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Comment by djohnston | Hacker News Reader

These whining rotors will be the last sound some poor freedom fighters hear in 10 years. And of course 10 years later the black market will have caught up, and these automated killers will be deployed by anyone from anywhere with near impunity.

More accurate than a roadside bomb, probably less risk as well.

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I would be more worried about the fact that a government would want to kill me rather than the method it chooses to kill me. I don't need to be a freedom fighter to get shot by the police in the USA yet nobody cares as much unless it is done by some stupid toy that is never going to be a practical weapon.

I think there is an interplay between the means of killing and the willingness to do so that you shouldn't ignore. The U.S. elevated extralegal killing of brown people to a full-time pursuit under the Obama administration with the proliferation of the drone program.

It's not as easy to blow up a wedding with an F18 as it is to do so from a trailer in Arizona, for some reason.

Every president since we've had drones has killed more people with drones than the last guy. Bit early to call it a trend I guess, since we only armed the things toward the end of Bush's last term, but still seems worrying.

> Bit early to call it a trend

Disagree.

These programs, from the President's perspective, are as autonomous as the machines. Barely any interaction, if any, is required from the W.H. to keep the bombs dropping.

the extrajudicial execution of American's abroad by using drones was by far the most glaring change in US policy during that Administration

I'm not sure why this is downvoted. Obama established the precedent that it's totally kosher to use flying death robots to murder US citizens without any semblance of due process. You just have to claim (but not actually produce any evidence or convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt) that they posed an imminent threat to the US.

That’s been the case for a very long time. Even ignoring the civil war, US citizens for example fought on both sides of WWII both before and after it entered the war. As soon as you start talking millions of people you end up with some extreme outliers.

The only thing that’s changed is we have a slightly better idea who we are shooting over time.

PS: Somewhat more bizarrely, letters of marque and reprisal mean private citizens can get the rights to kill other Americans who happen to be working on non military foreign ships.

> some stupid toy that is never going to be a practical weapon

Please watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA

I think the real world examples are better than a hypothetical.

https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/jgmou6/azerb...

Warning: This contains real world footage with examples including troops in a foxhole being precisely targeted by a drone that you can see on film moving into the foxhole with them that then explodes, numerous cases of troops in an open field spotting a drone, running from it and then exploding. Also contains numerous examples of tank and vehicle columns as well as fixed emplacements exploding.

I think we're there. As of 2020, and in particular the Nagarno-Karabakh war it's clear that having more drones than the other side is the key. Number of troops, tanks and gun emplacements isn't as relevant anymore. Mid-sized drones such as the Harop drone trump all of those.

> stupid toy that is never going to be a practical weapon.

Have you not heard of the recent Azeri invasion of Artsakh? It was a major war between modern armies that was won by small drone warfare, just a few weeks ago.

Yes, watch any of the Azerbaijan drone videos on Youtube. They decimated the conventional (tanks, vehicles, bunkers, artillery,) Armenian forces with "relatively" inexpensive Turkish and Israeli drones. A real object lesson about the future of warfare and the need for airborne countermeasures. A swarm of inexpensive drones like in this video, each one carrying an explosive charge, could easily overwhelm a traditional military position; in a forest, in a bunker or cave, behind fences, inside buildings. Hardly a toy.

As a combat Infamtryman (2007) the drone footage gave me chills watching. Im glad I don't have to fight in a war where drones are the norm. When I was in our drones were still very much in the early stages and practical use seemed very far off. There is definitely some serious amount of money for anyone who can field technology to defend tanks, infantry, and artillery from this sort of onslaught.

No need to have been in the military, these images are downright terrifying for anybody who understands what's going on... to think that thousands of young boys were killed there in a few days!

‘Small’ as in wingspans of up to 3 meters. You’d have trouble flying something that big through a forest no matter how manoeuvrable it was.

> yet nobody cares as much unless it is done by some stupid toy that is never going to be a practical weapon.

You're correct that that government wanting to kill you is a primary concern. However you're submitting this comment under a story with a video of drones flying autonomously through a forest, in a world where facial recognition is commonplace, and commercial drones can easily carry the weight of a polymer firearm.

There is value in the inherent friction a state encounters when deciding to kill someone. A lot of people have to say yes, and a person usually has to pull some kind of trigger.

Reduce that friction, reduce the amount of people involved, and it is a guarantee that coups and purges will be too tempting of an option for power seekers.

Depends. If you were high profile, you might be more concerned about the means.

For example, you might feel secure on your remote island retreat with its own airfield, security system, etc.

That any nut (not "Government") with a drone carrying an IED could surgically take you out would very likely worry that individual much more than it would worry you or me.

I recently watched the movie Angel Has Fallen on Netflix. The movie starts out with an assassination attempt on the president by a swarm of drones armed with explosives. The secret service agents were (not surprisingly) completely ineffective at defending against these drones using their hand guns. Just a fictional movie, but was still pretty terrifying to think about.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80190284

Your last statement might be the most short sighted statement I’ve read this month. In fact I don’t even think it’s short sighted, they are already incredibly practical weapons.

Drones are a significant factor in present day conflicts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nagorno-Karabakh_war#Mili...

Exactly. The Turkish military perfected that tactic earlier in the year, that's how they managed to suppress the Syrian Army's latest advance (which had been quite successful until that point). Artillery + drones proved to be too much for the Syrian Army [1].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sebastienroblin/2020/03/02/idli...

Yep, I think there is still time before they become popular black market weapons, but not that much time.

To be clear, those drones are more akin to unmanned planes than they are to quadrocopters.

Except for the one that is a quadrocopter (I guess use in the conflict I linked is not verified, but it's in use today none the less):

https://www.stm.com.tr/en/kargu-autonomous-tactical-multi-ro...

I suppose the different types of drones will cause different types of tactical shifts.

Oof some engineer is working on machine-learning to deal with the knockback of shooting a gun from a drone. It's probably an interesting as hell problem, enough to distract someone from the fact that they'll be enabling cheap robots to shoot people.

It is so sad that we, humans in general, devote so many resources to devising bigger and better means of violence.

Bigger and better actually worked pretty well w.r.t. MAD. Now we are developing smaller and better, which seems almost more dangerous since we're already using drones more flippantly than conventional military arms.

Maybe to handle knockback you could allow recoiling rotation around one axis and have the rotors automatically anticipate the force on fire.

Why do you need machine learning to "deal with the knockback of shooting a gun from a drone"?

‘cause people don’t understand this is a solvable problem any other way and of course ML can solve any problem you point it at.

well you need machine learning to coordinate these robots and they need to take into the effect of this robot shaking around a whole bunch.

It is very easy to work on these tools without even realizing it. Let us say that you are developing a video processing algorithm and publish the code on github. The developers of missile software can and will use it. At some point, they may ask you for consulting/support in exchange for a large amount of money and you will say yes, and never realize who they were. I'm not saying that this has happened several times to my lab.

In the video the drone self-destructs by exploding and producing shrapnel, I doubt knockback is a problem.

Periodic plug for Daniel Suarez https://daniel-suarez.com/ , I'm certain I recall a "death drone swarm" in one of the books but can't recall which one. It happens on a snowy mountain with a cabin, if that will ring bells for anybody else.

His writing is fairly-near-future (10-30 years) and uncomfortable in much the same way that the show Silicon Valley can be uncomfortable (that is, it's so close to the truth / likely near-future that it hurts).

I swear I don't know the guy, but this will be my... sixth recommendation of his books on HN. I just love me some near-future peri-apocalyptic fiction.

Ah, remembered the title, it was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Decision

Link to the original creators https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA

I agree with your sentiment but this already happens only that a human is piloting the drones. This is just a cost reduction, and discussing the ethics of it is more tricky.

I think it's more than a cost reduction, if a human is flying the drones then there is still someone who can rebel. If the only person who needs to actually do anything at all is a 4 star General it becomes alot easier to start mass killings

That's the first thing I thought of when I saw it. The Viet Cong are lucky this kind of thing didn't exist in 1968.

I'm immediately reminded of the "drones" in Half-Life 2. It really seems like the dystopia is here already.

one of the rules of modern warfare is "don't use a drone when a bomb would do". I'm certainly not worried about collateral damage to trees. if my target is in a forest, just blow the whole thing up

But where in a large forest is your enemy? These things can search and destroy, especially if they get quieter. Imagine letting these things lose in a cave system. Explore, seek and destroy with no human intervention.

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