13 ms·

Military robots are getting smaller and more capable

138 points by prostoalex 8y ago

javajosh 8y ago
Violent action is already mediated by compute devices: police and soldiers are dispatched by computer command to capture or kill people they don't know and have never seen before. Rarely do human actors have any discretion in the field, so the fact that a human constitutes "the tip of the spear" wouldn't seem to matter much.
- afarrell 8y ago
  > Rarely do human actors have any discretion in the field That seems like a very strong claim.
- omginternets 8y ago
  >Rarely do human actors have any discretion in the field Spoken like someone who's never been anywhere near the military. In case I wasn't clear enough: this is patently false, as any combat veteran can attest. ROE often explicitly allow for discretion in target engagement.
  - javajosh 8y ago
    How does a drone pilot, or a pilot in general, show discretion?
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      Most orders to fire will be discretionary, in both if, when and with what to engage it’s fairly rare for an order to engage to be explicit and in those cases they can still request confirmation including from higher up in the chain of command (depending on who is actually commanding the mission) only if it’s a direct order would they have to follow it at that point unless it’s an illegal order. Pilots drone or not have the best situational awareness and they often scrub missions and even abort after launch if the situation changes to what they would consider unacceptable. Essentially any type of “fire at will” order is discretionary. Pilots didn’t sign up to blow up schools and hospitals and they can and are directly liable for any collateral damage and civilian casualties they can and do question the intelligence and information which lead to authorizing the strike they’ll asses the strike package and they will assess the situation and the target to the best of their abilities before engaging. Shit does happen, mistakes are made but they are by far not the norm.
      - GordonS 8y ago
        > Pilots [...] are directly liable for any collateral damage and civilian casualties Serious question, are you aware of any cases of US pilots ever being punished for collateral damage or hitting the wrong target?
        dogma1138 8y ago
        Do you know of any cases where pilots intentionally hit the wrong targets? The laws both national and international that govern military operations don’t put civilian lives a head of military operations in all cases. I’m not American but from my experience we had to do a lot of work for risk reduction when planning missions, essentially we perform and throughly document the process in which we reduce the risk of collateral damage that came in form of selecting a strike package to minimize the damage, choosing a time that would ensure minimal non-combatants in the AO and also providing the parameters of engagement to the pilots based on the value of the target. I can say that out of the approved strikes close to 50% of them were aborted last minute and even after munition launch due to the pilots giving us the no-clear in the last moment and then essentially missing the window of opportunity.
        GordonS 8y ago
        > Do you know of any cases where pilots intentionally hit the wrong targets? I'm not involved with the military in any way, shape or form. My guess would be that if such a thing happened, it would be buried (see Chelsea Manning, Abu Ghraib etc). You did say though that pilots are directly liable for any collateral damage, so I was curious as to whether that had any real meaning - would a pilot actually face charges (military or criminal) if they, for example, negligently fired upon the wrong building, or failed to abort launching against a pre-approved target that it later turned out was obviously a school, hospital, wedding party, etc?
        dogma1138 8y ago
        Pilots for the most part don’t take on missions that are in clear violation of the military code of conduct and international law, mistakes happen but they are mistakes. If a pilot tracks a school bus that loaded a bunch of kids and heading into town and calls it a military target and blows it up they will be charged. Investigations also happen quite often, quite often they don’t result in anything because everyone did what they were supposed to do to reduce the risk and make the best judgment call based on the information they had. You can’t charge people for making a mistake as shitty as you might think it is war gets people killed by definition and for the most part professional soldiers do what they can to make sure that the people who die are combatants.
    - omginternets 8y ago
      Infantryman here, so I can't quite speak to how pilots make their decisions (and I think the sibling comment answers this pretty well). However, I can attest that pilots routinely provide us infantrymen with information that we weigh very heavily in our decision to engage. Moreover, it is often the case that air-strikes fall under the "close air support" (CAS) category, which in turn means the aircraft shoots where and when the ground troops request it. In other words: discretion is what separates the professional soldier from the disorganized militia.
- winceschwab 8y ago
  Actually, if anything, that means everything that happens next matters now more than ever. Put another way, if we think of 1960's era ICBM technology as entry level autonomous warfare, it's the least effective example of this kind of technology. That alone should give a bit of pause. That is how potent this technology is, and it should be regarded with no lighter wariness. It is more precise, more durable, more accurate, and worst of all, requires fewer people per intervention, indicating that it can be operated with a hair trigger, leaving the capacity to react with force more prone to emotional decisions. If it seems that ordinary guns make it easier for ordinary civilian citizens to lash out at tens of victims, this technology will expand that ability even further. But, put in the hands of unrestrained organizations and institutions, operating with the capacity and constraints of nation-state authority, no less than World War III is on the table.
  - Jugglerofworlds 8y ago
    What about defensive measures? Can these things be taken out with electromagnetic interference or a net? Maybe some sort of autonomous laser turret to melt the propellers of the drones?
    - imrelaxed 8y ago
      US military has a lot of anti drone weapons including lasers. If you’re worried about facial recognition then masks or makeup are what you’re looking for.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- KineticLensman 8y ago
  > Rarely do human actors have any discretion in the field It's precisely because people do have discretion that we have the concept of the strategic corporal [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Block_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Block_War
- unit91 8y ago
  Afghanistan combat veteran here. You've seen WAY too many movies. Discretion is everything. Any time we'd hit a compound, we would pore over the intelligence, assess whether this was a likely badguy, whether they were a key player or just a low level radical, etc. Equally important, are the people around said badguy likely also bad or innocent bystanders? If they're probably bad we want to capture them all together. If they're probably innocent we want to wait until the dude wanders off to minimize the risk to civilian life and property, even if that means greater risk to us. Once you actually get to the target location, it starts all over again, only with less time and information. Is that a shovel or an RPG? I can't quite tell from here. Looks like an RPG -- what if I'm wrong? There's a house behind him, what's the risk if I wait 30 seconds...? It's a real profession that takes real expertise by people with real emotions.
  - wolf550e 8y ago
    Unfortunately, it seems the ROE of American occupation forces in Afghanistan is more civilian-friendly than the ROE of American cops fighting the drug/race war.
    - imrelaxed 8y ago
      There’s no race war in America, only a misguided drug war, stop disseminating nonsense.
      - Abekkus 8y ago
        The drug war has always been a cultural and class war, and of course it cuts along racial lines, as well as political ones. Not nonsense at all. https://youtu.be/sXPOw2unxy0?t=238 https://youtu.be/sXPOw2unxy0?t=238
    - ryanmarsh 8y ago
      > Unfortunately, it seems the ROE of American occupation forces in Afghanistan is more civilian-friendly than the ROE of American cops You had me until race war but yes. This is true in my exp.
kartan 8y ago
An interesting video talked about in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
- themagician 8y ago
  I’m honestly surprised that these don’t exist already. I know the IDF was working on facial recognition for combat drones back in 2009, and I’m surprised this hasn’t been seen in the wild yet.
  - williamscales 8y ago
    I don't think we civilians would necessarily know about them if they did exist. Self-piloting drones exist, good facial recognition exists, just need to put them together.
    - lwansbrough 8y ago
      > good facial recognition exists Does it? I would guess if you're going to blow someone's head off with an autonomous drone you'd want to be pretty darn sure it's them. Though, on second thought, governements don't really care about civilian casualties anyway... Perhaps this is a pragmatic solution to lowering those counts....
      - subway 8y ago
        I imagine pulling the human element out of the loop is valuable to the military.
      - acdha 8y ago
        There are also intermediate steps before outright attacks: simply having drones which can track people in a crowd, guide ground forces, etc. has a lot of applications which wouldn’t be publicized (“officer smith recognized the resistance officer in the crowd and followed them home”). Plant some DL fakes on their phone and occupation could be very different.
scotty79 8y ago
I wonder how NRA prepares to defend guns as anti-dictatorship constitutional tool against government that has thumb size drones that can inject lethal dose of botox in your left butt cheek on demand.
- noonespecial 8y ago
  I suspect the same way they always do. The people who send thumb sized drones to kill have to go home and live somewhere. What's a bullet but a really fast, low tech thumb sized drone that can kill?
  - scotty79 8y ago
    > The people who send thumb sized drones to kill have to go home and live somewhere. All 12 of them? They may live on their private islands. Or even in the Whitehouse. Do you think approaching Whitehouse with a gun will be easier in the world of military thumb sized drones than it is today?
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Those 12 people don't actually send the drone, they just tell someone (to tell someone, etc) to send the drone. Until we have full Skynet abilities, they will need a bunch of people on the ground to do the work.
      - scotty79 8y ago
        Tech companies require less and less people to operate. Military will become tech company once small drones make infantry obsolete.
        icebraining 8y ago
        Right, but even tech companies have a lot of people. Google has 85000 employees, plus many, many more that produce supplies they depend on (like most of the hardware). It's not 12 people on private islands.
maxxxxx 8y ago
It will be interesting to see how this plays out once robots get more capable. If the people who planned the Iraq 2003 invasion had had robots available they may have just invaded more countries. Losing their own soldiers' lives is a strong incentive for politicians to limit military adventures. Once the cost to invade a country is only financial they may be tempted to be more aggressive.
- jbattle 8y ago
  I get your point but I honestly think the people planning the second Iraq war really didn't care about casualties, or perhaps we're just badly deceiving themselves. "We will be greeted with flowers" they said. "the war will pay for itself" they said. Specifically I think Cheney was willing to spill as much blood as needed. Some of his supporters in the media probably we're just in denial about the full costs of over throwing a country as large and fractious as Iraq. What this implies for future wars I'm not sure.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    They may not have cared about losing lives when they invaded but the American public quickly got sceptical about the war once they realized that their soldiers were getting killed. I think this definitely put some restraint on further military action.
  - pluma 8y ago
    They cared enough to pressure news reports into not airing any footage of dead American soldiers though. Modern politics are always about optics. Caskets with American flags draped over them are bad optics, especially when there's lots of them all the time.
  - UncleEntity 8y ago
    > "We will be greeted with flowers" That and American flags -- which, at the time, I wondered where they managed to get a bunch of flags? Yeah, yeah, I know people don't like to hear that the Iraqi people were actually glad we were there in the early days of the war and greeted us as "liberators"...
sorokod 8y ago
There is no doubt that as the technology advances it will spil over to the civilian umm... "market". A truly terrifying prospect.
LMYahooTFY 8y ago
Something even more terrifying to me is illuminated by a talk from John Sotos who served as Chief Medical Officer for Intel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY "...defensive technology always lags offensive technology. So you know, the cancer moonshot I would propose is dual use, just like nuclear weapons and nuclear power, two sides of the same coin. The ideal cancer treatment someday is going to be the doctors biopsy your tumor, get a sample, send it down to the lab, the lab will figure out the genetic signature of your exact cancer tumor. Then somebody will build a virus, that using that if-then statement, only targets the cancer cells in you. They'll put that virus inside you, you'll feel like you have a cold for a few days, the virus will go to work destroying your cancer, and then you'll wake up cancer free. That's a pretty good deal, we all want that to happen. But notice this exquisite targeting overcomes that big drawback against bioweapons. So the new technologies are going to allow incredibly targeted bioweapons. So think about three different axis. Who might you target?...you could also target a family, like the royal family. You could target a group of people, or an entire species." He goes on to describe examples of what he asserts will be possible to do, which is target virtually any identifiable characteristic among a life form, or cause practically any sort of deficiency or alteration within cells. He also points out that Biotech is currently outpacing Moore's Law, and this technology will likely become extremely cheap extremely fast.
- Swizec 8y ago
  I have a friend who's doing a PHd in building logic gates in bacterial DNA so you could program, say, E. Coli to do specific things in the body. Learning about her research is astounding, fascinating, and terrifying all at the same time.
  - samstave 8y ago
    Nearly ten years ago I ran into a researcher from UCSF who was working with StemCells where she had designed a fluid-matrix that she 3D printed, then wrote a python program to control valves which released certain proteins to the cells to determine how to get them to express into a certain type tissue/organ cell. I just point out how cheap off the shelf tooling that we take for granted in our industries and hobbies are also fueling this wave of change and how readily available they are The tools and materials to build something like this are free and open to literally anyone on the planet. So it makes sense that given enough exposure to human ingenuity, with the right tools freely available, any reality is possible.
Pxtl 8y ago
We have had the technology to have something the size of a remote controlled car that could murder every person in sight in a blink of an eye for some time. Modern warfare is much more about deciding who to shoot than it is about effectively shooting them.
- pixl97 8y ago
  That's only because we are trying to avoid total war, hence the release of nuclear weapons. If nukes didn't exist, I think technology along these lines would be far more terrifying than it is now.
golemiprague 8y ago
There is a funny war going on right now between fire kites of the Gazans to IDF drones, the kites are certainly autonomous, not sure about the defence drones.
pontifier 8y ago
can't read the article as it's behind a paywall, but I've recently become very paranoid. Just a few minutes ago I was thinking about small autonomous drones that are just big enough to infiltrate a building and insert themselves into the usb port of otherwise secure machines then escape with sensitive information. I think I'll start printing some usb port covers as a countermeasure.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  Or......there's the $5 wrench https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
  - earenndil 8y ago
    The difference is, if you hit someone with a wrench until they give you the password to some data, they're going not going to continue giving you data. Whereas, if you covertly get access to someone's computer, they're going to keep using it and keep feeding you data.
- earenndil 8y ago
  There was a post recently about a computer that could fit inside of a usb port, little arm chip. It was meant as an open yubikey substitute, but you could easily hide one of those inside of a mass-produced cell phone charger, and suddenly you have something doing arbitrary computation. It didn't have a wireless chip, but on the other hand it was $30, if you made it using off-the-shelf consumer parts. I'm sure an industrial complex would be able to shave the size down and potentially add a wireless chip. Scary stuff.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    USB Wifi adapters have been tiny for years, and they have a wireless chip (obviously) and certainly some computation.
nosjwshere 8y ago
as long as a central AI controlling it doesn't deem the armed civilians to be a threat.
amai 8y ago
Don't forget about all those simple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_countermeasure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_countermeasure devices. The Russians had quite some success in Syria using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasukha_(electronic_warfare_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasukha_(electronic_warfare_s... . (https://thedefensepost.com/2018/05/01/russia-syria-electronic-warfare/ https://thedefensepost.com/2018/05/01/russia-syria-electroni...) All those sensitive electronic robots are useless in a real war. Makes me wonder who really needs them?
- yorwba 8y ago
  Jamming communications doesn't make robots useless. It just means that they can't be controlled remotely, can't use GPS to navigate and can't provide real-time surveillance. That can be worked around by pre-programming a fixed route or an objective to be fulfilled autonomously, by using celestial navigation or geographical landmarks, and by having surveillance drones return to base to deliver recordings using a physical connection.
  - pixl97 8y ago
    Honestly a swarm of drones with laser based communication sounds just like the thing that may make widescale jamming useless in the future. Also, makes jamming pretty risky since something will head your way... and explode.
  - ntsplnkv2 8y ago
    Are there drones that use celestial navigation? What if it's cloudy?
    - yorwba 8y ago
      I don't know about drones, but it is in use for missiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_guidance#Astro-inertial_guidance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_guidance#Astro-inertia... Cloudiness would be a problem, but in that case you could still fall back to a combination of other systems.

138 points by prostoalex 8y ago

Violent action is already mediated by compute devices: police and soldiers are dispatched by computer command to capture or kill people they don't know and have never seen before. Rarely do human actors have any discretion in the field, so the fact that a human constitutes "the tip of the spear" wouldn't seem to matter much.

afarrell 8y ago
> Rarely do human actors have any discretion in the field That seems like a very strong claim.
omginternets 8y ago
>Rarely do human actors have any discretion in the field Spoken like someone who's never been anywhere near the military. In case I wasn't clear enough: this is patently false, as any combat veteran can attest. ROE often explicitly allow for discretion in target engagement.
- javajosh 8y ago
  How does a drone pilot, or a pilot in general, show discretion?
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    Most orders to fire will be discretionary, in both if, when and with what to engage it’s fairly rare for an order to engage to be explicit and in those cases they can still request confirmation including from higher up in the chain of command (depending on who is actually commanding the mission) only if it’s a direct order would they have to follow it at that point unless it’s an illegal order. Pilots drone or not have the best situational awareness and they often scrub missions and even abort after launch if the situation changes to what they would consider unacceptable. Essentially any type of “fire at will” order is discretionary. Pilots didn’t sign up to blow up schools and hospitals and they can and are directly liable for any collateral damage and civilian casualties they can and do question the intelligence and information which lead to authorizing the strike they’ll asses the strike package and they will assess the situation and the target to the best of their abilities before engaging. Shit does happen, mistakes are made but they are by far not the norm.
    - GordonS 8y ago
      > Pilots [...] are directly liable for any collateral damage and civilian casualties Serious question, are you aware of any cases of US pilots ever being punished for collateral damage or hitting the wrong target?
      - dogma1138 8y ago
        Do you know of any cases where pilots intentionally hit the wrong targets? The laws both national and international that govern military operations don’t put civilian lives a head of military operations in all cases. I’m not American but from my experience we had to do a lot of work for risk reduction when planning missions, essentially we perform and throughly document the process in which we reduce the risk of collateral damage that came in form of selecting a strike package to minimize the damage, choosing a time that would ensure minimal non-combatants in the AO and also providing the parameters of engagement to the pilots based on the value of the target. I can say that out of the approved strikes close to 50% of them were aborted last minute and even after munition launch due to the pilots giving us the no-clear in the last moment and then essentially missing the window of opportunity.
        GordonS 8y ago
        > Do you know of any cases where pilots intentionally hit the wrong targets? I'm not involved with the military in any way, shape or form. My guess would be that if such a thing happened, it would be buried (see Chelsea Manning, Abu Ghraib etc). You did say though that pilots are directly liable for any collateral damage, so I was curious as to whether that had any real meaning - would a pilot actually face charges (military or criminal) if they, for example, negligently fired upon the wrong building, or failed to abort launching against a pre-approved target that it later turned out was obviously a school, hospital, wedding party, etc?
        dogma1138 8y ago
        Pilots for the most part don’t take on missions that are in clear violation of the military code of conduct and international law, mistakes happen but they are mistakes. If a pilot tracks a school bus that loaded a bunch of kids and heading into town and calls it a military target and blows it up they will be charged. Investigations also happen quite often, quite often they don’t result in anything because everyone did what they were supposed to do to reduce the risk and make the best judgment call based on the information they had. You can’t charge people for making a mistake as shitty as you might think it is war gets people killed by definition and for the most part professional soldiers do what they can to make sure that the people who die are combatants.
  - omginternets 8y ago
    Infantryman here, so I can't quite speak to how pilots make their decisions (and I think the sibling comment answers this pretty well). However, I can attest that pilots routinely provide us infantrymen with information that we weigh very heavily in our decision to engage. Moreover, it is often the case that air-strikes fall under the "close air support" (CAS) category, which in turn means the aircraft shoots where and when the ground troops request it. In other words: discretion is what separates the professional soldier from the disorganized militia.
winceschwab 8y ago
Actually, if anything, that means everything that happens next matters now more than ever. Put another way, if we think of 1960's era ICBM technology as entry level autonomous warfare, it's the least effective example of this kind of technology. That alone should give a bit of pause. That is how potent this technology is, and it should be regarded with no lighter wariness. It is more precise, more durable, more accurate, and worst of all, requires fewer people per intervention, indicating that it can be operated with a hair trigger, leaving the capacity to react with force more prone to emotional decisions. If it seems that ordinary guns make it easier for ordinary civilian citizens to lash out at tens of victims, this technology will expand that ability even further. But, put in the hands of unrestrained organizations and institutions, operating with the capacity and constraints of nation-state authority, no less than World War III is on the table.
- Jugglerofworlds 8y ago
  What about defensive measures? Can these things be taken out with electromagnetic interference or a net? Maybe some sort of autonomous laser turret to melt the propellers of the drones?
  - imrelaxed 8y ago
    US military has a lot of anti drone weapons including lasers. If you’re worried about facial recognition then masks or makeup are what you’re looking for.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
KineticLensman 8y ago
> Rarely do human actors have any discretion in the field It's precisely because people do have discretion that we have the concept of the strategic corporal [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Block_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Block_War
unit91 8y ago
Afghanistan combat veteran here. You've seen WAY too many movies. Discretion is everything. Any time we'd hit a compound, we would pore over the intelligence, assess whether this was a likely badguy, whether they were a key player or just a low level radical, etc. Equally important, are the people around said badguy likely also bad or innocent bystanders? If they're probably bad we want to capture them all together. If they're probably innocent we want to wait until the dude wanders off to minimize the risk to civilian life and property, even if that means greater risk to us. Once you actually get to the target location, it starts all over again, only with less time and information. Is that a shovel or an RPG? I can't quite tell from here. Looks like an RPG -- what if I'm wrong? There's a house behind him, what's the risk if I wait 30 seconds...? It's a real profession that takes real expertise by people with real emotions.
- wolf550e 8y ago
  Unfortunately, it seems the ROE of American occupation forces in Afghanistan is more civilian-friendly than the ROE of American cops fighting the drug/race war.
  - imrelaxed 8y ago
    There’s no race war in America, only a misguided drug war, stop disseminating nonsense.
    - Abekkus 8y ago
      The drug war has always been a cultural and class war, and of course it cuts along racial lines, as well as political ones. Not nonsense at all. https://youtu.be/sXPOw2unxy0?t=238 https://youtu.be/sXPOw2unxy0?t=238
  - ryanmarsh 8y ago
    > Unfortunately, it seems the ROE of American occupation forces in Afghanistan is more civilian-friendly than the ROE of American cops You had me until race war but yes. This is true in my exp.

kartan 8y ago

An interesting video talked about in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA

themagician 8y ago
I’m honestly surprised that these don’t exist already. I know the IDF was working on facial recognition for combat drones back in 2009, and I’m surprised this hasn’t been seen in the wild yet.
- williamscales 8y ago
  I don't think we civilians would necessarily know about them if they did exist. Self-piloting drones exist, good facial recognition exists, just need to put them together.
  - lwansbrough 8y ago
    > good facial recognition exists Does it? I would guess if you're going to blow someone's head off with an autonomous drone you'd want to be pretty darn sure it's them. Though, on second thought, governements don't really care about civilian casualties anyway... Perhaps this is a pragmatic solution to lowering those counts....
    - subway 8y ago
      I imagine pulling the human element out of the loop is valuable to the military.
    - acdha 8y ago
      There are also intermediate steps before outright attacks: simply having drones which can track people in a crowd, guide ground forces, etc. has a lot of applications which wouldn’t be publicized (“officer smith recognized the resistance officer in the crowd and followed them home”). Plant some DL fakes on their phone and occupation could be very different.

scotty79 8y ago

I wonder how NRA prepares to defend guns as anti-dictatorship constitutional tool against government that has thumb size drones that can inject lethal dose of botox in your left butt cheek on demand.

noonespecial 8y ago
I suspect the same way they always do. The people who send thumb sized drones to kill have to go home and live somewhere. What's a bullet but a really fast, low tech thumb sized drone that can kill?
- scotty79 8y ago
  > The people who send thumb sized drones to kill have to go home and live somewhere. All 12 of them? They may live on their private islands. Or even in the Whitehouse. Do you think approaching Whitehouse with a gun will be easier in the world of military thumb sized drones than it is today?
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Those 12 people don't actually send the drone, they just tell someone (to tell someone, etc) to send the drone. Until we have full Skynet abilities, they will need a bunch of people on the ground to do the work.
    - scotty79 8y ago
      Tech companies require less and less people to operate. Military will become tech company once small drones make infantry obsolete.
      - icebraining 8y ago
        Right, but even tech companies have a lot of people. Google has 85000 employees, plus many, many more that produce supplies they depend on (like most of the hardware). It's not 12 people on private islands.

maxxxxx 8y ago

It will be interesting to see how this plays out once robots get more capable. If the people who planned the Iraq 2003 invasion had had robots available they may have just invaded more countries. Losing their own soldiers' lives is a strong incentive for politicians to limit military adventures. Once the cost to invade a country is only financial they may be tempted to be more aggressive.

jbattle 8y ago
I get your point but I honestly think the people planning the second Iraq war really didn't care about casualties, or perhaps we're just badly deceiving themselves. "We will be greeted with flowers" they said. "the war will pay for itself" they said. Specifically I think Cheney was willing to spill as much blood as needed. Some of his supporters in the media probably we're just in denial about the full costs of over throwing a country as large and fractious as Iraq. What this implies for future wars I'm not sure.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  They may not have cared about losing lives when they invaded but the American public quickly got sceptical about the war once they realized that their soldiers were getting killed. I think this definitely put some restraint on further military action.
- pluma 8y ago
  They cared enough to pressure news reports into not airing any footage of dead American soldiers though. Modern politics are always about optics. Caskets with American flags draped over them are bad optics, especially when there's lots of them all the time.
- UncleEntity 8y ago
  > "We will be greeted with flowers" That and American flags -- which, at the time, I wondered where they managed to get a bunch of flags? Yeah, yeah, I know people don't like to hear that the Iraqi people were actually glad we were there in the early days of the war and greeted us as "liberators"...

sorokod 8y ago

There is no doubt that as the technology advances it will spil over to the civilian umm... "market". A truly terrifying prospect.

LMYahooTFY 8y ago

Something even more terrifying to me is illuminated by a talk from John Sotos who served as Chief Medical Officer for Intel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY "...defensive technology always lags offensive technology. So you know, the cancer moonshot I would propose is dual use, just like nuclear weapons and nuclear power, two sides of the same coin. The ideal cancer treatment someday is going to be the doctors biopsy your tumor, get a sample, send it down to the lab, the lab will figure out the genetic signature of your exact cancer tumor. Then somebody will build a virus, that using that if-then statement, only targets the cancer cells in you. They'll put that virus inside you, you'll feel like you have a cold for a few days, the virus will go to work destroying your cancer, and then you'll wake up cancer free. That's a pretty good deal, we all want that to happen. But notice this exquisite targeting overcomes that big drawback against bioweapons. So the new technologies are going to allow incredibly targeted bioweapons. So think about three different axis. Who might you target?...you could also target a family, like the royal family. You could target a group of people, or an entire species." He goes on to describe examples of what he asserts will be possible to do, which is target virtually any identifiable characteristic among a life form, or cause practically any sort of deficiency or alteration within cells. He also points out that Biotech is currently outpacing Moore's Law, and this technology will likely become extremely cheap extremely fast.

Swizec 8y ago
I have a friend who's doing a PHd in building logic gates in bacterial DNA so you could program, say, E. Coli to do specific things in the body. Learning about her research is astounding, fascinating, and terrifying all at the same time.
- samstave 8y ago
  Nearly ten years ago I ran into a researcher from UCSF who was working with StemCells where she had designed a fluid-matrix that she 3D printed, then wrote a python program to control valves which released certain proteins to the cells to determine how to get them to express into a certain type tissue/organ cell. I just point out how cheap off the shelf tooling that we take for granted in our industries and hobbies are also fueling this wave of change and how readily available they are The tools and materials to build something like this are free and open to literally anyone on the planet. So it makes sense that given enough exposure to human ingenuity, with the right tools freely available, any reality is possible.

Pxtl 8y ago

We have had the technology to have something the size of a remote controlled car that could murder every person in sight in a blink of an eye for some time. Modern warfare is much more about deciding who to shoot than it is about effectively shooting them.

pixl97 8y ago
That's only because we are trying to avoid total war, hence the release of nuclear weapons. If nukes didn't exist, I think technology along these lines would be far more terrifying than it is now.

golemiprague 8y ago

There is a funny war going on right now between fire kites of the Gazans to IDF drones, the kites are certainly autonomous, not sure about the defence drones.

pontifier 8y ago

can't read the article as it's behind a paywall, but I've recently become very paranoid. Just a few minutes ago I was thinking about small autonomous drones that are just big enough to infiltrate a building and insert themselves into the usb port of otherwise secure machines then escape with sensitive information. I think I'll start printing some usb port covers as a countermeasure.

paulddraper 8y ago
Or......there's the $5 wrench https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- earenndil 8y ago
  The difference is, if you hit someone with a wrench until they give you the password to some data, they're going not going to continue giving you data. Whereas, if you covertly get access to someone's computer, they're going to keep using it and keep feeding you data.
earenndil 8y ago
There was a post recently about a computer that could fit inside of a usb port, little arm chip. It was meant as an open yubikey substitute, but you could easily hide one of those inside of a mass-produced cell phone charger, and suddenly you have something doing arbitrary computation. It didn't have a wireless chip, but on the other hand it was $30, if you made it using off-the-shelf consumer parts. I'm sure an industrial complex would be able to shave the size down and potentially add a wireless chip. Scary stuff.
- icebraining 8y ago
  USB Wifi adapters have been tiny for years, and they have a wireless chip (obviously) and certainly some computation.

nosjwshere 8y ago

as long as a central AI controlling it doesn't deem the armed civilians to be a threat.

amai 8y ago

Don't forget about all those simple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_countermeasure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_countermeasure devices. The Russians had quite some success in Syria using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasukha_(electronic_warfare_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasukha_(electronic_warfare_s... . (https://thedefensepost.com/2018/05/01/russia-syria-electronic-warfare/ https://thedefensepost.com/2018/05/01/russia-syria-electroni...) All those sensitive electronic robots are useless in a real war. Makes me wonder who really needs them?

yorwba 8y ago
Jamming communications doesn't make robots useless. It just means that they can't be controlled remotely, can't use GPS to navigate and can't provide real-time surveillance. That can be worked around by pre-programming a fixed route or an objective to be fulfilled autonomously, by using celestial navigation or geographical landmarks, and by having surveillance drones return to base to deliver recordings using a physical connection.
- pixl97 8y ago
  Honestly a swarm of drones with laser based communication sounds just like the thing that may make widescale jamming useless in the future. Also, makes jamming pretty risky since something will head your way... and explode.
- ntsplnkv2 8y ago
  Are there drones that use celestial navigation? What if it's cloudy?
  - yorwba 8y ago
    I don't know about drones, but it is in use for missiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_guidance#Astro-inertial_guidance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_guidance#Astro-inertia... Cloudiness would be a problem, but in that case you could still fall back to a combination of other systems.