[fnordpiglet]

There are also now drones with long spooling wires. Regardless, autonomous or not, connectivity to home is important.

I would note that a lot of drones are quite large too - small airplanes. They can carry more than enough hardware for autonomy. You can also have motherships doing planning and smaller kamikaze drones for combat.

These aren’t hard problems to solve, the harder problem is the reluctance to give over to automation. But that’s going to happen faster and faster.

[bdamm]

It is kind of a hard problem to solve. Sure, we can have expensive and custom equipment flying around, but the invasion of Ukraine (and really, any war when it gets bad enough) is all about economic efficiency. The question is not can it be done; the question is, can it be done repeatedly, can it be scaled, and can it be cheap?

We will have a fully autonomous Siri that is actually good before Ukraine gets autonomous motherships making targeting choices to repel Russian assault corps. However, given the pace of the war and the pace of AI development, that may actually happen. But it isn't happening today.

[pfdietz]

> long spooling wires

Long spooling optical fibers.