The original note, as written at the time
We could spend more resources and energy in creating and developing arresting technology. Arresters can be devices, robots or fields that can detect, isolate and safely contain threats in any context. These threats can be explosions, mechanical hostiles, human hostiles etc. A sample versatile arrester can be a fast drone with multi-action pinchers and the ability to deploy an inertial isolating field.
Ongoing development
We could spend more resources and energy on arresting technology.
An arrester is a device, robot or field that detects, isolates and safely contains a threat in any context — an explosion, a mechanical hostile, a human hostile. A versatile one might be a fast drone with multi-action pinchers and the ability to deploy an inertial isolating field.
What interests me is not the hardware. It is that we have an enormous industry devoted to delivering force and almost none devoted to arresting it. Weapons are funded as a category. Containment is funded as an afterthought, piece by piece, for each new kind of danger, after the danger has already appeared.
The result is that our response to every threat is calibrated to end it rather than to hold it. You cannot de-escalate with a projectile. You can only de-escalate with something that is capable of stopping a thing without destroying it — and that capability has to exist before the moment it is needed, which means somebody has to invest in it when there is no emergency to justify the budget.
The inertial isolating field is the interesting part of the sketch. If you can hold a mass still relative to the world for a few seconds, you can contain an explosion, catch a falling thing, stop a vehicle without injuring the people inside it. That is a capability with an obvious civil use and an obvious military one, and we have mostly thought about the second.
The design rule I would insist on is that an arrester must be slower and more visible than the thing it arrests. A fast, silent, invisible containment system is just a weapon with better manners.
Arresting power is what separates a police force from an army. We should build the machines that make that distinction real.