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Drones will realize the promise of suicide terrorism
- chrisweekly 1y agoThe linked blog post is interesting, plausible / rational, and scary. Curious if HN'ers have insights about its pov and/or the "exitgroup" per se.
- hooverd 1y agoWell, they seem concerned about "gay race communism" and want an "urban Reconquista" maybe just garden variety wignats?
- thomassmith65 1y agoOh dear. I wonder if the author splurged on a fancy bunker, and now fantasizes of scenarios that would justify the expense.
- xk_id 1y agoNaomi Klein’s article in the guardian
- walrus01 1y ago> Likewise, a drone factory is as vulnerable to drone attack as any other big, static, expensive piece of defense infrastructure. It's really not, the Ukrainians have geographically distributed assembly and testing, QC of quadcopters in the ten to fifteen inch propeller size class in many random and hard to find locations. A shitload of them can be assembled by a team of ten people working in a 2000 sq ft workshop in an apartment building basement. Large drone factories like something that can crank out shahed 136 size uav? Or like what the US mil calls a group 3 uav? Or group 4 sized? Sure, agreed, different thing. I agree with a lot of the points the author makes in this article but I question if they've ever assembled a 12" prop size quadcopter (large enough to carry a good sized amount of munition on a 10-15 minute one way trip) from components. It's something easy to distribute as a cottage industry.
- ajuc 1y agoMost of the work is in making electronics, batteries and engines. All requires typical long supply chains and big factories. Assembly is a very small part of the job. Currently there's no shortage of the components, but we could imagine a strict trade controls of the components, some cold war deglobalization scenario or even a WW3. Without CPUs there's no drones.
- walrus01 1y agoFinding and bombing the factory that turns out stm32h7 microcontrollers for hobby grade uav running betaflight seems like it would have a lot of unintended consequences.
- ajuc 1y agoWars and wide-spread terrosism tend to have unintended consequences, yes.
- tonyhart7 1y ago"a strict trade controls of the components" how can you restrict such manufacturing tho??? I mean you literally cant block off an entire chinnese industry can you?
- ajuc 1y agoYou can drone-bomb the factory and ban ASML from sending the next set of matrices to rebuilt it. That's just one scenario, there's others. The supply chains are REALLY long and touch basically every important country on Earth and quite a few unimportant ones.
- tonyhart7 1y agoYeah that mean they can't, you act like Western did not do that to russia already
- rbanffy 1y agoI would love to find a fundamental flaw in this reasoning, but I can't. It was, I guess, naïve to not expect exponential technological progress not to reflect in the political structures. The world is changing, and changing very quickly. The article doesn't get much into what can be the next step - fully autonomous drones that travel by night, charge by day, and find a target by themselves. A bit like landmines, with a shorter half-life, but highly mobile and intelligent enough.
- walrus01 1y agoHow would they charge? The watt hours needed to fly a medium sized VTOL uav of any type for any reasonable amount of time can't be collected by the size of pv panel that can be reasonably carried by the same craft. Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot.
- hackernewds 1y agothey don't need to be constantly flying. as long as work is not done, there isn't much energy being burned. and most of the energy burned is not with the rotors
- walrus01 1y agoIf you mean something that is put in place with a full charge and just uses PV to trickle charge keep itself awake and alive, sure. I was thinking a scenario where something is dropped off, flies 10-15 minutes and lands somewhere to await a target. It would need many days to charge before it could fly again for ten minutes.
- mcphage 1y ago> Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot. Isn’t that the answer to your question, then?
- walrus01 1y agoKind of, but it seems such things would be obvious and exposed to being easily located if just sitting around idle in sunlight collecting charge. Not exactly like a landmine.
- blargthorwars 1y agoA single long-distance drone can be easily defended by a tiny drone that only has to intercept it. All things being equal, the advantage belongs to the defender, with a significant caveat: the defender must be aware of the risk and deploy defensive drones in advance.
- xnx 1y agoWhat does the "2A" crowd think of homing bullets (drones) that have a range of miles and can be delivered anonymously. Is this what he founding fathers were thinking of when they wrote the Bill of Rights?
- TimorousBestie 1y agoDid you mean the Second Amendment?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lenerdenator 1y agoIf you mean second amendment, well, right now I'm just as afraid of the US government having these as I am some doomsday cult leader, so shrugs
- mosura 1y agoOne of the potential great filters is the absorption of all resources available to a civilization by a drone program intended to counter the drone program of a rival civilization. Historically nuclear arms used to be thought of as creating a hostage type scenario, where you can think of major cities of nuclear powers held hostage by their opponents. This is ok as long as the rival nuclear powers remain large and few in number such that their desires for your compliance do not contradict those of another nuclear power. The drone problem is going to become a variant of the “everyone has nukes now” except drones are so much harder to detect in idle states. Companies selling what they claim are solutions to this stand to print money, but it is not clear how it can really be done.
- jonplackett 1y agoBut there’s not the same mutually assured destruction to keep it in check. Culpability is very different. How do you know who launched a drone? It can also be scaled up or down in a way nukes can’t. And it could also be much more sudden and precise in a way nukes can’t.
- c22 1y agoBy rolling back your continuous aerial surveillance tape.
- dotancohen 1y agoAdd in the fact that any small rogue actor could build and operate a drone or even a fleet, and the calculus changes quickly.
- FerretFred 1y agoMaybe this is one reason why in the US and latterly in the UK, the authorities are scrambling to introduce remote ID for drones with 249gm flying weight upwards: this includes operator/pilot ID. No doubt there'll eventually be some sort of AI-assisted pattern recognition/prediction that'll enable pre-emptive prediction of attacks.
- skavi 1y agoIt’s fairly simple to build your own quadcopter.
- therein 1y agoYeah RemoteID is absolutely stupid. Legislators acting like only DJI makes drones.
- FerretFred 1y agoIt is, but if you're in a hurry and not bothered about the consequences just nip down to your local store and get one off the shelf.
- theamk 1y ago.. and if it does not have remote ID, in the future it might be shot on sight by an automatic system.
- snickerdoodle12 1y agoEven simpler to buy a drone and replace the electronics
- skavi 1y agoI would not expect that to be simpler. Working within that was designed as an integrated system sounds more annoying than putting together components that are intended to be used in DIY quadcopters.
- FridayoLeary 1y ago
- imaginationra 1y agoRe: crypto and this "The collapsing institutional monopoly on violence will yield a renewal of local and personal violence, and a very messy working-out of a hierarchy suited to the new conditions." If prediction markets come to act as proof of life oracles- which they already have in a few cases- things get very dark very fast for everyone I reckon.
- ajuc 1y agoThings get very dark in few dozen years anyway - see established mainstream science about global warming. We know and ignore this because it's unpleasant and if we take it seriously it cuts the short term profits. Instead we worry about things that are more sexy and less inevitable.
- skrebbel 1y agoI feel like you condensed multiple paragraphs worth of thought into 2 sentences and I simply can't follow at all. Would you care to write it out in more detail?
- mumbisChungo 1y agoI am guessing the idea is ubiquity of prediction markets -> there's a prediction market for the liveness of everyone/anyone -> financial incentive to kill anyone combined with the idea of the proliferation of local/personal violence
- imaginationra 1y agoSomething like that- I'm an artist/creative and was working on a (Black mirrorish)story years back about this, thats were the thought comes from- a related ransom system would also be built into it- would create an offshoot of Defi known as DeathFi.
- qiine 1y agoholysh*t this is grim
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- cakealert 1y agoWould you need to harden individual targets if you design and deploy a defensive drone swarm that is always patrolling? It will successfully mitigate the cheap flying drone threat as long as they aren't launched close to the target. There will probably not be any more birds in human territory however since discriminating will be counter productive anyway, hostile drones will seek to impersonate birds otherwise.
- jonplackett 1y agoIt’s the same problem as air Defense now though isn’t it - asymmetry. If you have 100 drones you can just launch them all at one critical thing. If you want to defend one critical thing from 100 drones, you might need 200 drones protecting it. And you also have to have 200 for every other critical thing. And even if you do do that, they just need 150 drones.
- cakealert 1y agoCurrent air defense approaches rely on non-reusable drones: missiles with rocket fuel. With reusable drones you can deploy expensive defensive drone swarms at scale. For example: radar drones, ramming drones, gun drones, etc. I don't see how long range single drones will be a meaningful threat in such a setup, even stealth drones will not be able to maintain stealth against multiple radar drones from different angles. The skies will belong to drone swarms.
- jonplackett 1y agoYou still have to protect everywhere though. That’s the asymmetry I mean. All the adversary needs to do is work out how to overwhelm whatever you’ve got. Also, frankly the idea of having that many drones flying around the whole country is probably just as terrifying as an actual drone attack. Who is going to be in charge of those ‘defensive’ drones?
- intended 1y agoCurrent air defenses depend on being able to make weaker players give up on their ideas of even trying to attack bigger players. The point being made here is that you can now have cheap attacks on boring targets, without having to risk any humans at all. And by boring targets, they're talking about things like roads, or bridges and overpasses - ways to slow the global economy to a crawl, and to force nations into blowing their resources on defending everything. > "What the Russians can’t do is harden every mile of highway, every bridge, every dam. Neither can the United States, and — critically — neither can the Chinese."
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- darquomiahw 1y ago>What would you restrict, if you wanted to prevent any other actor from building drones? Batteries? Rotors? 3D printers? $17 Raspberry Pis? Explosives and fuzing mechanisms, which are already regulated in many countries.
- arrowsmith 1y agoAnd yet terrorists and other bad actors have still been able to build bombs despite the regulations.
- ckemere 1y agoExplosives have to be manufactured, and most require precursors that are hard to come by. More broadly, perhaps the historic argument that we should care about, eg Somalia, because failed states can enable chaos that crosses borders becomes more true??? (*edit - I mean by hosting factories for illicit materials!)
- areyourllySorry 1y agoyou can cause damage to an electrical grid without any explosions. you can disrupt a highway by dropping spikes. etc
- therein 1y agoLooks interesting. I have quite a lot of domain expertise but taking you to a 99$ membership fee payment page right after filling the form leaves a bad taste. I hope ExitGroup.US doesn't think they are the first group to have this kind of collective.
- hooverd 1y agoseems like wignat militia prepper shit but for people who sell b2b saas
- thomassmith65 1y agoThis scenario might play out, but if it does, it will be a temporary phase. What will bring it to an end will be a panopticon: video surveillance everywhere, stronger anti-encryption laws, AI monitoring the whole lot. I'm not an activist with an agenda here; it's just that there's an upper limit to how much drone terrorism a society will tolerate.
- intended 1y agoThis is addressed in the article - its a core point. Everything you described is the friction which societies will endure to stop these threats. This friction will slow down our global economy, and break the world we have known entirely. Which is why the article ends on: > The future will be more like the past. > As the scale of effective communication, transportation, maintenance, and influence recedes, society will become more human and more personal, with weaker and multifarious institutions. > The collapsing institutional monopoly on violence will yield a renewal of local and personal violence, and a very messy working-out of a hierarchy suited to the new conditions. > Anyway, it’s a great time to make friends. I will say, that over time we have found ways to beat even the most distributed of systems. Napster and piracy come to mind.
- MichaelZuo 1y agoWhy would it be distributed? Increasingly effective surveillance propels increasingly effective centralization throughout the entirety of human history.
- logicchains 1y ago>there's an upper limit to how much drone terrorism a society will tolerate. There's an upper limit to how much authoritarianism a society can tolerate. Automated weaponry becoming cheaper and cheaper as technology progresses will eventually lead to a wave of decentralisation in society, because offense is much cheaper than defense, so wannabe tyrants will have a harder and harder time maintaining their own safety.
- deleted 1y ago
- 4ndrewl 1y agoYes, drones, but how is this much different in terms of strategy than packing a van with explosives like the IRA were doing in Britain in 80s/90s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Staples_Corner_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Staples_Corner_bombing
- jonplackett 1y agoThere’s a reason Ukraine didn’t just drive a van right up to those bombers
- ponector 1y agoBut they did run semi truck with tons of explosive fertilizer on the Crimea bridge.
- jonplackett 1y agoWhich did not destroy the bridge.
- intended 1y agoIts covered in the article - they can target infrastructure nodes that were previously too boring to even consider. The threat envelope has become everything.
- matusp 1y agoTwo differences. (1) You can do more targeted attacks. The furthest IRA got was usually to park a van in front of a building. With drones, you can target individuals, cars, planes, etc, even when they are physically separated from public spaces. (2) Since you can do targeted attacks, you don't need that much explosives. This makes you harder to identify and track. Breivik had to buy a farm to have access to the amount of fertilizer he wanted to use.
- AnotherGoodName 1y agoIt's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bomber_will_always_get_through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bomber_will_always_get_thr... of the 21st century where the bomber now costs less than a grand.
- jopsen 1y agoIf the world reverses away from larges states that control violence at scale, the industrial base that makes computers, social media, crypto and drones possible will simply disappear. Technology with globalization might be possible (I'm not entirely sure), technology we have today without organized states, not happening.
- CamperBob2 1y agoI wonder if that's true. Suppose Bejiing vanished tomorrow in a puff of smoke. Would anyone in Shenzhen care? Ditto, Washington DC and San Francisco. In the parlance of our times, city-states may be all you need.
- bambax 1y ago> In a hyper-mobile, distributed global economy, you can destroy billions of dollars in value just by reducing the speed at which goods and people can securely travel. Maybe, but the goal of terrorism isn't to destroy "value", whatever that is. It's to create fear and unrest and make life miserable for the people in the target country. "Economic disruption" doesn't do that. It doesn't actually do anything. Also, drones are not needed for any of this, or suicide bombers. It's trivial to leave a suitcase on a train or in the subway and cause hundreds of deaths and extreme mayhem. (Not trivial to make a bomb to fit that suitcase, but not very hard.) My theory of why it almost never happens is, there are actually very few terrorists. It's telling that the examples in the post are not from individual terrorists but from states.
- arrowsmith 1y ago> There are actually very few terrorists. The UK security services reportedly have 43,000 terror suspects on their watchlist. [0] And they still haven't managed to prevent every terror attack in recent years. Evil exists. [0]https://archive.is/C9uS2 https://archive.is/C9uS2
- directevolve 1y agoCounterpoints and questions: - Non-wired drones can be jammed. It’s early days for building defenses against these attacks. - Non-state actors have far less access to the sophisticated intelligence needed to strike hard targets or secure against counter strikes. - Setting up hidden bombs for remote detonation on soft targets, like the freeway, has been possible, no need for drones. What other factors have been preventing these types of attacks? How do drones change those factors? If America was hunting Osama bin Laden today, I bet we’d have used a drone to kill him rather than sending in special forces. Likewise, if I was a cartel in the jungle or rebel force in the mountains, I’d be damned scared of the military or police coming after me with an endless wave of drones.
- spwa4 1y ago> Non-wired drones can be jammed. It’s early days for building defenses against these attacks. AI drones can't be jammed. And I wouldn't count on terrorists having qualms about how unethical this would be.
- directevolve 1y agoTrue, but then terrorists need to have access to AI bombs, drones and AI targeting systems.
- scoofy 1y agoThis essay is about state actors and the future of warfare, not terrorists.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y agoWe must not have read the same essay. You are correct that it is about state warfare but it is also about terrorists. (The word “terrorism” is in the title!) > Drones will realize the promise of suicide terrorism > But the threat of soft-target suicide terrorism never came to much, because a suicide bomber is a targeting system with an ego. > But a drone is a suicide bomber without the expensive bottleneck in targeting. Their whole point is that the reason terrorists do not employ these tactics is that suicide bombers want to be remembered for destroying the White House rather than some numbered interstate highway; even if said highway is critical national infrastructure. Drones take that ego out of the equation. They don’t care if they’re used to blow up a highway and they especially don’t care that the last thousand drones failed.
- intended 1y agoGod, yet another grim future. I won't call this a counter point, since what is argued is plausible, if not likely. What I will make a comparison to piracy back in the MP3 era. It really seemed like it would be impossible to stop it, and then came the RIAA, MPAA. Eventually governments managed to figure out the internet and how to deal with the small and nimble upstarts. But better still, (or less grim) is Netflix - when actual alternatives to piracy existed, people were more than happy to follow them. (Of course that era didn't last for long, but we'll mark that as the utilty limit of the comparison)
- CamperBob2 1y agoIt really seemed like it would be impossible to stop it, and then came the RIAA, MPAA. No, then came Pandora and Spotify and YouTube. Nobody bothers pirating music these days because there's no point.
- andruby 1y agoWhat's the state of "automated" drone defense systems that fire a laser at the drone?
- orbital-decay 1y agoTerrorbots look like a ton of other cyberpunk predictions which never really materialized. I think the most recent one was that crypto + anonymity would enable easy assassination bounties and cause a wave of contract killings. Yes, I know the article argues that drones could eliminate the human factor, but it's not convincing and still puts the cart before the horse, just like a lot of the commenters in this thread. One rule about "infinite scaling" predictions is that the real world always messes them up. Warfare has changed, that's true. The rest of the life is not so easy to change, and (useful) drones are harder to build than it looks.
- johnea 1y agoSo, drone strike bombings are totally on topic, but US wing nut assassins shooting politicians, DHS tackling senators and arresting mayors, and the marines deployed to US cities, is all flagged out of existence. It's been made quite clear, that HN is fundamentally a right wing-nut controlled forum. I think there are a lot of woke-nut people in the mix as well, maybe even an equal amount, but the wing-nut mode of the highly bimodal distribution just flags anything that demonstrates that we've elected a criminal to the office of US president. Whereas the woke-nut mode is tolerant of allowing discussion to carry on, even on topics they don't agree with. I guess it was to be expected, given the vulture capital origins of the platform...
- tomhow 1y agoJohn, as you know you can always email us if you have queries or concerns about this. The current thread we're commenting in was flagged off the front page after forty minutes. The "marines deployed to US cities" story was on the front page for over 12 hours and on the "active" page for well over 24 hours [1] (despite strange claims to the contrary). The other stories seem too much in the realm of mainstream news, given we've already had a lot of it on the front page this week. The site guidelines explicitly state that mainstream news out of scope for HN, even though we make exceptions when the weight of community sentiment favours that (it did regarding the marines story, it hasn't about the others). As someone who is looking at the front page and reading the discussions for hours each day, it seems to me that the weight of sentiment is fairly strongly against the current U.S. administration, and also generally unimpressed with the venture capital industry. As moderators, it's not for us to try and change anyone's mind about any of these things. We know we can't even if we wanted to (which we don't). It's up to community members to discuss the topics and try to persuade each other with good arguments, and our role is just to make HN a healthy place for that to happen. If mainstream news is being flagged off the front page, it's not because people are politically motivated to "hide" that news (as if that would make a difference to anyone's awareness of these stories); it's because people come to HN to find out about technology and other topics that are interesting to technology enthusiasts, and much of the HN audience prefers to get their mainstream news elsewhere. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44264728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44264728
- Teever 1y agoWhy would this article get flagged?
- wltr 1y agoAs if they don’t flag random articles on someone’s whims.
- arp242 1y agoI'm one of the people who flagged it because after clicking around, it's basically just a far-right white nationalist publication that's balls-deep in nonsense like "Biden stole the 2020 election" and "the 1964 civil right regime is tyranny". It's not a serious publication in any shape or form. It all seems written by one guy and I have zero trust any of these anecdotes are actually true.
- PleasureBot 1y agoHad a good chuckle at the fearmongering about "what we call Liberalism, or Gay Race Communism".
- ndsipa_pomu 1y agoThe example used of attacking rush hour highways made me think of just how effective that could be. However, maybe drones aren't the best means of attack - I'd think that an ordinary vehicle could simply have a passenger equipped with a suitable laser pointer and simply shine it into the eyes of a following driver. That would leave very little evidence and of course laser pointers can easily be concealed.