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Most 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 t

Most 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?
rspeele 6y ago
The problem I have with it is this part of your statement: > 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 think that might not be true. Sure, the slaughterbots video showed a swarm released from a van with operators present. Seems like somebody might notice. But it's easy to imagine a scenario where the operators leave the drones in some out-of-the way place, inactive, without arousing suspicion, and they activate on a timer to carry out their mission. How would you track down who committed the act? A bomb can go off on a delay, but requires the killer to go to the target site to place it. A gun can kill from a great distance, but only with line of sight, the killer needs to be involved at the time of the shot, and even with a silencer it makes a fairly loud noise, drawing attention from those near the shooter. The fictional-for-now slaughterbots scenario would enable killing people at an event without ever going to the event site, without even being in the same city at the time of the event, and at low cost. Remember the scramble to identify and track down the Boston marathon bombers? They attended the race, set down bags with bombs in them, and then left. Fortunately they were both caught on camera and positively identified by surviving victims. What if they didn't have to go to the race at all, but instead went a week before to an abandoned building, inactive construction site, etc and set the hypothetical slaughterbots in place, set to launch later? Would they ever be caught? The combination of low cost, low skill needed by the deployment crew, and low risk of being caught (with corresponding deniability by state actors) is the frightening thing. The other end of it is that you could catch somebody if you had near universal surveillance -- you trace the drones back to their launch site based on reports/footage of them flying midair, and you pull footage from cameras that were watching there too. Or you stop it before it happens with massive data collection online, trying to detect the planning, discussion, or purchasing of equipment. Neither is going to be 100% effective but they'll be enough to get bills passed authorizing more surveillance after a couple attacks. So you could have a situation where terror attacks happen more frequently, or a situation where everybody is subject to a surveillance state granted even more power than the one we have today, or a little from both columns. Not thrilled about that. Obviously the tech is not there yet for the bots to execute attacks with autonomy like depicted in the video. But it seems very possible within this century.

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?

rspeele 6y ago

The problem I have with it is this part of your statement: > 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 think that might not be true. Sure, the slaughterbots video showed a swarm released from a van with operators present. Seems like somebody might notice. But it's easy to imagine a scenario where the operators leave the drones in some out-of-the way place, inactive, without arousing suspicion, and they activate on a timer to carry out their mission. How would you track down who committed the act? A bomb can go off on a delay, but requires the killer to go to the target site to place it. A gun can kill from a great distance, but only with line of sight, the killer needs to be involved at the time of the shot, and even with a silencer it makes a fairly loud noise, drawing attention from those near the shooter. The fictional-for-now slaughterbots scenario would enable killing people at an event without ever going to the event site, without even being in the same city at the time of the event, and at low cost. Remember the scramble to identify and track down the Boston marathon bombers? They attended the race, set down bags with bombs in them, and then left. Fortunately they were both caught on camera and positively identified by surviving victims. What if they didn't have to go to the race at all, but instead went a week before to an abandoned building, inactive construction site, etc and set the hypothetical slaughterbots in place, set to launch later? Would they ever be caught? The combination of low cost, low skill needed by the deployment crew, and low risk of being caught (with corresponding deniability by state actors) is the frightening thing. The other end of it is that you could catch somebody if you had near universal surveillance -- you trace the drones back to their launch site based on reports/footage of them flying midair, and you pull footage from cameras that were watching there too. Or you stop it before it happens with massive data collection online, trying to detect the planning, discussion, or purchasing of equipment. Neither is going to be 100% effective but they'll be enough to get bills passed authorizing more surveillance after a couple attacks. So you could have a situation where terror attacks happen more frequently, or a situation where everybody is subject to a surveillance state granted even more power than the one we have today, or a little from both columns. Not thrilled about that. Obviously the tech is not there yet for the bots to execute attacks with autonomy like depicted in the video. But it seems very possible within this century.