My first question is about the title picture. I have some priors on how a computer tomography machine for vehicles would look like. Basically, you want to take x-ray images from many different directions. The medical setup where you have a ring which contains the x-ray source on one side and the detectors on the other side, and rotate that ring to take images from multiple directions before moving the patient perpendicular to the ring to record the next slice exists for a reason: high resolution x-ray detectors are expensive. If we scaled this up to a car size, we might have a ring of four meters in diameter. A bridge of some low-Z material (perhaps beams of wood) would go through that ring. Park on the bridge, get out of the car, and watch as the rotating ring moves over the bridge.
The thing in the picture looks does not look like it has big moving parts. I can kind of see it taking a sideways x-ray image of the car but I am puzzled by the big grey boxes visible over the car. Having an x-ray source or detector above the car would only make sense if you had the other device below the car, in the road. Of course, if there is anything in the road, one would imagine that that piece of road was some low-Z material material designed not to block half of your x-rays. Instead, the road material below the car looks exactly like the road outside the detector, concrete probably.
In Europe, we kind of dislike being exposed to ionizing radiation (even though Germany is rather silly about it). I get that the US is a bit more relaxed about it, but a computer tomography device capable of scanning a car with a good resolution would likely emit to a lot of scattered x-rays to anyone nearby. The position in which that boarder guard stands would likely not be a safe position to stand a significant fraction of your work-life.
At the very least, I would expect that black and yellow trefoil sign warning of ionizing radiation, with a visual indicator if the x-ray is on, and a line marking the minimum safe distance. More realistically, you might have something like a garage door before and behind the car.
Just from the vibes, I get that the pictured non-intrusive fentanyl inspection machine might run on the operation principle of the famous ADE 651, which is to say it does nothing whatsoever.
While detecting dry fentanyl through high resolution CT scans seems to be possible in principle at least, once the smugglers go through the additional trouble of dissolving it all bets are off. Wikipedia is light on solubility data, but from the looks of it fentanyl should dissolve well in organic solvents.
You can check the gas tank of every car if you want, but what are you going to do if an eight-wheeler full of one- gallon-bottles of cooking oil crosses the border? If your scan is good, it would perhaps detect if one bottle in the middle of the stack has been filled with powder instead. There is no way in hell it will detect if one such bottle has ten grams (perhaps 10k doses) of fentanyl dissolved in it. Your best bet would be to detect some residue of the oil on product seized off the streets and work backwards from that.
Of course, “as long as the profit margin is that high, we could go full iron curtain on our borders and would not stop the trafficking” is not a politically acceptable answer. Hence some snake oil salesmen are able to get your tax dollars for products which have not been proven in adversarial conditions. (To train an AI, it is not enough to have a ton of samples, you would need known positive and negative samples. Also, while we are playing buzzword bingo, why not mention that the shipping manifests will be securely stored on The Blockchain?)
You’re very likely correct IMO. The only thing I see pulling in the other direction is that cars are far more standardized than humans, and a database of detailed blueprints for every make and model could drastically reduce the resolution needed for usefulness. Especially if the action on a cursory detection is “get the people out of the area and scan it harder”, not “rip the vehicle apart”.
My first question is about the title picture. I have some priors on how a computer tomography machine for vehicles would look like. Basically, you want to take x-ray images from many different directions. The medical setup where you have a ring which contains the x-ray source on one side and the detectors on the other side, and rotate that ring to take images from multiple directions before moving the patient perpendicular to the ring to record the next slice exists for a reason: high resolution x-ray detectors are expensive. If we scaled this up to a car size, we might have a ring of four meters in diameter. A bridge of some low-Z material (perhaps beams of wood) would go through that ring. Park on the bridge, get out of the car, and watch as the rotating ring moves over the bridge.
The thing in the picture looks does not look like it has big moving parts. I can kind of see it taking a sideways x-ray image of the car but I am puzzled by the big grey boxes visible over the car. Having an x-ray source or detector above the car would only make sense if you had the other device below the car, in the road. Of course, if there is anything in the road, one would imagine that that piece of road was some low-Z material material designed not to block half of your x-rays. Instead, the road material below the car looks exactly like the road outside the detector, concrete probably.
In Europe, we kind of dislike being exposed to ionizing radiation (even though Germany is rather silly about it). I get that the US is a bit more relaxed about it, but a computer tomography device capable of scanning a car with a good resolution would likely emit to a lot of scattered x-rays to anyone nearby. The position in which that boarder guard stands would likely not be a safe position to stand a significant fraction of your work-life.
At the very least, I would expect that black and yellow trefoil sign warning of ionizing radiation, with a visual indicator if the x-ray is on, and a line marking the minimum safe distance. More realistically, you might have something like a garage door before and behind the car.
Just from the vibes, I get that the pictured non-intrusive fentanyl inspection machine might run on the operation principle of the famous ADE 651, which is to say it does nothing whatsoever.
While detecting dry fentanyl through high resolution CT scans seems to be possible in principle at least, once the smugglers go through the additional trouble of dissolving it all bets are off. Wikipedia is light on solubility data, but from the looks of it fentanyl should dissolve well in organic solvents.
You can check the gas tank of every car if you want, but what are you going to do if an eight-wheeler full of one- gallon-bottles of cooking oil crosses the border? If your scan is good, it would perhaps detect if one bottle in the middle of the stack has been filled with powder instead. There is no way in hell it will detect if one such bottle has ten grams (perhaps 10k doses) of fentanyl dissolved in it. Your best bet would be to detect some residue of the oil on product seized off the streets and work backwards from that.
Of course, “as long as the profit margin is that high, we could go full iron curtain on our borders and would not stop the trafficking” is not a politically acceptable answer. Hence some snake oil salesmen are able to get your tax dollars for products which have not been proven in adversarial conditions. (To train an AI, it is not enough to have a ton of samples, you would need known positive and negative samples. Also, while we are playing buzzword bingo, why not mention that the shipping manifests will be securely stored on The Blockchain?)
You’re very likely correct IMO. The only thing I see pulling in the other direction is that cars are far more standardized than humans, and a database of detailed blueprints for every make and model could drastically reduce the resolution needed for usefulness. Especially if the action on a cursory detection is “get the people out of the area and scan it harder”, not “rip the vehicle apart”.