[Infowarrior] - PBS Tonight: ‘Nova: Rise of the Drones'

[Richard Forno]

January 22, 2013
Television Review | ‘Nova: Rise of the Drones'
Questioning Its Marvels and Morals
By MIKE HALE

http://tv.nytimes.com/2013/01/23/arts/television/nova-rise-of-the-drones-on-pbs.html

Welcoming President Obama to his second term, PBS has scheduled “Rise of the Drones,” an examination of one of the more controversial items on his agenda, as Wednesday night’s installment of “Nova.”

Though the program’s focus is technology rather than politics or military ethics, and it has the peppy, isn’t-science-great tone typical of “Nova,” it doesn’t ignore the debate surrounding America’s extensive use of remotely piloted aircraft to launch covert missile attacks on targets in Pakistan and other countries. Experts in military design and tactics point out that no one really knows how many civilians are being killed by the strikes and that the bloodless nature of the drone allows the United States to carry out a major air war without calling it a war.

But rather than dwelling on such questions, “Rise of the Drones” quickly moves on to its next gee-whiz moment. If the problem is that the drones’ pilots can make mistakes because they have too narrow a field of view, check out the new Argus camera: 1.8 billion pixels, able to show an entire small city while simultaneously zooming in on up to 65 individual spots and picking out objects as small as six inches long.

The program is full of things like the Argus that are sufficiently amazing or at least intriguing to distract you momentarily from the larger moral questions. (It is pointed out that unmanned planes are used primarily for surveillance, and we’re told that the Air Force already has the ability to archive all of the video being fed to it by its thousands of drones: Big Brother with wings.)

We’re given a history of the process of taking pilots out of the cockpit equation, beginning in World War II, and introduced to Abe Karem, an engineer who, in too-good-to-be-true fashion, designed and built the predecessors of today’s Predator drones in his garage. Working in the early 1980s with a few thousand dollars borrowed from his family, he never imagined, he says, that his unmanned aircraft would someday be armed.

He probably didn’t imagine how they would be controlled, either, and one of the most interesting places the program takes us is inside a room where actual Predator drones are piloted. Unlike the sleek or at least commodious chambers depicted in spy thrillers, it’s a storage container in the New Mexico desert where a pilot and a spotter squeeze, space-module style, into chairs facing intimidating banks of computer monitors stacked three high, like stock traders or extremely spoiled video game players.

“Rise of the Drones” argues, convincingly, that the move to remotely piloted aircraft is inevitable and accelerating — the Air Force is training more drone pilots than cockpit pilots. Glimpses of the automated future include a look at the X-47B, a full-size, unmanned jet that is already flying and could soon be able to land and take off on aircraft carriers (“Battlestar Galactica” fans will be reminded of Cylon Raiders), and fascinating scenes of small helicopter drones that can fly in formation or find their way through buildings, exhibiting a pilotlike intelligence.

There is a possibly paranoid science-fiction element to this, reflected in the program’s title — a heavy-handed reference to the third “Terminator” movie, “Rise of the Machines.” But not to worry, one of the show’s experts tells us: “We should be so lucky” as to develop aircraft with an ability to think.

Viewers may not be quite so sanguine or think that they’re lucky to have an item like the Switchblade, a long-range, remotely guided missile that fits in a small backpack. “It’s a tool our customers are very excited about,” says a spokesman for AeroVironment, the California company that produces it. Apparently luck, in this case, means not being on the bad side of those customers.

Nova

Rise of the Drones

On PBS stations on Wednesday night (check local listings).

Produced by Pangloss Films LLC for Nova/WGBH. Written, directed and produced by Peter Yost; Paula S. Apsell, senior executive producer for Nova.

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