Slaughterbots

Can drones be stopped? They have the potential to wage campaigns of automated political violence. I see companies trying to protect against them, like Dedrone [1] -- how effective are these? I imagine most here have seen it, but if not, you must see the slaughterbots video. [2] [1] link [2] ▶ this video

This brings to mind a great video which I've posted here a few times: ▶ this video What happens when technology progresses so much that anyone can make a swarm of killer drones? Will politicians no longer be able to go out in public? What about a distant future, when enriching uranium can be done in your garage for cheap...

The substantive part of this conversation comes about 35 minutes in, when Allen describes the DoD's five AI ethics principles: that any deployed AI systems must be "Responsible, Equitable, Traceable, Reliable, and Governable." [1]. I think "Responsible" raises some hard questions. Today, any weapons use by a robot might require a responsible human operator to first (remotely) pull the trigger. But what if an adversary allows their robots to fire without waiting for human permission? The first side to do so would gain a critical advantage, and we cannot have an autonomy gap. Some have raised conerns that in the extreme case, this could lead to a world of machines anonymously killing without attribution. If you haven't, see Stuart Russell's compelling short film "Slaughterbots" [2]. [1] link [2] ▶ this video

The tech required for search and rescue is the same tech required for search and destroy. We seem to be running headfirst into the autonomous killer bot future without giving so much as a second look at the implications. Slaughterbots [0] is a pretty good look at what can be achieved by refining and integrating technologies which all exist today. [0] ▶ this video

Related: Reminds me of the slaughterbot video [0] and the Hated in the Nation Dark Mirror Episode [1][2] [0] ▶ this video [1] link [2] link

I don't think any of tensions, classical conflicts, asymmetric conflicts, the amount of people with nothing left to "loose", or all of these together, are at particularly unusual levels compared to the previous 6000 years, though they're higher than they were 20 years ago. But, for most of that time, warfare was geographically localized; you could avoid directly experiencing warfare by not being a soldier and living inside a country that wasn't being actively invaded, or on the national border between two countries that weren't at war with each other or being actively invaded. Sometimes that was easier said than done, but most people managed it most of the time. In the Drone Age, though, you can remotely pilot a quadcopter 4300 km away to blow up airplanes on the airstrip: link — or to blow up your political opposition, if you can guess where they are or will be. The US has been doing this for 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq: link (use Readability mode to bypass "this is not a paywall") but a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper costs on the order of US$100 million, so there are less than 400 of them link while Ukraine's most popular drones cost on the order of US$300, can be 3-D printed in a basement, already cause 70% of casualties on the battlefield, and are produced in volumes approaching 10 million per year link . Many experts believe drones have made tanks obsolete on the battlefield link . Even without autonomous weapons, we're rapidly moving toward the future of bor

It's a shame that Slaughterbots ( ▶ this video ) didn't have the intended impact and shortly after the video was released it seems that autonomous drones were used to hunt down humans Libya.

Every time I see one of these drone tech demonstrations, I can't help but wonder how they will be adapted for warfare. This one... I'm seeing flying solar powered landmines (skymines?) that can flutter around an active combat zone aimlessly for hours until it detects a personnel target and bops them near the temple with a small round. I wonder if there are any actual benefits over just putting a solar panel on a regular quadcopter and having them charge a battery, maybe staying stationary in field or ditch near the road, relocating once in a while and waiting for a target. Slaughterbots, assemble! ▶ this video

It's eery to see reality slowly resemble science fiction of the past. obligatory Slaughterbots reference: ▶ this video Also scary how much of this war you can watch with a POV. UkraineWarVideoReport is full of videos where you can see the drones and humans in action link

I remember the first time I learned about drone swarms was this YouTube video called Slaughterbots: ▶ this video Of course at this point, my country had been using drones to kill people since I was a small child, which I think is ironic. In the Slaughterbots scenario, each specific drone has sensors and AI good enough it can pilot itself and doesn’t need an external connection that can be detected or disrupted and is good enough to target individual people with facial recognition. I believe (this is not an area of expertise for me) that the drones depicted in that video are still far more advanced than what currently exists currently (but I think it could probably get there within the next 10-20 years), whereas the video linked shows a more realistic drone swarm attack where it’s targeting infrastructure and the blast radius is larger than being able to target an individual's head, but still smaller than traditional UAVs. It’s an upsetting watch, but the part of me that enjoys speculative science fiction (I love evaluating how realistic the apocalypse is in zombie movies) always found the attempted countermeasures employed to be silly and unrealistic. Covering windows and leaving only tiny circles so no drone can get through etc… But at the same time, the video struck a chord because as soon as I saw it, I knew some form of this was coming and likely within the next decade. But mitigations and countermeasures are being developed in tandem. I think that's the major thing the Slaugh

> Killer robots will be a great equalizer in the ability to create a nightmare hellscape I imagine most people here have already seen the Slaughterbots video: ▶ this video A more conventional type of attack would be using large numbers cheap cruise missiles. If you can make them for $20k each then $1bn would buy you 50,000 of them, which is probably a good deal more than the number of anti-aircraft missiles your adversary has, and certainly a lot more than their number of fighter aircraft. Therefore firing off a lot in one go would overload their defences and many would get through. If aimed at infrastructure target, they could cripple a country's economy, and how soon after that do people start starving?

It'd be better to link to the source[0], that's a content-stealing channel you linked to. [0] ▶ this video