Drones will realize the promise of suicide terrorism
blog.exitgroup.us
blog.exitgroup.us
The article doesn't get much into what can be the next step - fully autonomous drones that travel by night, charge by day, and find a target by themselves. A bit like landmines, with a shorter half-life, but highly mobile and intelligent enough.
You're aware that the (to my knowledge, which is entirely based on documentaries) primary way drugs are shipped to the USA are drones nowadays? Some via air, some underwater etc
There is just to much area and drones are tiny. It's infeasible to track them without spending insane amounts of money (and creating a total surveillance state as a by-product)
It's not impossible if it's predominantly automated. You have swarms of "police drones" on patrol actively scanning for other drones and when they see one that they don't like (some sort of signed certificate that authenticates the owner and their license) they shoot it down. It works as long as the "police drones" are plentiful and well dispersed to the point of maintaining dominance.
>and creating a total surveillance state as a by-product
that's what i meant when i said this brings its own host of problems. My point's not that our way of life will continue unabated my point is that this particular force multiplier goes both ways, and the defense will be a sort of "drone police corps". The biggest problems will be whatever happens outside of the "margin of error" (ie accidentally shooting down the wrong drones, civilians caught in crossfire, people hurt by falling debris) and the general end of any notion of privacy (not that America isn't already going in that direction anyways).
Floating clouds of molecular drones ever-present designed to destroy other unauthorized drones, and that technology will enable the long walk on a short pier for those that violate phyle rules. Cookie cutters.
For decades we've lived in a society where defending against these kinds of violent acts was far easier than committing them. That's changing, and it only has to change a little bit to have radical effects on society.
The reality is that a majority of people are simply too lazy to do this stuff. We are talking about populations that call a guy to come change a lightbulb - rigging a drone with explosives, figuring out control at a distance - this is beyond the scope of capability for the majority of malcontents. Most would-be pipe bombers end up nabbed at the point where they try to purchase a charge for their devices. Same deal here. Yes, there’s scope for a small number of bad actors to wreak havoc, but the thing about small numbers is that they are readily dealt with through existing law enforcement frameworks.
On a state level, war is war, and arms races are never static. You send flotillas of drones? I manufacture flotillas of counter-drone drones.
Yes, there is an asymmetry currently, but just as air supremacy was once seen as “well, this makes war practically impossible”, and became just another battleground, the same will happen here.
“Further, the process of transformation… is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
The recent advancements in the normalization of hate and suffering, while tech keeps advancing, makes me feel like I have Cassandra Syndrome, aka, I feel like I am taking crazy pills.
We are coming face to face with the concept of exponential growth itself. Humanity versus the feedback loop. And it will take coordinated genius to best such a naturally powerful foe.
The memory of what happens when hate takes control died, literally. The people who survived WWII are mostly gone. Now, without their knowledge, without their shame, we are swinging back to the other side.
My concern is that the swing happens to go the wrong way, at the same time that we happen to have an incredibly asymmetric ability to destroy each other.
We might be 1 or 5 swings away from that being a truly end-of-times situation. At this point, that seems to me like it would be when a pissed off kid, whose parents were killed as "collateral damage," could create a novel pathogen with only a $10k lab.
If tech and hate keeps advancing at the current rate, what is that, 100 years max? We really need to get our shit together.
Drones aren't limited to quadcopters.
> Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot.
So do that?
Humans are persistance predators, or so I'm told. We didn't domesticate horses by running faster than them, but by because they had to rest, and when they stopped we'd catch up, and then they'd run again, a cycle that repeated until they couldn't run any more.
But these days, we humans are no longer nomadic: we live in predictable homes, and most of us who work do so at predictable locations.
A drone that takes a year to get to one of us? We could outrace it, or shoot it down… but only if we know it's there.
As someone in the IRA once told Margaret Thatcher, "We only need to be lucky once. You need to be lucky every time".
Why would that be an issue? Planners have to think further ahead, but the threat is only marginally decreased.
Isn’t that the answer to your question, then?
In any case, the solar cells should still be visible.
Such cells would be half as efficient I suppose, so would need to be twice as large and probably at least twice as heavy. I wonder how that might affect design and payload constraints as it scales.
(For competently designed fixed-wing drones, Canada is "in the area" of San Diego).
Advanced knowledge has only once been used in a terror attack, and not very effectively.
These types of drone would need to collect a lot of not-so-easy-to-get knowledge. You'd need weapons, mechanical design, electronic fuses ... but mostly an AI good enough to make decisions on their own. And frankly, with good AI you could do a lot more damage than this without ever killing anyone.
- Non-wired drones can be jammed. It’s early days for building defenses against these attacks.
- Non-state actors have far less access to the sophisticated intelligence needed to strike hard targets or secure against counter strikes.
- Setting up hidden bombs for remote detonation on soft targets, like the freeway, has been possible, no need for drones. What other factors have been preventing these types of attacks? How do drones change those factors?
If America was hunting Osama bin Laden today, I bet we’d have used a drone to kill him rather than sending in special forces. Likewise, if I was a cartel in the jungle or rebel force in the mountains, I’d be damned scared of the military or police coming after me with an endless wave of drones.
AI drones can't be jammed. And I wouldn't count on terrorists having qualms about how unethical this would be.
> Drones will realize the promise of suicide terrorism
> But the threat of soft-target suicide terrorism never came to much, because a suicide bomber is a targeting system with an ego.
> But a drone is a suicide bomber without the expensive bottleneck in targeting.
Their whole point is that the reason terrorists do not employ these tactics is that suicide bombers want to be remembered for destroying the White House rather than some numbered interstate highway; even if said highway is critical national infrastructure. Drones take that ego out of the equation. They don’t care if they’re used to blow up a highway and they especially don’t care that the last thousand drones failed.
The possibilities of drone warfare is terrifying, but imo the author is overstating the danger that they pose in the hands of domestic terrorists.
It's really not, the Ukrainians have geographically distributed assembly and testing, QC of quadcopters in the ten to fifteen inch propeller size class in many random and hard to find locations. A shitload of them can be assembled by a team of ten people working in a 2000 sq ft workshop in an apartment building basement.
Large drone factories like something that can crank out shahed 136 size uav? Or like what the US mil calls a group 3 uav? Or group 4 sized? Sure, agreed, different thing.
I agree with a lot of the points the author makes in this article but I question if they've ever assembled a 12" prop size quadcopter (large enough to carry a good sized amount of munition on a 10-15 minute one way trip) from components. It's something easy to distribute as a cottage industry.
Assembly is a very small part of the job.
Currently there's no shortage of the components, but we could imagine a strict trade controls of the components, some cold war deglobalization scenario or even a WW3. Without CPUs there's no drones.
how can you restrict such manufacturing tho??? I mean you literally cant block off an entire chinnese industry can you?
That's just one scenario, there's others. The supply chains are REALLY long and touch basically every important country on Earth and quite a few unimportant ones.
What West did was slapping russia on hands (but not too hard cause it's inconvenient).
> But drone technology is too cheap, too modular, and with too many useful civilian applications for the big players to control their manufacture. >What would you restrict, if you wanted to prevent any other actor from building drones? Batteries? Rotors? 3D printers? $17 Raspberry Pis?
Theres definitely a recognition of how cheap and easy it is.
What will bring it to an end will be a panopticon: video surveillance everywhere, stronger anti-encryption laws, AI monitoring the whole lot.
I'm not an activist with an agenda here; it's just that there's an upper limit to how much drone terrorism a society will tolerate.
Everything you described is the friction which societies will endure to stop these threats.
This friction will slow down our global economy, and break the world we have known entirely.
Which is why the article ends on:
> The future will be more like the past.
> As the scale of effective communication, transportation, maintenance, and influence recedes, society will become more human and more personal, with weaker and multifarious institutions.
> The collapsing institutional monopoly on violence will yield a renewal of local and personal violence, and a very messy working-out of a hierarchy suited to the new conditions.
> Anyway, it’s a great time to make friends.
I will say, that over time we have found ways to beat even the most distributed of systems. Napster and piracy come to mind.
Increasingly effective surveillance propels increasingly effective centralization throughout the entirety of human history.
There's an upper limit to how much authoritarianism a society can tolerate. Automated weaponry becoming cheaper and cheaper as technology progresses will eventually lead to a wave of decentralisation in society, because offense is much cheaper than defense, so wannabe tyrants will have a harder and harder time maintaining their own safety.
Explosives and fuzing mechanisms, which are already regulated in many countries.
(*edit - I mean by hosting factories for illicit materials!)
If prediction markets come to act as proof of life oracles- which they already have in a few cases- things get very dark very fast for everyone I reckon.
combined with the idea of the proliferation of local/personal violence
E.g. "I bet $1,000,000 of BTC that [politician] won't be assassinated before the end of 2025. Anyone want to prove me wrong?"
That was effectively the idea behind the "Assassination Market" site that popped up in the early days of Bitcoin [0]. Obviously that was just some stupid fantasy site made by some libertarian crypto weirdo that never led to anything real. (As far as I'm aware, no-one has yet assassinated Barack Obama.) But there's a first time for everything.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market#Assassina...
Instead we worry about things that are more sexy and less inevitable.
so second coming of Jesus is on the books?
can't wait.
Historically nuclear arms used to be thought of as creating a hostage type scenario, where you can think of major cities of nuclear powers held hostage by their opponents. This is ok as long as the rival nuclear powers remain large and few in number such that their desires for your compliance do not contradict those of another nuclear power. The drone problem is going to become a variant of the “everyone has nukes now” except drones are so much harder to detect in idle states.
Companies selling what they claim are solutions to this stand to print money, but it is not clear how it can really be done.
It will successfully mitigate the cheap flying drone threat as long as they aren't launched close to the target. There will probably not be any more birds in human territory however since discriminating will be counter productive anyway, hostile drones will seek to impersonate birds otherwise.
If you have 100 drones you can just launch them all at one critical thing.
If you want to defend one critical thing from 100 drones, you might need 200 drones protecting it.
And you also have to have 200 for every other critical thing.
And even if you do do that, they just need 150 drones.
With reusable drones you can deploy expensive defensive drone swarms at scale. For example: radar drones, ramming drones, gun drones, etc.
I don't see how long range single drones will be a meaningful threat in such a setup, even stealth drones will not be able to maintain stealth against multiple radar drones from different angles. The skies will belong to drone swarms.
The point being made here is that you can now have cheap attacks on boring targets, without having to risk any humans at all.
And by boring targets, they're talking about things like roads, or bridges and overpasses - ways to slow the global economy to a crawl, and to force nations into blowing their resources on defending everything.
> "What the Russians can’t do is harden every mile of highway, every bridge, every dam. Neither can the United States, and — critically — neither can the Chinese."
You will most likely require a ground drone with high explosives or launching an air attack drone, which will become an expensive complex operation. Mitigating the threat of cheap drones.
> But the threat of soft-target suicide terrorism never came to much, because a suicide bomber is a targeting system with an ego.
stating that many targets which would have truly been disastrous if hit, were ignored because the attackers wanted to satiate their egos or narrative, by hitting landmarks / high profile symbolic sites.
Also, frankly the idea of having that many drones flying around the whole country is probably just as terrifying as an actual drone attack. Who is going to be in charge of those ‘defensive’ drones?
The threat envelope has become everything.
Technology with globalization might be possible (I'm not entirely sure), technology we have today without organized states, not happening.
In the parlance of our times, city-states may be all you need.
Maybe, but the goal of terrorism isn't to destroy "value", whatever that is. It's to create fear and unrest and make life miserable for the people in the target country. "Economic disruption" doesn't do that. It doesn't actually do anything.
Also, drones are not needed for any of this, or suicide bombers. It's trivial to leave a suitcase on a train or in the subway and cause hundreds of deaths and extreme mayhem. (Not trivial to make a bomb to fit that suitcase, but not very hard.)
My theory of why it almost never happens is, there are actually very few terrorists.
It's telling that the examples in the post are not from individual terrorists but from states.
The UK security services reportedly have 43,000 terror suspects on their watchlist. [0] And they still haven't managed to prevent every terror attack in recent years.
Evil exists.
All things being equal, the advantage belongs to the defender, with a significant caveat: the defender must be aware of the risk and deploy defensive drones in advance.
One rule about "infinite scaling" predictions is that the real world always messes them up. Warfare has changed, that's true. The rest of the life is not so easy to change, and (useful) drones are harder to build than it looks.
I hope ExitGroup.US doesn't think they are the first group to have this kind of collective.
I won't call this a counter point, since what is argued is plausible, if not likely.
What I will make a comparison to piracy back in the MP3 era. It really seemed like it would be impossible to stop it, and then came the RIAA, MPAA. Eventually governments managed to figure out the internet and how to deal with the small and nimble upstarts.
But better still, (or less grim) is Netflix - when actual alternatives to piracy existed, people were more than happy to follow them.
(Of course that era didn't last for long, but we'll mark that as the utilty limit of the comparison)
No, then came Pandora and Spotify and YouTube. Nobody bothers pirating music these days because there's no point.
It's been made quite clear, that HN is fundamentally a right wing-nut controlled forum.
I think there are a lot of woke-nut people in the mix as well, maybe even an equal amount, but the wing-nut mode of the highly bimodal distribution just flags anything that demonstrates that we've elected a criminal to the office of US president. Whereas the woke-nut mode is tolerant of allowing discussion to carry on, even on topics they don't agree with.
I guess it was to be expected, given the vulture capital origins of the platform...
The current thread we're commenting in was flagged off the front page after forty minutes.
The "marines deployed to US cities" story was on the front page for over 12 hours and on the "active" page for well over 24 hours [1] (despite strange claims to the contrary).
The other stories seem too much in the realm of mainstream news, given we've already had a lot of it on the front page this week. The site guidelines explicitly state that mainstream news out of scope for HN, even though we make exceptions when the weight of community sentiment favours that (it did regarding the marines story, it hasn't about the others).
As someone who is looking at the front page and reading the discussions for hours each day, it seems to me that the weight of sentiment is fairly strongly against the current U.S. administration, and also generally unimpressed with the venture capital industry. As moderators, it's not for us to try and change anyone's mind about any of these things. We know we can't even if we wanted to (which we don't). It's up to community members to discuss the topics and try to persuade each other with good arguments, and our role is just to make HN a healthy place for that to happen.
If mainstream news is being flagged off the front page, it's not because people are politically motivated to "hide" that news (as if that would make a difference to anyone's awareness of these stories); it's because people come to HN to find out about technology and other topics that are interesting to technology enthusiasts, and much of the HN audience prefers to get their mainstream news elsewhere.
When I re-read my comment, I realize it's not completely clear: its definitely not my impression that moderation, or HN platform administration, are flagging these articles.
My impression is that a portion of the user community is.
In my interactions with moderation, I've always received even handed and personal replies. This, I feel, is one of the greatest aspects of HN.
While the majority of posts are technical, many many of the links on HN are non-technical. This seems to me to be an important feature. Tech doesn't exist in a bubble, it's part of broader society, and major breaking news impacts tech workers, tech products, and the viability of startups and the products they'll offer.
The tech communities ability to exchange comments on these broader issues is one of the most striking features of HN, and a great deal of users participate.
Moderators are certainly the most knowledgeable about the flow of threads and user affinity, I only have my outside impression. But it seems that threads describing certain events are flagged out of use much more frequently.
To me, it doesn't seem like a broad response of removing non-technical links, but more specific-topic motivated.
I don't know the exact details of when a flagged article becomes unavailable for comments, but it often seems that when one demographic is flagging the comments, others are eager to exchange discussion.
If there is a user <flag> link, that can make comments unavailable, wouldn't it be helpful to also include an <unflag> link?
I read quite a few news sites everyday. but I find links to non-technical news on HN that I didn't discover anywhere else. The community at HN is not only technical, but broadly knowledgeable about many many topics. This is a great feature of the site.
I'd just like to be able to comment on some articles that others don't seem interested in. I don't think I'm alone in that regard.
Moderation removing articles that are blatantly spam, ad hominem, or otherwise offensive is obviously needed, but letting the community converse on non-technical topics, even if a portion of the community is not interested, doesn't seem like a divergence from the core mission.
My comment is already too long, but I want to say again: Thank You for the efforts of the mods! and Thank You for all of your responses, which have always been thoughtful, and individually crafted.
Is this what he founding fathers were thinking of when they wrote the Bill of Rights?