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Comment by ermir | Hacker News Reader

I've been dreading the "softwareification" of weapons for quite a few years now. There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about how weapons can nowadays be readily and cheaply made with commodity parts and no special training or materials. Obviously the algorithms and software for this sort of stuff needs to be made, but it's far more accessible than expertise and equipment in for example metallurgy.

There was a video a couple of years back of a kid in Texas attaching a pistol to a drone and firing off a couple of shots. Stuff like this is not rare or inaccessible, and it's only a matter of time before it becomes widespread.

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The "hardwareification" is also troubling. When there is no human cost for one side to wage war, it becomes a lot more politically palatable because you no longer have family members coming home in boxes.

It's easy to say "Well, the other side are bad dudes who have it coming", but even if they are genuinely bad dudes (and not just politically inconvenient) there's no war without collateral damage (a term invented by the US during Vietnam, when they were doing a lot of it).

Vietnam was not special because of the amount of collateral damage done but rather due to some serious strides being made towards avoiding or minimizing it for the first time. Let's not forget that in Korea levelling every city north of the front line was deemed an acceptable strategy.

> I've been dreading the "softwareification" of weapons for quite a few years now. There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about how weapons can nowadays be readily and cheaply made with commodity parts and no special training or materials.

It's not so much software that's the issue, it's people taking existing tech and weaponizing it.

Software has been in weapon systems since the 1970's from guidance to target acquisition. It's already there, and has been for a while. Machine learning is just another iteration on what's already out there.

The world knows how to kill en masse for a long time now with NBC (Nuclear/Biological/Chemical) weapons -- and software wasn't a part of Fat Man or Little Boy.

But consider the challenges the US had in the middle east for the past two decades.

* Consumer drones dropping hand grenades.

* IED's using manual triggers.

* Trucks loaded with explosives blitzing checkpoints.

* Cars with explosives driving up next to convoys.

* Land mines.

You don't really need custom software, just take existing tech and get creative with it.

By "softwareization" I mean the transfer of the difficulty of making weapons from software to hardware. Programmers and programming knowledge is far more widely available that specialized hardware or techniques. We've already seen this process in many fields of business with great success, so it's no wonder that it would come to warfare as well.

And I don't see how that changes anything. I just see this as a distinction without a difference.

People have written software to target buildings, soldiers, tanks, planes, missiles, etc. This is done via radar, heat signatures, cameras -- and software already. It's not such a big change really.

I believe the thing you really have to worry about is the proliferation of NBC. It's easier to drop a nerve agent in a war zone than it is to figure out how to make an explody drone to kill your enemies and not you, say.

> Software has been in weapon systems since the 1970's from guidance to target acquisition. It's already there, and has been for a while.

Obviously correct, so in a sense the parent commenters concerns are not about something new.

But historically these weapons systems are massively expensive custom systems developed by defence contractors for major states. Costs, budget cycles, and technical limitations went some way to limiting their ubiquity and the rate they could gain functions.

So cruse missiles had autonomous terrain-matching terminal guidance, but the US needed the combined abilities of the NRO and General Dynamics / McDonnell Douglas / Raytheon etc to build it.

Whereas now we have free and triviably cloneable software (embedded OSs, drone flight and guidance s/w, ML and image recognition stacks, global mapping data) and a massive range (compared to event ten years ago) of dirt-cheap cots hardware (GPS, lidar, ...)for making autonomous moving objects. And often those devices are fairly thin hardware shells around yet more software.

The network effects driving these capabilities, particularly in software, and their seemingly exponential increase, are what I took to be the source of the parent commenters concerns.

> Whereas now we have free and triviably cloneable software (embedded OSs, drone flight and guidance s/w, ML and image recognition stacks, global mapping data) and a massive range (compared to event ten years ago) of dirt-cheap cots hardware...

If you look at the current tactics of insurgency, software is not a part of it. Enemies of the US (Al Qaeda, etc) already had tremendous success with the current insurgency tactics (IEDs, etc) which were low tech solutions, and were vastly hard for the US to overcome.

Why would they go to software when there's plenty of tried and tested low-tech solutions already to kill your enemies?

> Why would they go to software when there's plenty of tried and tested low-tech solutions

To kill more people, whilst taking even lower risks themselves.

They probably wouldn't write the software themselves -- they'd get it from e.g. some supportive dictatorship

(With "them", I'm personally not thinking about the talibans, but other groups)

I just think about the history of war, and it was already pretty brutal without software. I don't see how software changes that equation. More brutal than what?

Sarin gas? Nuclear weapons? Truck Bombs? Strapping bombs onto children?

I didn't say it'd be more brutal.

Cheaper and more accessible though. Not many people can build or buy their own nukes or sarin gas.

I think "commoditization" might be a better word for it. In the past, the general citizenry was restricted to use weapons provided through very specific channels, and if they wanted to build their own weapons they would either be rather primitive, like bows or slings, or one would need special knowledge, tools, and/or materials.

Sure someone might have had the ability to make their own gun at home, but today there are far more people who are able to build lethal weaponry from consumer-grade materials.

It's a frightening development.

Making stuff like this still requires specialized software, but software development is far more readily available and accessible. The proliferation of software is also essentially effortless, so a terrorist group or similar could have a single team supplying standardized designs worldwide.

Consider the hobby of FPV drone racing. The designs and plans are widely available, and you can get a top-notch drone for about $2000 for a first-time purchase (less for the subsequent ones, since you'll already have goggles/radios). These drones are regularly built by teenagers and it's not difficult at all to add capabilities to the drones, such as target tracking, autonomous operation, software-defined radios for jamming resistance, etc.

I get the sentiment, but how is this any worse than a nail bomb with a timer?

It's the same multiplying effect that software has on other business ventures. Software can be scaled, optimized, perform complex features, and duplicated without cost.

So you can multiply an AI attack drone easier than a pipebomb... because of software?

Which makes me wonder what happened with the whole 3D printing guns story...at one point few years back it was front page news for a while. Weird how no one talks about it anymore...

Perhaps it's just so easy to buy guns on the black market that there's no point going through the effort of 3D printing one? I'm just speculating, I have no idea.

It think it’s more relevant that 3D printed guns mostly don’t work well and fall apart after a most a couple of shots. By the time you build something that works well you may as well get proper machining tools and make it out of metal.

Really? Not a day goes by? Bit dramatic aren't we?

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