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You paint a bleak future. Keep in mind though, there have been many dark moments in human history when a lot of people got killed for very bad reasons, and yet here we are. is as easy and anonymous as buying porn on Amazon I'm not sure ease of use is such a game changer. You can buy a drone today, completely anonymously, strap some explosives to it, remotely fly it into someone and detonate it, a few hundred yards away from you. Easily available cheap drones like that existed for at least a decade, yet I don't remember many cases where someone used them for this purpose. Does Slaughterbot-like product existence make it easier? If some terrorist wants to kill a bunch of people, how is it easier than just detonating a truck full of C4? To a terrorist this technology does not provide that much benefit over what's already available. How about governments? I don't see it - if a government wants someone dead, they will be dead (either officially, e.g. Bin Laden, or unofficially, Epstein-style). If a government wants a bunch of people dead, the difficulty lies not in technology, but in PR. I doubt there is a lack of trigger happy black ops types (or "patriots") ready to do whatever you can program a drone to do. Here I'm talking about democratic first world governments. It's even less clear if tyrannical governments would benefit a lot from this technology - sending a bunch of agents to arrest and execute people is just as effective. I don't think tactical difficulties of finding and physically shooting people is a big concern for decision makers. As you yourself pointed out, Khmer Rouge or North Korea had no problems doing that without any advanced technology. you must kill them before they have a chance to deploy their forces. Yes. And that's how it has been at least since 9/11 - CIA drone strikes all over the world. Honestly, I'd much rather have them only have done drone strikes if at all possible (instead of invading Iraq with boots on the ground). more rapid and complete than nuclear weapons could ever have threatened Sorry, I'm not seeing it - how would this change major conflicts and battlefields? If you have a battlefield, and you know who your enemy is, you don't really need Slaughterbots - you need big guns and missiles that can do real damage. It's much easier to defend soldiers against tiny drones than against heavy fire. If you don't know who your enemy is, say terrorists mixed in the crowd of civilians, how would face detection help you? As for precise military strikes - we're already doing it with drones, so nothing new here. end up with everyone inevitably dead within a few days
enjoy what remains of our lives before it ends them You are being overly dramatic. Yes, terrorists and evil governments will keep murdering people just like they always have. No, this technology does not make it fundamentally easier. Is the world today a scary place to live in? Yes, but for very different reasons - think about what will start happening in a few decades when the global temperature rises a couple degrees, triggering potentially cataclysmic events affecting livelihood of millions, or global pollution contaminating air, water and food to the point where it's making people sick. I really hope we will develop advanced technology by that time to deal with those issues. But of course it's way more fun to discuss advanced defense methods against killer drones. So let's do that :) I was thinking that some kind of a small EMP device could have been used whenever slaughterbots are detected, but after reading a little about EMPs it seems it would not be able to hurt them much because these drones are so small. I don't think nets of any kind would be effective - I just don't see how would you cover a city with nets. Underground fortresses and off-planet camps can only protect a small number of people. In some scenarios some kind of laser based defense system could be effective (deployed in high value/risk environments), and of course we can keep tons of similar drones ready to attack other drones at multiple locations throughout the city. Neither of these seem to be particularly effective against a large scale attack, and both require very good mass surveillance. I think that a combination of very pervasive surveillance with an ability to deliver defense drones quickly to the area of the attack (perhaps carried in a missile, fired automatically as soon as a threat level calculated by the surveillance system crosses some threshold) is the best option. The defense drones could be much more expensive than the attack drones, so be able to quickly eliminate them. Fascinating engineering challenge! |
The US is known to have carried out drone strikes in Afghanistan, Yemen (including against US citizens), Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia; authority over the assassination program was officially transferred from the CIA to the military by Obama. That leaves another 200-plus countries whose citizens do not yet know the feeling of helpless terror when the car in front of you on the highway explodes into a fireball unexpectedly, presaged only by the far-off ripping sound of a Reaper on the horizon, just like most days. The smaller drones that make this tactic affordable to a wider range of groups will give no such warning.
> It’s much easier to defend soldiers against tiny drones than against heavy fire.
Daesh used tiny drones against soldiers with some effectiveness, but there are several major differences between autonomous drones and heavy fire. First, heavy fire is expensive, requiring either heavy weapons or a large number of small arms. Second, autonomous drones (which Daesh evidently did not have) can travel a lot farther than heavy fire; the attacker can target the soldiers’ families in another city rather than the soldiers themselves, and even if they are targeting the soldiers directly, they do not need to expose themselves to counterattack from the soldiers. Third, almost all bullets miss, but autonomous drones hardly ever need to miss; like a sniper, they can plan for one shot, one kill.
You may be thinking of the 5 m/s quadcopters shown in the Slaughterbots video, but there’s no reason for drones to move that slowly. Slingshot stones, arrows from bows, and bottle-rockets all move on the order of 100 m/s, and you can stick guidance canards on any of them, VAPP-style.
> If you don’t know who your enemy is, say terrorists mixed in the crowd of civilians, how would face detection help you?
Yes, it’s true that if your enemy is protected by anonymity, face-recognition drones are less than useful — that’s why the first step in my scenario is the end of any government transparency, because the only people who can govern in that scenario (in the Westphalian sense of applying deadly force with impunity) are anonymous terrorists. But if the terrorists know who their victims are, the victims cannot protect themselves by mixing into a crowd of civilians.
> Yes, terrorists and evil governments will keep murdering people just like they always have. No, this technology does not make it fundamentally easier.
Well, on the battlefield it definitely will drive down the cost per kill, even though it hasn’t yet. It’s plausible to think that it will drive down the cost per kill in scenarios of mass political killing, as I described above, but you might be right that it won’t.
The two really big changes, though, are not about making killing easier, but about making killing more persuasive, for two reasons. ① It allows the killing to be precisely focused on the desired target, for example enabling armies to kill only the officers of the opposing forces, only the men in a city, or only the workers at a munitions plant, rather than everybody within three kilometers; ② it allows the killing to be truly borderless, so that it’s very nearly as easy to kill the officers’ families as to kill the officers — but only the officers who refuse to surrender.
You say “evil governments”, but killing people to break their will to continue to struggle is not limited to some subset of governments; it is the fundamental way that governments retain power in the face of the threat of invasion.
Covering a city with nets is surprisingly practical, given modern materials like Dyneema and Zylon, but not effective against all kinds of drones. I agree that underground fortresses and off-planet camps cannot save very many people, but perhaps they can preserve some seed of human civilization.