4 ms·

Sci-Fi Short Film “Slaughterbots” [video] (2017)

56 points by throwoutway 3y ago

hindsightbias 3y ago
https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Slamhound https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Slamhound Count Zero, 1986
- msh 3y ago
  Second Variety (1953) by Phillip K Dick is about the consequences of using autonomous weapons in a global conflict.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
paulryanrogers 3y ago
Scary, though I don't think the AI is the scariest part. It's the micro drones themselves
- heisenzombie 3y ago
  Hm, I think the AI does several scary things when applied to weapons: Makes countermeasures harder (can’t just jam the control signal) Allows scale (don’t need 1 pilot per drone, so can have 1000 drones flying in a swarm) And perhaps most scary, it launders responsibility (It wasn’t US that chose to kill those people, it was “the algorithm”)
dredmorbius 3y ago
Wikipedia has additional context and analysis on the short feature and its impacts: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterbots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterbots> The project's website is at <https://autonomousweapons.org https://autonomousweapons.org> And subsequent developments in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine since the film was released in 2017 show how the concepts illustrated are being realised in real-world conflicts, highlighting both capabilities and limitations of the concept, though I'd strongly suggest that the full potential has yet to be realised. One interesting distinction is between the nature of precisely targetable weapons as with the slaughterbots, and stochastic ranged weapons, which date back to at least WWII and the long-range but only loosely-targeted attacks via V-1 "buzz bomb" and V-2 rocket bombs, or more recently through cheap and inaccurate rockets such as the Qassam used heavily by Hamas (see: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/world/middleeast/gaza-rockets-hamas-israel.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/world/middleeast/gaza-roc...>), or the Russian S-8KL (see: <https://www.newsweek.com/russia-cluster-bombs-dumb-rocket-s8kl-rockets-1820504 https://www.newsweek.com/russia-cluster-bombs-dumb-rocket-s8...>). Precision is useful against specific military targets or civilian leadership. Stochastic attacks have long been used against general populations or forces, though the morale effects may well backfire unless the lethality is truly overwhelming. The questions raised in the video about countermeasures and the consequences for use-of-force are interesting and I'd very much like to see further discussion of those topics if anyone is aware of any.
- imtringued 3y ago
  >Stochastic attacks have long been used against general populations or forces, though the morale effects may well backfire unless the lethality is truly overwhelming. The video is underwhelming. Futuristic technology is used to harass and kill people for no reason other than some CEO wanting to earn money from a secret investor sales pitch? The range of the weapons is limited so they need to be deployed near the university that is being attacked. The weapon leaves no impact other than some broken windows or dead bodies. Meanwhile in Ukraine Putin levels cities with indiscriminate artillery. Imagine if these cities were being attacked by face scanning weapons. Civilians would most likely not be on the list of enemies. If Putin does not have a database of Ukrainian soldier faces, then he can't target this weapon. He will have to target based on the uniform instead but then soldiers could just stop wearing uniforms or even intentionally dress like civilians. At some point the weapon must become indiscriminate again and once it is indiscriminate, it is not any different than being hit by bombs, artillery, nuclear weapons, etc. My prediction: We will keep using more artillery instead.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    The bit about stochastic attacks was my own commentary. It's a description of one mode of current and recent (well, largely 20th-century onward) mode of warfare. The Slaughterbots premise though is specific targeted attacks against identified individuals. We've seen this to be effective in multiple theatres and modes throughout history, though recent trends have shown remarkable additional efficacy. Assassinations would be the original notion, though that's a messy practice when you're stabbing Caesar in the back. The ability to drop wet teams in on a specific target was improved with near-real-time surveillance, but still involved significant feet on the ground. An example is the 2010 assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, UAE, by 26 Israeli Mossad agents: <https://www.gq.com/story/the-dubai-job-mossad-assassination-hamas https://www.gq.com/story/the-dubai-job-mossad-assassination-...> Ten years later, when Israel again committed another assasination, this time of Iranina nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, they used a remotely-controlled machine gun mounted in a truck: <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/11/iranian-nuclear-scientist-killed-by-israeli-automated-gun-report https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/11/iranian-nuclear-sci...> Nicholas Maduro, president of Venezuela, survived an attempted assassination using drones and explosives in 2018, in which seven soldiers were injured. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45073385 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45073385> Putin is well-known for targeting individuals for assassination, with Wikipedia listing at least 115 known instances since 1999, many within Russia against Russians. The killing of Ukrainian grain tycoon Oleksiy Vadatursky by missile is thought to have been a specifically targeted attack; his house, and specifically bedroom, was struck by a missile, killing Vadatursky and his wife. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62367356 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62367356> Similar attacks could be carried out against specific high-profile, high-value targets within Ukraine, including government, military, and business officials. On the battlefield itself, targeting priorities would likely be different, though officers and leadership roles might be individually identified. More likely though drones would be directed toward specific equipment or given the general characteristics of enemy soldiers (e.g., uniforms and insignia, or locations), and directed toward them. There are reasons why soldiers do wear uniforms, including identification by their own forces and avoidance of friendly fire. Rules of war and the Geneva Convention generally require distinctive uniforms and insignia "having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance", in part to avoid confusion with civilian populations. It's possible of course for such rules to be changed, but that's not the present situation. I don't think artillery is going away. But it has been supplemented by ever more precisely-directed weapons, and will likely continue to be with time. I do put heavy emphasis on the sorts of scenarios illustrated in the video, however. Specifically-targeted attacks in soft areas seem a distinct likelihood, and many nascent opposition movements can be crippled by incapacitating or cowing a small number of leaders. Though writing this does give me pause to think that one of the most effective tools Ukraine has for targeted elimination of Russian leadership to date as been VVP.
yetanotheruser8 3y ago
I work in this field. I don't think this is going to get restricted anymore than AI will. The modern battlefield is just signal jammers. Remote human pilots just wouldn't work like their proposals wants. Autonomy is becoming a requirement. No targeting humans is logical and the predictable autonomy is pretty much there. A lot of this stuff in this video though, you can get off the shelf and implement today. Compute and battery life are the limiters. The whole world is pouring billions into making those much better though.
- MattRix 3y ago
  Isn’t it inevitable that the stuff in the video will happen then, specifically autonomous murder drones? I don’t really see a way to prevent that in the future… which is terrifying.
  - FuckButtons 3y ago
    You can already watch hundreds, if not thousands of hours of Russians and Ukrainians being mercilessly hunted by drones with grenades. What difference does it make if it has a human pilot or not? The world has always been ugly and brutal if you were actually paying attention.
    - MattRix 3y ago
      There’s a really obvious difference of scale, where you could kill millions without needing millions yourself. The implications when it comes to terrorism are scary. In that sense it’s similar to the threat of nuclear weapons, but the technology will be more accessible and more precise, able to target people based on things like race. You can also destroy all the people in an area without harming the resources/environment/structures, etc.
      - azmodeus 3y ago
        The asymmetric nature is great for smaller manpower counties. Drones will equalise combat for smaller countries and reorient it to capital and industrial capabilities.
Borrible 3y ago
Fortunately, the God-Emperor foresaw that Butler's Jihad would not prevent the logical end of the future evolution of the hunter-seeker problem and directed mankind to the Golden Path.
- euroderf 3y ago
  Hunter-seekers are remotely controlled, yes?, avoiding the issue of automation of target recognition.
  - Borrible 3y ago
    'This was to prevent anyone with the gene from being hunted by prescient hunter-seekers.' https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Golden_Path#Objectives https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Golden_Path#Objectives The evolution of prescient hunter-seeker. You can look it up in 'God-Emperor of Dune' yourself if you want. It's one of the main plot points. The evolution of autonomous, self replicating killer machines driven by human power dynamics. What else is AI but the attempt to predict and exploit human behavior?
    - euroderf 3y ago
      I haven't read most of the sequels, so these plot points are news to me. But in the original Dune, or at least in the Lynch version, don't they find the H-S operator ? Because it cannot be an automaton.
      - Borrible 3y ago
        That is correct and it is the reason I referenced 'God Emperor of Dune'.Maybe I should have mentioned Saberhagen's Berserker series or the replicators from Stargate to make my point more clear... The ideas that war is the father of many things (Heraclitus) and its creatures grow over man's head (Golem, Sorcerer's Apprentice) is not exactly new. I could probably dig up even older cultural knowledge from ancient Indian culture. The evolutionary dynamic of hunter and hunted is also old news.
3seashells 3y ago
The problem is that every tech acceleration produces the possibility of such a arms creation beconing common place. The final stage being a space born species that flings rocks at each other's habitats across a solar system. At some point you goto get this out of the nature of a species, before you can progress. Methods include social implants (like cellphones), synthetic religions with taboos, etc. The alternative is running headfirst into a great filter build out of wild tech acceleration and a completely tribalist, stagnant individual (the flaws barely hidden by over- supply bribery). TL, dr: tech as a permanent fix for evolutionary left behind problems is not viable. Kicking the can down the road produces ever more high stakes failure scenarios,but no permanent stability as created by self alterations.
belter 3y ago
Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15731913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15731913 Slaughterbots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24825928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24825928
karmakaze 3y ago
Today, there's this other story about Axon taser drones[0] to be deployed in schools 'to prevent mass shootings'. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37454176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37454176
Gys 3y ago
Also discussed extensively six years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15731913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15731913
gmargari 3y ago
Black Mirror, Hated in the nation (2016) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation

56 points by throwoutway 3y ago

hindsightbias 3y ago

https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Slamhound https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Slamhound Count Zero, 1986

msh 3y ago
Second Variety (1953) by Phillip K Dick is about the consequences of using autonomous weapons in a global conflict.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

paulryanrogers 3y ago

Scary, though I don't think the AI is the scariest part. It's the micro drones themselves

heisenzombie 3y ago
Hm, I think the AI does several scary things when applied to weapons: Makes countermeasures harder (can’t just jam the control signal) Allows scale (don’t need 1 pilot per drone, so can have 1000 drones flying in a swarm) And perhaps most scary, it launders responsibility (It wasn’t US that chose to kill those people, it was “the algorithm”)

dredmorbius 3y ago

Wikipedia has additional context and analysis on the short feature and its impacts: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterbots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterbots> The project's website is at <https://autonomousweapons.org https://autonomousweapons.org> And subsequent developments in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine since the film was released in 2017 show how the concepts illustrated are being realised in real-world conflicts, highlighting both capabilities and limitations of the concept, though I'd strongly suggest that the full potential has yet to be realised. One interesting distinction is between the nature of precisely targetable weapons as with the slaughterbots, and stochastic ranged weapons, which date back to at least WWII and the long-range but only loosely-targeted attacks via V-1 "buzz bomb" and V-2 rocket bombs, or more recently through cheap and inaccurate rockets such as the Qassam used heavily by Hamas (see: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/world/middleeast/gaza-rockets-hamas-israel.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/world/middleeast/gaza-roc...>), or the Russian S-8KL (see: <https://www.newsweek.com/russia-cluster-bombs-dumb-rocket-s8kl-rockets-1820504 https://www.newsweek.com/russia-cluster-bombs-dumb-rocket-s8...>). Precision is useful against specific military targets or civilian leadership. Stochastic attacks have long been used against general populations or forces, though the morale effects may well backfire unless the lethality is truly overwhelming. The questions raised in the video about countermeasures and the consequences for use-of-force are interesting and I'd very much like to see further discussion of those topics if anyone is aware of any.

imtringued 3y ago
>Stochastic attacks have long been used against general populations or forces, though the morale effects may well backfire unless the lethality is truly overwhelming. The video is underwhelming. Futuristic technology is used to harass and kill people for no reason other than some CEO wanting to earn money from a secret investor sales pitch? The range of the weapons is limited so they need to be deployed near the university that is being attacked. The weapon leaves no impact other than some broken windows or dead bodies. Meanwhile in Ukraine Putin levels cities with indiscriminate artillery. Imagine if these cities were being attacked by face scanning weapons. Civilians would most likely not be on the list of enemies. If Putin does not have a database of Ukrainian soldier faces, then he can't target this weapon. He will have to target based on the uniform instead but then soldiers could just stop wearing uniforms or even intentionally dress like civilians. At some point the weapon must become indiscriminate again and once it is indiscriminate, it is not any different than being hit by bombs, artillery, nuclear weapons, etc. My prediction: We will keep using more artillery instead.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  The bit about stochastic attacks was my own commentary. It's a description of one mode of current and recent (well, largely 20th-century onward) mode of warfare. The Slaughterbots premise though is specific targeted attacks against identified individuals. We've seen this to be effective in multiple theatres and modes throughout history, though recent trends have shown remarkable additional efficacy. Assassinations would be the original notion, though that's a messy practice when you're stabbing Caesar in the back. The ability to drop wet teams in on a specific target was improved with near-real-time surveillance, but still involved significant feet on the ground. An example is the 2010 assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, UAE, by 26 Israeli Mossad agents: <https://www.gq.com/story/the-dubai-job-mossad-assassination-hamas https://www.gq.com/story/the-dubai-job-mossad-assassination-...> Ten years later, when Israel again committed another assasination, this time of Iranina nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, they used a remotely-controlled machine gun mounted in a truck: <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/11/iranian-nuclear-scientist-killed-by-israeli-automated-gun-report https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/11/iranian-nuclear-sci...> Nicholas Maduro, president of Venezuela, survived an attempted assassination using drones and explosives in 2018, in which seven soldiers were injured. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45073385 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45073385> Putin is well-known for targeting individuals for assassination, with Wikipedia listing at least 115 known instances since 1999, many within Russia against Russians. The killing of Ukrainian grain tycoon Oleksiy Vadatursky by missile is thought to have been a specifically targeted attack; his house, and specifically bedroom, was struck by a missile, killing Vadatursky and his wife. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62367356 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62367356> Similar attacks could be carried out against specific high-profile, high-value targets within Ukraine, including government, military, and business officials. On the battlefield itself, targeting priorities would likely be different, though officers and leadership roles might be individually identified. More likely though drones would be directed toward specific equipment or given the general characteristics of enemy soldiers (e.g., uniforms and insignia, or locations), and directed toward them. There are reasons why soldiers do wear uniforms, including identification by their own forces and avoidance of friendly fire. Rules of war and the Geneva Convention generally require distinctive uniforms and insignia "having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance", in part to avoid confusion with civilian populations. It's possible of course for such rules to be changed, but that's not the present situation. I don't think artillery is going away. But it has been supplemented by ever more precisely-directed weapons, and will likely continue to be with time. I do put heavy emphasis on the sorts of scenarios illustrated in the video, however. Specifically-targeted attacks in soft areas seem a distinct likelihood, and many nascent opposition movements can be crippled by incapacitating or cowing a small number of leaders. Though writing this does give me pause to think that one of the most effective tools Ukraine has for targeted elimination of Russian leadership to date as been VVP.

yetanotheruser8 3y ago

I work in this field. I don't think this is going to get restricted anymore than AI will. The modern battlefield is just signal jammers. Remote human pilots just wouldn't work like their proposals wants. Autonomy is becoming a requirement. No targeting humans is logical and the predictable autonomy is pretty much there. A lot of this stuff in this video though, you can get off the shelf and implement today. Compute and battery life are the limiters. The whole world is pouring billions into making those much better though.

MattRix 3y ago
Isn’t it inevitable that the stuff in the video will happen then, specifically autonomous murder drones? I don’t really see a way to prevent that in the future… which is terrifying.
- FuckButtons 3y ago
  You can already watch hundreds, if not thousands of hours of Russians and Ukrainians being mercilessly hunted by drones with grenades. What difference does it make if it has a human pilot or not? The world has always been ugly and brutal if you were actually paying attention.
  - MattRix 3y ago
    There’s a really obvious difference of scale, where you could kill millions without needing millions yourself. The implications when it comes to terrorism are scary. In that sense it’s similar to the threat of nuclear weapons, but the technology will be more accessible and more precise, able to target people based on things like race. You can also destroy all the people in an area without harming the resources/environment/structures, etc.
    - azmodeus 3y ago
      The asymmetric nature is great for smaller manpower counties. Drones will equalise combat for smaller countries and reorient it to capital and industrial capabilities.

Borrible 3y ago

Fortunately, the God-Emperor foresaw that Butler's Jihad would not prevent the logical end of the future evolution of the hunter-seeker problem and directed mankind to the Golden Path.

euroderf 3y ago
Hunter-seekers are remotely controlled, yes?, avoiding the issue of automation of target recognition.
- Borrible 3y ago
  'This was to prevent anyone with the gene from being hunted by prescient hunter-seekers.' https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Golden_Path#Objectives https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Golden_Path#Objectives The evolution of prescient hunter-seeker. You can look it up in 'God-Emperor of Dune' yourself if you want. It's one of the main plot points. The evolution of autonomous, self replicating killer machines driven by human power dynamics. What else is AI but the attempt to predict and exploit human behavior?
  - euroderf 3y ago
    I haven't read most of the sequels, so these plot points are news to me. But in the original Dune, or at least in the Lynch version, don't they find the H-S operator ? Because it cannot be an automaton.
    - Borrible 3y ago
      That is correct and it is the reason I referenced 'God Emperor of Dune'.Maybe I should have mentioned Saberhagen's Berserker series or the replicators from Stargate to make my point more clear... The ideas that war is the father of many things (Heraclitus) and its creatures grow over man's head (Golem, Sorcerer's Apprentice) is not exactly new. I could probably dig up even older cultural knowledge from ancient Indian culture. The evolutionary dynamic of hunter and hunted is also old news.

3seashells 3y ago

The problem is that every tech acceleration produces the possibility of such a arms creation beconing common place. The final stage being a space born species that flings rocks at each other's habitats across a solar system. At some point you goto get this out of the nature of a species, before you can progress. Methods include social implants (like cellphones), synthetic religions with taboos, etc. The alternative is running headfirst into a great filter build out of wild tech acceleration and a completely tribalist, stagnant individual (the flaws barely hidden by over- supply bribery). TL, dr: tech as a permanent fix for evolutionary left behind problems is not viable. Kicking the can down the road produces ever more high stakes failure scenarios,but no permanent stability as created by self alterations.

belter 3y ago

Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15731913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15731913 Slaughterbots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24825928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24825928

karmakaze 3y ago

Today, there's this other story about Axon taser drones[0] to be deployed in schools 'to prevent mass shootings'. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37454176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37454176

Gys 3y ago

Also discussed extensively six years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15731913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15731913

gmargari 3y ago

Black Mirror, Hated in the nation (2016) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation