Hacker News Reader

Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

How much do you think the Ukrainians (or the Russians, if you're a psychopath) would pay for a fully automated missile that detects the source of incoming artillery, launches in that direction, identifies the gun, and blows it up?

It really doesn't seem much of a stretch from the current state of technology. The only thing missing is an AI-driven targeting system for the last mile. I sincerely hope somebody (on "our" side) is working on it.

View on HN

This is a somewhat dated (not as in obsolete, but as in used for decades) and normal part of warfare. Artillery combat generally involves "shoot and scoot" strategy since the units tend to be identified quite quickly, in some cases before their first shells have even landed.

All AI would do is pull the trigger in the end. And I'd always rather that be done by a human. If AI were in charge of nuclear deployments during the Cold War, it's likely we would have seen nuclear annihilation since there were genuine false positives where a nuclear response was only stopped by a human breaking the chain of command and refusing to escalate as he "should have." [1] With AI we needn't worry about such 'discipline problems.'

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Counter battery radar only tells you where the enemy was when they fired, not where they are now. Even with drone surveillance, the drone has to find the target before it gets shot down, and then the information has to be acted on before they move. Also counter battery radars are themselves are vulnerable targets. It doesn't seem implausible to suggest that within a decade there will be missiles or loitering munitions with image detection programs for seeking out enemy artillery (or ships, or tanks, or even infantry) that would render shoot and scoot much less effective. It wouldn't require anything like AGI. There are all sorts of ethical issues with this idea, but the PLA isn't going to care about that. Not really sure how the West is going to handle the fact the PLA will have weapons that much of the western public are against developing in principle. I guess that's another parallel with nuclear weapons.

Ukrainians are using Polish TOPAZ system that does mostly that. Not AI needed (radar systems). Probably radars or satelitte images could be imroved with AI though. I think with somethink like starlink you could use tracking tech for tracking foreign military but US seems to have something like that. Probably also smart to automate analyst like in Russia-Ukraine war you could source info from relevant Telegram channels. Also tracking of social media for any leaks (seems like it’s present already).

What ukrainians needed was their own satelitte that got crowdfounded as US didn’t want to share all intel in real time. What they need now is long range rockets and then Russia will start peace negotiations.

Not very different from systems like shotspotter deployed in us cities, modern couter artillery systems

You mean like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-battery_radar ?

I don’t because “their side” will eventually reverse engineer it as they have with all other weapons

Reply on news.ycombinator.com