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Turkey Now Has Swarming Suicide Drones It Could Export
- qmmmur 6y agoTo all the talented developers and researchers who work on this kind of tech. Please change careers and do something useful.
- enriquto 6y agoHow is that different to the rest of the application of advanced technology to war? (e.g., radar, missile guidance, shaped explosives, etc) I don't really disagree with you, just asking.
- 0-_-0 6y agoA suicide drone can be used to take out any individual anywhere on the planet, fully remotely and untraceably with minimal collateral damage, while radar, missles and explosives can't. The scenario depicted in the film below is getting closer to reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg Although the above is overdramatised, it's not unrealistinc.
- enriquto 6y agoModern guided missiles are not essentially different that these drones. I guess the main difference is that these drones are intended to be cheap and disposable, while having a much shorter range.
- meaydinli 6y agoI love this analogy. While Turkey can't spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy smart missiles, it innovated to protect herself. Its allies used to rent drones for surveillance against terrorism, then used it as both a carrot and a stick. Now, Turkey has its own drones that regularly take down targets effectively, even some air defenses. After Syrian war started and "modern western liberal democracies" failed to help with the refugee crises, those borders became even more treacherous.
- StavrosK 6y ago"Protect herself" sounds funny when they're invading neighbours left and right.
- pinkfoot 6y agoWe fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here." Heard that before?
- StavrosK 6y agoBy that logic, the EU should invade Turkey.
- meaydinli 6y agoThen her neighbors should stop harboring, training and hosting terrorists, no? ...and it is laughable to suggest EU will lift another finger for Greece after taking their wallet and vacationing with that money too
- StavrosK 6y agoWhat terrorists is Greece harboring, and how is driving refugees to the border and forcing them to cross a solution to that?
- meaydinli 6y agoGreece financing terrorists: https://www.counterextremism.com/threat/kurdistan-workers-party-pkk https://www.counterextremism.com/threat/kurdistan-workers-pa... . Please scroll down to "Financing". They also have links to their sources. As for refugees, they weren't forced. The border police just didn't stop them. I agree Erdogan coming on TV and yelling it out openly was a below-the-belt tactic and after that people started transporting refugees by the bus to the border.
- soganess 6y agoBeing on the side of Turkey in the Syria conflict cannot be the right side of history. Especially because they are now in control of Kurdish occupied lands in Syria. Saying that the Turkish government harbors a century-long paranoid animosity toward the Kurds is the understatement of the year. Turkey's government is just the big despotic fish in the small geopolitical pool that is the Caucasus / Northwest Middle East. Finding cheap ways to kill is not a defensive strategy for the gov't.
- gambiting 6y agoDrones are consumer level technology. This isn't very different from a high-end Mavic drone, except that someone mounted an explosive instead of a camera to it. On the other hand there is absolutely nothing that a regular consumer can buy that would reassemble a guided missile.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoI agree. Technology trickles down the bank account spectrum. At first only nation states could do drones. Then smaller nation states could do drones. Then bigcos could do drones. Now we've got drones in consumers hands. It should come as no surprise that some nation states decide to use consumer quality and price drones for nation state purposes (their police probably patrol the streets with the same handguns consumers can buy). Just because it's trickled down doesn't mean it's not useful.
- meaydinli 6y agooh you should definitely checkout some of the more serious "hobby" rockets and launches. All it would need is some extra kick and some guidance. Hezbollah builds and launches even more basic missiles all the time, and hurts Israel all the time.
- sudosysgen 6y agoYou can buy a jet engine and build a 700mph drone that can carry a payload. You can also buy a laser gyroscope, or use open source code to build a SLAM system for guidance. So yes, a consumer can build a guided missile.
- candiodari 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGDAZyQ44k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGDAZyQ44k I wonder what chance anyone has of stopping something like this. It can certainly carry an explosive and flying 50 or even 200 km is probably doable with a bit of a scaleup.
- coralreef 6y agoNot that I necessarily disagree with your opinion, but generally minimizing collateral damage is a good thing.
- bradstewart 6y agoIt is great when the use of a weapon is well thought out. The risk of collateral damage forces people to think twice before deploying these weapons though.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoIt's an interesting thought experiment as to whether there is a point of inflection where the risk of collateral damage is so little that it drives the opportunity for extra judicial killing too high.
- threatofrain 6y ago> A suicide drone can be used to take out any individual anywhere on the planet, fully remotely and untraceably with minimal collateral damage, while radar, missles and explosives can't. This just sounds like you're trying to persuade people on why drones are definitely the future of war.
- 0-_-0 6y agoThey are going to be, doesn't matter what I say. The cost/kill is significantly lower with a small fully autonomous suicide drone carrying a small explosive. All it takes is a small drone (30$), a few grams of explosives and software to kill someone (anyone). I'm sure the software will get there.
- remote_phone 6y agoDrones don’t have unlimited range. The ones in the article have a range of 6km. If there was really a war situation I imagine an EMP could disable them or a MOAB could just blow everyone up instead.
- pjc50 6y agoWhat, like this? https://www.foxnews.com/world/al-qaeda-secret-us-missile-knives-hellfire-ninja-bomb https://www.foxnews.com/world/al-qaeda-secret-us-missile-kni... Dunno about "untraceable" though, there's a long history of tracing munitions from fragments.
- maxwell 6y agoThe difference is cost. Only states can afford R9Xs, and the costs will never come down significantly. Private individuals will soon be able to afford automated drone swarms. Set it and forget it.
- caddie 6y agoThe nuclear bomb brought nuclear reactors, providing affordable electricity in many places. Drone swarms also have the potential to turn into useful applications.
- jawns 6y agoAre you suggesting that nuclear reactors could have never been developed independently, and that the nuclear bomb was a necessary precursor? It sounds almost as if you're giving these deadly, weaponized drone swarms a pass because it's possible to do non-deadly things with drone swarms as well.
- mattmaroon 6y agoNot op but: I wouldn’t say they couldn’t have been invented, but it’s unlikely they would have for economic reasons. Controlled Fission almost had to be done by government due to the resources required and uncertainty of the payout. It seems unlikely any private company would have done what the Manhattan project did just to get a small cost savings over burning fossil fuels
- 0-_-0 6y ago> Are you suggesting that nuclear reactors could have never been developed independently, and that the nuclear bomb was a necessary precursor An uncontrolled nuclear reaction is significantly simpler than a controlled one. We still don't have fusion reactors, while fusion bombs were developed 10 years after fission bombs.
- vladTheInhaler 6y agoThat's a very unconventional use of the words "uncontrolled" and "simple". The reaction inside a nuclear bomb (fission or fusion) has to be incredibly tightly choreographed down to the microsecond in order to work as intended, whereas a fission reactor is (egregiously oversimplifying) put some fissile stuff next to some other fissile stuff for a while and let it get warm. The Chicago Pile came way before Trinity. Rock formations have even been known to come together accidentally to form natural nuclear reactors, but I think it will be a very long while before the first natural nuclear bomb.
- danaos 6y agoYour calls are in vain. That would only make sense in more liberal countries like western ones. When it comes to tech and innovation Turkey has become quite forward-looking but they still retain their nationalist culture.
- gus_massa 6y agoIn case of war I expect no difference between the "liberal" countries and the "nationalistic" countries. Remember that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilian cities. Probably in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_radiation_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_radiation_experiments the section about USA is bigger because it is more open, but it is scary anyway.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoFrom Wikipedia: > During World War II, the Second General Army and Chūgoku Regional Army was headquartered in Hiroshima, and the Army Marine Headquarters was located at Ujina port. The city also had large depots of military supplies, and was a key center for shipping. So, a civilian city, but not just that.
- gus_massa 6y ago> Fewer than 10% of the casualties were military.
- mantas 6y agoAs long as there's at least 1 actor (state or not) doing this, it's very useful to develop such technologies. Powerful military is damn nice deterrence.
- searchableguy 6y agoThis reminds me of the video released a year ago - https://youtu.be/9fa9lVwHHqg https://youtu.be/9fa9lVwHHqg Next thing you know there is an AI detecting crime and killing the criminal without making a mess.
- ezekg 6y agoWow that was terrifying, because we all know we have the potential to go in that direction. looks up how an EMP works
- ryanwaggoner 6y agoI'm very skeptical. We can't even get police to properly investigate many crimes in the US, let alone without "making a mess". The idea that we're going to magically invent AI that "detects crime" and carries out lethal summary judgment seems completely detached from reality. By the time we have general AI that can do that, we won't even be in charge anymore and whatever happens from there will be up to the AIs.
- searchableguy 6y agoI don't think you need a general AI for something like this. You can detect what the other person is carrying and that works good as a filter. A person carrying knife in a crowd or school outside of canteen doesn't make any sense by general norms. Second would be to detect the intent - now that's a much harder problem but you can whitelist few situations where the person has already stabbed someone or shown sufficient physical evidence of criminal intent.
- dafoex 6y agoNot sure we need general AI, we can already detect undesirables and shadowban them on Twitter, all you need is to throw some facial recognition into the mix and you can link a person to an account that has a "wrong" ideology.
- lostmsu 6y agoLove that idea! In this society many people will be severely discouraged from crimes under threat of being banned from social platforms. You can even think up a dystopia where Facebook does the policing.
- throw51319 6y agoLol so naive. One day you will realize that this guy Teddy Roosevelt said something profound: "Speak softly and carry a big stick" Putting your head in the sand won't save you.
- s1artibartfast 6y agoBig sticks don’t work against non state actors
- mantas 6y agoVast majority of non-state actors are financed by state when you dig deep enough
- sudosysgen 6y agoFinanced by states, sure. But they can and most definitely do operate without states. They can just turn to crime, drug smuggling, or if popular enough can finance themselves.
- sbmthakur 6y agoHuman losses could be prevented if all parties in a conflict have access to this tech. Then there's also the matter of trust. You stopping work on it doesn't mean your adversary has stopped work on it.
- Vysero 6y agoYeah go work for Google instead so you can suppress the freedom of speech for millions of unnamed data points on the internet... at least this southern wolf bears it's teeth before it bites.
- pvtmert 6y agounfortunately money and cutting-edge tech are in this kind of applications the amount of money put into may-be-probable piece of tech is astronomical in defence indistury, because it may really be game-changer. (eg. lasers, rail-guns etc) every piece of tech we use today started as a defence project. You may say ML/AI is just research stuff. If you think AI is being developed to help you with groceries, you are being lame... (no harm intended but my opinion)
- celloductor 6y agotell that to all the engineers, programmers and researchers who make UAV for war. But I guess it's OK when you're "on the good side"?
- lmilcin 6y agoPretty sure all major powers either have or will soon have the capability but don't feel the need to blab around about it. The issue I have is when this gets actually exported to countries that may want to use against civilians (to squash opposition) though it was know for a long time this must happen.
- luckylion 6y ago> The issue I have is when this gets actually exported to countries that may want to use against civilians (to squash opposition) though it was know for a long time this must happen. Turkey wouldn't need to export it to anyone for it to be used against civilians, that's a pretty common thing for Turkey.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jobu 6y agoThe issue I have is non-state bad actors acquiring or building them on their own to create flying IEDs. It would be pretty easy to fly a drone into a crowded stadium or protest and kill hundreds if not thousands of people with a weaponized drone. Getting the explosives is the hard part and many groups have already shown they can do that.
- lmilcin 6y agoYou are right. This is way more scary.
- ryanwaggoner 6y agoWhy aren't they doing this now? Why haven't all flights been grounded worldwide because they keep getting brought down by flying IEDs?
- meaydinli 6y agoBecause that is an escalation that nobody wants, for now. Even piracy was tolerated for a while until it became economically too disturbing. I don't think it all disappeared but it is not that bothersome. If anybody started threatening commercial civilian flight, countries would fall on them like bricks. Quarantine for a few months was devastating on many fronts. Now, think if all flights were grounded for months...
- popotamonga 6y agoThe naming is a little strange. I would call them Homicide drones
- mc32 6y agoTrue but it’s just following the form of “suicide bomber”. Maybe kamikaze drones would be more apt.
- caddie 6y agofunny how they cut the camera right before hitting the target. Probably cause it's not doing much at the moment.
- radu_floricica 6y agoIt's anti personnel, so it fires before it hits the target to spread to a larger area.
- toyg 6y agoIt will take some sort of international agreement to regulate these bad boys.
- csunbird 6y agoLike the nuclear agreement, where only a small subset of countries rushed into having nuclear weapons and restricted others from having any, and now it is extremely unfair to other countries to not have the power but others do and enjoy having the weapon superiority. No international agreement will survive war, they are just used to suppress and bully countries.
- toyg 6y agoInternational agreements are not perfect but they are still necessary. They are more or less holding in the chemical-weapons area, which has really nothing to do with restricted technology. Humans can (and must) agree to be better than frightened animals.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago>They are more or less holding in the chemical-weapons area, Tactical inconveniences that limit utility are what's preventing chemical weapon usage. Nobody uses chemical weapons because we have better, more effective ways to kill each other making them not really useful except in limited circumstances like terrorizing civilians (a static target that probably doesn't have gas masks) in areas where you have air superiority (e.g. Syria now, Iraq decades ago, etc.). Chemical weapons were mostly abandoned after WW1 because they just didn't work well enough for the effort and resources required to use them. Edit: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/ https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
- radu_floricica 6y agoWhat's the reason to regulate them? As weapons go, they're extremely clean. A step up from almost anything else, in terms of side-effects and collateral damage. Scary - as hell. But they're meant to kill people so yeah.
- buboard 6y agohow robust are these systems to E/M interference?
- virmundi 6y agoProbably not at all. However I don’t think any one has an EM defense aside from some really odd looking guns by the French and nuclear bombs. https://interestingengineering.com/7-anti-drone-weapons-used-by-the-military-and-law-enforcement-around-the-world https://interestingengineering.com/7-anti-drone-weapons-used... We’re in a new arms race. Better drones. Better anti drone systems. Hopefully better pizza delivery.
- eruci 6y agoThe good news is, the next war will be fought by drones against drones.
- elliekelly 6y agoI agree the next war will be fought by drones but I’m skeptical it will be fought against drones. I very much hope you’re right though.
- cheez 6y agoMost likely drones against disarmed populations
- josefresco 6y agoWhen one side's drones kill all the other drones, what happens to the people on the losing side?
- eruci 6y agoThe next genocide will be committed by drones too.
- narrator 6y agoThese weapons are so cheap that the cost of starting a country just fell by an order of magnitude. I could see a hacker warlord of the future giving everyone who is a citizen some sort of transponder to prevent drone attacks and have the drones kill everyone else in a given area.
- mahesh_rm 6y agoThis might be one of the most ethically controversial comments I've ever read on the internet.
- throw51319 6y agoIt's so obvious this is the next stage of conflict. China could have thousands of these sleeper drones in the US. To preempt before a real conflict, it could simultaneously take out most of the heads of state, causing chaos.
- javajosh 6y agoIt's worse than that. If you undermine chip fabrication to insert backdoors at the silicon level, you could disable...almost everything with an arbitrary signal. The only problem with this is that you, the attacker, need to be careful not to install the altered chips in your own infrastructure.
- pjc50 6y agoThe likely future is the other way round: frog boiling and border pushing, like at the border with India. China doesn't want to have a real conflict, it wants to keep poking and pushing until it gets what it want.
- Vysero 6y ago"China could have thousands of these sleeper drones in the US." -- Yeah, and 911 was an inside job! EDIT: If you think China has thousands of sleeper drones in the US you are on par with people who think 911 was an inside job, end of story. Down vote all you want but be sure to don your tin foil hats afterwards.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sudosysgen 6y agoI thought that it was made in the future tense, meaning that in the future they might acquire them.
- simion314 6y ago>China could have thousands of these sleeper drones Why is China your example and not X? There are other countries that use killer drones, do secret killing and kidnapping operations on other countries territories etc. I have the impression that a few years back you would have said Russia, then N Coreea and today China, like the big bad enemy is changing each few years depending on what politics need.
- remote_phone 6y ago500 isn’t a lot but I imagine having 10,000 flying suicide drones could be very effective in battle. Probably an EMP would bring them down. I wonder if something as simple as smoke bomb would render them useless if they couldn’t see properly.
- maxwell 6y agoEMPs are too expensive to fight drone swarms: https://www.quora.com/How-much-would-it-cost-to-build-an-EMP-that-can-damage-a-part-of-country?share=1 https://www.quora.com/How-much-would-it-cost-to-build-an-EMP... Similar to tanks vs. machine guns, but the machine guns needed human operators. I'd think IR (e.g. https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/139 https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/139) could see through smoke, otherwise lidar keeps getting cheaper (https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/tags/lidar https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/tags/lidar). We'll need defensive drone swarms.
- EGreg 6y agoSwarming drones and AI is the scariest tech and we are going to see the consequences. Because it will be so cheap and ubiquitous. This isn’t even the atomic bomb — where the work was just too sweet to stop. This is basic technology with small incremental improvements tons of people can do. Drones are the first robots that are among us (overhead). Self-driving cars are at least very expensive to produce. But drones can be mass-produced and deployed anonymously. Drones with live munitions is terrifying. Imagine an anonymous swarm descending on Union Square in SF. Even under normal operation, drones can fall and hit someone by accident. Let alone a swarm. This is one technology I should not want to be in anyone’s hands, but if it is, it should be in the hands of the State and not everyone. Just like bombs. PS: With cheap cameras being ubiquitous and people can be identified by their gait, heartbeat etc. consumer level tech can also include an AI that can cross correlate everywhere you’ve been. Businesses would use it to fine you when you park your car for too long and don’t go into the store. But governments and police departments can concoct tons of believable stories with parallel construction and put anyone they want away. In fact AI can also be adopted in other places in the policing and judicial process (as with Palantir) leading to a Kafkaesque experience for sentencing. And with deepfakes it’s worse than that. Anyone could create a believable video of a rape-caught-on-video or a damaging “speech at a private event” or whatever. Reputational attacks were cheap already (see CIA handbook) but with a swarm of sleeper twitter bot accounts and other bots you could introduce anything. In short I am worried we are going to be entering a dystopia soon. This video nails the drones issue: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
- seesawtron 6y agoUSA has been operating drones since last decade in conflict zones in the Middle. The same drones that they use to "neurtalize" terrorists and dictators. Is there still time to oppose that or have we casually accepted them as a necessary for the war on terrorists?
- ianleeclark 6y agoThe collective trauma experienced on 9/11 largely made anti war movements DOA. Combined with the sheer volume of conflicts and proxy wars were involved in, were probably too far gone.
- thinkingemote 6y agonot only did it stop anti-war movements, it also stopped anti-capitalist and anti-globalist movements. Seattle in 1999 to 2001 had huge protests and riots [1,2]. After 9/11, protesting the west almost meant supporting the terrorists. When globalisation used to mean the exploitation of the developing world by the west - now the west was under attack and so to attack imperialism via violent protest was to be sympathetic to the terrorist. It's only now, 20 years later that the children of these protestors are repeating the same things their parents did. And it also explains why certain politicians try to associate protest with terrorism these days, that it's a different generation protesting explains why this association falls flat. Today's protestors were not born when the towers fell. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Mardi_Gras_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Mardi_Gras_riot
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y agoTurkey is slowly becoming a regional power. It is interesting how well they seem to be playing the political game with EU, US, Russia and Israel. I am not a fan, but I can't help but to admire that level of skill to balance competing interests.
- sprash 6y agoTurkey has a unique geographic location of immense strategic value. There is a reason NATO bends over backwards to include a country that is culturally completely incompatible with the rest of the mostly European members and even openly attacking other NATO members like Greece. What you see now is heavy influence of China that wants to take complete control over Europe under the guise of something called the "Belt and Road" initiative with the heavy support of some European industrial leaders. Assume that the leadership in Turkey is nothing more than a puppet regime fullfilling those interests.
- meaydinli 6y agoKonstantinoble: https://youtu.be/Wcze7EGorOk https://youtu.be/Wcze7EGorOk
- kyriakos 6y agoto me it looks like they are overstretching their hand and will eventually snap. if AKP stays in office eventually turkey will be the next Iraq without oil
- tartoran 6y agoCan't drones be jammed? If so what does it take to jam their signals, fry their circuits with some sort of electrical guns? Having these war flying tools advanced so much in the last decade, isn't there an incentive to develop some good defense against them? Or maybe it is happening but it's not made public.
- ColanR 6y ago> jam their signals Only if they're remote controlled. Nothing to jam if they're autonomous and using the right navigation sensors. > fry their circuits with some sort of electrical guns EMPs are painful for everyone involved, not just the target. > incentive to develop some good defense against them Far as I can tell, autonomous drone swarms are the Nash Equilibrium.
- tartoran 6y agoThey don't have full autonomy yet, there appears to be a human operator who takes key decision remotely. But, even if that was so, is there no way to have some defense against such attacks, having that they're electric and rather slow? Tesla ray guns come to mind but I am not very knowledgeable in this field.
- dafoex 6y agoWhile its true that they have human operators currently, they don't necessarily need a lot of autonomy to attack someone jamming their signal. Most of the drone signal jammers I've seen take the form of a handheld directional radio "gun", so it would be pretty easy to just have your bombdrone just direction find the jamming signal and bomb the operator, freeing the field for the n other drones.
- bawana 6y agoDean Ing wrote a SF novel 'Butcher Bird' exploring this. Why is humanity stuck in the same story? We make something cool. We then commoditize it. We then militarize it. I think every tool/discovery/thing we invent/produce should also be introduced with its own antidote/kill switch. Clearly a malevolent state would be able to excise the the suicide switch in the chip, but at least this is a start. Deploying an EMP device at scale is a lot harder than activating a paralysis/suicide switch. After all, not everyone can deploy their own custom cpu. And the REAL worry is when a script kiddy gets one of these and deploys them at the next protest. I dont want to say the 'T' word. By making commodity hardware fragile and defeatable, we protect ourselves against our dark side. And no matter how good an AI gets at face recognition/inference/etc, we will still be able to turn it off. Did we not learn the lesson of 'Colossus: The Forbin Project'
- josefresco 6y agoRelated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK6IGG5zRU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK6IGG5zRU8
- abathur 6y agoAnyone out there working on affordable, autonomous, personal, portable anti-aircraft defense systems?
- blackrock 6y agoWell, that was a chilling and terrifying look into the future. But, to be honest, I’m not really worried. It doesn’t really change the tactical situation of today. It just makes the attack vector cheaper. The USA already uses drones that loiter from 30 miles away, and has a high resolution camera that can see you. Then you’re targeted and a Hellfire missile is locked on, and shot at the target. Same effect. The target is killed. However, this technology increases the critical retaliation magnitude. If the attacker chooses to assassinate the political leadership of the enemy country by suicide drone, then the victim country can retaliate with an all out nuclear assault. So, we are now basically at the same situation we were at before. MAD principles still apply. Nothing has changed.
- _bxg1 6y agoTo play devil's advocate against the panic I'm watching unfold in this thread: I don't think there's an enormous categorical difference here from weapons that already exist. We've had long-range (longer range than most drones) guided missiles for decades. We've had drones that can launch them, for decades. Those technologies already have the ability to wipe out targets anywhere, anytime, en masse, with little to no risk. Yet we don't see people (as one commenter suggested) wiping out entire plots of land so they can start a new country. We don't see (most) countries turning such weapons on their own citizens. We don't see (very many) heads of state being assassinated in this way. What this tells me is that there are sociopolitical forces that make such things un-advantageous or infeasible, for one reason or another. The only true differentiator I can see with suicide-drones is a potential increase in precision, though that's not really true right now because these in the article look to be basically flying hand-grenades. That's not really better than a missile; in fact it's probably a lot easier to intercept or shoot down. Now, many of us have seen that (fictional) video with the micro-explosive assassination drones. Maybe that would change the game in some way, but I still don't think it's a drone apocalypse we'd be looking at. Nation states have so many ways of killing people at this point. When they don't, it's usually because it doesn't make sense to, not because they lack some key capability.
- searchableguy 6y agoYou are relying on the presumption that they won't become autonomous machines for wiping out "criminals". A drone can be used for more than a singular purpose. There might be more efficient ways to kill someone we already know like you said but what if we don't know them yet? What if they don't exist yet? Imagine you have a crowd and there is one violent person inside it, how would you immobilize such a person without harming the others?
- _bxg1 6y agoThey could already wipe out people they want to designate as "criminals" by busting into people's houses and shooting them in their sleep. The reason they don't (very often) is that, as we've seen in recent weeks, that's how you get riots. The current unrest resulted from only a handful of unjustified killings. Imagine what would happen if they started sending drones to kill people en masse?
- ryanwaggoner 6y agoMost of the hand-wringing about this strikes me as pretty far-fetched. While I have no doubt that attack drones will be used extensively on the battlefield, I think their use beyond that will be isolated. There are few advantages to using drones as a weapon that aren't already available to both terrorists and states. If you want to hunt specific people down and kill them, you don't need a drone. And if you want to cause mass casualties, there are much better options today than a swarm of hundreds of fragile one-time-use drones. Why don't we have more terrorist attacks using guns or truck bombs? Why don't we have drone IEDs right now? Why aren't drones taking down airplanes and helicopters all over the world? Why don't we have SAM attacks at every airport in the world? The nightmare scenario most people seem to be worried about is the "slaughterbots" one from that video, but it doesn't make any sense to me. In some mythical future, we'll have the ability to use a tiny explosive charge to blow a hole in a specific person's head? I guess the person who came up with this missed the memo about the 300 million devices we have in this country that can use a shaped explosive charge to put a hole in someone's head. And who is the entity that's releasing these drones to kill half a city? If it's our government, they could clearly do this now if they wanted to. Why don't they? If it's another government, that's no different than any other act of war they could currently carry out. What advantage does this offer? If it's a terrorist organization, again, they have better and cheaper options available today. And it's not like we couldn't stop them: who was flying that giant plane? Who were those guys releasing these swarms from the van? Where did they buy these drones? Where did they get the explosives? Just like many other threats, we'd track them down. I'm not saying there's no risk, just that I think it's completely overblown. Every new technology carries a risk that a malicious actor will use it for harm, but the same technological advancements also enable us to better defend ourselves. So maybe there is some future dystopia where huge swarms of anonymously-controlled "slaughterbots" roam the skies looking for targets to murder, but if we have the ability to do that, we also have the ability to maintain defensive swarms, personal EMPs, chaff and smoke emitters, laser sentries, broad spectrum signal jamming, automated hacker entities, or whatever else we come up with.
- tacocataco 6y ago"I could hire half the poor to kill the other half." And in the end, even those jobs were automated. Remember, how poorly people are treated now and in the past is how we are treated while the 1% needs something from us (our labor). Do you honestly expect better treatment when we are useless eaters?
- dafoex 6y agoSeen one reference to slaughterbots already, but even without AI on board these are terrifying. These could be small enough to have little to no radar return, so just dropping them one by one out of an aeroplane would be a viable delivery method for stealth killers.