Oh, we've already arrived at Slaughterbots.
Besides that, yes, I do tend to believe that autonomous flying drones will play a large role in future conflicts. This dude I follow on Reddit thinks this based on what he is seeing going on in Ukraine[1]. I got sold on it as a possibility.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/15uimh0/cr...
How exactly?
Are you expecting some sort of DRM in all commercial EDA and CAD software? Will opensource CAD and EDA software become illegal?
Will customs search all packages from Chinese PCB manufacturers for illicit drone designs?
Of course a nuclear weapon can kill more people than a drone swarm, but that's besides the point.
What exactly does non-proliferation look like for drone swarms? What happens when the cost of a drone swarm drops to $10?
it puts it firmly out of reach for anyone that isn't state sponsored.
Not saying autonomous weapons won't/couldn't be an issue. just pointing out that drone swarms won't be.
The rest of the issues are mere technical speedbumps that industrious open source people will cruise over.
Not if you were a bit precocious in HC chemistry; I know my friends and I were not even close to alone in knowing all kinds of interesting fireworks recipes, all of which were well tested, and could be configured for anything from a small 'pop' to far more power than a slaughterbot. All from basic chemicals that can be easily be acquired without raising an eyebrow (could alternatively just repurpose a bullet/ shotgun shell, very easily obtained). The ability to put it right on target means that very little is needed.
>>acquiring all the training data and ML modals to actually make them useful.
Sure, if you are looking for fully ai-controlled and integrated with a city-wide CCTV system, that's a big task. But drone control and swarming is already out of the bag. Even a basic open-source Pixhawk does obstacle avoidance, and so can likely be reprogrammed for obstacle-targeting. Multiple off-the-shelf drones have done "follow-me" for years. I'd be astonished if a competent team with five-figure funding couldn't make a working system that could be deployed near a target, ID, it and home in.
We're way past needing state funding. The fact that it is not here suggests that while the scenario is scary, it is not actually that useful? Perhaps that's hoping too much.
I wonder how far EM could go if he went full evil, full throttle and tried to take over something [the world? a country?] with a drone fleet?
Charging stations seems easily solved, so the drones never need direct human interaction.
Terrifying.
That said, with all the advantages Musk would have if he "went full Evil", if he challenged something that got the US military involved, I'd bet on the US Military. In a straight-up fight, they're the most lethal force that ever existed. You might get away with 'sucker-punching' them a few times, but not for long.
1) He's the richest man on the planet
2) He has competence (arguably, but that's another debate)
3) He already has all the infrastructure, experience, and people to do close to this exact thing
4) He's already widely considered evil or at least hated
If you sub in Bezos, I'm guessing he's got a lead on EM in the software, but he'll be way behind in other areas.
If you sub in Buffet or Gates, then I have no idea how to even have this flippant conversation, because I have no idea how to rate their ability to get the job done.
I'm confident 3 of the 4 above could solve the problems of "make autopiloting, auto-targeting AI drones, and produce millions of them." I'm sure countless people could solve those problems and have the means to get it done. Have your choice of billionaires and motives, or nation-states and motives, or aliens and motives.
Maybe I should have chosen Santa Claus. I do really have a hard-on for him.
You can also use poisons like sarin or even good old cyanide dissolved in DMSO.
States will hand them out like candy to very nasty people on their side of a conflict.
How is the explosive used in the slaughterbots scenario different from what you can buy by the box in cartridges of bullets? Those aren't exactly highly protected even in the USA.
I imagine e.g. just tying a bullet to a drone, without the structure of a gun around, it isn't exactly going to be effective. But how far off would it be?
1/4 lb total for a devastating precision or area weapon.
The casing required for any nitrocellulose based device to do anything dangerous at all will exceed the weight of both of the above and be barely a firecracker. Fragments will be limited in velocity too.
High explosive vs low explosive.
The main thing gating slaughterbots from reality is the proliferation of the shaped explosive, not of the delivery mechanism.
What you're telling me is that slaughterbots will be armed with guns that shoot bullets, not fragementation grenades.
It could be used by some people who want to do targeted killings, e.g. in gang violence, where it could be better than other methods maybe. But on the other hand, RC helicopters able to carry and shoot a gun have existed since at least 2006: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZCH1492CzA
The number of people who actually want to kill lots of people without being physically present is extremely small; so small that in a country the size of the US, one only crops up every couple decades, e.g. Timothy McVeigh.
I would make a solid bet that proliferation of cheap drones does not impact the homicide or terrorism rate in the US in either direction.
If you watch Ukraine footage, soldiers barely even look where they’re shooting. They’re just trying to establish suppression over an area so that they can toss more grenades to kill people.
That’s because both sides have guns. If you aren’t fighting an armed combatant to the death. The calculus changes a lot.
(Video shows airsoft players using a standard FPV drone with an actuator to press a trigger, and the guy flies around the field getting "kills" and it looks incredibly effective (partly due to no recoil, but .22LR exists))
I feel that the point our stances diverge is you feel these kind of weapons systems would become something a skilled hacker could make in a shed out of AliExpress parts for a 10$ bom, whereas I view it as being a complex weapon system that would be sophisticated and relies on battlefield infrastructure and complex supply chains to be feasible to properly deploy.
I think if you look at cutting edge weapons, my belief is no hacker could build them in their garage, no matter how sophisticated. Hell, take a look at the pathetic state of "3d printed" weapons to see how I imagine DIY "slaughterbots" would look like.
And acquiring the real weapons would not be easy at all. Heck, even now, if you want to acquire for your projects certain camera or heat sensors you have tons of hoops to jump through to get your hands on them.
Besides, even IF it would be something a DIY-er could do, someone wanting to kill civilians would probably use the most effective tools, least resource intensive, least effort tool, least conspicuous to gather resources and this would not be it. Today any maniac can use a car to plow down civilians or get a gun and go on a rampage. That is low effort high impact. This would be a lot higher effort. Probably kind of the same impact.
The only part of this technology that is remotely possible to tackle on is proliferation of explosives.
I agree that it will be much like sophisticated military hardware is today - but I say that as someone within 20’ of his own third-generation night vision, body armor, and weapons that are approximately on par with that of a contemporary US soldier.
> Heck, even now, if you want to acquire for your projects certain camera or heat sensors you have tons of hoops to jump through to get your hands on them
Nonsense. You can order very usable thermal sensors from China, shipped to your door. You can order even more capable sensors that are covered by ITAR and prohibited for export without so much as signing something. A notice on the website saying that they’re restricted to the US is the extent of it.
> Today any maniac can use a car to plow down civilians or get a gun and go on a rampage. That is low effort high impact. This would be a lot higher effort. Probably kind of the same impact.
I totally agree with you here. Firearms aren’t the most effective way to cause harm to a large number of people even today; drones certainly won’t be for the foreseeable future.
Imagine a drone that flies towards a cellphone signal and when it gets within range does some basic shape recognition and adjusts it's course to fly towards a the nearest neck until it detonates a crude fragementation grenade.
How much would a drone that can do that cost today? They don't need to be durable as they are meant for single use, and they don't need to be particularly fast, just faster than a person can run.
Those seem like pretty large hurdles imo.
Edit: and, as others mentioned, goods even tangentially related to defense are routinely controlled. In the extreme case, countries like the US would onshore manufacturing of certain components, acquisition would require licensing, and competing products from overseas would simply be banned.
> In the extreme case, countries like the US would onshore manufacturing of certain components, acquisition would require licensing, and competing products from overseas would simply be banned.
Which parts exactly? the PCBs? The motors? the microcontrollers? the batteries? How would that work exactly? How do you regulate any of this without per component DRM? What would that look like exactly? Would I need a license to buy a child's toy that had a microcontroller in it? Would they nerf microcontrollers for devices like appliances and toys so taht they weren't fast enough to handle the needs of a drone?
If you wanted to control components going into homebuilt drones, you would probably target the guidance, since even basic waypoint navigation requires something to tell you where you are in relation to the target. To an extent this is already done with GPS (the true precision was classified last I checked, civilian uses are downgraded), but controlling manufacture and distribution of the stack would shut any kind of home robotics down while leaving a lot of channels untouched. If people wanted PCBs, fine, they just wouldn't be able to get certain sensors on them without a license.
You don't need global DRM to control exports. It's routine for some industries.
Of course, much of this is besides the point, because if someone really wants to hurt other people, they'll find a way. But the components to build a cruise missile in your backyard not only exist, they're mostly available COTS, but the critical parts like the payload are controlled. In some hypothetical future where AI drones became a threat, you can bet that the critical paths would be identified fairly quickly and locked down.
[!!!] Being afraid of social media enabling something like automated, weaponized drones
This boogieman from the future is kind of overshadowing the fact that social media is already weaponized and used to harm people, and can be used in increasingly effective ways without the need for shaped charges or even physical objects.
It still takes about two of the much more expensive cluster munitions to get one kill. The submunitions in those things are about as expensive as a “murder bot” would be.
An actual person-seeking drone might have a failure rate lower than 50%.
A single shell with 20 mini drones could take out a dozen troops, even if they’re in a trench, or spread out, or lying on the ground to avoid shrapnel.
It would be the end of infantry warfare, forever.
Squishy meat troops can’t evade tiny bots with 1000 fps cameras and inhuman reaction times.
That said, within battery range looks pretty grim.
Though that does raise some interesting relationships between insolation and combat situations. Night-time, winter (short daylight cycles and low solar angle), and overcast / stormy weather might favour infantry over solar-powered / assisted drones.
Water is not a deterrent - Ukraine has already deployed drone watercraft.
I'm going to assume that those are low-speed at best. Water transport is efficient at scale, but has tremendous drag, and electric boats (of a non-nuclear sort) will tend to be quite slow.
WWII-era diesel-electric submarines typically have a top speed of less than 10 knots submerged on battery power, as compared with 20 kt surfaced (or at snorkel depth), and in excess of 25 kt for nuclear powered submarines.
Though on writing this I'm noting that the Swedish Gotland-class submarine reports 20 kt submerged on batteries, though only 5 kt on air-independent propulsion (AIP), a Stirling-cycle engine design.
I'm finding very little on UA drone ships / unmanned surface vehicles (USV), but this CNN report shows a still photo of one generating a considerable wake, which I'd estimate shows at least a 15-20 kt speed and possibly greater. The copy reads "faster than anything on the Black Sea". I still suspect that stealth and battery limitations would make lower-speed operations far more common, particularly where the hull could hide from radar or other detection in wave chop.
<https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/30/europe/ukraine-drones-black-s...>
The accompanying video seems to indicate engine noise, which would indicate combustion-based propulsion. Given that the explosive payload is 300 kg of explosive, and in the Kerch Bridge attack, 1 tonne of high explosive (HE), as well as the extended range of the missions (Odessa to the Sea of Azov), I'd expect that any battery capacity would be limited at best. Fuel, on the other hand, would help enhance explosions and seems far more likely.
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Iv1WbNY-yB0>
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=u7STLTtOEOM>
Ukraine seems to call these "Sea Baby".
<https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-sea-baby-naval-drones-usv-k...>
Very clear piston motor noises here, I'd estimate 25--50 HP or greater motor:
<https://old.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/15sp244...>
(25 HP on a light planing hull will give you a pretty impressive top speed, anything above that is gravy.)
This schematic suggests water-jet engines based on a Sea-Doo:
<https://news.usni.org/2022/10/11/suspected-ukrainian-explosi...>
A typical Sea-Doo jetski has a 1600 cc engine of roughly 80 HP / 60 kW.
<https://www.personalwatercraft.com/specs/sea-doo/3-4-passeng...>
<https://www.motorbimble.com/guides/convert-displacement-to-h...>
(Multiple in-place edits as I've turned up more information here.)
It's also not about warring states, but instead very targeted assassinations, where the perpetrators doesn't have to be anywhere near the target, allowing very little risk of punishment, retaliation, or even identification.
What really stops the average person from building these systems isn't necessarily the difficulty of the system itself, but rather the impossibility of getting the components. The drone is just a delivery mechanism for the ordinance, and good luck getting your hands on that.
Also, for said killbots to be anything other than a trivial threat (just jam the signal) they would need pretty decent onboard AI to function independently, which I guess is the point they're trying to make. But there are almost certainly far easier and more cost effective ways to get the same effect that don't rely on currently non-existent technology.
Sure. I should have said assassinations and targetted attacks. The video shows the ability to target specific races/genders/demographics.
> The drone is just a delivery mechanism for the ordinance, and good luck getting your hands on that.
I don't know why a shotgun cartridge could not be used in place of a shaped charge. Just pop down to your local Walmart.
You seem to be arguing that this work speculative fiction isn't interesting because we already have a huge number of ways to kill people, and that it's not currently possible. The point of this sort of fiction is to get us to imagine a world where these things are possible, where it is achievable.
My objection is that it's mostly fright porn for drumming up mindshare. I don't think it's particularly compelling because a) imagining such systems is trivial, and b) there are already ways for us to achieve the same goal, so it's not even a novel threat.
But of course, that's just my opinion. Others obviously feel differently.
Shotgun shells don't do much without a barrel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SSdLQcGEio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osxBoO9Hs5E
But that's beside the point. There are folks on YouTube making all sorts of dangerous things in their garden sheds on a shoestring budget. If Explosions&Fire can do it, so can a dedicated attacker.
Couldn't a terrorist load an explosive on a drone and drove it into a music festival or some other open-air large gathering? This is what concerns me personally.
Although long-term (~10 years) I wouldn't bet on more capable weaponised drones being hard to aquire, maintain, or operate.
The reason these horror scenarios aren't so common is that most people simply are not suicidal murderers. It's always been easy to target crowds of people. But it's not that common for people to actually do that. When it does happen, there usually isn't a happy end for anyone involved with the attack.
Any determined idiot armed with a knife, baseball bat, truck, improvised explosives, etc. would be able to do quite a bit of damage. And in the US you can of course add all the light military gear that lots of people there buy for fun (assault rifles, etc.). That sometimes goes horribly wrong of course but you don't need drones to do a lot of damage.
Protections against this sort of thing usually exist in the form of radio jammers; disrupting the control transmission from the pilot or the video transmission from the drone. If the control system is onboard the drone it's a lot harder to disrupt.
As far as I know the systems designed to counter this sort of threat look like shipping container sized microwave emitters that interfere with the electronics of the UAV.
Really? Because as of right now everyone in HN and other tech communities thinks government regulation of AI is "market capture" and should be blocked entirely. Many will not be convinced until the horse is already long gone.
The parts to make an 8 inch kill drone (except the explosive, but you could use a blade or other simple weapon) from scratch are sold at microcenter. The only missing piece is the software.
Not much need to imagine. https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/12fl7lq/ukra...
Warning this is NSFL: https://twitter.com/search?q=ukraine%20drone%20russians&src=...
AI isn't really the limiting factor as far as I can tell. We have good enough pattern recognition and flight software already.
But what happens when the drone is navigating with a camera and selecting its own target based upon training?
The scary scenario as far as I'm concerned, is mass genocide based on some characteristic. 10k drones wiping out 100k civilians who are identifiable based on location, skin color, clothing or some other measure. It's a scenario that has seemed vaguely plausible to me for several years now.
I refer to it as "stabby the robot" because drones wielding blades or other means of exsanguination do not run out of ammo and have little limitations on how much they can achieve their goals(other than powering themselves).
Then again, from watching the publicly available videos, it seems like these drones have been most useful for defensive operations on the battlefield.
There will always be a chance that the targeting system misses so strobbing a laser (or bidirectional jamming) will minimize the risk of damaging the surrounding area (people, animals, etc.) vs shooting it down with bullets/nets.
Decoys are likely the best answer, but not necessarily practical for offensive operations. And given the low cost of drones, likely limited in usefulness anyway.
> Real-world applications include environmental monitoring or disaster response.
Disaster response. There's absolutely no way this would be used for any form of military application ok?
Online reputational attacks overnight.
Astroturfing a revolution on any topic. Disinformation at massive scale. Amassing karma points and deploying sleeper accounts with morals totally off.
Destroying forums and overwhelming every human fitting a filter.
Getting people into trouble easily in 800 different ways (think Trump lawsuits)
And this is before we ever get to the physical world.
People are still stuck wondering how a poker bot will do at a table with 9 humans. The issue is what will humans do when surrounded by self-organizing swarms of 10000 bots for every human?