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Comment by tonyarkles | Hacker News Reader

The child comments from yours are mentioning nuclear weapons as a parallel but there's one big difference between drone tech and nuclear weapons: plutonium is really hard to make.

We might be able to put a pin in this tech from a policy perspective, but the cat is way out of the bag as far as the tech goes. A cell phone already has all of the sensors you need baked right into it (honestly, we can thank mobile devices for getting the cost down). An ESC for a motor is a cheap microcontroller and a couple of MOSFETs. The frames can be made of cheap plastic. Even if things like ArduPilot didn't exist, a smart EE student could build one from scratch, including the flight control software, using parts from Digikey and relatively basic PID control code.

The cat is definitely out of the bag.

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A lunatic will be able to wipe out school children playing outside and have little chance of getting caught, for example.

Nice.

Yes, and so far it's much easier to drive a van into a crowd of people. Nobody has tried to mandate tech in cars that detects and prevents such malicious behavior.

Can you drive a van into a group of people without even being physically present though ?

> Can you drive a van into a group of people without even being physically present though ?

It's probably totally doable by now. We literally have self-driving cars.

Yes. https://www.psu.edu/news/campus-life/story/hackers-who-remot...

Even without vulnerabilities like that, something like https://comma.ai/openpilot could very likely be used in the same way ArduPilot was used in the recent Ukrainian drone attacks.

easier than a drone, technically. using the same tools and techniques too.

a van is just a bigger, more inherently stable drone.

The RAF guys tried this back in 1967 to attack the Iranian Shah...

Vehicles are registered and licensed to tie them to specific owners. You are required to provide a identification/drivers license when renting a vehicle. The largest, most dangerous vehicles like semi-trucks have additional restrictions on licensing and access. There is a pretty robust system in place to reduce unattributable crimes using vehicles.

I mean... yeah, that’s a definite possibility. If a lunatic has access to explosives, there’s an infinite number of ways they could do that.

The hard part is that there is no effective way to regulate anything in the supply chain involved except for the explosives themselves. Everything else is super commoditized at this point and, other than the props, very multi-purpose. The first significant hexcopter I built used a BeagleBone Blue for processing, generic ESCs and BLDCs for the motors, and an aluminum frame that I cut out of aluminum tubes from Home Depot. Max takeoff weight was 55lb, because that’s the heaviest it could legally take off with. This was 7 years ago.

If one is a lunatic, there are easy to find recipes for making bulk (albeit dangerous to be around) explosives.

one thing in societies favor though - sufficiently unstable lunatics tend to self delete themselves in various ways by being unstable lunatics. few tend to be in the “sweet” spot of dangerous lunatics who are stable and focused enough to follow through successfully with a dangerous plan. thankfully.

For example - most people who could synthesize multi-kilo quantities of TATP without blowing themselves up and successfully build a DIY drone to carry it have better and more productive things to do with their lives. at least in the west.

Generally, if you are smart enough to fashion this without being caught, you are too smart to do something like that.

Plus, you got a cool and potentially lucrative hobby, designing exterminator machines. Why bother with children at that point?

There are much, much better targets to be had.

Your point on the dwindling barrier to implementation stands.

It's the barrier to implementation that I find concerning and the lack of defensive innovation just as much of a concern.

> Why bother with children at that point?

the premise is that the person doing it is very mentally ill. the question, "why would they do that when they could do something else that makes more sense?", doesn't make a lot of sense itself under the premise.

If a person is very ill mentally then there are already many ways to kill people in numbers, some of which ways are much more accessible than slaughterbots.

"Most people don't want to murder innocents" isn't reassuring. It only takes one lunatic. And there's a lot of lunatics out there.

Then the proper solution is to create fewer lunatics: provide better mental health support, good social safety nets, and a more egalitarian society.

Well yes, but that's a utopian idea that can never be fully realised. You can't fix them all. There'll always be some number of crazy, broken, malevolent psychos out there. If you don't think this is true then you need to meet more people.

We need to minimise the damage they can cause, and that means preventing them from using slaughterbots.

> A lunatic will be able to wipe out school children playing outside and have little chance of getting caught, for example.

America insists on making sure that guns are universally available so that school shootings can still happen. Doesn't register. The death toll seems to be politically acceptable.

That’s why only the strong communities with strong families will survive, because even lunatics are cared for in strong community structures.

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