Saronic Drone Boat Saves Helicopter Crew

  

On Monday night, June 8, Iranian forces shot down a U. S. helicopter with a two-member crew aboard off the coast of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz.  Presumably they bailed out with life jackets or some other means of flotation, but their prospects for rescue were uncertain, to say the least. 

 

The U. S. Navy chose to direct a Corsair unmanned sea drone, made by Saronic Technologies, to the last known location of the flyers.  The Corsair was inspired by Ukraine's successes with unmanned sea drones used to attack Russian naval assets.  It's a 24-foot-long boat that can carry a payload of up to 1,000 pounds.  Early Tuesday morning, it successfully located the helicopter crew members, who climbed aboard it and rode on it to another location where a helicopter picked them up and took them to safety.  They were in the water for about two hours before being rescued.

 

This success story shows how unmanned drones are taking on more roles in modern warfare all the time.  The Corsair's rescue was the first time in history that an unmanned sea-going drone was used in a successful rescue attempt. 

 

A BBC report on the rescue quotes naval expert Bryan Clark, of the Hudson Institute, as saying the drone was probably manually piloted during the search.  The boat has a 360-degree camera and onboard radar, both of which would have been helpful in locating the downed flyers. 

 

Remotely-controlled floating vehicles are nothing new.  In 1898, Nikola Tesla demonstrated a radio-controlled model boat in a small tank at his New York City laboratory, and filed numerous patents on it in the hopes of interesting the day's naval powers in it.  Although World War II saw some work with remote-controlled planes, the communications technologies of the day were not up to the challenge of sending the massive amounts of data needed to both convey an adequate picture of the vehicle's environment and to exert precise control over it. 

 

With computer networks and satellite communications, those challenges have been overcome.  Now drones play an essential role in the Russia-Ukraine war, as well as the conflict between Iran and the U. S.  While the emphasis has been on hostile drones carrying weapons or doing surveillance, it's good to know that drones can be used for search-and-rescue operations as well.  One wonders when the U. S. Coast Guard will get into the drone business in a major way, to avoid endangering their own personnel during hazardous searches for lost boats.

 

Saronic, the company recently awarded $392 million to produce Corsairs and similar products, is a newcomer to the defense industry, with much of its operations based in Austin, Texas.  It is not surprising that the big innovations in technological warfare are coming not from the large, established firms such as Boeing and General Dynamics, but from newer upstarts such as Palantir and Saronic.  This is a pattern that plays out in most new technical fields, and says something about the sociology of invention and organizational innovation. 

 

Reportedly, the U. S. Navy has about fifty Corsairs all told, and it was a good thing that one of them was deployed close enough to effect the rescue earlier this week.  Should the Navy be worrying about acquiring larger seagoing drones to do more than just rescue a few downed flyers? 

 

This is a debate that has been going on for some time in the engineering ethics community:  the question of autonomous warfare, in which unmanned devices and systems do the things that soldiers and sailors used to do. 

 

In the case of a benign action such as a rescue, I think everyone would agree that sending a seagoing drone to do the job is better than risking human lives, as long as the drone succeeds.  In peacetime, drones and remotely-controlled robots are resorted to in situations such as building collapses that are simply too hazardous for people to enter.  This advantage compensates for the expense and limited abilities of drones and robots compared to a human being. 

 

In the case of war, drones become another tool or weapon that is ultimately controlled by those in charge of fighting.  The fear of turning loose a completely autonomous drone or robot in the battlefield is that it will be unable to discriminate between enemy fighters who are legitimate targets, and innocent bystanders such as housewives or children, who should be exempt from attack, although that ethical principle has been violated countless times in the last several decades.  Also, an autonomous drone might turn against its own operators. 

 

Those are some of the hazards that have kept drones out of warfare historically, although in places like Ukraine where the need to fight trumps almost all other considerations, these hesitations have been swept aside.  Not too long ago, a group of Russian soldiers were captured by remotely controlled Ukrainian robot fighters.  The capture was a legitimate act of war, and whether the Ukraine soldiers were standing right there with guns or safely ensconced in a control room miles away didn't make any difference to the Russians.

 

Drones are making war into a new kind of ball game, and any country which wants to remain militarily competitive can't afford to ignore that fact.  What seems to be happening now is a kind of innovation that is integrated into the whole matrix of the battlefield, rather than standing out as a totally novel kind of warfare, the way the invention of nuclear weapons did. 

 

"War is hell," according to General Sherman, whose depredations in the South were notorious for their thoroughness and harshness.  He should have known.  While it would be wonderful if all war ceased, the realities of international politics mean that all available technologies will be pressed into service of military priorities.  It's nice to know that a technology which Ukraine developed to blow up Russian ships has been modified to serve as a rescue vehicle.  And there may be other positive benefits that wartime technological developments bring in the future. 

 

But for now, we should expect to see more firsts of many kinds involving drones and autonomous weapons.  While they are not so effective as to make war unthinkable, they may make it safer for those who fight, and that would be a good thing.

 

Sources:  I referred to a BBC News account "What we know about US sea drone used in helicopter crew rescue mission," which appeared at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2xvnd5eqwo.  I also referred to the Saronic website at https://www.saronic.com/.  A description of Tesla's experimental radio-controlled boat appears on pp. 229 of W. Bernard Carlson's supreme biography, "Tesla:  Inventor of the Electrical Age" (Princeton Univ. Press, 2013).

Aristotle, Aquinas, and AI

What have a Greek philosopher who lived about 2300 years ago, a Dominican friar, theologian, and philosopher who died in 1274 A. D., and artificial intelligence (AI) got to do with each other?  Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke.  What I have to say is no joke, however, because if we don't heed the wisdom of these two parties, which has been almost totally forgotten, we are liable to make some mistakes shortly that will be exceedingly costly in terms of missed opportunities, misdirected hopes, and maybe even lives.

 

The particular wisdom I speak of is known by the technical term of scholastic metaphysics.  It was, and still is, a way of viewing the universe, and it dominated the West for over a thousand years.  The Scientific Revolution vigorously uprooted it and threw it in the trash pile, to oversimplify a very complicated history.  And now it is almost completely forgotten except by a few lucky people such as yourself, if you keep reading.

 

The aspect of scholastic metaphysics I wish to explain concerns the nature of things.  Here's an example, taken from an article by journalist Mary Harrington in the June/July issue of First Things.  Take a dog, any dog.  It may be black, white, spotted, or bald.  But none of those attributes change the fact that it's a dog.  The scholastic metaphysical term for the dogness of a dog is its substantial form, also known as essence.  The aspects of a thing that can change without changing its substantial form are called accidents.  That's a weird use of the word, I know, but I'm not going to argue with Aristotle, who came up with these ideas, and Aquinas, who put them in terms compatible with Christianity.  The substantial form of a thing is its organizing principle.  The accidents are characteristics that can change without altering the substantial form.

 

What about people?  We have an organizing principle called the soul.  No matter what accidental characteristics we have—whether a person is fat, thin, from Teaneck, New Jersey, or in a coma—that substantial form remains. 

 

What about computers, and all the systems that are known by the general term of AI?  AI is, of course, artificial—that is, it is a man-made artifact.  Unlike living things, an artificial object has no substantial form that is prior to what its human makers say it is.  We can cobble together a bunch of transistors, call it a computer, and get it to do certain things for us.  But computers, and the AI systems supported by them, are simply assemblies of accidents.  This makes AI systems fundamentally different in kind from human beings. 

 

What emerges from looking at humans and AI from the viewpoint of scholastic metaphysics is this:  human beings are just a clean different kind of thing from AI systems.  And treating AI systems and humans as though they were basically the same kind of thing, simply piles of atoms arranged differently—which is how modern materialistic science encourages us to think—ignores a vital difference between the two.  Human beings have souls as their organizing principle, and AI systems do not.  No imaginable or unimaginable future progress in AI can change that fact.

 

This viewpoint flies in the face of the transhumanist agenda so popular in Silicon Valley, which looks forward to the day when human beings can transcend their messy, disease-and-death-prone meat-cage origins and live forever in an eternal bit-world of computer-borne bliss that will take over the universe.  (I may have left something out in that description, but I think I got most of it.)  Human beings are the rational animals that result from propagation by other human beings.  Anything you might upload from a human being to a computer is not going to be that human being.  And treating it, or any other AI product, as if it were human is a category error that can lead to heinous consequences.

 

In Harrington's words, trying to teach sand to think is not only futile, but if we start treating the result as though it had a soul, we are in danger of losing our own souls.

 

This may sound like just another anti-technology rant, but it's not.  AI can do truly amazing and useful things, but only if its human users keep in mind what it is and don't try to endow it with quasi-human agency.  A tool should be under the control of its human users at all times.  That control may be loose and barely perceptible sometimes, but it has to be there.  If we begin to bow down to AI entities as though they were thinking humans like us, we will soon regret it.  An automobile provides useful service when under control, but if it gets out of control it becomes a dangerous missile.  The same thing is true of AI.

 

Thinking in terms of scholastic metaphysics seems strange to most people unfamiliar with it, and it takes a while to realize that it's just as useful as it ever was.  I have had a passing acquaintance with it ever since I read a book on Thomistic philosophy in the 1990s.  The thing that drove me to that book was a statement by a former theoretical physicist turned pastor, who said that the Catholic Church's notion of transubstantiation of the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ was based on an outmoded theory of matter.  I wanted to know more about this outmoded theory, and it turned out to be scholastic metaphysics. 

 

What modern science did to scholastic metaphysics is a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  There was a lot of useless bathwater in Aristotle's physics—rocks having a desire to fall downward and so on—but there was also great wisdom in his metaphysics.  The wisdom of scholastic metaphysics can save us from making lots of mistakes that could be avoided if we just keep in mind that however clever and human-like AI appears, it's really just words written in the sand.  And we wrote the words to start with. 

 

Sources:  Mary Harrington's article "Thomophobia" appeared on pp. 19-27 of the June/July 2026 issue of First Things.  For those wanting to know more, she refers to Edward Feser's book Scholastic Metaphysics (Editiones Scholasticae, 2014, $34 on Amazon).

 

Autonomous Cars Need Waymo Time Out for Floods

  

Pardon the bad pun.  But imagine that you've taken one of the new driverless Waymo taxis from the San Antonio airport right after a big rain.  The car exits the freeway, and on the access road ahead you see where a nearby stream has overflowed, and water the color of coffee with cream is rushing across the road.  The Waymo vehicle keeps going.  You can't be sure, but the water looks deeper than you'd like, and if you were driving, you'd follow the poetic advice to turn around rather than drown.  You look for a panic button in the car:  there is no such thing.  You think about just opening a door and jumping out, but the car's going too fast for you to try that without risking your neck.  Just as the front wheels hit the water, you feel the car skidding, and you decide to try jumping out anyway.  Only now the water pressure on the door is too great, and it won't open. . . .

 

This didn't actually happen.  But it could have. 

 

On April 20, after heavy rains caused flooding on several roadways in San Antonio, an unoccupied Waymo vehicle was swept away from an interstate access road in floodwaters arising from Salado Creek.  The vehicle was later found about half a mile downstream. 

 

Following this and another incident earlier in the month, when a Waymo car became stuck in high water in San Antonio and had to be towed out, Waymo suspended all service in San Antonio and five other cities in three states, including Nashville and Atlanta.  Another Waymo car got stranded in Atlanta during heavy rains as well.  Waymo is working on updating its software to prevent such incidents in the future, but as of today, service still appears to be suspended in Austin and Atlanta, although it has been restored in San Antonio.

 

Waymo is to be commended for taking swift action in the face of obvious problems that could kill passengers in a peculiarly horrifying way.  Especially with high-tech operations of super-wealthy companies such as Alphabet (the parent firm of both Waymo and Google), profit sometimes takes a back seat to safety, and that is as it should be. 

 

Up-to-date information on high water in roadways is currently available through various means, including municipal emergency services and mapping organizations such as Waze.  But especially in Texas, floodwaters can rise within minutes, and few systems can respond that fast.  It looks like the challenge of directly detecting the presence of high water on a road through on-board sensors is something that is either too hard to do, or too unreliable.  So Waymo and other autonomous-vehicle operators may rely mostly on third-party data about where it's too dangerous to drive because of high water. 

 

Despite the drama surrounding the flooded Waymo cars, this is actually part of a process I would call normal engineering.  No matter how many problems a designer anticipates before a new technology is fielded, there will always be some issues that don't show up until the technology has been in use for a while.  This is doubly true for a complex multidisciplinary system such as an autonomous vehicle.  The world is simply too complicated for non-omniscient engineers to anticipate every single thing that might go wrong before deploying a system in the field.

 

Many of the locations where Waymo suspended service were new to the company, so Waymo had its first encounter in those cities with this spring's rainy season.  While California also has flash floods, I don't think they are as prominent a part of the landscape as they are in central Texas, for example. 

 

If I'd been riding in a Waymo car headed toward a flooded road, I wouldn't have had a lot of options.  There is no panic button as such in a Waymo.  But on the Waymo website there is a section titled "Pulling over, collisions, and security events."  They do list an option to ask the car to pull over out of traffic, but the decision as to how and when to do that is up to the system, not the passenger.  There is a way to contact "Support" (presumably a human being on the monitoring staff that every autonomous-vehicle company maintains), but having a conversation with someone possibly thousands of miles away as water surrounds the car is probably not the first thing you'd want to do.

 

All things considered, it was the wisest course for Waymo simply to shut down all service until their engineers can figure out a way to keep their cars out of water, hot or otherwise. 

 

This is also a good example of how semi-serious incidents can flag a problem that could easily lead to more serious consequences, such as customer fatalities.  If you look into the details of many historic engineering disasters, you will commonly find that less serious precursor incidents often happened in the days or years leading up to the big disaster.  This isn't always the case.  But it happens often enough that system designers should train themselves to take very seriously any safety-related problems that constitute narrow escapes.  And they should address the issues allowing such narrow escapes before some unlucky person encounters the combination of circumstances that proves deadly.

 

In shutting down all service in certain cities until the flood problem can be addressed satisfactorily, Waymo did the right thing.  This doesn't guarantee that nobody will ever drown in a Waymo car.  But in taking such a public move that obviously cost the company revenue, Waymo has both given itself time to fix the problem, and has sent a strong message to the public that they regard passenger safety as paramount. 

 

Sources:  I referred to articles in the Austin American-Statesman at https://www.statesman.com/business/technology/article/waymo-freeway-robotaxi-safety-pause-22272052.php, the BBC News website at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgplyxxl75o, and Waymo's own safety information at https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9449023?hl=en.