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Comment by rtkwe | Hacker News Reader

There's a couple sizable leaps in there in particular the combination of size, payload, and autonomy for the main mini murder drones. Particularly quads/drones of that small size just don't have the payload/flight time combination to really do that, they're extremely sensitive to weight and have really short flight times that are hard to extend because more weight requires more power in kind of a mini version of the rocket equation.

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Well, if you deploy them close to the targets, they don't need much flight time to deliver the charges.

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.

The video looks a bit in the future, but even a crude attempt at this kind of attack with what's available right now, would be terrifying.

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