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Comment by armatav | Hacker News Reader

I think there would be absolutely no possible way to restrict drone technology of this kind, and so the article is built on an irrelevant foundation.

Nuclear weapons are restrictive because the enrichment process is difficult.

Biological weapons are restrictive because the cultivation process is difficult.

Drones are easy, machine learning is becoming more approachable for every person in civilized society.

Better to make a counter-drone-swarm technology company than worry about what regulators are going to do when a terrorist cell starts to manufacture killer drones - you cannot stop that with regulation, you can only stop that with your own drone swarm.

This is a new age of war, and if free society is to stand a chance it needs to develop and research countermeasures for this sort of stuff - classification and regulation is meaningless as deterrence.

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Biological weapons are more restricted by the fact that they're impossible to control, and so using an effective one is a suicide mission.

Honestly I find them far scarier than the other two because as technology improves, it's becoming easier and easier to build designer diseases in a back yard lab.

Most mass produced biological weapons are things like anthrax or tularemia that aren't human to human transmissible. The USSR did have several tons of weaponized smallpox but nothing on the scale of their anthrax production.

I disagree that it's a suicide mission, but I agree they are harder to control.

Equipped with the right weapon drone can do more massive destruction

> Biological weapons are more restricted by the fact that they're impossible to control, and so using an effective one is a suicide mission.

It isn't a suicide mission if your side is immune to it. For example, biological warfare against the natives were instrumental in the conquest of the americas. Not only did it quickly thin down and weaken the native population, it also left the infrastructure intact.

Cheap slaughterbots call for cheap emps.

Correct me if I'm wrong but hardening against that increases the weight and cost.

I assume you don't mean nuclear device EMP -- that's probably what whoever downvoted you thought.

Yes, small EMP devices might be a good way to temporarily or permanently disable individual drones and swarms of drones hanging out to close to each other. Good idea.

That's right, I don't mean a nuclear device emp. I mean an emp generated another way.

But what about all the nuclear weapons that were disabled because we asked nicely?

that treaty is getting close to expiration

NewSTART is being intentionally scrapped is more accurate description, since there are provisions for automatically renewing it for five more years that the Trump administration are just neglecting to use.

But Chemical weapons are not so difficult to make. There is a chance that some weapons are forbidden if the Nuclear Powers don't want other countries to have nice toys.

The way you restrict is is you create a category where anyone involved in the manufacture or use can be prosecuted anywhere by anyone.

Hard enough to do in one country given 3D printers. Impossible to prevent cheating in an international agreement.

Think, even OPEC members cheat all the time, and their oil output and sales is reasonably easy to check/forecast/estimate.

What I means is say we apply that to landmines. Anyone selling, manufuring or deploying landmines risks prosecution if they travel to another country. Because a lot of them will arrest, try and imprison you the moment you step on their soil.

That works when you know they make and sell landmines. What about when it's surreptitious?

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