[roenxi]

Considering the lower and upper bounds on the death toll this sort of technology will be responsible for ... that is a bit ghoulish.

In fact, one of the worst aspects of this is that it will enable people who think "wow this is cool, just like Starcraft!" to kill hundreds of people without ever even having to confront the amount of damage they are doing.

[jdiez17]

Totally agreed. I found myself mesmerized watching the short video [1]; wow cool tech, nice views... but there are serious ethical implications for the engineers working on these systems. Let's not forget that our work as technologists does not exist in a vacuum.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4T6Vr4a1hY

[Aeolun]

To be fair, work on recovering drone aircraft in midair can be employed for a whole lot more than just military purposes.

[flipbrad]

I could imagine it being useful for search and rescue missions

[CaptainJustin]

Can you imagine how this would the increase the search radius of a air rescue mission? One search and rescue flight looking for survivors could launch a half dozen drones each extending the explored area by thousands of square kilometres per hour.

[derekjdanserl]

How often are drones used for anything of that sort? Any actual examples? Or are you just purely fantasizing?

[Aeolun]

Just found a quick example.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-northern-ireland-foyle-west-5...

[ceejayoz]

Drones are pretty quickly being adopted by search and rescue and firefighting organizations. No reason to think that's gonna stop.

https://www.birminghamtimes.com/2021/11/video-drone-rescue-s...

[yissp]

"Search and rescue" seems to be given as the use-case for every new development in robotics. Is it basically a meme in that field by this point?