[bostik]

> 30 milligrams of high explosive is enough to open your daughter's skull, or, more relevantly, your commanding officer's daughter's skull, and there are a thousand ways to deliver it

While we are talking about flying drones, we are not far off from Slaughterbots becoming reality.[0] Why bother with surgical assassinations if you can blanket entire regions with with swarms of autonomous seek-and-destroy explosives?

After all, as last two years have so amply demonstrated: people are fine with genocide.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU

[godelski]

What's important to remember is that we get to Slaughterbots with "best intentions." Trying to feel safer. Trying to kill our enemies. Trying to protect our friends, families, children. Little by little is how it happens. The road to hell is paved, after all.

[nine_k]

Well, no. People with outright evil intentions, the kind that would hire a hitman, definitely also pour money and brains into the very same research.

Technologies are morally agnostic: a knife, a rifle, a piece of cryptography, they all work equally well for the noblest and the most nefarious purposes. It's the humans' task to structure the society in such a way that good uses of technology mostly dominate evil uses.

[godelski]

You're missing the substance of what I've said. No one is denying evil people exist. But take a few more seconds to process what I said...

[nine_k]

I know that the road to hell is paved with best intentions. My point is that the pavement is not 100% best intentions, some intentions are outright bad, and we should acknowledge that, and prepare to face that.

[godelski]

Yes, I understand. I was trying to point out that essentially everyone default understands that, so it does not need be said. Bad causes bad, people know this or are hopeless. Good causes bad is non-obvious and needs constant reminder.

[kragen]

Slaughterbots is just the beginning; it's definitely too late to prevent that scenario now.

Why bother? For the same reason to bother with surgical assassinations if you can blanket entire regions with nuclear fireballs. Radioactive wastelands are unprofitable! This is a general problem with genocide: it only gets you land, and since the Green Revolution land is abundant. Protection rackets, on the otehr hand, are highly profitable, but only with some exclusivity; if extortionists multiply, the unique Nash equilibrium is multiple gangs that collectively demand many times the victims' total revenues, resulting in ecological collapse.

More generally, the threat of violence is only effective as a form of coercion when you can credibly withdraw the violence as a reward for compliance. Violence provides no incentive to comply to someone who believes they are just as likely to be a victim whether they comply or not.

But swarms of autonomous seek-and-destroy explosives are plausibly the most effective way to provide that surgical-assassination threat, perhaps combined with poisons, solid penetrators, and/or incendiaries. The Minority Report spiders (not yet technically feasible) or a quadcopter can be enormously more selective than a GBU-57, a Hellfire missile, or even a hand grenade, and can choose to avert their attack at the last millisecond upon the presentation of properly signed do-not-assassinate orders, even if long-distance communication is jammed.

[nine_k]

This is correct. But the surgical precision is only enabled by the fact that a person can be reasonably well located and tracked. It's likely not hard to pinpoint a specific person of interest in a vast metropolis, but, IMHO, really hard or impossible to locate a specific wild zebra in an African savanna, because they do not wear tracking devices, and inhabit large areas. So you can target e.g. me in NYC much more easily than some specific zebra, even though the zebra is likely less intellectual and less privacy-conscious.

Hence, I suppose, important figures will eventually disappear from the public eye. Definitely, a president or a governor must be present in person at many events. But e.g. CEOs of military contractors, or even key scientists and developers in certain fields, may start to fade away, turn pseudonymous, and virtualize, now that remote work and videoconferencing is normalized. They would still be somehow trackable as normal citizens, but their visible connection to their work would be severed and kept an utmost secret, literally a life-and-death secret.

This would be good news for national defense, but bad news for any dissenters who cross any powerful-enough entities for those to consider an assassination or at least blackmailing. Unlike a hitman, a hit drone can be completely and safely destroyed beyond recognition within an hour, by burning it and grinding the ashes.

Also, precisely delivered non-lethal means could be quite effective, and hard to track. Inject or just spray a bad virus to disable your opponent for several critical months. Spray a potent allergen if the target is allergic. Inject some LSD into politician's bloodstream an hour before an important meeting or speech. "Innocent" stuff like that.

[gruez]

>After all, as last two years have so amply demonstrated: people are fine with genocide.

Last two years? Try last few decades at the very least. People only care about the war in Gaza more because it's controversial. For non-controversial cases people just agree it's bad but shrug their shoulders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_genocide

[jonah]

What's ridiculous is that it's even seen as controversial by some.

[tomalbrc]

It is will how some people will live in their bubble and not see the controversies

[chrz]

People care because they follow news. You dont send reporters where you dont want news about.

[aleph_minus_one]

In many European countries people do care about the Bosnian genocide - I mean the geographical distance is not that far from where they live.

This also explains the more prevalent ignorance concerning the other two genocides of your list: they are simply for away from the place the respective person lives.

[autoexec]

It's sad that it was only months after that video was released that autonomous drones were being used to kill people in war. That video was meant as a warning but it was totally ignored.

[MoonGhost]

> After all, as last two years have so amply demonstrated: people are fine with genocide.

And open war crimes like intentionally killing civilians (TV broadcasters in Iran for example, or Gaza en mass)