'Machine-gun with AI' used to kill Iran scientist | Hacker News Reader

'Machine-gun with AI' used to kill Iran scientist

bbc.com

23 pointsint_10h7 comments

This is such a weird story. The Iranian government keeps changing its story. They also focus on strange details, like that the gun had the capability to hit the scientist but not his wife. Machine guns have penetration and dispersion, so unless firing from the front, I don't see how it could have minimized the chance of hitting a passenger next to the target. But then if firing from the front, you'd expect it would be likely to penetrate and hit someone in front or behind the target. It's just such a strange detail that really doesn't speak to AI at all.

I don't trust the Iranian government to tell the truth but perhaps it's a poor translation for semi-auto AI turret.

I think they're referring to the recoil. It says 13 rounds were fired, and I'm guessing they were fired in fully automatic mode. Assuming we're talking about a higher caliber weapon (likely an AK variant, given the region), humans can't make a 10" group with an AK in full auto. Had a human tried this, they're about as likely to kill his wife as they are to kill him. AK's fire 600 rounds per minute in full auto, with each shot generating 6.9 ft lbs of recoil.

> Machine guns have penetration and dispersion

I don't think machine guns have the amount of dispersion that you think they do. An AK-47 shoots ~5-6 MOA groupings (5-6" groups at 100 yards). That's not particularly accurate for modern machine guns, but it is likely in the realm of what we're looking at here. An RPK is also an option, and would produce smaller groupings. Assuming you have something that can control the recoil, I don't see any reason why shooting in full auto would be less accurate.

> It's just such a strange detail that really doesn't speak to AI at all.

It has less to do with the AI itself and more to do with the implications. If someone really has created an AI that can wield guns, that is incredibly terrifying. World leaders are scared because assassination attempts used to be a death sentence; now they can be killed by a parked car. The rest of us should be terrified because mass shootings could become drastically more effective. If this thing has good target acquisition, it could become a terrifyingly effective weapon for mass shootings. As bad as our mass shootings have been, they're usually done by humans, who are pretty bad shots. The majority of the bullets miss everyone. Imagine what happens if there's an AI that can aim an AK as fast as the AK can fire. It could shoot 10 people in the head per second.

If someone really has created an AI that can wield guns

Every major military already has this. Air warfare has relied on automated target identification of various sorts for decades. Functional ground deployment for a line of sight munition is feasible with consumer-grade code and basic mechatronics skills. Hell, new consumer drones and every smartphone for five years have face ID...

Make no mistake, the future is scary and we have already built it.

> a machine-gun mounted on the Nissan pick-up was "equipped with an intelligent satellite system which zoomed in on martyr Fakhrizadeh"

Less or more the technique seen in the '97 remake of "The Day of the Jackal" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jackal_(1997_film) with Bruce Willis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ4j7OArO8Q , without depleted uranium ammo

What is scary that it is technically quite possible to develop such a gun even for an individual. The most complex part is probably mount and motors, but that is a manageable problem.

Believe it or not there are even more terrifying things than that. How long until someone builds a rifle scope that can visualize Wifi RF reflection patterns in the same way a thermal scope can see infrared? The rifle scope using this technology could see right through walls. https://news.mit.edu/2018/artificial-intelligence-senses-peo...

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