Sci-Fi Short Film “Slaughterbots” [video] (2017)
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TL, dr: tech as a permanent fix for evolutionary left behind problems is not viable. Kicking the can down the road produces ever more high stakes failure scenarios,but no permanent stability as created by self alterations.
The project's website is at <https://autonomousweapons.org>
And subsequent developments in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine since the film was released in 2017 show how the concepts illustrated are being realised in real-world conflicts, highlighting both capabilities and limitations of the concept, though I'd strongly suggest that the full potential has yet to be realised.
One interesting distinction is between the nature of precisely targetable weapons as with the slaughterbots, and stochastic ranged weapons, which date back to at least WWII and the long-range but only loosely-targeted attacks via V-1 "buzz bomb" and V-2 rocket bombs, or more recently through cheap and inaccurate rockets such as the Qassam used heavily by Hamas (see: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/world/middleeast/gaza-roc...>), or the Russian S-8KL (see: <https://www.newsweek.com/russia-cluster-bombs-dumb-rocket-s8...>).
Precision is useful against specific military targets or civilian leadership. Stochastic attacks have long been used against general populations or forces, though the morale effects may well backfire unless the lethality is truly overwhelming.
The questions raised in the video about countermeasures and the consequences for use-of-force are interesting and I'd very much like to see further discussion of those topics if anyone is aware of any.
The video is underwhelming.
Futuristic technology is used to harass and kill people for no reason other than some CEO wanting to earn money from a secret investor sales pitch?
The range of the weapons is limited so they need to be deployed near the university that is being attacked.
The weapon leaves no impact other than some broken windows or dead bodies.
Meanwhile in Ukraine Putin levels cities with indiscriminate artillery. Imagine if these cities were being attacked by face scanning weapons. Civilians would most likely not be on the list of enemies.
If Putin does not have a database of Ukrainian soldier faces, then he can't target this weapon. He will have to target based on the uniform instead but then soldiers could just stop wearing uniforms or even intentionally dress like civilians. At some point the weapon must become indiscriminate again and once it is indiscriminate, it is not any different than being hit by bombs, artillery, nuclear weapons, etc.
My prediction: We will keep using more artillery instead.
The Slaughterbots premise though is specific targeted attacks against identified individuals.
We've seen this to be effective in multiple theatres and modes throughout history, though recent trends have shown remarkable additional efficacy. Assassinations would be the original notion, though that's a messy practice when you're stabbing Caesar in the back. The ability to drop wet teams in on a specific target was improved with near-real-time surveillance, but still involved significant feet on the ground. An example is the 2010 assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, UAE, by 26 Israeli Mossad agents:
<https://www.gq.com/story/the-dubai-job-mossad-assassination-...>
Ten years later, when Israel again committed another assasination, this time of Iranina nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, they used a remotely-controlled machine gun mounted in a truck:
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/11/iranian-nuclear-sci...>
Nicholas Maduro, president of Venezuela, survived an attempted assassination using drones and explosives in 2018, in which seven soldiers were injured.
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45073385>
Putin is well-known for targeting individuals for assassination, with Wikipedia listing at least 115 known instances since 1999, many within Russia against Russians. The killing of Ukrainian grain tycoon Oleksiy Vadatursky by missile is thought to have been a specifically targeted attack; his house, and specifically bedroom, was struck by a missile, killing Vadatursky and his wife.
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62367356>
Similar attacks could be carried out against specific high-profile, high-value targets within Ukraine, including government, military, and business officials.
On the battlefield itself, targeting priorities would likely be different, though officers and leadership roles might be individually identified. More likely though drones would be directed toward specific equipment or given the general characteristics of enemy soldiers (e.g., uniforms and insignia, or locations), and directed toward them. There are reasons why soldiers do wear uniforms, including identification by their own forces and avoidance of friendly fire. Rules of war and the Geneva Convention generally require distinctive uniforms and insignia "having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance", in part to avoid confusion with civilian populations. It's possible of course for such rules to be changed, but that's not the present situation.
I don't think artillery is going away. But it has been supplemented by ever more precisely-directed weapons, and will likely continue to be with time.
I do put heavy emphasis on the sorts of scenarios illustrated in the video, however. Specifically-targeted attacks in soft areas seem a distinct likelihood, and many nascent opposition movements can be crippled by incapacitating or cowing a small number of leaders.
Though writing this does give me pause to think that one of the most effective tools Ukraine has for targeted elimination of Russian leadership to date as been VVP.
The modern battlefield is just signal jammers. Remote human pilots just wouldn't work like their proposals wants. Autonomy is becoming a requirement. No targeting humans is logical and the predictable autonomy is pretty much there.
A lot of this stuff in this video though, you can get off the shelf and implement today. Compute and battery life are the limiters. The whole world is pouring billions into making those much better though.
I don't know what the cost of a modern army's soldier in the field is (or how that varies by national average income --- one of the cost drivers for the US military is simply typical wages and income), but as a very naive ballpark estimate, the US Army which boasts north of 450,000 active-duty soldiers and a $173 billion budget (FY2022) is therefor looking at about $380k/soldier-year, total cost.
I'll estimate that actual combat troops are roughly 10% of the total, so we're looking at about $4 million per pair of boots on actual ground.[1] Maybe.
A Tomahawk cruise missile costs about $1--4 million (varying by source). Single use.
A Predator MQ-1 drone costs about $40 million. Multi-use. The Hellfire missile (with which Predators may be equipped) run about $58k -- $150k each.
The DJI consumer-grade drones being used in the Russo-Ukraine war run about $1k--2k each. Multi-use.
Switchblade 300 and 600 drones run from $6k to $70k per unit.
Significant challenges for smaller drones are the warhead that can be carried, range, identification of targets, and avoiding counter-battery fire, in which the launch, recovery, and/or control points for drones are identified and attacked by retaliatory fire. Among other advantages of single-use drones are that such counter-battery fire is more challenging as one cannot simply follow the drone back home.
Slaughterbot-scale drone attacks strike me as reasonably implausible in contemporary warfare. Targets are insufficiently dense, ranges are too short, and costs are comparatively high. A swarm of, say, 10 to 100 drones might be viable, but that's going to only take on 10 to 100 individual targets. Swarms of 1,000s of drones would require a very capable military organisation (of which the US, possibly a few other NATO forces, and perhaps China might be capable of affording such weapons), and still have to be transported relatively close to the field of battle by some other means. Though drop-shipping a standard 40-foot container might well be one option available. Others could be launching from a larger mothership (a drone aircraft itself, manned cargo aircraft, a ship or submarine, or land-transports such as trucks or railcars). Those are easier than launching an manned land-invasion, but still a complex undertaking.
Even states that have significant technical capabilities and relatively low inhibitions (Israel, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Iran, Russia) seem not to have widely adopted or deployed drone weapons, though whether that's a technical limitation or strategic decision I'm not sure.
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Notes:
1. As with all estimates, this is eliding a tremendous amount of detail and includes much guesswork and outright ignorance. I'd greatly appreciate pointers to accurate information on fighting vs. support troops. I'm omitting national guard though I'm well aware that they serve combat roles. My sources don't give hard numbers on soldiers in infantry, though I'm finding that the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 11th, and 25th divisions are considered "infantry", that a typical division is 10k -- 25k soldiers, so we're looking at 50k -- 250k soldiers assigned to infantry divisions, though again some fraction of that is support roles. Still, $0.5 -- $5 million for a soldier-year on the ground seems a reasonable ballpark.
Slaughterbots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24825928
Makes countermeasures harder (can’t just jam the control signal)
Allows scale (don’t need 1 pilot per drone, so can have 1000 drones flying in a swarm)
And perhaps most scary, it launders responsibility (It wasn’t US that chose to kill those people, it was “the algorithm”)
Count Zero, 1986
https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Golden_Path#Objectives
The evolution of prescient hunter-seeker. You can look it up in 'God-Emperor of Dune' yourself if you want. It's one of the main plot points. The evolution of autonomous, self replicating killer machines driven by human power dynamics.
What else is AI but the attempt to predict and exploit human behavior?
The ideas that war is the father of many things (Heraclitus) and its creatures grow over man's head (Golem, Sorcerer's Apprentice) is not exactly new. I could probably dig up even older cultural knowledge from ancient Indian culture. The evolutionary dynamic of hunter and hunted is also old news.