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It's true that building the chips is hard, but making it hard to buy general purpose small computers, or digital camera sensors suitable for vision, or rotor bl

by wcarss 5y ago

It's true that building the chips is hard, but making it hard to buy general purpose small computers, or digital camera sensors suitable for vision, or rotor blades, or batteries, or antennas, is also going to be very difficult. Proliferation has already happened. Maybe cheap LIDAR will be something we can keep a lid on? But regular vision is still likely pretty good for lining up a shot or finding a face.

cabalamat 5y ago
> but making it hard to buy general purpose small computers [...] is also going to be very difficult Just ban general purpose computers that allow running arbitrary unsigned code. I'm sure lots of governments and corporations would be happy to get on board that one, and many end-users wouldn't notice.
- kian 5y ago
  A cure worse than the disease. Also wouldn't stop the military from building up a drone army and then someone within it choosing to go rogue and take it with them. It only ensures that no one else can stop them.
  - wcarss 5y ago
    I think the parent post agreed with you and was just being facetious -- 'just ban general purpose computing' isn't very likely to be a popular sentiment on hn!
    - kian 5y ago
      I hope so as well ;)
est31 5y ago
In a war situation, likely supply chains will be disrupted, so the regime will have to use whatever it has in the country. There are chips in circulation, but each different chip needs different drivers, has different performance characteristics, etc. E.g. I read that Tesla changed a bunch of chips due to the current shortage and they had to write new drivers for them. That's one chip they had to replace. Of course you could make your population turn over their old smartphones, remove IR filtering from the camera lenses and solder them to a robot body. But this will slow down manufacturing as it isn't well suited to mass manufacturing processes. Furthermore, it's a limited resource so you might have to deal with attempts by your enemy to exhaust it. Last, you'd be limited in fanciness, as in your robots can only process limited amounts. The best place to source the computation needed for really "smart" robot soldiers would probably be self driving cars as they have the AI processing power needed.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

by wcarss 5y ago

cabalamat 5y ago

> but making it hard to buy general purpose small computers [...] is also going to be very difficult Just ban general purpose computers that allow running arbitrary unsigned code. I'm sure lots of governments and corporations would be happy to get on board that one, and many end-users wouldn't notice.

kian 5y ago
A cure worse than the disease. Also wouldn't stop the military from building up a drone army and then someone within it choosing to go rogue and take it with them. It only ensures that no one else can stop them.
- wcarss 5y ago
  I think the parent post agreed with you and was just being facetious -- 'just ban general purpose computing' isn't very likely to be a popular sentiment on hn!
  - kian 5y ago
    I hope so as well ;)

est31 5y ago

In a war situation, likely supply chains will be disrupted, so the regime will have to use whatever it has in the country. There are chips in circulation, but each different chip needs different drivers, has different performance characteristics, etc. E.g. I read that Tesla changed a bunch of chips due to the current shortage and they had to write new drivers for them. That's one chip they had to replace. Of course you could make your population turn over their old smartphones, remove IR filtering from the camera lenses and solder them to a robot body. But this will slow down manufacturing as it isn't well suited to mass manufacturing processes. Furthermore, it's a limited resource so you might have to deal with attempts by your enemy to exhaust it. Last, you'd be limited in fanciness, as in your robots can only process limited amounts. The best place to source the computation needed for really "smart" robot soldiers would probably be self driving cars as they have the AI processing power needed.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]