8 ms·
To all the talented developers and researchers who work on this kind of tech. Please change careers and do something useful.
by qmmmur 6y ago
To 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"?