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Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

How are these autonomous killer robots significantly different from cruise missiles?

I think the key distinction is that, for the most part, the current generation of cruise missiles are targeted and launched with a "human in the loop" - that is, a person actively makes the decision to fire the missile at a specific target. However, the autonomous weapons being debated have significantly less direct human control - they are potentially designed to simply patrol a certain area and attack anything that the weapon classifies as an enemy.

Of course, there are grey areas here - certainly there are existing missiles that can be launched without a defined target and programmed to aim for anything that, say, has radar emissions that match known enemy systems.

Autonomous drones with weapon systems coupled with sufficiently advanced obstacle avoidance, facial recognition, and other AI/ML identification based systems, could swarm cities and eliminate entire battalions or local populations with little to no environmental or infrastructural damage. Imagine Russia preparing to invade the Donbas region of Ukraine and ahead of that invasion deploying a couple of drone swarms to "clear out" a bulk of the Ukranian army presence. Drones could idle, lie in wait and silently hunt opposing forces. It could significantly lower the cost (number of casualties) of invasion for the attacking force.

It is already here. Ukraine got Turkish drones, and Russia can only amass large WWII style force in response which are going to be slaughtered by the drones.

Drones are the new paradigm of warfare which allows smaller players to play in many situations (like the modern limited local wars) on par with the big ones without attempting to acquire nuclear. No UN talks can prevent those smaller players from development of such capabilities.

Yeah I've been kinda wondering about what the deal is there - given the slow public build-up of forces it seems hard to imagine Russia going forward with an old-school invasion when all those troops will just be drone fodder. Is it for internal propaganda? A way to gather intelligence on Ukraine's defensive responses? I'm sure it's hard to tell from the outside.

Ukraine has got strategic advance with the drones (Russia didn't get the message 2 years ago when the air defense Pantsir systems got slaughtered in Syria by those drones). Such a huge advance is though temporary - those Russian air defenses need upgrade to deal with the drones, and it will be done in the near future. So, Ukraine got window of opportunity to solve Donbass the way Azerbajan solved the Karabah using the same drones a year ago. So Russia is trying to prevent it by the public buildup of forces in the way which clearly shows that it can cut Ukranian Donbass forces from the rest of the country by scissor invasion from North and South behind those forces if Ukraine makes a move on Donbass now. Such invasion will be with huge losses and will cost Russia a lot and is very risky, and Russia doesn't want it (at least not at the cost it is going to be at right now), and i'm not sure that Russia can really pull it right now, yet it is the only response Russia got for now, thus such a public build-up of the forces looking a lot like bluffing in poker.

You do the arm signal for drone swarm, shout "drones, drones, drones!", and drop to the ground and cover yourself in your poncho.

My point is that we adapt. It's not worse than chemical weapons and it's preferable to bombing entire cities to achieve your objective. Is it finally dawning on HN that war is hell?

You're missing the point, new technological developments in warfare aren't about "worse or better" since one human wishing to inflict suffering or death on another needs only a sharp stick or a rock and their imagination to produce the worst forms of torture. They're about physical distance. Fighting hand to hand requires an immense level of personal commitment to causing harm. Each technological advance in warfare has lowered that barrier by increasing the distance at which you can maim and kill. It's now possible to kill without ever seeing the person you are killing. Autonomous weapons are the final stage of this development where you don't even need to make the decision to kill, you simply design some inevitably flawed conditions under which you would theoretically kill someone and the machine takes care of the rest.

I think the objective should be preventing war and that means making it more difficult to kill not less.

> I think the objective should be preventing war

I agree and that's usually the connotation behind the words, "war is hell." Unfortunately, either the entire world agrees to never weaponize drones or we all need to start thinking about weaponizing drones. That's how arms races work.

If wars are going to happen though I think we are better off with drones rather than annihilating entire cities, civilians and soldiers together. It's important to elect leaders who are not cavalier about deploying drones needlessly.

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