Dystopian movies have obviously gotten it wrong. The attack drones won't be slowly scanning the forest for escapees above the canopy but will instead rip through the forest in large packs at 40km/hr. How uber-dystopian.
The future is not Star Wars style fights where lumbering ships can't seem to reliably hit each other despite clear lines of sight. The future is fast, precise, sterile and not something a human can react to. The future is drones with knives slicing your jugular before you know they are coming.
I'm an embedded SW programmer and the speed of computation still boggles my mind sometimes.
Apparently you can also recognize someone by the way they walk, so if you’ve recorded that before, getting them to run around for a bit provides an extra level of identification.
3 types of problems:
1) quadcopters battery is not great (yet) 2) AI is very specialized 3) You underestimate how fast and creative a human being is when survival is at stake.
1) quadcopters battery is not great (yet) Quadcopters must balance weight, energy and payload. Essentially drones don't fly very long and any payload you add will increase their weight and decrease their speed or flying time. In the video the tiny drones are released from an airplane. Already not sure if that would work, what about wind and altitude? The drones might spend a significant part of their battery just to reach the ground. They might be so light that a gentle breeze would swipe them hundreds of meters away. Even if battery will be better there will always be a constraint on what it's possible to do and how much it cost to build it. In the video the announcer says 25 million USD for enough drones to wipe a city. Let's say there are 5 million in the city and half is 2.5 million people. Your budget than is 10USD per drone. Clearly that budget is just too small.
2) AI is very specialized Just because an AI can beat the world champion at chess doesn't mean it can do anything else at all. Take the same AI and change the chess board size or another fixed parameter of chess. The AI will likely not work at all without being retrained while a human being will still manage to figure it out on the spot.
3) Underestimating humans Alright somehow the tiny drones with explosives reach the room. It's not like in nature we don't have insects and birds flying at us. People have reflexes to fly or fight. Most people would duck or protect their face with hands. If you think the drone will be too fast remember it's a 10USD drone dropped from an airplane. Frankly it's a miracle even if manages to land on the ground.
How about you sign up for the "escape the AI slaughterbots challenge" in 2030. Win $10,000 if you survive the 1,000 Slaughterbots trying to kill you.
It could but it's quite not sure it will. In 2001 we were supposed to be doing a space odyssey on Mars and beyond. And 5 years ago we were supposed already to have full autonomous vehicles. Just because something looks close in sci-fi made-up movies doesn't mean it will turn reality. It's about the tech.
>How about you sign up for the "escape the AI slaughterbots challenge"
You are making a very different scenario. You are suggesting in 2030 will be possible to kill one person in a setup environment with very high budget for 1000 drones. The scenario of the movie is to kill 2.5 million people with 2.5 million tiny drones with 25 million USD budget over a very large and not controlled environment like a city.
For medium capability drones your budget is already in the millions so it is only fair to use a medium capability air defense system: https://youtu.be/1DXpPmpmcak
Edit: Before you say that I don't get to defend myself according to the threat level then a single person beating me to death would be enough to kill me. Not very interesting.
I mean, it’s obviously possible. That means militaries have at the very least developed it to a proof of concept by now. This kind of tech often exists for many years before becoming publically known.
> 1) quadcopters battery is not great
Dropping does not require energy. A drone-mothership will obviously take wind in account when dropping the dronelets. The video was not realistic in that regard because the drones would probably be folded for initial descent.
I find USD 10 is not unrealistic. Already now a device with battery, chip, and motor can be manufactured for under that. It will get cheaper.
2) AI is very specialized
We've just seen how a drone navigates autonomously at high speed without crashing. They don't need much more to be killers.
3) Underestimating humans
You have to be prepared to react well to a drone attack like that. These things will not wait around for you to figure it out.
That already exists. It's called GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) and it has been obsoleted already by the GBU-53/B StormBreaker. Yet nobody is freaking out.
Ohh and even a nice fictional animation: https://youtu.be/n8u0l_c2_NA
From the same Iain Banks, "Against a Dark Background" features space battles where rules of engagement ban the use of AI-controlled weapons.
Speaking of fast, the Russians now have hypersonic missiles that go roughly 14,000 miles per hour. That's more than 3 miles a second! If you have a missile defense on board a ship, that means the missile defense has to detect, target and kill that missile in just a few seconds maximum.
In reality, automated killing happens without the target receiving previous warning.
Anyway if they have infrared cameras, they'd be more efficient by scanning the forest high in the sky and if they just rely on normal cameras, good old camouflage still works.
I could be wrong but IMHO we're entering a period of rarefaction of resources. I don't think in the future they will waste precious resources like energy and drones to hunt common people, it will be reserved for high profile cases.
...or engage in wrongthink. The Supreme Commander must never be questioned even in private, peasant.