sexy, and that’s why they use it.

I was watching a program — Science Times, I think — yesterday on The National Geographic channel, and they had a segment on “rat bots.” These are rats that have had three electrodes inserted into their brains that allow them to be lead around remotely, sort of the high-tech equivalent of dangling a piece of cheese. The idea is that you can get them easily into a building that has collapsed or been taken over by terrorists. The segment also featured competing technology in the form of remote controlled vehicles, referred to on the program as robots.

Netiher the rats nor the “robots” are autonomous. Both require a remote operator to guide them to their destination. Roomba, the robot vaccuum cleaner, is a real robot because you turn it on and without any further input from you, it will clean your room. It is autonomous. Imagine what a crappy product it would be if you had to sit at your computer and guide it around the room.

Eventually we will have real robots that can search for survivors in the aftermath of an earthquake wihtout direct control by a person out of harms way. The current crop of search-and-rescue robots are a good place to start. They’re just not actually robots.