Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajuc | Hacker News Reader

> Now imagine those machines chasing down a thought criminal desperately trying to hide in the woods in order to avoid execution.

If you're hiding in a forest and they know where you are within 30 minutes of flying time - you've already lost. If they don't have drones they can just use dogs.

The problems with this situation to solve, sorted by priority:

- don't have a totalitarian state

- don't let them know your thoughts

- escape to a different country while you can

- don't let them know in which forest you're hiding

- don't let them know where exactly

Drones only change the last point, and only marginally at that. Meanwhile we're collectively helping the internet overlords with the first 4 points by carrying smartphones everywhere and using google and facebook and whatsup etc.

View on HN

> - don't have a totalitarian state

Except that democracies can and do slip into totalitarian rule by autocrats who declare themselves the winner of elections and then obliterate their political opponents.

> - don't let them know your thoughts

Uh, whoops, they just know everything you ever searched for, watched, or bought online, who your friends and lovers are, where you live, what music you listen to, and what your genetic history is!

> - escape to a different country while you can

Except COVID and visas drying up, and anti-immigration sentiment rising everywhere.

> - don't let them know in which forest you're hiding

Better disable GPS on every device near me then! As well as disable every "CC" camera that's just for "security". Better also shoot down any surveillance drones or satellites!

> - don't let them know where exactly

That was my point? These are the hard problems that need to be solved, not drones.

The solution is almost never technology, it's usually politics and legislation.

So let's just give everyone nuclear weapons and hope for the best.

A mandatory gun for every person, but everyone only gets one slug.

That's existentially very clever

The point is reasonable; but drones are quite different to dogs.

I imagine it is much cheaper maintain 100 drones, truck them to where they are needed and have them swarm with some level of facial or gait recognition than the equivalent operation would be with dogs.

Also this could be centrally coordinated with cameras a lot more cheaply over a wider area than at any point in the past, with fewer people and less requirement for locals to dob people in.

> ...don't have a totalitarian state...

After COVID, I'm not sure how feasible this step is. "People should be allowed to leave their homes without first having the required paperwork" does not even appear to be a consensus view. And speaking from Australia even that would be a step up from what we have had recently.

The same exact argument can be made against end-to-end encryption that is resilint against state actors … if you have to resort to sneaking around, your society has already lost politically. Fix your government.

Well, yes. But in one case you're arguing for ban on technology (drones) and in another you're arguing against banning technology (encryption).

It's much easier not to ban something than to ban it, especially when the state is hostile.

The drones also solve the second to last point, if they make it viable to just sweep all forests within travel distance.

That's the important difference between dogs and drones: you can't substantially bring down the price of trained dogs with handlers. The costs of drones on the other hand are guaranteed to go down with scale, both in terms of capital costs and operating costs. So if your dystopian goal can't be achieved by a couple drones, just deploy more of them.

Compare this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw

With this:

USA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jlm2olEyXI

INDIA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq2kJlbUXEw

Reality is boring. The drones will be used for surveillance but the death will be delivered by regular firearms. The holocaust was "expensive" enough to justify shipping people into a central location where they are executed as efficiently as possible. What makes people think that a government would be willing to spend $5000 per killed civilian when it has to kill hundreds of millions?

I agree, with one correction: majority of Holocaust victims never seen a camp (neither concentration nor death camp). They were executed with regular firearms near the place they lived.

Camps were for undesirables that for whatever reason couldn't be killed immediately. Mostly because there were too many of them in one place.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28797055

And above those: Don't do a crime that will get you executed.

Like declaring yourself independent of the english crown. Basically the usa wouldn't exist if they had tech like this in the past.

And yet, Afghanistan exists today as an independent Taliban state. I think the English would still have trouble projecting power across the pond indefinitely.

We have enough problems running functional petrol stations these days.

Sometimes that's out of your hand. The people killed in Nazi Germany had no choice in being Jewish or disabled.

Governments can change for the worse pretty quickly, if you have one competent charismatic guy with the wrong ambitions. So we would better not give such people the tools to keep their power, if it ever comes to that.

Or queer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...

Sometimes that crime is having the audacity to exist.

Or...ever be accused or framed for one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com