Smart Dust, is Here and its Arrival May Not Be for the Better
There is a technology being developed that sounds like something pulled straight out of a science-fiction movie: tiny, nearly invisible computers and sensors that can be scattered throughout an environment, collect information about what is happening around them, communicate wirelessly and send that information somewhere else.
It is called smart dust, and while the technology could eventually do some genuinely incredible things, I am not convinced we should be rushing to sprinkle microscopic sensors into the world simply because we can.
The basic concept behind smart dust is surprisingly old. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley developed the original Smart Dust project under DARPA funding, with the goal of creating autonomous sensing and communication systems that could eventually fit into a cubic-millimeter package. These tiny devices, often called “motes,” can contain sensors, processing electronics, communications technology and some form of power. The original project specifically explored military applications, including battlefield surveillance and detecting the movement of vehicles.
How is Smart Dust to be Used?
The potential uses are enormous. Smart dust could monitor bridges and buildings for structural damage, detect dangerous chemicals, monitor crops for water or disease, track machinery inside factories, monitor environmental conditions, help with medical monitoring and provide soldiers with real-time information from environments where conventional sensors would be difficult or dangerous to deploy. Researchers are also exploring smart-dust-like systems for chemical mapping, environmental monitoring, healthcare, agriculture and defense.
And that is the part that sounds fantastic.
Imagine sensors embedded into a bridge that detect a microscopic structural problem before the bridge becomes dangerous. Imagine farmers knowing exactly which sections of a field need water rather than dumping millions of gallons across an entire crop. Imagine doctors being able to monitor certain biological signals continuously instead of relying on a patient to show up at a hospital every few months. There are legitimate applications here that could save money, prevent disasters and potentially save lives.
But then there is the other side of the equation.
What happens when the technology becomes cheap enough that we don’t just put sensors in bridges, factories and farms? What happens when we put them everywhere?
That is where smart dust becomes considerably less exciting.
The fundamental selling point of the technology is also its biggest problem: you may not know the sensors are there. A camera on a wall is obvious. A microphone sitting on a desk is obvious. A smart-dust sensor potentially the size of a grain of sand is another matter entirely. Once distributed, recovering individual sensors could be extremely difficult or impossible.
A U.S. Army War College technology assessment noted that smart dust could eventually become commercially mainstream and specifically identified privacy concerns surrounding the deployment of sensors that could potentially gather information without people’s knowledge.
And this isn’t merely theoretical paranoia. The technology has already been envisioned for surveillance. The original Berkeley project was funded by DARPA and explicitly included defense-related sensor networks and battlefield surveillance among its applications. More recent research continues to examine smart-dust networks for intrusion detection, security and military surveillance.
Now comes the really interesting part.
Does Wells Fargo Have a Patent on Smart Dust?
In 2022, the U.S. Patent Office granted Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. patent US11354666B1, titled “Smart Dust Usage.” The patent application was originally filed in 2016. It describes using smart-dust technology as part of a system for authenticating a person making a payment.
According to the patent, the smart-dust system could potentially collect information about a person, including audio, optical information, temperature, pressure and motion. The patent also describes biometric information such as height, weight, heart rate or pulse, blood pressure and body temperature, as well as the possibility of capturing images and using facial recognition to authenticate the individual making a payment.
That is where my eyebrows went up.
To be clear, a patent does not mean Wells Fargo has deployed microscopic sensors throughout society, and it does not prove that your bank is secretly sprinkling smart dust on customers. A patent is essentially a legal claim around an invention or proposed method. It can describe technology that never becomes a commercial product. There is a gigantic difference between “a company patented this idea” and “the company is currently doing this to you.”
But the patent demonstrates something important: financial institutions have at least considered whether this technology could be used to identify and authenticate people.
And suddenly smart dust isn’t just about monitoring bridges.
Now This is Where it Gets Scary
It potentially becomes about knowing who you are, where you are and whether you are the person attempting to conduct a transaction.
There is an obvious argument for this. Fraud costs banks and consumers enormous amounts of money. If a payment system could verify that the person making a transaction is actually the account holder using multiple biometric and environmental signals, it could potentially make financial transactions more secure.
But there is a line between security and surveillance, and technology has a nasty habit of moving that line after everyone gets comfortable with the previous one.
Today, you might voluntarily use Face ID to unlock your phone. Tomorrow, biometric identification could become a routine part of walking into a store. Eventually, a network of sensors could theoretically determine that you entered a particular building, identify you, observe your behavior and associate that information with other databases.
Then You Have Data Ownership… Who Actually Will Own the Data Collected?
There is another problem that doesn’t get nearly enough attention.
If thousands or millions of microscopic sensors are collecting information, where does all of that information go? Who owns it? Who can access it? How long is it stored? Can law enforcement obtain it? Can corporations sell it? Can insurance companies use it? Can advertisers use it? Can artificial intelligence analyze it and discover things about you that you never knowingly revealed?
These questions become much more important when the sensor collecting the information is invisible.
We already live in a world where phones, cars, smart speakers, watches, cameras and websites generate staggering amounts of information about human beings. Smart dust could take that concept to another level by turning the physical environment itself into a sensor network.
And that is the part that bothers me. This is BONKERS LEVEL SCARY SHIT! This is what Minority Report wishes it was.
Technology is usually introduced by explaining what it can do for us. The harder question is, what will it allow other people to do to us.
Smart dust could help detect a crack in a bridge before the bridge collapses. It could help a farmer reduce water consumption. It could help doctors monitor patients. It could detect chemical contamination or hazardous environmental conditions before humans are exposed. All of this on the surface is amazing.
But if the same basic technology eventually allows governments, corporations or other organizations to monitor people without their knowledge, suddenly we have a very different conversation.
The Jury is Still Out: Is This Dust Good or Evil?
The technology itself isn’t inherently good or evil. A sensor doesn’t have political beliefs. A microchip doesn’t wake up in the morning plotting against humanity. Humans decide what the technology is used for, and history gives us plenty of reasons to be skeptical whenever someone says a powerful new surveillance capability will only be used responsibly.
The biggest danger may not even be some dramatic scenario where someone releases a cloud of microscopic tracking devices over a city. The more realistic concern is much more boring: thousands of individual systems gradually adopting tiny sensors because they make something cheaper, easier, safer or more profitable.
That is why I have a hard time accepting the argument that we should simply celebrate smart dust because the technology is impressive. It is impressive. That’s precisely why we should be careful.
Human beings have a spectacular history of inventing things first and deciding what the consequences are afterward. We invented social media before figuring out what it would do to people’s attention spans. We built enormous databases before seriously considering what happens when those databases are breached. We connected everything to the internet and then acted surprised when someone hacked everything.
Now we’re talking about making sensors so small that they could potentially disappear into the background of everyday life.
Maybe smart dust will become one of the most useful technologies of the next several decades. It could improve medicine, agriculture, infrastructure, environmental monitoring and national security.
Or perhaps it will become another piece of the slowly expanding surveillance machine that nobody remembers agreeing to.
The technology isn’t necessarily the problem. The problem is what happens when something capable of seeing almost everything becomes too small for anyone to see. And when that day comes, the question won’t simply be whether smart dust is useful. It will be whether we still have the ability to tell when we’re being watched.
