4 ms·
What's the nefarious use of finding someone who is already screaming?
by jwhitlark 5y ago
What's the nefarious use of finding someone who is already screaming?
- munk-a 5y agoLocating winning lottery tickets?
- harimau777 5y agoEliminating survivors
- Steltek 5y agoThere needs to be a name for comments that are so sociopathic and terrifying that I jump in my seat. HN seems to do this more than Reddit, which is also disturbing.
- grogenaut 5y agoIsn't one of the hottest movies right now about monsters that kill anything that makes a noise?
- heavyset_go 5y agoSuppression of dissent.
- dash2 5y agoMore generally, listening and detecting human speech and intent has plenty of military uses, and they are the main buyers of drones. It seems quite common for technologists to come up with humanitarian justifications for what is really new military hardware.
- jwhitlark 5y agoMore generally, sure. But it's not like you'd derive that from this tech, you'd just create it from some of the generic pieces that are already laying around. Finding people that are hurt and trapped and most importantly trying to be found is really useful in non-combat situations; on a battlefield, not so much, as far as I can see.
- dash2 5y agoI don’t know, it seems likely that this tech could be easily repurposed. Recognising screams implies recognising other things that aren’t screams. Do we know that there’s already generic technology for drones to pick up accurate ground audio?
- jwhitlark 5y agoReplying to myself because I can't edit the comment. As someone who has spent time in a combat unit, I can't come up with tactical or strategic advantages that this would create, even if you fully set morality aside. There are so many easier ways to suppress dissent or eliminate survivors that worrying about weaponizing this particular technology is like worrying about dropping toilets out of bombers; yea, you can kill people that way, but it's so impractical you have to ask if anyone is really going to try. I was asking this as a serious question, in case I was missing something. But I still don't see it. This feels like it's so specialized that it'd be a dead end for anyone trying to weaponize it.