Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

To play devil's advocate against the panic I'm watching unfold in this thread: I don't think there's an enormous categorical difference here from weapons that already exist.

We've had long-range (longer range than most drones) guided missiles for decades. We've had drones that can launch them, for decades. Those technologies already have the ability to wipe out targets anywhere, anytime, en masse, with little to no risk. Yet we don't see people (as one commenter suggested) wiping out entire plots of land so they can start a new country. We don't see (most) countries turning such weapons on their own citizens. We don't see (very many) heads of state being assassinated in this way. What this tells me is that there are sociopolitical forces that make such things un-advantageous or infeasible, for one reason or another.

The only true differentiator I can see with suicide-drones is a potential increase in precision, though that's not really true right now because these in the article look to be basically flying hand-grenades. That's not really better than a missile; in fact it's probably a lot easier to intercept or shoot down. Now, many of us have seen that (fictional) video with the micro-explosive assassination drones. Maybe that would change the game in some way, but I still don't think it's a drone apocalypse we'd be looking at. Nation states have so many ways of killing people at this point. When they don't, it's usually because it doesn't make sense to, not because they lack some key capability.

You are relying on the presumption that they won't become autonomous machines for wiping out "criminals".

A drone can be used for more than a singular purpose. There might be more efficient ways to kill someone we already know like you said but what if we don't know them yet?

What if they don't exist yet?

Imagine you have a crowd and there is one violent person inside it, how would you immobilize such a person without harming the others?

They could already wipe out people they want to designate as "criminals" by busting into people's houses and shooting them in their sleep. The reason they don't (very often) is that, as we've seen in recent weeks, that's how you get riots. The current unrest resulted from only a handful of unjustified killings. Imagine what would happen if they started sending drones to kill people en masse?

That's a very US centric view. It doesn't apply to many other countries. The point is still that it will be cheaper to manufacture large number of autonomous justice drones than to hire policemen to do the dirty work.

Why pay for their pension years after they have retired?

Why pay for their healthcare, training, damage, etc?

You really think lack of money for hiring thugs with guns to shoot helpless citizens is the limiting factor for any ill-willed nation-state?

Even the most insidious state relies on its citizenry to some extent. You're not ruling anything if your people are constantly in revolt, or if they're all dead.

> You really think lack of money for hiring thugs with guns to shoot helpless citizens is the limiting factor for insidious nation-state?

Yes, there is a money problem for employing enough cops.

Reference - India.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...

And you really don't think those inhabitants would riot and swiftly overwhelm whatever enforcement existed if their friends and neighbors started getting picked off by assassination drones? If anything it sounds like India's enforcement should be more scared of the populace than they are in the U.S. because of how outnumbered they are.

Playing the devil's advocate since you think cops are thugs with guns who can't work without making a mess, why don't you believe in replacing them with autonomous drones?

In an ideal future, autonomous drones would make less mistakes since they don't feel threatened or care about dying. They won't kill someone just because it looked threatening. They won't turn off the body cam because of reasons. They will have a more accurate aim and will be more trained since training doesn't cost anything for them. You can invest the other funds in improving rehabilitation or de-escalation services.

Nah, it's the same in most countries. If you kill enough innocents you create more people to kill and eventually you get riots.

Imagine you have a crowd and there is one violent person inside it, how would you mobilize such a person without harming the others?

Hmm...a gun?

without harming the others.

Humans aren't good in stressful situations and their aim isn't great. A ground view isn't necessarily helpful in situation where the criminal might be inside the group ring.

A rooftop sniper, then.

You can only do that for specific situations. What if the criminal runs inside the building or grabs a person to shield himself from the sniper? Are you going to surround the person with snipers from every direction?

Also sounds like the cost for those snipers would be pretty high than manufacturing few drones to lock in a target and swarm under their head.

Cost of drones is only going to decrease while the cost of sustaining human life remains more or less the same if not increase.

A well-trained sniper that you can trust to cover a crowd needs a lot of training and time and money.

A drone is $30k

A bomb drone would have to be absolutely tiny to satisfy not hurting others. I don't want slaughterbots to be science fact as much as anyone else, but these drones currently aren't small enough.

What if LEO don't have LoS? What if that violent person is in the middle of a massive crowd? Article says this drone can fly at 90 mph, which means it can get to the threat muuuuch faster. For a gun, you also need personnel on the ground, which puts them at risk and they can cover only so much area. A drone at a good enough altitude with a streaming camera can send it back home for constant, automagical scanning and threat-profiling.

Absolutely not. That and the "rooftop sniper" idea are how you get Bloody Sunday. Firing into crowds is indiscriminate mass murder. As is detonating bomb drones in the crowd.

And then all the other people pull out guns and think that you're the shooter. Or maybe you miss and kill someone else.

The problem posed in the slaughterbots video wasn't the technology itself being inherently dangerous (although that was a considerable factor), but instead it focused on what happens when it gets compromised or otherwise falls into the wrong hands. The small, mass producible nature of the slaughterbots made it very easy for this to happen, and was the worst case scenario for fully autonomous weapons in general.

That said, I think we are right to be concerned about these "suicide drones", because they are a lot smaller than the fixed wing drones with the missiles, and as such would be harder to detect. I'm picturing these things dropping out of the back of a small aeroplane, one by one, nearly invisible to radar as they fall and land themselves in waiting for troops on the ground to collect them. Alternatively, they fall from the aeroplane and take flight to a GPS location of some small, but bombable fixture like a radio mast or portacabin.

And what's to stop terrorists from dropping hand grenades from a small airplane onto whatever they want, today?

Control on explosive substances (and on aircraft themselves, to a degree) is what. These drones don't change that equation.

This is true, there is very little stopping someone strapping a grenade to an off the shelf drone and flying it into a crowd, other than regulation on the explosives themselves, but that's not something that can easily be mass produced. Anyone with enough skill and determination can produce a weapon by themselves, I just think mass production makes it far easier for ill-willed people to obtain a ready-to-go weapon.

I still think the bigger risk, currently, is from the people buying these legitimately. These are not much more than precision bombs in their current state, and the risk is not from terrorism but war, and specifically how close to home that war can get. When the Salisbury poisonings happened it scared a lot of people, so imagine the panic if something like this was used to attack a van or a small building in a populated area.

I largely agree at this point in the proposed capabilities. As you say these are just hand grenades that fly in cool looking formations. Independently guided aerial buck shot.

But the game changer is when these cheap independent systems can communicate and coordinate an intercept task against SOTA weapons systems - namely jets and nuclear subs.

As we know from birdstrikes, just a collision at the speed jets are moving at will probably neutralize it. To do this, the swarm will create several layers of buckshot that the jet can't avoid every one of them. If the jet is able to evade this first cloud, that cloud will now have very accurate targeting data to relay on to the next cloud.

And there will no longer be five billion dollar, 100-person manned subs to intercept other subs, all we'll need is an omni-present net of autonomous buoys that can "collapse-in" on any detected threat.

Depends. How fast are the drones? How fast is the SOTA plane they're trying to intercept? Trying to build a build a cloud in front of the jet is difficult when it's 20 times faster than the elements of the cloud.

It's even more difficult when the plane can fly on the deck or at 60,000 feet, or anywhere in between. Now you have to build a cloud 60,000 feet tall in front of something 20 times faster than the cloud. That is non trivial.

[Edit: Oh, yeah, what's the range of the drones? I read 6 km; is that accurate? If so, good luck getting them in front of anything.]

Agree. Even the murderdrones black mirror scenario posits a two-stage system: ~5 mile transport/breech-stage + 100-foot-range intercept unit. All to attack a stationary school building. So yeah, intercepting jets is going to need a another stage. And I think the intercept stage might look more like a guided mortars than a quadcopter.

Easy. Blow up the planes on the ground, or blow up the ship it came from :)

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