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Marching humanoid terminator robots will never be as cheap as a drone. Autonomous suicide drone swarms are what should terrify you.
by kibwen 6mo ago
Marching humanoid terminator robots will never be as cheap as a drone. Autonomous suicide drone swarms are what should terrify you.
- trhway 6mo agoAutonomous suicide drone swarms are easily countered by autonomous interceptor swarms. >Marching humanoid terminator robots ground bots, not necessarily marching, do have their value. They can have bulletproof armor, while still be relatively lightweight and small and fast. They can easily carry even 20-25mm autocannon - very destructive weapon, sometimes can even succeed against a real tank. And imagine when a swarm of drones lifts a ground bot, brings and drops it right into the needed point and protects it from the enemy drones while the ground bot just destructs the things around. Synergy between different weapons system has always been the super-weapon.
- DennisP 6mo agoThey can also sit in one spot guarding a position without using much battery. Ukraine recently took territory from Russian forces using ground bots, the first time it's been done without using soldiers on the ground. Now they're starting to scale the bots up to mass production.
- trhway 6mo agothe issue is remote control. Ground position means a lot of obstacles in addition to the widespread jamming. One can try to control the bot from the fiber-optic controlled drone hanging over, yet such complication has its own drawbacks. That means that ground bots are in real need of making them autonomous.
- throw4847285 6mo agoYou say that now, but once we perfect AMBAC technology and accidentally release large numbers of Minovsky particles, we will need humanoid combat vehicles to fight our battles!
- antonvs 6mo ago> Minovsky particles I love the way these things always have to have names that sound exotic or menacing to English speakers. Where are the Smith particles or the Jim particles?
- throw4847285 6mo agoWell in this case it was made by and for Japanese speakers.
- antonvs 6mo agoI guess Russians are scary for everyone. Including Russians, I assume.
- throw4847285 6mo agoAll of my Russian friends briefly become terrified when they pass by a mirror, and have to regain their composure.
- Terr_ 6mo agoOr they might decide to, er, pre-deliver the payloads. "Citizen, congratulations on reaching your age of majority. Report for your Patriotic Assurance Implant at surgical bay 43B."
- SecretDreams 6mo ago> Marching humanoid terminator robots will never be as cheap as a drone. Autonomous suicide drone swarms are what should terrify you. If money or economics were relevant in these decisions, most wars would probably not play out in the first place. Tesla probably wouldn't be worth 1.2T. And we certainly wouldn't see AI buildouts happening at their current rates. Economics and costs only matter for normal humans, small countries, and efforts that might actually help humanity. They're not seemingly considerations in nefarious applications.
- DennisP 6mo agoIt matters quite a bit. If your drone costs $1000, you can build a thousand times more of them than if a drone costs $1M. As the saying goes, quantity has a quality all its own. This is a lesson the US has yet to learn, and its military drones are really expensive. Ukraine learned it by necessity, and now it's building millions of drones annually.
- boothby 6mo agoOn the other hand, if Musk really flips his lid, he's one OTA away from a network of ground-delivered lithium bombs. The fear of humanoid bots is their banality: if a government or private company has a reason to build them, then the world is full of hardware with terrifying capability and questionable security.
- andyjohnson0 6mo agoI think what your parent commenter means is that, if the application is warlike or nefarious, them the money will be found. If, on the other hand, it is humanitarian, then every penny will be counted.
- DennisP 6mo agoYes, I get that, but for whatever amount of money is found, you're better off using it more effectively. The cost of things still matters, if you want to win wars against serious adversaries. One problem the US has had in its Iran adventure is that they're shooting down $30K drones with million dollar missiles, often several of them. Now the missile stockpiles have been depleted by 30% to 50%, depending on missile type, and they're not all that quick to replace.
- fragmede 6mo agoWhich of those is opening doors?
- 4gotunameagain 6mo agoTwo drones. One to blast the door open, the next goes through. Still more cost effective than a humanoid robot, even in the presence of hundreds of doors.
- fragmede 6mo agoThat breaks the building. If you want to destroy the whole thing, conventional weapons has that covered. Drones can't get through nets and doors. Though, have you considered packs of robot dogs with machine guns and one arm/hand? Cheaper than a fully bipedal humanoid robot.
- fc417fc802 6mo ago> have you considered packs of robot dogs with machine guns I don't have it to hand but already a few years ago a defense contractor had attached quite a heavy rifle on some sort of articulable mount to the top of something that looked exactly like Boston Dynamic's Spot. I'm not sure how much ammo it was capable of carrying or what it's range was but it's definitely a concerning development. I think I might become an enthusiastic custom anti-materiel rifle collector in the near future.
- plaguuuuuu 6mo agoI'll carry an ammo belt of little EMP devices.
- antonvs 6mo agoA microwave weapon could be effective. And reusable.
- philwelch 6mo ago
- fhub 6mo agoNot marching, but Ukraine uses continuous track machine gun robots seemingly very effectively. They aren’t suicide ones. https://archive.is/dpNsN https://archive.is/dpNsN
- rustyhancock 6mo agoThey are an interesting prospect but their use isn't quite as claimed. They are extremely vulnerable to the same drones humans are. It's more along the lines of this is a patch were not expecting active fighting this robot can act as a deterrent and surveillance. Cheaper and simpler than a loitering IRS drone. But more concentrated in domain. I believe for a while Samsung developed similar drones for the demilitarised zone in Korea. Those could be static as they were hard wired in.
- andriy_koval 6mo ago> They are extremely vulnerable to the same drones humans are. I am not confident about this. Human gets disabled by few small shrapnel projectiles into soft tissue. It is possible to build way more protected robot, for which you need some direct hit to disable it. That robot could also be very agile: e.g. do some evading jump at the last moment before being hit.
- rustyhancock 6mo agoI think you just pitched a Robot Wars revival for 2026.
- fhub 6mo agoThis article shows them being used for offense. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/20/europe/robots-ukraine-battlefield-drones-intl-cmd https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/20/europe/robots-ukraine-bat...
- imtringued 6mo agoMost military grade drones cost $10k or more and they can only be used once. An optimized quadruped could probably be built for the same price and have an integrated 60mm mortar instead. The front legs act as the bipod and the rear legs would be designed to dig into the ground for stabilization. The only problem here is reloading the mortar, which could be done using a revolver style magazine. That's 5 shots per robot vs 1 per drone.