[Animats]

Progress marches on. Autonomous visual navigation have been available for some time. Face recognition can be done with smartphone hardware. Inertial guidance for drones is available but still a bit pricey.[1]

This is going to be a major problem for the golf industry. It's the ideal target environment - high-value targets, no place to take cover.

[1] https://www.uavnavigation.com/products/ahrs-imu/polar-300

[esturk]

Nah, golf industry will be fine. If a technology is so advantageous, then it will eventually become the counter to itself. Imagine several drone swarming around you like a body guard and you would have several orbital layers for short/medium/long range protection.

Imagine a drone being so sophisticated that it can calculate the sniper shot gunning for you and can even deflect the bullet or take the direct hit for you. Same for suicidal bombs. If the enemy drone explode on impact, your drone can kamikaze theirs.

[sudosysgen]

That can just never work. Several drones swarming around you do will do bugger all against enough shrapnel, or against a shaped charge, or just a sufficiently heavy drone going fast enough. Or the drone could carry a chemical agent and kill you.

The economics of defence are such that kamikaze anti-drone drones won't work. Either they'll miss the vast majority of the time, or they will be hideously more expensive than the drone they're defending against.

[Animats]

"The bomber will always get through". That remark was made about the big bombing campaigns of WWII, and the planned nuclear attacks of the 1950s and 1960s. Drone attacks are the same concept in miniature.