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Comment by qmmmur | Hacker News Reader

To all the talented developers and researchers who work on this kind of tech. Please change careers and do something useful.

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How is that different to the rest of the application of advanced technology to war? (e.g., radar, missile guidance, shaped explosives, etc)

I don't really disagree with you, just asking.

A suicide drone can be used to take out any individual anywhere on the planet, fully remotely and untraceably with minimal collateral damage, while radar, missles and explosives can't. The scenario depicted in the film below is getting closer to reality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg

Although the above is overdramatised, it's not unrealistinc.

Modern guided missiles are not essentially different that these drones. I guess the main difference is that these drones are intended to be cheap and disposable, while having a much shorter range.

I love this analogy. While Turkey can't spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy smart missiles, it innovated to protect herself.

Its allies used to rent drones for surveillance against terrorism, then used it as both a carrot and a stick. Now, Turkey has its own drones that regularly take down targets effectively, even some air defenses.

After Syrian war started and "modern western liberal democracies" failed to help with the refugee crises, those borders became even more treacherous.

"Protect herself" sounds funny when they're invading neighbours left and right.

We fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here."

Heard that before?

By that logic, the EU should invade Turkey.

Then her neighbors should stop harboring, training and hosting terrorists, no?

...and it is laughable to suggest EU will lift another finger for Greece after taking their wallet and vacationing with that money too

What terrorists is Greece harboring, and how is driving refugees to the border and forcing them to cross a solution to that?

Greece financing terrorists: https://www.counterextremism.com/threat/kurdistan-workers-pa... . Please scroll down to "Financing". They also have links to their sources.

As for refugees, they weren't forced. The border police just didn't stop them. I agree Erdogan coming on TV and yelling it out openly was a below-the-belt tactic and after that people started transporting refugees by the bus to the border.

Being on the side of Turkey in the Syria conflict cannot be the right side of history. Especially because they are now in control of Kurdish occupied lands in Syria. Saying that the Turkish government harbors a century-long paranoid animosity toward the Kurds is the understatement of the year.

Turkey's government is just the big despotic fish in the small geopolitical pool that is the Caucasus / Northwest Middle East. Finding cheap ways to kill is not a defensive strategy for the gov't.

Turkey is a major economy that can and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on missiles, so not really.

Drones are consumer level technology. This isn't very different from a high-end Mavic drone, except that someone mounted an explosive instead of a camera to it. On the other hand there is absolutely nothing that a regular consumer can buy that would reassemble a guided missile.

I agree. Technology trickles down the bank account spectrum. At first only nation states could do drones. Then smaller nation states could do drones. Then bigcos could do drones. Now we've got drones in consumers hands. It should come as no surprise that some nation states decide to use consumer quality and price drones for nation state purposes (their police probably patrol the streets with the same handguns consumers can buy). Just because it's trickled down doesn't mean it's not useful.

oh you should definitely checkout some of the more serious "hobby" rockets and launches. All it would need is some extra kick and some guidance. Hezbollah builds and launches even more basic missiles all the time, and hurts Israel all the time.

You can buy a jet engine and build a 700mph drone that can carry a payload. You can also buy a laser gyroscope, or use open source code to build a SLAM system for guidance.

So yes, a consumer can build a guided missile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGDAZyQ44k

I wonder what chance anyone has of stopping something like this. It can certainly carry an explosive and flying 50 or even 200 km is probably doable with a bit of a scaleup.

Not that I necessarily disagree with your opinion, but generally minimizing collateral damage is a good thing.

It is great when the use of a weapon is well thought out. The risk of collateral damage forces people to think twice before deploying these weapons though.

It's an interesting thought experiment as to whether there is a point of inflection where the risk of collateral damage is so little that it drives the opportunity for extra judicial killing too high.

> A suicide drone can be used to take out any individual anywhere on the planet, fully remotely and untraceably with minimal collateral damage, while radar, missles and explosives can't.

This just sounds like you're trying to persuade people on why drones are definitely the future of war.

They are going to be, doesn't matter what I say. The cost/kill is significantly lower with a small fully autonomous suicide drone carrying a small explosive. All it takes is a small drone (30$), a few grams of explosives and software to kill someone (anyone). I'm sure the software will get there.

Drones don’t have unlimited range. The ones in the article have a range of 6km. If there was really a war situation I imagine an EMP could disable them or a MOAB could just blow everyone up instead.

What, like this? https://www.foxnews.com/world/al-qaeda-secret-us-missile-kni...

Dunno about "untraceable" though, there's a long history of tracing munitions from fragments.

The difference is cost. Only states can afford R9Xs, and the costs will never come down significantly.

Private individuals will soon be able to afford automated drone swarms. Set it and forget it.

This reminds me of the video released a year ago - https://youtu.be/9fa9lVwHHqg

Next thing you know there is an AI detecting crime and killing the criminal without making a mess.

Wow that was terrifying, because we all know we have the potential to go in that direction.

looks up how an EMP works

I'm very skeptical. We can't even get police to properly investigate many crimes in the US, let alone without "making a mess". The idea that we're going to magically invent AI that "detects crime" and carries out lethal summary judgment seems completely detached from reality. By the time we have general AI that can do that, we won't even be in charge anymore and whatever happens from there will be up to the AIs.

I don't think you need a general AI for something like this.

You can detect what the other person is carrying and that works good as a filter. A person carrying knife in a crowd or school outside of canteen doesn't make any sense by general norms. Second would be to detect the intent - now that's a much harder problem but you can whitelist few situations where the person has already stabbed someone or shown sufficient physical evidence of criminal intent.

Not sure we need general AI, we can already detect undesirables and shadowban them on Twitter, all you need is to throw some facial recognition into the mix and you can link a person to an account that has a "wrong" ideology.

Love that idea! In this society many people will be severely discouraged from crimes under threat of being banned from social platforms.

You can even think up a dystopia where Facebook does the policing.

Year 2030:

"Linkedin implements a system to identify to-be criminals by personal history and behaviour it tracks", in a report on Friday from the executives, Linkedin has decided to label offenders on its platform to reduce their reach and stop them from getting a job before it's too late. The CEO explained that this is just one of the policies that linkedin has implemented to serve justice to our society.

Mark Zuckerberg says "justice shall be served. Social media platforms have the duty to govern society". Facebook has decided replace profiles of people breaking its policy with support social justice banners and links to donation box of variation NGOs. Additionally, they have decided that this policy will effectively block all offenders accounts on any platform they control including instagram, whatsapp, and integration which uses Facebook sign in functionality. They will share this data publically and encourage others such as partnered advertisers to block those offenders.

After years of toxicity on Twitter, jack Dorsey says they are finally taking steps to serve justice to our society. New twitter update will make it mandatory to attach your credit card at all times and social security number as well as sensitive personal information. Offenders will be charged and fined on the platform and their accounts will be handed out to the victims for exposure therapy.

Sundar Pichai thinks google must fix people's wrong perception and biases. Google representative told us that they would soon manipulate search and ad results of people it deems problematic in an attempt to "fix" them. Racist people will start seeing more anti-racist content in the coming days.

The nuclear bomb brought nuclear reactors, providing affordable electricity in many places. Drone swarms also have the potential to turn into useful applications.

Are you suggesting that nuclear reactors could have never been developed independently, and that the nuclear bomb was a necessary precursor? It sounds almost as if you're giving these deadly, weaponized drone swarms a pass because it's possible to do non-deadly things with drone swarms as well.

Not op but: I wouldn’t say they couldn’t have been invented, but it’s unlikely they would have for economic reasons. Controlled Fission almost had to be done by government due to the resources required and uncertainty of the payout. It seems unlikely any private company would have done what the Manhattan project did just to get a small cost savings over burning fossil fuels

> Are you suggesting that nuclear reactors could have never been developed independently, and that the nuclear bomb was a necessary precursor

An uncontrolled nuclear reaction is significantly simpler than a controlled one. We still don't have fusion reactors, while fusion bombs were developed 10 years after fission bombs.

That's a very unconventional use of the words "uncontrolled" and "simple". The reaction inside a nuclear bomb (fission or fusion) has to be incredibly tightly choreographed down to the microsecond in order to work as intended, whereas a fission reactor is (egregiously oversimplifying) put some fissile stuff next to some other fissile stuff for a while and let it get warm.

The Chicago Pile came way before Trinity. Rock formations have even been known to come together accidentally to form natural nuclear reactors, but I think it will be a very long while before the first natural nuclear bomb.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-control...

To a degree they would not have been invented with out the weapon. For example thorium reactors are designed in the 60s. The US ignored them because we couldn’t make weapons from their waste. The only reason thorium even got started was we thought it could be a weapon.

I feel like you're over focused on the repercussions of the swarm technology, but not the murder bit.

Anything goes as long as we get cheap energy, right? /s

The first nuclear reactor predates the first nuclear test, so I'm afraid not.

Yeah go work for Google instead so you can suppress the freedom of speech for millions of unnamed data points on the internet... at least this southern wolf bears it's teeth before it bites.

As long as there's at least 1 actor (state or not) doing this, it's very useful to develop such technologies. Powerful military is damn nice deterrence.

Human losses could be prevented if all parties in a conflict have access to this tech. Then there's also the matter of trust. You stopping work on it doesn't mean your adversary has stopped work on it.

unfortunately money and cutting-edge tech are in this kind of applications

the amount of money put into may-be-probable piece of tech is astronomical in defence indistury, because it may really be game-changer. (eg. lasers, rail-guns etc)

every piece of tech we use today started as a defence project. You may say ML/AI is just research stuff. If you think AI is being developed to help you with groceries, you are being lame... (no harm intended but my opinion)

Your calls are in vain. That would only make sense in more liberal countries like western ones. When it comes to tech and innovation Turkey has become quite forward-looking but they still retain their nationalist culture.

In case of war I expect no difference between the "liberal" countries and the "nationalistic" countries. Remember that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilian cities.

Probably in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_radiation_experiments the section about USA is bigger because it is more open, but it is scary anyway.

From Wikipedia:

> During World War II, the Second General Army and Chūgoku Regional Army was headquartered in Hiroshima, and the Army Marine Headquarters was located at Ujina port. The city also had large depots of military supplies, and was a key center for shipping.

So, a civilian city, but not just that.

> Fewer than 10% of the casualties were military.

Lol so naive. One day you will realize that this guy Teddy Roosevelt said something profound: "Speak softly and carry a big stick"

Putting your head in the sand won't save you.

Big sticks don’t work against non state actors

Vast majority of non-state actors are financed by state when you dig deep enough

Financed by states, sure. But they can and most definitely do operate without states. They can just turn to crime, drug smuggling, or if popular enough can finance themselves.

tell that to all the engineers, programmers and researchers who make UAV for war. But I guess it's OK when you're "on the good side"?

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