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Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

Landmines have a simple binary "decision" process: is the target on them or not. So in itself that's not a decision, it's a physical phenomenon: you close a switch, you trigger an event.

Drones have several layers of added "decision making" that are out of human control making them far more dangerous. They get to autonomously decide, target, and kill based on many factors, using algorithms that we cannot trust or predict 100%. They also does it from afar. I know you can't trust a human 100% either but it's still the best we've got.

It's the difference between walking in a bog and encountering a lion. Both might kill you but they're in no way similar even in principle.

Autonomous killer drones are just automating murder and terrorism. Taking horrific weapons and making them worse by giving them better range, better targeting, and a brain that's smart enough to kill but stupid enough to do it as dangerously as possible.

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Landmines are worse, because they don't even know, the war has ended.

Wouldn't it be even worse if a landmine could just come to you at any time and "decide" to take out it's target and everything that surrounds it? Maybe the algorithm was tripped and you're a "good enough" match, wherever you may be, even in your safe zone. There's no "keep out" sign, no safety because someone else already checked or if you keep to the main road, no removing the threat. They need no preparation, they will actively seek their target from as far away as possible. They can cover more ground than mines ever could and they won't just take out the target but also the ones around it. And all this under the control of an algorithm.

This is the terror element. People will have to worry about getting blown up anytime, anywhere. That's why we keep making weapons with more range and better targeting, because waiting for the target to come to the weapon just wasn't horrific or effective enough.

Sure, landmines are really bad but we're inching closer to things that surpass landmine horrors in every way and makes them seem like the lesser evil. Because if there's one thing that's bad, it's taking an already bad thing and augmenting it. And that should really scare you.

If autonomous drones really become that much of a threat then counter-measures will quickly be developed. We already have radar or even just auditory systems that can target drones, and something like a laser might be enough to take them out.

That's fine for the military, how does that protect joe random citizens?

While Joe random citizen may have illusion of grandeur, they probably are not important enough to be targeted by an advanced drone attack.

If someone really wants a hit on joe random citizen, why would they choose one of these drones over the traditional method? Much harder for a weaponized drone hit to look accidental.

Joe random citizen has a much harder life in places at the wrong end of USA's, Russia's, Turkey's, Israel's, China's, and others' interests, countries who can afford to deploy such technology at scale or have a propensity for projecting their power.

> why would they choose one of these drones over the traditional method

Why does anyone use automation or AI for anything? To have dozens or even hundreds of drones constantly in the air with close to no supervision from drone operators. When you're going after an enemy false positives and collateral damage matter very little, if at all.

> Much harder for a weaponized drone hit to look accidental

Nobody bothers making deaths look accidental in the places these drones will be used. If reality showed anything it's that they barely bother to argue when they bomb schools and hospitals beyond the boilerplate "we're fighting terrorism".

This kind of tech makes a bad situation even worse for many people in some parts of the world. But you'll start worrying about it only if/when someone decides to use it somewhere in a civilized country, closer to home. I'm sure so many people will suddenly find plenty of arguments against the autonomous killing machines then.

USS The Latest will have all the countermeasures it needs. What about $random_middle_eastern_wedding_guests? Countermeasures aren't available to anyone but the military. But in some parts of the word everybody can be a target, especially if some superpower needs to maintain its sphere of influence, or they happen to be at war with some genocidal regime.

Drones have been used quite successfully for many decades now and clearly haven't developed any countermeasures for what most of their targets are concerned, "quickly" or otherwise. This is why we still read about drones bombing people out of existence, whether the correct target or not.

An autonomous drone just outsources the usual killing from the human operator to a script, making it even more likely to make a mistake and also apply the desired effect: terror.

Or to flip the (pithy) argument: "Autonomous drones are worse, because they can declare war."

historically yea, but not for long

What about guided missiles? Once the instruction to kill is given, they hone into the target autonomously.

I guess missiles are given an order for a specific aircraft.

The unspoken issue with these drones is the fact that they’re widely available and made up of commercial-off-the-shelf components. A guided missile requires expertise in chemistry, materials science, and a lot of expensive experimentation. You can’t fly under a government’s radar with them. A drone however, is accessible to every citizen, and the software that runs them is widely available and accessible.

In nuclear weapons it’s the difficulty in sourcing the nuclear material that prevents widespread proliferation. Imagine if the core could be made of something like iron, everyone would have nukes and our civilization would not survive.

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