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Does AI really get you anything in that situation? If you're only launching 8 drones, unless your terrorist cell has fewer than 8 members (and then you're not

Does AI really get you anything in that situation? If you're only launching 8 drones, unless your terrorist cell has fewer than 8 members (and then you're not in 'non-state actor' but 'radicalised lone wolf' territory) you can already do that manually with a webcam and a remote controlled quadcopter. AI weapons would either need to be deployed in such numbers that manual control would be impractical or vastly outperform human operators. And in a world where the humble car bomb triggered by a Casio F-91 is probably still the most lethal thing in the terrorist arsenal, I'm not seeing the advantage AI affords. Maybe gun-drones for automating mass shootings? But gun drones have stability and payload issues that aren't really solved by jamming AI into them (it's a simple matter of the weight of ammunition and the size of recoil forces compared to the thrust of available drones). Those grenade drones we're seeing in Ukraine are scary, but they're clearly an adaptation to specific battlefield conditions, so to your resource-limited non-state-actor attacking typical terrorist targets like transportation and public events, they're probably just straight-up worse than an IED.

dist-epoch 4y ago
> manually with a webcam and a remote controlled quadcopter. Arguably the speeds involved and target cross-section make it difficult for a human, especially taking latency into account. > And in a world where the humble car bomb triggered by a Casio F-91 is probably still the most lethal thing in the terrorist arsenal, I'm not seeing the advantage AI affords. Creating a bomb in the West is highly tracked. Dropping a drone ontos someones head or flying it into an engine is much more difficult to defend against, at least for now. > But gun drones have stability and payload issues Recoil would not be a problem for the first shot. So with AI targeting you can use it as a one shot sniper drone.
- m348e912 4y ago
  I replied earlier in this thread before I read your reply. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
  - YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
    I'm reminded of the Black Mirror episode with the killer robot bees, in that the danger there is that those drones basically have science-fiction levels of speed, range and manoeuvrability and cost only $35, but they're otherwise operating in a world no different to ours. A pocket-sized quadcopter that can fly half-way across a city, carry a lethal payload and outrun a human in full sprint is magic. And also implies a world where an overloaded phone battery in a subway car can easily kill everyone in said subway car. It's a world where you don't even need AI weapons to kill half a city (given the unspecified hacking technology also mentioned in the video), because everyone's got an IED in their pocket that's one zero-day away from killing their entire family.
- YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
  I can see some value to some kind of "assassin in a box" that turns any malcontent with a few thousand dollars into an expert sniper, or some set of 3D-printable parts that could do the same to an off-the-shelf rifle. However, JFK was shot from just a hundred yards away with a gun designed in 1891, Jo Cox was killed with a single-shot .22 hunting rifle and Shinzou Abe was killed by a gun made of duck tape, metal pipe and match-heads by someone with basically no firearms experience. It's clear that access to high-tech firearms or the skills to use them is not the main barrier to assassinations. When considering killing individuals, for the people with the motivation to do so, the labour involved in actually doing the killing is such a small part of the process that it's not something there's value in automating. Once they've picked a target, acquired the weapon and planned the attack, 99% of the work is already done, so I'm still not really seeing the extra danger from AI here.
  - dist-epoch 4y ago
    The danger about AI and drones/robots is scaling. It's difficult to find 100 people to execute an operation on the same day, most likely some of them would be informants and the information would leak. But you can buy 100 drones under false pretense and distribute them, maybe even in different cities. Imagine a LLM talking with 100 delivery agents and saying something like "I need you to deliver the drone at this address, unpack it, charge it, plug a stick with this software I'm emailing you with and leave the window open for an artistic experiment I'm doing"
    - YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
      And then what? You injure a hundred individual people by ramming? Maybe some of them die? Your drone can't exactly carry a meaningful payload since that'll look super sus to the delivery driver. "Yes, take the 40mm grenade and load it into the drone and then let it free." Meanwhile, for less than a tenth of that investment, a guy in a Las Vegas hotel room with a bunch of rifles killed 60 people and injured 400. Smart loiter munitions make sense if you're the military and have billions of dollars, but all the scenarios people come up with for these killer drones seem very expensive and not much more deadly when compared with knives, guns, trucks or bombs.
Ancapistani 4y ago
> Does AI really get you anything in that situation? Yes, it allows the actors to disassociate themselves with the act. Assuming you have drones with on-board image processing and autonomous loiter capability, you could place them hours, days, or even weeks in advance and have them configured to launch at a predetermined point in the future. FWIW, I wouldn't even call this sort of thing "AI" - it's already totally possible using mostly COTS ("Commercial, Off-The-Shelf") components and software. The only thing that would need to be custom is the image processing portion, and that's not really all that complex. The "follow me" functionality of most commercial photography-oriented quadcopters (e.g., DJI Mavic series, Autel Evo 2 series) already implements that sort of thing, just specific to identifying and tracking a person, vehicle, animal, etc.

dist-epoch 4y ago

> manually with a webcam and a remote controlled quadcopter. Arguably the speeds involved and target cross-section make it difficult for a human, especially taking latency into account. > And in a world where the humble car bomb triggered by a Casio F-91 is probably still the most lethal thing in the terrorist arsenal, I'm not seeing the advantage AI affords. Creating a bomb in the West is highly tracked. Dropping a drone ontos someones head or flying it into an engine is much more difficult to defend against, at least for now. > But gun drones have stability and payload issues Recoil would not be a problem for the first shot. So with AI targeting you can use it as a one shot sniper drone.

m348e912 4y ago
I replied earlier in this thread before I read your reply. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
- YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
  I'm reminded of the Black Mirror episode with the killer robot bees, in that the danger there is that those drones basically have science-fiction levels of speed, range and manoeuvrability and cost only $35, but they're otherwise operating in a world no different to ours. A pocket-sized quadcopter that can fly half-way across a city, carry a lethal payload and outrun a human in full sprint is magic. And also implies a world where an overloaded phone battery in a subway car can easily kill everyone in said subway car. It's a world where you don't even need AI weapons to kill half a city (given the unspecified hacking technology also mentioned in the video), because everyone's got an IED in their pocket that's one zero-day away from killing their entire family.
YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
I can see some value to some kind of "assassin in a box" that turns any malcontent with a few thousand dollars into an expert sniper, or some set of 3D-printable parts that could do the same to an off-the-shelf rifle. However, JFK was shot from just a hundred yards away with a gun designed in 1891, Jo Cox was killed with a single-shot .22 hunting rifle and Shinzou Abe was killed by a gun made of duck tape, metal pipe and match-heads by someone with basically no firearms experience. It's clear that access to high-tech firearms or the skills to use them is not the main barrier to assassinations. When considering killing individuals, for the people with the motivation to do so, the labour involved in actually doing the killing is such a small part of the process that it's not something there's value in automating. Once they've picked a target, acquired the weapon and planned the attack, 99% of the work is already done, so I'm still not really seeing the extra danger from AI here.
- dist-epoch 4y ago
  The danger about AI and drones/robots is scaling. It's difficult to find 100 people to execute an operation on the same day, most likely some of them would be informants and the information would leak. But you can buy 100 drones under false pretense and distribute them, maybe even in different cities. Imagine a LLM talking with 100 delivery agents and saying something like "I need you to deliver the drone at this address, unpack it, charge it, plug a stick with this software I'm emailing you with and leave the window open for an artistic experiment I'm doing"
  - YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
    And then what? You injure a hundred individual people by ramming? Maybe some of them die? Your drone can't exactly carry a meaningful payload since that'll look super sus to the delivery driver. "Yes, take the 40mm grenade and load it into the drone and then let it free." Meanwhile, for less than a tenth of that investment, a guy in a Las Vegas hotel room with a bunch of rifles killed 60 people and injured 400. Smart loiter munitions make sense if you're the military and have billions of dollars, but all the scenarios people come up with for these killer drones seem very expensive and not much more deadly when compared with knives, guns, trucks or bombs.

Ancapistani 4y ago

> Does AI really get you anything in that situation? Yes, it allows the actors to disassociate themselves with the act. Assuming you have drones with on-board image processing and autonomous loiter capability, you could place them hours, days, or even weeks in advance and have them configured to launch at a predetermined point in the future. FWIW, I wouldn't even call this sort of thing "AI" - it's already totally possible using mostly COTS ("Commercial, Off-The-Shelf") components and software. The only thing that would need to be custom is the image processing portion, and that's not really all that complex. The "follow me" functionality of most commercial photography-oriented quadcopters (e.g., DJI Mavic series, Autel Evo 2 series) already implements that sort of thing, just specific to identifying and tracking a person, vehicle, animal, etc.