Three Interesting Examples of IT Solutions From Three Different Decades (Week 1)

1970-s: Combat drones

Unmanned combat aerial vehicles or "combat drones" are a type of military aircraft that have no onboard human pilot. They are most commonly used for intelligence and drone strikes. Usually these vehicles are under real-time human control, though fully autonomous drones are being developed.

Unlike the small drones that are sold commercially for recreational purposes, these machines can weigh anywhere from hundreds to thousands of kilograms. Smaller reconnaissance aerial vehicles can weigh as little as 1 kilogram, though these cannot technically be considered "combat drones".

One has to use sophisticated detection systems to spot these drones - they are virtually invisible to civilians. Due to mistakes made by operators, people have begun to fear clear skies - the perfect conditions for deployment of combat drones. There is growing concern that this technology is making military conflict politically "cheaper" for major powers, as war is good for ratings and there is no associated cost in lives of potential voters.

The first drones were a creation of John Stuart Foster Jr., a nuclear physicist. Foster was a model airplane enthusiast and he used his knowledge to draw up plans, from which in 1973 first prototypes were built. These were powered by lawn-mower engines and could carry up to 13 kg of payload.

Combat drones were widely used by Israel in 1970-s and 80-s, helping to neutralize their opponents' defenses without losing a single Israeli pilot. 

In recent years the United States has increased the use of combat drones as a part of its War on Terror and by now the number of people killed is at least 8 800 with at least 910 of them being civilians.

 

2010-s: Deepfake technology

While the tech has been in development in academic circles since the late 1990-s, the advances in deep learning have allowed amateurs to take up the mantle and start a revolution in the field of synthetic media.

The technology started receiving widespread attention because of its use in generating celebrity pornographic videos, child abuse videos, political propaganda and fake news.

In one instance widely covered by the media, a girl's face was deepfaked onto a pornographic footage, sparking discussions about the legal system struggling to keep up with modern technology, failing to protect people from moral abuse.

The technology is based on a neural network called an autoencoder. An encoder reduces the image to an embedding space, and this space is then decoded with a model specifically trained for the target. The resulting image, as a rule, then has the body of the original video and facial features of the target.

This architecture is often upgraded with a generative adversarial network. This system consists of a generator, which generates images, and a discriminator, which tries to find generated images. This results in defects being caught by the network, creating images that are nearly indistinguishable from reality. The algorithms evolve constantly in a zero-sum game, resulting in what can be described as an arms race.

2020-s: GFT

"What to give somebody who has everything? Give the gift of a GFT, surprise NFTs designed especially for gifting."

In January of 2022 Atari, formerly known as a video game company, has announced its own take on NFTs - a trend speculative investors jumped on the year before. The idea is to merge NFT technology with the idea of loot boxes - a type of in-game purchase where the player pays money without knowing exactly what they are going to get in return.

In other words, the consumer is paying money for an NFT, without knowing what it is until a certain date when the GFT "unlocks", revealing the NFT inside.

The reason for this thought-provoking new development is to celebrate the 50-year anniversary of Atari. As of the moment of writing, it is not clear whether this new idea is going to catch on, but so far the response of the public has been quite spirited, with lots of opinions shared. If it does, it will open up a whole new way of making money, which will undoubtedly be very exciting for investors.