The Dawn of the AI Drone
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Not at all surprising, and a mostly arbitrary milestone for NYT to declare. But still key to mark the progression, and note where we are at right now.
this part seems painfully ironic: >often run on off-the-shelf microcomputers like Raspberry Pi
But we all know where this is headed. It's probably not too long until someone develops a system to uses surveillance drones to monitor and area and detect targets with AI, then dispatches automated attack drones to kill anything that moves.
[1] The only remote-controlled missile I'm even aware of is this one, from the 40s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_X.
2025: Eric Schmidt: I'm “a licensed arms dealer.”
> He has framed his movement into the A.I. arms sector as implicitly humanitarian. “Now you sit there and you go, Why would a good liberal like me do that?” he said at Stanford. “The answer is that the whole theory of armies is tanks, artilleries and mortars, and we can eliminate all of them and we can make the penalty for invading a country, at least by land, essentially be impossible.” A.I.-powered weapons, he suggested, could end this kind of warfare.
O RLY?
>This is a prediction with precedent from when machines guns were poised to upend ground combat as people knew it. In 1877, Richard Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun, a prominent forerunner of automatic fire, proposed that as an efficient multiplier of lethal violence his weapon might spare people the horrors of war. “It occurred to me,” he wrote, that “if I could invent a machine — a gun — which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies.”
>Maybe the future will prove Eric Schmidt’s vision right. Whatever is coming will reveal itself in time. History shows Gatling was spectacularly wrong.
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.” ― George Orwell
If you want a more malicious framing, it's "now that all your tanks and mortars are ineffective, when you want to have a war you'll need to buy lots of my drones"