Comment by vlehto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vlehto | Hacker News Reader

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Luckily there are physical limitations. There are practically two ways to arm a drone. Bombs and guns.

A small flying drone operating an 9mm pistol has extremely poor accuracy. Especially with multiple shots. If you increase the accuracy, you have to increase the mass. Which makes it bigger target. Currently regular guy with little training and a rifle can probably shoot down a gun wielding drone most of the time before the opposite can happen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqHrTtvFFIs

Then there are drones with bombs attached to them. One of the most sophisticated is called Hellfire missile. But it's needlessly big and expensive. The quad copter in next video costs 100$ and has payload to carry regular hand grenade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb2Tpp3CIoY

You could go RC car route. But you again need a bit of size to conquer stairs. Also it's easier to track where it comes & goes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUXRMDK3r7s

I'm less worried about government doing bad shit and more worried about private citizens getting nasty. Autonomous flight, GPS navigation, address from google maps and bit of facial recognition. First civilian drone murder is just matter of time. People kill with more ease the further they can be when it's done.

I'm guessing this internet privacy thing will seem like child's play when all of sudden everybody wants to hide their physical address. Once that is handled, it's only bit like having rabid dogs with homing device.

"Luckily there are physical limitations.... I'm less worried about government doing bad shit and more worried about private citizens getting nasty."

The MSF Trauma Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan (3rd October) didn't have this luxury and in the fog of war, [0] 12 MSF medical staff and ten patients were killed. [1],[2]

Killing by remote sensing, is indiscriminate. Adding AI is another order of stupidity.

References:

[0] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/how-te...

[1] http://www.msf.org.uk/article/in-memoriam-msf-colleagues-kil...

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/06/doctors-witho...

AI can probably actually improve this particular incident. Having a "rocket" that doesn't explode but drops an AI controlled drone that kills (or even just disables) exactly who is targeted seems like it would be far superior from both the military perspective and the moral perspective.

This sort of thing: https://youtu.be/DTqa-NEwUbs?t=94

It could even drop "phone home" over radio, allow the operators to point out the targets at that point, and then fire.

We've been hearing about "smart weapons" since the early 90s and they don't seem to be getting any more intelligent as time has gone on.

Not sure that it matters for the sake of argument, but the weapon system used in question was a human-piloted, human-manned AC-130 gunship, not a drone / remote platform

"the weapon system used in question was a human-piloted, human-manned AC-130 gunship"

True, read the Ars article: "The BMC crew is responsible for steering the aircraft to targets, identifying them, and shooting them; the aircraft's battery is slaved to the sensor suite for targeting." - Aircrew, well trained, professional. As ethical as you can get.

Now what happened is "A US special operations team on the ground, given coordinates of the Afghani NDS building by the Afghan forces they were working with, passed them to the AC-130. But when the AC-130 crew punched the grid coordinates into their targeting system, it aimed at an open field 300 meters away from the actual target. Working from a rough description of the building provided from the ground, the sensor operators found a building close to the field that they believed was the target. Tragically, it was actually the hospital."

Will adding AI to this situation make any improvement when the real issue is ' lack of a "common operating picture,"'?

No, you're right. The only thing that may have happened was lack of connectivity to COP and no person in the loop to authorize, resulting in a stand-down of operation and no ordnance on target. Great if it's a hospital, not so great if it's actually a bunch of enemy that you need to remove to save your soldiers on the ground. Tough, tough thing to get right all the time. I think a measured, hybrid approach will probably get you the best outcome but I'm no expert in this field.

just gets muddier and muddier ~ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2015/12/11...

Total aside, but the United States should really promote some sort of beacon / FLIR-readable indicator for hospitals. Their existence would have to be kept a quiet so there weren't a bunch of false positives floating around, but I would think the cost is minimal for the returned value.

Governments already have their AI killer robots. It's called "military personnel" and "policemen". The increase of government lethality towards regular people should be somewhat minimal compared to current tech. This has to be controlled politically, hence democracy.

But governments could greatly increase their capability for surveillance.

    > Adding AI is another order
    > of stupidity.

That is predicated on the assumption that AI would make worse decisions than humans, which I'm really not sure is a given.

In Prof. Tegmark’s presentation at the UN he mentioned the possibility of extremely cheap drones that approach the victim's face very quickly and pierce a bolt into the victim's brain through one of their eyes. That wouldn't require a high precision projectile so it will be easy and cheap to build.

Are you suggesting there is something about drones that makes them fundamentally inaccurate? It would seem to be that advancements in computer vision will solve that problem in short order. Particularly with the VR industry introducing strong incentives for marginal improvements on image-based tracking.

Newton's third law; Hence the comment about drone size/weight and mentioning the small caliber weapon it would have to use.

It could expand out a big frill along a plane perpendicular to the shot when firing to transfer the kickback momentum to the air.

We already drop quarter of a million dollar bombs to kill single targets. Having a drone which turns into a disposable rocket to hit a single target is hardly unfeasible.

They are still going to optimize everything, something that can fire X number of shots instead of being a one-off rocket will stretch their budget farther, etc.

Right, but that wasn't the point - the point was that thusfar, the appeals to mechanical limitations of drones as weapons of war have been based on very limited thinking.

Umm, it doesn't have to have good aim if it can get close enough, eg. a drone small enough to crawl into a person's ear and then fire/detonate.

How big of an explosion do you think a drone small enough to fly through your ear canal is really going to be? How does it even reach its target with such a minuscule mass? The target exhaling would blow it away (and likely destroy it)

obviously enough to blow your brains out once it's in your ear

Obviously it would require enough to blow out your brains to be effect. How do you propose to create a drone so tiny and light to also carry the payload required to do that? Just because the payload itself could fit into someones ear doesn't mean the delivery mechanism can, well, actually deliver it

Miniaturization is expensive. And you need some way to get to the victim that doesn't take years. This increases the cost too. Most people would be just "too cheap to kill".

> If you increase the accuracy, you have to increase the mass. Which makes it bigger target.

Boeing is developing compact portable laser weapons technology that could conceivably be mounted on drones.

http://www.livescience.com/52121-laser-weapon-destroys-test-...

The laser itself might be compact enough. But---where do you get the energy from?

I'd like to point out, that 2 kilowatts is the power AK47 can give as output of kinetic energy when fired at full auto.

If you look past the hype, lasers are far from ready.

You'd probably really like the book The Future of Violence by Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum

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