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This is only a few days after the massive drone attack in Russia. Only a matter of time until we have drones smart enough to dodge bullets (or at least dodge o

This is only a few days after the massive drone attack in Russia. Only a matter of time until we have drones smart enough to dodge bullets (or at least dodge out of where guns are pointing) while flying at breakneck speeds being controlled by AIs we don't fully understand. The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future.

stackedinserter 1y ago
OTOH there's no mass adoption of autonomous drones after 3+ years of real active war between two technologically advanced nations.
- Swoerd 1y ago
  -That you know of.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  As long as the end of civilization comes soon, we'll be fine!
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  The seeds of the Butlerian Jihad
- jandrese 1y ago
  There is already mass adoption of drones, the AI stuff is only lagging behind slightly.
  - stackedinserter 1y ago
    Please read before responding.
- karn97 1y ago
  [dead]
- dghlsakjg 1y ago
  Are you sure? One of the theories for why there were tires on top of the russian planes that were bombed is that it confuses automatic targeting systems by breaking up the profile of the airplane used in automatic target recognition systems. Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed to run an autonomous route with or without a radio link connection. This is a huge reason that GPS is just constantly jammed in this part of the world. If you can get a GPS signal on the battlefield, you can tell a drone to go destroy something.
  - stackedinserter 1y ago
    Sigh. The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone who served in russian/soviet army. > Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed Lock on a moving target and hit it is not the same as put waypoints in INAV. My point was that there's still no mass adoption of target locking or self-aiming drones, overwhelming majority of hits, on both sides, are done with regular FPV drones with very standard school hardware that's barely modified for combat use (namely: custom frequencies for VTX and ERLS).
    - pjc50 1y ago
      > The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone who served in russian/soviet army. Why is this, for the rest of us?
      - vbezhenar 1y ago
        To imitate. There was order from the higher ups: protect the planes. There was no specific order like "build a garages for planes". So they put tires on planes and called it protection. Now soldiers have to move tires around, fill the journals, sign them up. New procedures are developed. Order is fulfilled. Everyone was happy. May be someone even got a promotion for creating a plane defence system so cheap.
    - dghlsakjg 1y ago
      If you know more about it, you seem to now more than this source at cent-com https://www.twz.com/air/russia-covering-its-aircraft-in-tires-is-about-befuddling-image-matching-seekers-u-s-military-confirms https://www.twz.com/air/russia-covering-its-aircraft-in-tire...
- dji4321234 1y ago
  There's enormous adoption of autonomous drones. A large number of front-line FPV drones are equipped with automated last-second targeting systems like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coUwYOyIoAU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coUwYOyIoAU , based on Chinese NPU IP / CCTV systems and readily available as full solutions on Aliexpress. The basic idea is that if the drone loses control or video link due to EW countermeasures, it can continue to the last target. Loitering and long-range fixed wing reconnaissance drones have been fully autonomous since the beginning. One common recent technique taken from traditional "big" militaries is the use of loitering autonomous high altitude base stations with Starlink or LTE on them providing coverage to the battlefield below, since it's much harder to jam things when they are flying high above the ground.
  - stackedinserter 1y ago
    You have no idea what you're talking about and your video is just a demo from some chinese account. There are tons of footage from drone units, from both sides, and they are all old school analog FPV until the very last moment.
    - dji4321234 1y ago
      https://x.com/sternenko/status/1770348417102819563 https://x.com/sternenko/status/1770348417102819563 Rather, it is you who does not know what you are talking about. Here is a real frontline video characterizing these systems. Yes, it is all still analog FPV. The lock-on system selects a target and overlays the reticle on the analog video. As the FPV flies closer and encounters the jamming from the target, the lock-on unit ensures it is still a hit. These have fallen out of favor as fiber optic is a little easier to get than it used to be but they are still in wide use.
      - stackedinserter 1y ago
        Your link literally says: > Технологія нова, потребує вдосконалення і масштабування. > Eng: "The technology is new and will need improvement and scaling" I don't understand what you're trying to prove. They do exist and I never said they don't. They keep popping up here and there, mainly working in demo conditions against static contrast targets. My point was that so far, these things are just curiosities with very limited usage and there's no mass adoption. Maybe some, but there's some of everything in this war. All the main uav units that I'm aware of use manually controlled fpvs and there are reasons for that. > These have fallen out of favor as fiber optic is a little easier Oh gosh.
- switchbak 1y ago
  Maybe we should come back to this in a few years, I think this will have aged worse than the old dropbox comment. Governments are falling over themselves to: acquire drones, figure out how to defend against existing and future drones, and to figure out how to exploit them well. Given the recent attack against Russian bombers, I find it hard to take you seriously here. Hell, the US knows it can't compete with China on aircraft numbers, and is placing its money on collaborative combat aircraft to give it the advantage. That's about as strong an endorsement as you can get.
  - XorNot 1y ago
    What the Loyal Wingman program is trying to build is extremely far from what people keep thinking when someone says "drone". The word is overloaded as hell: no one draws a distinction between a quadrotor with a 20 minute flight time and an air breathing jet aircraft costing $20 million a piece. But then they go and say "drone swarms will defeat all future adversaries!" Like in the Ukrainian context everyone seems to think the drone swarm was the deciding factor and is saying "this will replace air forces!"...kind of ignoring the multi month infiltration and espionage operation which got those systems in range (they were literally trucked right up to almost the fence line).
    - switchbak 1y ago
      "when someone says", "no one draws" ... who are these people you're talking about? The folks I listen to make it very clear the kinds of platforms they're talking about, and use different terms to describe things at different levels of specificity. Many/most folks use the term "drone" to talk about CCA's and other expensive platforms. In fact, "drone warfare" predates the common application to quadcopters, people were calling the Predator drone a drone in the early 2000's. I do agree that calling everything a drone is annoying though, and makes it hard to know what people are talking about. "AI" is having the same problem today.
      - XorNot 1y ago
        The general public. If the people you're talking to are military or professionals, then fairly obviously they'll be setting up very precise language and expectations. But every post vaguely about drones on HN has a whole bunch of people acting like a 1000 quadcopters will replace an F-35.
- arcticfox 1y ago
  Remember when TB-2s and grenade bombers were the peak of drone technology in Ukraine? That was like 2 years ago, now the frontlines are draped in equal parts anti-drone netting and fiberoptic threads.
  - baq 1y ago
    The recent picture of sun rising or setting above a field of fiber threads really drives the point home. At peace time you have to pay $50k to get fiber to the home. At war it’s coming at you at 50mph and you can’t do anything to stop it.
  - stackedinserter 1y ago
    Do you follow this war closely? Show me which drone units adopted anything autonomous, just name it. There are cases when they are used but there's no mass adoption, they all use regular FPV and FO drones. Anti-anti-drone avoidance systems on Russian zala's is the only example of autonomous action that I can remember.
- pjc50 1y ago
  I think people are missing the word "autonomous" here, which means you're right .. so far. I wouldn't bet against it changing.
- 542354234235 1y ago
  An interesting paper just published about the current state of AI in Ukrainian and Russian drones on the battlefield [1]. "Promises of an immediate AI/ML drone revolution are premature as of June 2025, given that both Russian and Ukrainian forces will need to allocate more time, testing, and investment to deploy these drones on the frontlines en masse. Russia and Ukraine will continue improving their ML and machine vision capabilities while training and testing AI capabilities. Russia and Ukraine will then need to tackle the issue of scaling the production of the new AI/ML drones that will require additional time and resources to facilitate. Russia and Ukraine may start to use some AI/ML drones to carry out specific tasks in the meantime, such as striking certain types of targets like armored equipment or aircraft, before learning to fully operate on the battlefield. AI/ML drones are also unlikely to fully replace the need for the mass of tactical FPV drones over the coming months because the latter are cheaper to produce and adapt to the current battlefield conditions at the current state of technology." [1] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/battlefield-ai-revolution-not-here-yet-status-current-russian-and-ukrainian-ai-drone https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/battlefield-ai-rev...
- numpad0 1y ago
  Yeah. I guess military taboo and export control schemes/scare tactics is doing phenomenal jobs restraining and de-escalating use of computers in arms development. Less money spent improving means to kill people might be good, but the long gap between the cutting edge of technology in general to technology applied to military domain feels weird.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
This is portrayed in Ministry for the Future which describes AI controlled swarms of small drones/bombs that fly apart and come together at their target and are almost impossible to stop.
- chrisweekly 1y ago
  Fantastic book, highly recommended.
  - Taek 1y ago
    I tried to read the book and to me it came off as little more than doomer and disaster pornography. I found a lot of the situations to be far fetched and didn't feel like it portrayed a realistic image of how the world works.
    - MangoToupe 1y ago
      Interesting! I found it to be almost too optimistic or unbelievably hopeful.
      - WastedCucumber 1y ago
        Same here. I think I hadn't ever felt so hopeful for the future as I was while reading that book. I doubt that our world will turn out so positive.
        worldsayshi 1y ago
        It will likely come out somewhere in between our fears and our hopes. So it's good that we double down on imagining hopeful scenarios. Makes it easier to realize them.
        Lu2025 1y ago
        Not so sure. Russia arranged a lot of "worst case scenarios" for all of us. It will take a lot of effort to get to "okay" again.
spaceman_2020 1y ago
Some of this stuff is getting to the point where we will seriously need to have a global talk on whether we should put a pin in this tech or not
- jandrese 1y ago
  As if the billionaires won't simply go "F that noise, more money for me!!!" Ethical concerns are way down the priority list for most AI focused companies.
- jolt42 1y ago
  why? if nuclear weapons got the green light, do you expect a different outcome?
  - AlienRobot 1y ago
    Because nuclear weapons got the green light.
  - spaceman_2020 1y ago
    Weapon that threatens everyone is better than weapon that threatens only some
- switchbak 1y ago
  I'm sure that everyone would agree on that, and that $bad_actor wouldn't take advantage of the fact that everyone else had agreed to lay down their arms. Game theory sucks, but it's hard to get around.
- tonyarkles 1y ago
  The child comments from yours are mentioning nuclear weapons as a parallel but there's one big difference between drone tech and nuclear weapons: plutonium is really hard to make. We might be able to put a pin in this tech from a policy perspective, but the cat is way out of the bag as far as the tech goes. A cell phone already has all of the sensors you need baked right into it (honestly, we can thank mobile devices for getting the cost down). An ESC for a motor is a cheap microcontroller and a couple of MOSFETs. The frames can be made of cheap plastic. Even if things like ArduPilot didn't exist, a smart EE student could build one from scratch, including the flight control software, using parts from Digikey and relatively basic PID control code. The cat is definitely out of the bag.
GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
yeesh. i made this comparison once and HN told me that campy action movies are bad to base policy on :\
nothrabannosir 1y ago
Obligatory link to the short film (future documentary) “Slaughterbots” (2017), which depicts exactly this in harrowing detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
belter 1y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1l29eo5/drones_returning_to_their_launch_pads_after_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1l29eo5/dr...
deleted 1y ago
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trhway 1y ago
>drones smart enough to dodge bullets well, there will be similarly smart "predator"/defense drones. The humans will have no chances on such a battlefield populated by thousands drones per square kilometer fighting each other. >The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future. And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing. >or at least dodge out of where guns are pointing just a bit of arithmetic comparing new weapons - drones vs. classic guns. Say a radar guided gun takes 1 sec. to train onto a drone and shoot several bullets. The range is max 3 km (an expensive 20mm-30mm autocannon like Pantsir) - 35 seconds for a 200 miles/hour drone. Thus all it takes is maximum 36 such drones coming simultaneously from all the directions to take out that gun. At less than $1000/drone it is many times cheaper than that radar guided gun. (and that without accounting for the drones coming in very low and hiding behind trees, hills, etc and without the first drones interfering with the radar say by dropping a foil chaff clouds, etc.) It is basically a very typical paradigm shift from vertical scaling to horizontal scaling by way of software orchestrated cheap components.
- impossiblefork 1y ago
  >And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing. It is very dangerous, since it will mean that an organization with enough drones can dominate society on its own. Much better if humans were battlefield-relevant.
  - trhway 1y ago
    It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant. And if you look at Russia your logic does fail on that example - no amount of human losses affect Russia's behavior in the current war as they are sure that Ukraine will run out of soldiers before Russia does. So, from Russia's POV the faster the grinder the sooner their victory.
    - impossiblefork 1y ago
      No. Here in Sweden we instituted mandatory military service we did so because we wanted to ensure that there was no military class that if they decide to can take over. We knew the cost, and the cost is worth it. In normal times the cost is simply to do ones mandatory military service. This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.
allturtles 1y ago
“What hope can there be for mankind,” I thought, “when there are such men as Felix Hoenikker to give such playthings as ice-nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women are?” And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?” It doesn’t take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: “Nothing.” --Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
- fsloth 1y ago
  Vonnegut’s bleakness is not theoretical which gives it a specific bite. As POV Vonnegut cleaned up the shriveled remains of civilian victims of firebombing.
energy123 1y ago
All hard countered by a laser like the Iron Beam, no? Unless there's a hard counter to the hard counter?
- worldsayshi 1y ago
  The obvious counter to a laser could be 'more drones'? And maybe just have the drones sneak up close to the ground.
  - lolc 1y ago
    I always hear this sneak up thing and think about how birds can be caught with netting. And all the barbed wire in old battlefields. I don't think drones will be able to meaningfully sneak up to a laser. Of course more drones works. But more drones here is less drones there. It means lasers are an effective deterrent against opportunistic attacks.
    - orthoxerox 1y ago
      Both Russia and Ukraine are putting up netting around the roads near the frontlines. Wire-guided drones are able to fly close enough to the ground to avoid it.
    - worldsayshi 1y ago
      Sure but i would expect a laser to be at least 10x more expensive than a drone. Would you need 10 sneaky drones to overwhelm a laser?
      - lolc 1y ago
        My theory is that there will be pernicious netting around lasers, and any sneaking drones will tangle themselves up far from the laser. So only straight mass attacks will work. If you have but 10 drones you'll be unlikely to take out a laser I'd say.
- lazide 1y ago
  a laser needs a line of sight and dwell time. drones flying 3 ft off the ground, in between bushes and trees, at 100+ mph? not an easy situation. ramp up power levels so dwell time might only be 1/2 second? maybe. but then there is a race for rapid target discrimination. and then ablative armor on the drones (cheap and easy to 3d print), and backup cameras, etc.
randomtoast 1y ago
And Great Britain just announced plans to deliver 100,000 of them to Ukraine. Ukraine lacks the manpower compared to Russia. It seems logical to strengthen their forces by deploying these flying mini terminators. I believe we are not far from large-scale drone warfare. In World War II, we had epic tank and aircraft battles; now, the time has come for autonomous drone battlefields.
- jajko 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - MetaWhirledPeas 1y ago
    I hope this scares nations away from warfare altogether, given the unpredictability of outcomes with heavy drone usage. Even China: they may have a lot of the little buggers, but that Ukraine attack took a lot of scheming. I doubt China can out-manufacture human and AI trickery.
  - NoOn3 1y ago
    I'm afraid they won't have a choice. Without Russia The West and Nato will crush China fast.
    - NoOn3 1y ago
      Only The West and Ukraine can stop this, the East part has no choise in that case, becase If they lose, they will cease to exist...
- pjc50 1y ago
  Missed that news; https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/britain-pledges-deliver-100000-drones-ukraine-by-april-2026-2025-06-03/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/britain-p... I think we're already deep into large-scale drone warfare. Destroying a third of the enemy heavy bomber fleet is pretty substantial. It feels to me like that attack operated like Pearl Harbor, a marker that the old way of surface naval warfare / air attack was being replaced by a new one. Don't forget that Russia has their own drones. They were the first to deploy the fiber-optic cable drones as an anti-ECM measure. And of course both sides are ordering parts from China.
deleted 1y ago
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greenavocado 1y ago
Let's review what Uncle Ted had to say about this. See paragraph 87 by searching for "THE MOTIVES OF SCIENTISTS" https://dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/IndustrialSocietyAndItsFuture_201902/Industrial%20Society%20and%20Its%20Future.txt https://dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/IndustrialSocietyAnd...
- cess11 1y ago
  The conclusion is succinct and the stuff leading up to it of dubious quality. "92. Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research."
deadbabe 1y ago
They don’t need to dodge bullets. Just make them small, cheap, fast, and powerful enough to fly to a target and punch a single bullet perfectly through their skull in an instant. Launch a swarm for redundancy. And because they are autonomous, these drones can be entirely unaffected by radio signals once deployed. Politicians will never go outside again. The only defense is to be loved by all and have no enemies. Or, the more likely scenario: disguises and full anonymity.
- octoberfranklin 1y ago
  No, only our rulers will be anonymous. We'll simply never know who we're being ruled by.
bluealienpie 1y ago
That future arrived years ago. Now it's targeting journalists, women and children. Ukraine is just doing it at a lower cost. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCfv79C_-I0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCfv79C_-I0
rapnie 1y ago
Technical University Delft. Not a word about ethics of developing these AI technologies. Happy techbros making happy gadgets.

stackedinserter 1y ago

OTOH there's no mass adoption of autonomous drones after 3+ years of real active war between two technologically advanced nations.

Swoerd 1y ago
-That you know of.
ceejayoz 1y ago
As long as the end of civilization comes soon, we'll be fine!
insane_dreamer 1y ago
The seeds of the Butlerian Jihad
jandrese 1y ago
There is already mass adoption of drones, the AI stuff is only lagging behind slightly.
- stackedinserter 1y ago
  Please read before responding.
karn97 1y ago
[dead]
dghlsakjg 1y ago
Are you sure? One of the theories for why there were tires on top of the russian planes that were bombed is that it confuses automatic targeting systems by breaking up the profile of the airplane used in automatic target recognition systems. Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed to run an autonomous route with or without a radio link connection. This is a huge reason that GPS is just constantly jammed in this part of the world. If you can get a GPS signal on the battlefield, you can tell a drone to go destroy something.
- stackedinserter 1y ago
  Sigh. The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone who served in russian/soviet army. > Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed Lock on a moving target and hit it is not the same as put waypoints in INAV. My point was that there's still no mass adoption of target locking or self-aiming drones, overwhelming majority of hits, on both sides, are done with regular FPV drones with very standard school hardware that's barely modified for combat use (namely: custom frequencies for VTX and ERLS).
  - pjc50 1y ago
    > The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone who served in russian/soviet army. Why is this, for the rest of us?
    - vbezhenar 1y ago
      To imitate. There was order from the higher ups: protect the planes. There was no specific order like "build a garages for planes". So they put tires on planes and called it protection. Now soldiers have to move tires around, fill the journals, sign them up. New procedures are developed. Order is fulfilled. Everyone was happy. May be someone even got a promotion for creating a plane defence system so cheap.
  - dghlsakjg 1y ago
    If you know more about it, you seem to now more than this source at cent-com https://www.twz.com/air/russia-covering-its-aircraft-in-tires-is-about-befuddling-image-matching-seekers-u-s-military-confirms https://www.twz.com/air/russia-covering-its-aircraft-in-tire...
dji4321234 1y ago
There's enormous adoption of autonomous drones. A large number of front-line FPV drones are equipped with automated last-second targeting systems like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coUwYOyIoAU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coUwYOyIoAU , based on Chinese NPU IP / CCTV systems and readily available as full solutions on Aliexpress. The basic idea is that if the drone loses control or video link due to EW countermeasures, it can continue to the last target. Loitering and long-range fixed wing reconnaissance drones have been fully autonomous since the beginning. One common recent technique taken from traditional "big" militaries is the use of loitering autonomous high altitude base stations with Starlink or LTE on them providing coverage to the battlefield below, since it's much harder to jam things when they are flying high above the ground.
- stackedinserter 1y ago
  You have no idea what you're talking about and your video is just a demo from some chinese account. There are tons of footage from drone units, from both sides, and they are all old school analog FPV until the very last moment.
  - dji4321234 1y ago
    https://x.com/sternenko/status/1770348417102819563 https://x.com/sternenko/status/1770348417102819563 Rather, it is you who does not know what you are talking about. Here is a real frontline video characterizing these systems. Yes, it is all still analog FPV. The lock-on system selects a target and overlays the reticle on the analog video. As the FPV flies closer and encounters the jamming from the target, the lock-on unit ensures it is still a hit. These have fallen out of favor as fiber optic is a little easier to get than it used to be but they are still in wide use.
    - stackedinserter 1y ago
      Your link literally says: > Технологія нова, потребує вдосконалення і масштабування. > Eng: "The technology is new and will need improvement and scaling" I don't understand what you're trying to prove. They do exist and I never said they don't. They keep popping up here and there, mainly working in demo conditions against static contrast targets. My point was that so far, these things are just curiosities with very limited usage and there's no mass adoption. Maybe some, but there's some of everything in this war. All the main uav units that I'm aware of use manually controlled fpvs and there are reasons for that. > These have fallen out of favor as fiber optic is a little easier Oh gosh.
switchbak 1y ago
Maybe we should come back to this in a few years, I think this will have aged worse than the old dropbox comment. Governments are falling over themselves to: acquire drones, figure out how to defend against existing and future drones, and to figure out how to exploit them well. Given the recent attack against Russian bombers, I find it hard to take you seriously here. Hell, the US knows it can't compete with China on aircraft numbers, and is placing its money on collaborative combat aircraft to give it the advantage. That's about as strong an endorsement as you can get.
- XorNot 1y ago
  What the Loyal Wingman program is trying to build is extremely far from what people keep thinking when someone says "drone". The word is overloaded as hell: no one draws a distinction between a quadrotor with a 20 minute flight time and an air breathing jet aircraft costing $20 million a piece. But then they go and say "drone swarms will defeat all future adversaries!" Like in the Ukrainian context everyone seems to think the drone swarm was the deciding factor and is saying "this will replace air forces!"...kind of ignoring the multi month infiltration and espionage operation which got those systems in range (they were literally trucked right up to almost the fence line).
  - switchbak 1y ago
    "when someone says", "no one draws" ... who are these people you're talking about? The folks I listen to make it very clear the kinds of platforms they're talking about, and use different terms to describe things at different levels of specificity. Many/most folks use the term "drone" to talk about CCA's and other expensive platforms. In fact, "drone warfare" predates the common application to quadcopters, people were calling the Predator drone a drone in the early 2000's. I do agree that calling everything a drone is annoying though, and makes it hard to know what people are talking about. "AI" is having the same problem today.
    - XorNot 1y ago
      The general public. If the people you're talking to are military or professionals, then fairly obviously they'll be setting up very precise language and expectations. But every post vaguely about drones on HN has a whole bunch of people acting like a 1000 quadcopters will replace an F-35.
arcticfox 1y ago
Remember when TB-2s and grenade bombers were the peak of drone technology in Ukraine? That was like 2 years ago, now the frontlines are draped in equal parts anti-drone netting and fiberoptic threads.
- baq 1y ago
  The recent picture of sun rising or setting above a field of fiber threads really drives the point home. At peace time you have to pay $50k to get fiber to the home. At war it’s coming at you at 50mph and you can’t do anything to stop it.
- stackedinserter 1y ago
  Do you follow this war closely? Show me which drone units adopted anything autonomous, just name it. There are cases when they are used but there's no mass adoption, they all use regular FPV and FO drones. Anti-anti-drone avoidance systems on Russian zala's is the only example of autonomous action that I can remember.
pjc50 1y ago
I think people are missing the word "autonomous" here, which means you're right .. so far. I wouldn't bet against it changing.
542354234235 1y ago
An interesting paper just published about the current state of AI in Ukrainian and Russian drones on the battlefield [1]. "Promises of an immediate AI/ML drone revolution are premature as of June 2025, given that both Russian and Ukrainian forces will need to allocate more time, testing, and investment to deploy these drones on the frontlines en masse. Russia and Ukraine will continue improving their ML and machine vision capabilities while training and testing AI capabilities. Russia and Ukraine will then need to tackle the issue of scaling the production of the new AI/ML drones that will require additional time and resources to facilitate. Russia and Ukraine may start to use some AI/ML drones to carry out specific tasks in the meantime, such as striking certain types of targets like armored equipment or aircraft, before learning to fully operate on the battlefield. AI/ML drones are also unlikely to fully replace the need for the mass of tactical FPV drones over the coming months because the latter are cheaper to produce and adapt to the current battlefield conditions at the current state of technology." [1] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/battlefield-ai-revolution-not-here-yet-status-current-russian-and-ukrainian-ai-drone https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/battlefield-ai-rev...
numpad0 1y ago
Yeah. I guess military taboo and export control schemes/scare tactics is doing phenomenal jobs restraining and de-escalating use of computers in arms development. Less money spent improving means to kill people might be good, but the long gap between the cutting edge of technology in general to technology applied to military domain feels weird.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

This is portrayed in Ministry for the Future which describes AI controlled swarms of small drones/bombs that fly apart and come together at their target and are almost impossible to stop.

chrisweekly 1y ago
Fantastic book, highly recommended.
- Taek 1y ago
  I tried to read the book and to me it came off as little more than doomer and disaster pornography. I found a lot of the situations to be far fetched and didn't feel like it portrayed a realistic image of how the world works.
  - MangoToupe 1y ago
    Interesting! I found it to be almost too optimistic or unbelievably hopeful.
    - WastedCucumber 1y ago
      Same here. I think I hadn't ever felt so hopeful for the future as I was while reading that book. I doubt that our world will turn out so positive.
      - worldsayshi 1y ago
        It will likely come out somewhere in between our fears and our hopes. So it's good that we double down on imagining hopeful scenarios. Makes it easier to realize them.
        Lu2025 1y ago
        Not so sure. Russia arranged a lot of "worst case scenarios" for all of us. It will take a lot of effort to get to "okay" again.

spaceman_2020 1y ago

Some of this stuff is getting to the point where we will seriously need to have a global talk on whether we should put a pin in this tech or not

jandrese 1y ago
As if the billionaires won't simply go "F that noise, more money for me!!!" Ethical concerns are way down the priority list for most AI focused companies.
jolt42 1y ago
why? if nuclear weapons got the green light, do you expect a different outcome?
- AlienRobot 1y ago
  Because nuclear weapons got the green light.
- spaceman_2020 1y ago
  Weapon that threatens everyone is better than weapon that threatens only some
switchbak 1y ago
I'm sure that everyone would agree on that, and that $bad_actor wouldn't take advantage of the fact that everyone else had agreed to lay down their arms. Game theory sucks, but it's hard to get around.
tonyarkles 1y ago
The child comments from yours are mentioning nuclear weapons as a parallel but there's one big difference between drone tech and nuclear weapons: plutonium is really hard to make. We might be able to put a pin in this tech from a policy perspective, but the cat is way out of the bag as far as the tech goes. A cell phone already has all of the sensors you need baked right into it (honestly, we can thank mobile devices for getting the cost down). An ESC for a motor is a cheap microcontroller and a couple of MOSFETs. The frames can be made of cheap plastic. Even if things like ArduPilot didn't exist, a smart EE student could build one from scratch, including the flight control software, using parts from Digikey and relatively basic PID control code. The cat is definitely out of the bag.

GuinansEyebrows 1y ago

yeesh. i made this comparison once and HN told me that campy action movies are bad to base policy on :\

nothrabannosir 1y ago

Obligatory link to the short film (future documentary) “Slaughterbots” (2017), which depicts exactly this in harrowing detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU

belter 1y ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1l29eo5/drones_returning_to_their_launch_pads_after_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1l29eo5/dr...

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trhway 1y ago

>drones smart enough to dodge bullets well, there will be similarly smart "predator"/defense drones. The humans will have no chances on such a battlefield populated by thousands drones per square kilometer fighting each other. >The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future. And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing. >or at least dodge out of where guns are pointing just a bit of arithmetic comparing new weapons - drones vs. classic guns. Say a radar guided gun takes 1 sec. to train onto a drone and shoot several bullets. The range is max 3 km (an expensive 20mm-30mm autocannon like Pantsir) - 35 seconds for a 200 miles/hour drone. Thus all it takes is maximum 36 such drones coming simultaneously from all the directions to take out that gun. At less than $1000/drone it is many times cheaper than that radar guided gun. (and that without accounting for the drones coming in very low and hiding behind trees, hills, etc and without the first drones interfering with the radar say by dropping a foil chaff clouds, etc.) It is basically a very typical paradigm shift from vertical scaling to horizontal scaling by way of software orchestrated cheap components.

impossiblefork 1y ago
>And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing. It is very dangerous, since it will mean that an organization with enough drones can dominate society on its own. Much better if humans were battlefield-relevant.
- trhway 1y ago
  It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant. And if you look at Russia your logic does fail on that example - no amount of human losses affect Russia's behavior in the current war as they are sure that Ukraine will run out of soldiers before Russia does. So, from Russia's POV the faster the grinder the sooner their victory.
  - impossiblefork 1y ago
    No. Here in Sweden we instituted mandatory military service we did so because we wanted to ensure that there was no military class that if they decide to can take over. We knew the cost, and the cost is worth it. In normal times the cost is simply to do ones mandatory military service. This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.

allturtles 1y ago

“What hope can there be for mankind,” I thought, “when there are such men as Felix Hoenikker to give such playthings as ice-nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women are?” And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?” It doesn’t take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: “Nothing.” --Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

fsloth 1y ago
Vonnegut’s bleakness is not theoretical which gives it a specific bite. As POV Vonnegut cleaned up the shriveled remains of civilian victims of firebombing.

energy123 1y ago

All hard countered by a laser like the Iron Beam, no? Unless there's a hard counter to the hard counter?

worldsayshi 1y ago
The obvious counter to a laser could be 'more drones'? And maybe just have the drones sneak up close to the ground.
- lolc 1y ago
  I always hear this sneak up thing and think about how birds can be caught with netting. And all the barbed wire in old battlefields. I don't think drones will be able to meaningfully sneak up to a laser. Of course more drones works. But more drones here is less drones there. It means lasers are an effective deterrent against opportunistic attacks.
  - orthoxerox 1y ago
    Both Russia and Ukraine are putting up netting around the roads near the frontlines. Wire-guided drones are able to fly close enough to the ground to avoid it.
  - worldsayshi 1y ago
    Sure but i would expect a laser to be at least 10x more expensive than a drone. Would you need 10 sneaky drones to overwhelm a laser?
    - lolc 1y ago
      My theory is that there will be pernicious netting around lasers, and any sneaking drones will tangle themselves up far from the laser. So only straight mass attacks will work. If you have but 10 drones you'll be unlikely to take out a laser I'd say.
lazide 1y ago
a laser needs a line of sight and dwell time. drones flying 3 ft off the ground, in between bushes and trees, at 100+ mph? not an easy situation. ramp up power levels so dwell time might only be 1/2 second? maybe. but then there is a race for rapid target discrimination. and then ablative armor on the drones (cheap and easy to 3d print), and backup cameras, etc.

randomtoast 1y ago

And Great Britain just announced plans to deliver 100,000 of them to Ukraine. Ukraine lacks the manpower compared to Russia. It seems logical to strengthen their forces by deploying these flying mini terminators. I believe we are not far from large-scale drone warfare. In World War II, we had epic tank and aircraft battles; now, the time has come for autonomous drone battlefields.

jajko 1y ago
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- MetaWhirledPeas 1y ago
  I hope this scares nations away from warfare altogether, given the unpredictability of outcomes with heavy drone usage. Even China: they may have a lot of the little buggers, but that Ukraine attack took a lot of scheming. I doubt China can out-manufacture human and AI trickery.
- NoOn3 1y ago
  I'm afraid they won't have a choice. Without Russia The West and Nato will crush China fast.
  - NoOn3 1y ago
    Only The West and Ukraine can stop this, the East part has no choise in that case, becase If they lose, they will cease to exist...
pjc50 1y ago
Missed that news; https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/britain-pledges-deliver-100000-drones-ukraine-by-april-2026-2025-06-03/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/britain-p... I think we're already deep into large-scale drone warfare. Destroying a third of the enemy heavy bomber fleet is pretty substantial. It feels to me like that attack operated like Pearl Harbor, a marker that the old way of surface naval warfare / air attack was being replaced by a new one. Don't forget that Russia has their own drones. They were the first to deploy the fiber-optic cable drones as an anti-ECM measure. And of course both sides are ordering parts from China.

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greenavocado 1y ago

Let's review what Uncle Ted had to say about this. See paragraph 87 by searching for "THE MOTIVES OF SCIENTISTS" https://dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/IndustrialSocietyAndItsFuture_201902/Industrial%20Society%20and%20Its%20Future.txt https://dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/IndustrialSocietyAnd...

cess11 1y ago
The conclusion is succinct and the stuff leading up to it of dubious quality. "92. Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research."

deadbabe 1y ago

They don’t need to dodge bullets. Just make them small, cheap, fast, and powerful enough to fly to a target and punch a single bullet perfectly through their skull in an instant. Launch a swarm for redundancy. And because they are autonomous, these drones can be entirely unaffected by radio signals once deployed. Politicians will never go outside again. The only defense is to be loved by all and have no enemies. Or, the more likely scenario: disguises and full anonymity.

octoberfranklin 1y ago
No, only our rulers will be anonymous. We'll simply never know who we're being ruled by.

bluealienpie 1y ago

That future arrived years ago. Now it's targeting journalists, women and children. Ukraine is just doing it at a lower cost. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCfv79C_-I0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCfv79C_-I0

rapnie 1y ago

Technical University Delft. Not a word about ethics of developing these AI technologies. Happy techbros making happy gadgets.