In the future I have a feeling that's the sound you hear before death is approaching in a battlefield. Much the same way as the sound of jets overhead or the squeal of dive bombers in WW2 or the whistling of artillery in WW1.
Artillery travels faster than the speed of sound, you hear the impacts before you hear the guns firing.
Similar sort of story with fighter jets. The loud end is behind the jet, you just hear a faint whining as it comes towards you, and an almighty woosh as it flies overhead.
In both those cases, if you can hear the source of death, it means you've escaped it, at least momentarily.
It uses a lot of fuel, you can't maneuver easily, and you fly over your target too fast.
I'd imagine that takes a bit of time to hit the ground, unless it's rocket propelled. So you will probably hear the jet just as it's about to detonate, no?
I think the answer to defending against offensive UAVs is defensive UAVs. Just today a story[1] appeared about a USAF Reaper shoot down of another UAV. Supposedly a first.
[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a23320374...
They were extremely effective in combat, and called the "poor man's cruise missile" by analysts. Here's a video of a strike; note that they were often used in as the opening salvo of combined arms attacks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZBAU_TTZ-4
Of course there’s an aspect of their ideals that glorifies suicide so maybe they’ve already thought of this but just prefer to keep the suicide route.
Self driving cars already have everything required to control the car built in. They just need to hijack the existing controls and hook it up to a RC system (or just tell it to drive to location using internal controls).
I’m surprised someone hasn’t hooked up a remote control interface to an existing car.
This kind of stuff was done in the Daemon/Freedom sci-fi books, which are entertaining and becoming concerningly less fiction with every passing year.
That’s not to say it won’t happen (Uber) but it shouldn’t.
Edit to add: of course, it’s a never ending cycle of attack vector vs countermeasures I guess.
I’m not really sure how we counter this type of threat.
The idea is that instead of packing a truck with explosives (which create a large but very localised detonation) you just deploy a swarm of these and let them take out whatever group of people you want to target.
Unlike in Black Mirror's Metalhead this isn't a scenario that requires long-lived machines. You just need them to be readily available at scale and to use facial recognition (or whatever -- the US already targets drone strikes based on cell phone signals I hear) to determine their targets.
Or hey, imagine a white supremacist group (not like the US has any of those) using them to just kill people of color. Terrorism doesn't need anything approximating a 100% success rate to achieve its goal.
Then EM pulse weapons, lasers etc.
That's addressed in the film.
> EM pulse weapons
That's not actually a thing.
> lasers
Aside from being impractical, this is bringing a knife to a carpet bombing. The video is about the potential of autonomous drones being used against civilian targets. Unless you put all civilians in bunkers guarded with lazors, they are irrelevant (plus of course you still have created a nightmare scenario where humans need to live in bunkers to avoid random electronic micro-terrorists).
I believe this is also the biggest intent of Black Mirror (where I believe the video is from).
For example Facebook and Google have so much data about you that a drone can track you down by using this data. Geo data, face data, habits, family and friends, you name it.
Let's hope the video will never happen.
Black Mirror does have a very similar episode though: Hated in the Nation (S03E06).