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Comment by zer00eyz | Hacker News Reader

> Autonomous AI weapons

In theory, you can do this today, in your garage.

Buy a quad as a kit. (cheap)

Figure out how to arm it (the trivial part).

Grab yolo, tuned for people detection. Grab any of the off the shelf facial recognition libraries. You can mostly run this on phone hardware, and if you're stripping out the radios then possibly for days.

The shim you have to write: software to fly the drone into the person... and thats probably around somewhere out there as well.

The tech to build "Screamers" (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screamers_(1995_film) ) already exists, is open source and can be very low power (see: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/O_lz0b792ew ) --

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> software to fly the drone into the person... and thats probably around somewhere out there as well.

ardupilot + waypoint nav would do it for fixed locations. The camera identifies a target, gets the gps cooridnates and sets a waypoint. I would be shocked if there wasn't extensions available (maybe not officially) for flying to a "moving location". I'm in the high power rocketry hobby and the knowledge to add control surfaces and processing to autonomously fly a rocket to a location is plenty available. No one does it because it's a bad look for a hobby that already raises eyebrows.

The Ukrainian drones that took out Russia's long range bombers used ArduPilot and AI. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb)

> a hobby that already raises eyebrows

Sounds very interesting, but may I ask how this actually works as a hobby? Is it purely theoretical like analyzing and modeling, or do you build real rockets?

Build and fly. It’s interesting because it attracts a lot of engineers. So you have groups who are experts in propulsion that make their own solid (and now liquid bi-prop) motors. You also have groups that focus on electronics and make flight controllers, gps trackers etc. then you have software people who make build/fly simulators and things like OpenRocket. There’s regional and national events that are sort of like festivals. Some have FAA waivers to fly to around 50k ft. There’s one at Blackrock Nevada where you can fly to space if you want. A handful of amateurs have made it to the karman line too.

Not whom you are replying to, nor a rocket hobbyist myself, but yes, they do build and launch rockets for fun, eg VC Steve Jurvetson out at black rock: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/54815036982/

Pretty impressive!

Didn't screamers evolve sophisticated intelligence? Is that what happens if we use claw and let it write its own skills and update it's own objectives?

Scarier, in the original story, the robots were called "claws".

Judging by the ecohazard of fiber optics Ukraine has become I think it’s safe to say it can’t be this easy

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