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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

Yes. I think anyone who wants to see the future of warfare should take a look at robot sumo wrestling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS-L2fpV1Is

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.

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This video was posted to HN a couple years ago. It's the first thing I think of whenever I watch one of these videos of new drone tech.

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

https://autonomousweapons.org/

The thing those movies get wrong is the moments of suspense when the slaughterbot is chasing it's victim. They'll be dead before they even contemplate running.

It’s not inconceivable that they’ll follow their victims for a bit to make sure that the face recognition doesn’t have a glitch.

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.

Thank you for your comforting assurances.

Simply pop a small pebble in your shoe to change your gait /s

Unless, of course, you don't care about collateral damage, in which case you might well kill first, verify second.

Of course, but then you don’t use a stupid drone. You drop a hellfire missile from 10km up.

If you're a nation state maybe. The question here is how far down the cost of drones like these will go, and how easy it will be to contain the technology.

Thank you for sharing - terrifying

I remember the video with the swarm of tiny drones dropped from the airplane. It's very unrealistic in my opinion.

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.

Dude, this is what could happen easily within 10 years. What is your point? That the video doesn't show the reality of 2021?

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’s naive to assume military research labs don’t have this in an advanced state of development right now, or even combat-ready weapons that just haven’t been used yet.

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.

Yes probably the US and Russia and China militaries have some advanced quadcopters. Do you think even to build one of them costed less 10 USD? You have to count in all the research and development put in.

Depending on the capabilities of the drones that could be absurdly trivial. GPS jamming scales to an infinite number of drones.

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.

>could happen easily within 10 years.

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.

I have no problem seeing this as realistic.

> 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.

>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.

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.

https://youtu.be/CxePhkdIo0o

https://youtu.be/hyaIrhGrCzo

Ohh and even a nice fictional animation: https://youtu.be/n8u0l_c2_NA

And yet last week a simple light show with quad-copters didn't manage to go as planned: https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/travel-troubles/126582371/its... Now I don't think those drones costed 10USD each, they probably costed more and even having them doing a light show is very hard.

The trick about drones is that you don't care about the ones that don't make it.

Autonomous killing drones are already here https://www.cnet.com/news/autonomous-drone-attacked-soldiers...

I always liked Peter F. Hamilton’s description of space battles from the Void trilogy that are all over in a fraction of a second.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_Trilogy

It's the same in the Culture series. Near-God AI motherships manufacture combat psychopath AI ships by the thousand, which fight lower tech ships by overwritting their CPU caches with EM effectors (very advanced versions of phased array emitters) in milliseconds, taking them over for their side. Rarely it gets to anti-matter and particle beams.

Well, "Excession" from the same series gets its fair share of psychopath AIs using anti-matter and particle beams during a few nanoseconds fight.

From the same Iain Banks, "Against a Dark Background" features space battles where rules of engagement ban the use of AI-controlled weapons.

Or Stanislaw Lem from 1964's "The Invincible" where autonomous drone swarms take out all life and complex machinery. In the story, they evolve, but a lot of the swarm behavior is similar to killer bot drone swarms like from the clip above.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible

“…how in the name of chaos did a lump of meat outwit and destroy a knife missile?”

Yes, I've been saying this for years. Everyone seems to overlook the massive speed advantage they could have over us. Even if they're not trying to kill us, aside from for interacting with humans, there is no reason that they would be constrained to operating at human compatible speeds. It's possible that we could see them as operating on a completely different time scale than us, similar to how we see fungus.

Elon Musk got mocked when he talked about robots moving so fast you'd need a strobe light to see them but typically for Musk he was just a bit too early in his timeline. Definitely the way things are going; why wouldn't they?

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