Musk-Backed 'Slaughterbots' Video Will Warn the UN About Killer Microdrones (space.com) 252
An anonymous reader quotes Space.com:
A graphic new video posits a very scary future in which swarms of killer microdrones are dispatched to kill political activists and U.S. lawmakers. Armed with explosive charges, the palm-sized quadcopters use real-time data mining and artificial intelligence to find and kill their targets. The makers of the seven-minute film titled Slaughterbots are hoping the startling dramatization will draw attention to what they view as a looming crisis -- the development of lethal, autonomous weapons, that select and fire on human targets without human guidance.
The Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to mitigating existential risks posed by advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, commissioned the film. Founded by a group of scientists and business leaders, the institute is backed by AI-skeptics Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, among others. The institute is also behind the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of non-governmental organizations which have banded together to call for a preemptive ban on lethal autonomous weapons... The film will be screened this week at the United Nations in Geneva during a meeting of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons... The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is hosting a series of meetings at this year's event to propose a worldwide ban on lethal autonomous weapons, which could potentially be developed as flying drones, self-driving tanks, or automated sentry guns.
"This short film is more than just speculation," says Stuart Russell, a U.C. Berkeley considered an expert in artificial intelligence.
"It shows the results of integrating and miniaturizing technologies we already have."
The Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to mitigating existential risks posed by advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, commissioned the film. Founded by a group of scientists and business leaders, the institute is backed by AI-skeptics Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, among others. The institute is also behind the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of non-governmental organizations which have banded together to call for a preemptive ban on lethal autonomous weapons... The film will be screened this week at the United Nations in Geneva during a meeting of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons... The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is hosting a series of meetings at this year's event to propose a worldwide ban on lethal autonomous weapons, which could potentially be developed as flying drones, self-driving tanks, or automated sentry guns.
"This short film is more than just speculation," says Stuart Russell, a U.C. Berkeley considered an expert in artificial intelligence.
"It shows the results of integrating and miniaturizing technologies we already have."
Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
If it can be thought up it WILL BE built!
Re:Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear bombs which are highly cobalt salted to increase fallout have been thought of but the evidence is that no nuclear power has built them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb [wikipedia.org]. Similarly currently, we know how to make a massive number of different types of chemical weapons, but the vast majority of countries have none in their arsenals.
The weapons you mention are indiscriminate, and can easily cause just as many problems for those that deploy them as they do for the targets. There are very good reasons not to use or bother building them. The whole point of the drones is that they're cheap, surgical, and can be deployed with little to no consequence for the attackers.
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The worst thing about the drones is that even if they are only used by state actors with legitimate targets in mind, they still won't be 100% accurate.
Errors in facial recognition will happen, or criteria will be set too broadly to ensure the target gets hit - but that well targeted killbot could just as easily get the wrong guy, which would be chalked up to "acceptable collateral damage".
If its so hard to get OCR to be more than about 98% accurate, when its analysing a high resolution scan of stationary
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>> They will just define accurate as within a hundred miles of the official target and anyone within that region as enemy.
You aren't wrong. In Afghanistan the definition of a militant for the purpose of counting civilian casualties was "all military-age males in a strike zone".
Said another way, if we blew up a male aged 15-35 it was cool, because he was a "terrorist".
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Re:Pointless (Score:4, Insightful)
currently, we know how to make a massive number of different types of chemical weapons, but the vast majority of countries have none in their arsenals.
Tobacco kills 7 million people worldwide every year.
Alcohol kills over 3 million people worldwide every year.
Countless other harmful yet legal chemicals used in pesticides and food additives. Cancer affects 1 in 3 humans.
Every battlefield humans have ever stepped on cannot even try to compare to these statistics.
Perhaps we need to understand that chemical warfare is a lot more fucking subtle these days.
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Given that you could make these swarms with COTS parts and mostly open-source software... yeah.
Of course, drones that are capable of carrying a significant payload are still expensive. Right now this would very much be a 'one person per drone that gets through the defenses' kill tool. It's for assassinations, not terrorism.
The real fun starts when someone realizes you can fly very small drones at high altitude and have them loiter until someone on the ground marks the target for them. There are already m
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Of course, drones that are capable of carrying a significant payload are still expensive.
A quadcopter that costs $120 to build from eBay parts can carry a kilo. The actual production cost is way lower. And you could deliver the same payload much cheaper with styrofoam, foamcore, or coroplast gliders. You'd need some way to launch them, but there's a variety of ways to do that. Balloon drop, say.
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Auto shotgun manjacks loaded with birdshot for everybody's roofs.
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Pew pew pew pew pew what could go wrong?
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Mosquito sized drones that give doses of LSD, sarin or anything else toxic.
A firecracker, not a bomb (Score:4, Interesting)
>> Armed with explosive charges, the palm-sized quadcopters use real-time data mining and artificial intelligence to find and kill their targets.
>> If you can attach a camera to a drone, you can attach a bomb
The cameras used to hobby drones typically weigh 20-100grams. In the US, Fourth of July fireworks sold to the public can weigh 1,000 grams (with 500 grams of explosive inside). So the camera could be replaced with a small firework, which would make the target curious about that popping noise.
1,000 Kg is a decent bomb (1 million grams, or 10,000 times as much as a drone camera).
$500-$1000 quads CAN carry a bit more weight, but at a major reduction in flight time and range, as well as speed and the ability to fly in a stiff breeze. Unladen, a DJI Phantom 3 Professional ($700) can fly for about 23 minutes. Add a 1Kg payload and flight time is less than half that much. At 6MPH it could cover about 1 mile, if there is no breeze at all. With a 5MPH breeze against it, and carrying a 1Kg load would cover a several hundred feet before the battery died.
You're probably better off just throwing the pipe bomb with your hand. Much simpler. If you must go "fancy", a potato gun (plumbing pipe and hairspray) will go just about as far with a 1Kg grenade.
Going a little larger (Score:2)
Above I talked about hobby-sized drones like DJI makes, on the $500-$1000 range. I didn't address the "palm sized" concept in the ridiculous video because palm sized toys have don't have the payload capacity to even cause pain. Those might able to barely carry a "black cat" style fire cracker, the tiny ones that come in a roll of 500 crackers. Those don't hurt much when they go off in your fingers, much less cause any permanent injury (guess how I learned that).
So let's scale up to something that can do
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It only needs to carry a very small amount of a nerve agent. I don't know microbots are viable, but they needn't carry an explosive charge to be lethal.
Re:Going a little larger (Score:5, Informative)
There is a big difference between a black cat, and a shaped high explosive charge.
Take for instance, semtex. This is a commercially available plastic explosive used for demolition. (and frequently used by terrorists.)
250 grams of it is enough to destroy an in-flight airplane, if properly placed.
The premise of the video is that a human skull is pretty thin, and not evolved to stop a shaped explosive's concussion wave. If one uses something like this, they can blow half your skull off with just a few grams of material, pretty much exactly like in the video.
A shaped charge explosive works by having a special void in the explosive material on the surface that is to be favored for blast-wave creation. This provides a high velocity path of least resistance, through which combustion products of the explosion will favor being expelled, and giving the explosion a preferred direction for energy delivery. (This is very different from a fire cracker, which explodes basically uniformly.)
Considering that just about any high explosive is many times more powerful per gram than the black powder found inside the black cat mentioned by the grandparent, and are capable of producing shaped shock fronts on detonation, I basically call bullshit on grandparent's dismissal. For reference, military grade C4 plastic explosive detonates with a combustion rate 29,000 feet per second. Black powder? Between 600 and 1400 feet per second. Literally, just replacing that "black cat" with the same weight of C4, increases the explosive force 20 times, at best, and 48 times at worst.
Apples and oranges sir. Your black cat is not even in the same class as the material they are suggesting could be inside these drones.
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Flash powder is not exclusively used in typical bangpops. Black powder is indeed often used.
However, for the sake of argument, let's use flash powder. It indeed does burn significantly faster-- 25000 feet per second. (Not too shabby, and in the same general ballpark as C4. However, a significant fraction of a fire cracker is paper and clay containment. You dont need that with a plastic explosive, meaning you get more actual explosive for the payload. There is maybe a gram of flash powder inside a black cat,
Detonation is not fast combustion (Score:2)
>An object "Detonates" when the burn rate exceeds the speed of sound
Detonation is a pressure reaction, it is not burning (which is a heat-based reaction). Not even burning "really fast".
The same compound may be able to both burn (combust) and detonate. Burning is always at a rate less than the speed of sound, so if you measure the reaction to be happening faster than the speed of sound, it must be detonating rather than burning (or detonating in addition to detonating - the products of RDX combust in t
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You are aware of how a bullet gets fired, right?
A primer cap filled with crushed glass and lead azide has a little "hammer" inside it that compresses the mixture inducing a small detonation. That detonation then detonates the powder in the shell.
In a fire cracker, a burning fuse extends into a sealed container (usually made of paper and clay)- when the inner explosive mix is ignited, it produces lots of gas. This increases the pressure inside the firecracker until the rest of the explosive detonates from th
I was going to say, in non-technical terms, danger (Score:2)
Yeah I started to follow up my post by saying;
Putting aside the fact that no specific number can compare the two since they work in fundamentally different ways, a C4 explosion is intuitively "more dangerous" than a flash powder or black powder explosion. I've made high explosives and made a lot of low explosives, so I wanted to some idea of how "strong" they are in comparison. That's kinda like asking how much stronger Jim Beam whiskey is than solar power, but what I came up with was high explosives such
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Maybe not enough for a simple bomb, but 150g is enough for a long needle laced with something suitably toxic. A bit beyond the means of a lone wolf attacker, but well within the capabilities of even the smallest nation. All the drone need do is identify the target and ram. Ricin would be ideal. Or abrin - that stuff is so toxic you'd only need to fly the drone around your target's head while dispersing it into the air.
I've seen this idea before many years ago. It was an episode of Bugs. Their drones looked
Re:A firecracker, not a bomb (Score:5, Interesting)
A more realistic weapon for a palm-sized drone would be a wasp-style injection, just ram the target and have a spring released needle to punch through the clothing and skin or shoot from close range like a taser gun. There are plenty toxins you could deliver that would be fatal with even a very tiny dose. But the topic wasn't really if a drone attack is practical, but whether an autonomous drone attack is more practical. I don't really see it, if there's only one target then human RC will do fine. If there's many targets, gathered in a relatively small space like some form of meeting or conference, why wouldn't you just hit that with one big bang? I mean the assumption here is that you're willing to commit mass murder, are you going to care if there's a little collateral?
I'd think the only reason you'd care is because you're trying to be the good guys, like IS is using human shields or they're in a camp with women and children or whatever and you want to make precision kills without harming the rest. In any case there's probably good reasons to build all this technology for non-lethal purposes, swapping out some non-critical function with some kind of trigger/detonator is always going to be easy. It's like trying to build an alarm clock that can't be rigged to blow up a bomb when the alarm goes off. What are you going to do, ban alarm clocks?
1984 Dune - Hunter-Seeker drone (Score:2)
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Or you could have a high-speed slug of metal that travels at hypersonic speed and uses kinetic energy exclusively to cause damage, much like a snipers rifle.
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If your knowledge of explosives is limited to fireworks, you don't know anything about the subject. Don't you think it odd that no military employs fireworks as weapons?
Here are three types of explosive munitions that would be quite deadly even in "hobby drones": explosive formed projectiles (EFPs) [wikipedia.org], directed fragmentation munitions like the Claymore mine [wikipedia.org], and then there are ordinary fragmentation grenades [wikipedia.org].
A drone/EFP system designed for assassination (aiming and attacking a specific target) could use an EFP
Yep, back to a hand grenade like I originally said (Score:2)
Yep, something generally along the lines of that 400 gram grenade is about the sweet spot. (Which is why I said "grenade" in my original post. You could try a shaped charge (and good aim) but at this scale I'm not sure how much difference that makes - you get better yield in one direction, but need to aim, which means adding a gimble for aiming and gust of breeze can wreck your day.
400g plus facial recognition computer is enough to hamper the flight performance of the drone, especially in a breeze, so range
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A good directed fragmentation payload could get a reliable kill out to 25 meters (just think of it as one quarter segment of a Claymore mine), which is much more than "a couple of meters", a drone flying straight in and detonating at 25 meters might tax Secret Service perimeter protection to get the President behind cover before the kill shot was made. And only he and the VP have this level of protection. Anybody else in the U.S. would be far more vulnerable.
And sure booby trapping a car and getting within
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>> $500-$1000 quads CAN carry a bit more weight, but at a major reduction in flight time and range, as well as speed and the ability to fly in a stiff breeze. ...
>> You're probably better off just throwing the pipe bomb with your hand.
ISIS has published a highlight reel of effective attacks with the weapons you describe as ineffective or implausible.
The video is here. This shows people dying.
NSFW, NSF-Children, NSF-Snowflakes.
https://www.liveleak.com/view?... [liveleak.com]
Compare a pressure cooker (cooking pan) (Score:2)
Like I said, sure you CAN attach a small pipe bomb to a drone. Basically a hand grenade. Or just throw the same pipe bomb with your hand.
Compare the video you posted (trusting ISIS to present accurate truth, btw) to the Boston Marathon bombing, which used a pressure cooker, a cooking pan from the 1600s. I think you'll find that the 500 year old technology of a metal pot is more effective than a $700 drone. An attacker can also get about 10 or 20 cooking pots for the same price they'd pay for each drone
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190 pounds to make it lethal, genius (Score:2, Interesting)
We toss bullets, actually complete cartridges in the campfire. They make a fun popping noise when they cook off. A bullet is a ball of lead. A cartridge is a bullet combined with gunpowder, a casing, and a primer, for loading into a gun. A gun makes a bullet go fast, and weighs about ten pounds. (Handguns are only effective out to about 20 feet, and even then two or three shots probably won't kill the bad guy.)
The important bit of the system is the part which aims the gun at a vital part of the target's
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A gun makes a bullet go fast, and weighs about ten pounds.
Nonsense. A and doesn't weigh even one pound in the case of a pistol.
Handguns are only effective out to about 20 feet,
That's a lot of bullshit. [quora.com]
and even then two or three shots probably won't kill the bad guy.
That depends very much on how good your aim is.
The important bit of the system is the part which aims the gun at a vital part of the target's body and fires at the proper instant. That part is called the marksman. It weighs about 180 pounds.
What does yolo 9000 [github.com] running on a raspberry pi zero weigh?
Everything you said was wrong.
Whoops, botched a link (Score:2)
1911 barrel is 3 1/8 oz. [1911forum.com] P90 barrel is .5 lb [hi-desertdog.com]. A cheap 450-sized quad can carry over 2lb. You could have four rifle shots for that, if your rounds were electrically triggered.
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LOL yea, fire a rifle round out of a hobby drone.. the drone will fly in the opposite direction wanted, and the lead will stay stationary almost and drop with very little velocity... Have you ever fired a gun, let alone a rifle?!?
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>> fire a rifle round out of a hobby drone..
>> the drone will fly in the opposite direction
>> the lead will stay stationary almost
Conservation of momentum indicates that your assertion is incorrect.
See also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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What does yolo 9000 [github.com] running on a raspberry pi zero weigh?
Perhaps SFM would be a better thing to do? You don't need to recognize things, you just need to hit the 1.7m-sized thing that moves.
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Disarm the plebs! They don't deserve freedom like us smart, virtuous Democrat partisans!
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A bullet needs a gun to fire it. You also need a lot of bullets to have any real chance of hitting something., At this point you are talking about a fairly large amount of weight.
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Ever heard of 12 Gauge Buckshot?
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Too short range for the use (why do you think shotguns are never mounted on military aircraft?), plus you're still going to need a gun.
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> Do you have any experience with explosives?
Yes, I do.
> I have seen what 200 grams of TNT will do to a human body
Ah so you saw the video that purports to represent what could happen if you were holding it in your hand when it went off? The one made with a glove full of hamburger meat (pre-ground)? Yeah it's not recommend to hold it in your hand. Put it a few feet away, perhaps on a flying drone, and see how much difference that makes. I'm no saying it would be totally safe, but it's also not a p
Ps: at 200 grams, a "swarm" of one or two (Score:2)
Btw your story / argument had a couple of conflicting points. You said:
"200 grams of TNT ... carry a suitcase to a location, open it and release a swarm of small drones"
To fly around with 200 grams of TNT and deliver it effectively, you're going to need a drone at least the size of a typical hobby drones like the DJI Phantom. That's 20"*20"*8". A "large" suitcase (airline standards) is 30"*19", so that'll hold a "swarm" of exactly one drone. Let's give your attacker an extra large suitcase so he can have
Swarms? (Score:3)
Is this like Millennium Challenge [wikia.com] where swarms of small, fast boats were able to disable/sink numerous simulated ships? Or, during that same exercise, swarms of cruise missiles overwhelmed the fleet defenses?
I guess, in one respect, at least someone's talking about it [theguardian.com].
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A cruise missile is just about the worst thing you would have coming at ships. I mean, the "cruise" in cruise missile means it is a cross between a missile and an airplane! If you have a whole "swarm" of them, duh, that's bad, and the ships will sink.
This is why when the US moves all our ships suddenly out of the Persian Gulf, Iran starts accusing of us preparing for war! Because in a war against an enemy who has cruise missiles, any nearby ships would sink.
For America, this is a danger to sailors in a Navy
Common sense (Score:2)
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I'm wondering if this is the sort of technology that can be defeated with chicken wire.
Probably not. The video demonstrates the swarms defeating windows and other hard surfaces by having a subset of the swarm commit suicide so that the rest can penetrate. No doubt these bots could be designed to handle countermeasures like chicken wire with some similar approach.
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I'm wondering if this is the sort of technology that can be defeated with chicken wire.
I was wondering that, also, along with large butterfly nets, jumbo cans of silly string, large tennis racquets - now that would be fun, kind of like a lethal version of "pass the parcel" - but primarily I was wondering how long their batteries last, how well do they function in the rain, and how much facial recognition technology can you get into something the size of a matchbox? Enough to ensure that wearing a Guy Fawkes mask can keep you safe?
On second thoughts, maybe not a Guy Fawkes mask - they strike m
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Yeah, the gaps in chicken wire are way less than a nanoparsec, so it is definitely good for nanoscale defense!
why palm sized? (Score:2)
why not a grape sized one that injects a neurotoxin?
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Or insect sized, for that matter. Black Mirror already did the whole "killer swarm of robots" thing before with robot bees were reprogrammed to kill. This idea isn't new.
Hell... why bother even building something new for this, when you can reprogram of modify something that already exists. Frankly, I'm suprised that a black hat hacker or terrorist hasn't already found a way to hack the autopilot system in a Model S in order to use it as a weapon.
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Black Mirror did it. But Bugs did it first
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>> Frankly, I'm suprised that a black hat hacker or terrorist hasn't already found a way to hack the autopilot system in a Model S in order to use it as a weapon.
There are some who believe that vehicle hacks have already been militarized and used for targeted killings. Until someone leaks proof, that remains the province of conspiracy theory.
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You can't service it yourself
Where is the slashdot rage about being able to hack and repair your own stuff?
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I figured that someone would just steal the car and make the modifications that way.
I would like to hope that if someone found a remote exploit of Tesla systems over their network, it would get patched quickly. That said, if Tesla continues to totally botch their Model 3 rollout and sends the company into bankruptcy, there might be a ton of unpatched cars out there in the future.
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>> Most of the "automated vehicle is hacked" type of potential requires direct access to the vehicle in the first place. eg you can hack most CANBUS II equipped vehicles, and insurance companies willingness to adopt CANBUS dongles for insurance purposes is the easy target.
Most, but not all. There have been at least two successful compromises of production vehicles via the IP connected entertainment system. It's also worth noting that RF keyless remote systems are usually directly integrated into the
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targeted assassinations are a surgical way to shape the future, while mass murder is just a news item.
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you make a bunch of assertions without proof or reasons.
Grape sized drones exist, that's why I specified the size. Neurotoxin that are lethal in microgram quantities exist. Ramming a person with a needle the width of a human hair or less mounted on a grape sized drone is a trivial feat to accomplish. Having a swarm of these attacking a crowd is just an engineering challenge of moderate difficulty.
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hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
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Seems pretty easy to thwart facial recognition. More concerning is the fact that most of us carry around a homing beacon in our front pocket.
Super easy, just wear a different mask every day of your life! See killer drone problem solved, easy-peesy.
What's the problem, exactly? (Score:5, Funny)
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Overrated. I'm not fond of the prospect of killer drones the size of hockey pucks flying around programmed to target political leaders, no matter what side of the aisle they sit on, thankyouverymuch.
20 gauge Handguns (Score:2, Insightful)
A 20-guage handgun with small birdshot loads would do a number on a whole swarm of microdrones.
Better yet, self-defense anti-drone microdrones to destroy any microdrones that approach a protected target....
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Drones that can employ facial recognition can also employ firearm recognition, and avoid the projected trajectory of its projectiles. They can also spread out enough you wouldn't take out more than a couple per shot. If you're in public, you're unlikely to want to start shooting randomly, particularly if they're level with you. They could just wait until you're asleep, have your pants down, have to reload, or don't have your shotpistol on you. You're also assuming you see/hear them coming, which may not be
The problem is they're too cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that these things are more destructive than older weapons. It's that these things give the power of a targeted artillery strike to anyone for pennies of what nation state weapons cost, so it opens up WWI type levels of destructive capability to just about anyone on any budget. WWI really caught people off guard. People had no idea the level of destruction that was going to be unleashed by the industrial revolution. Likewise people have no idea the destructive power that's going to be unleashed by the AI revolution.
Re:The problem is they're too cheap (Score:5, Interesting)
Forget artillery strikes. What's really gonna stir shit up is when drone attacks allow for anonymous murder. What society could cope with that? It's gonna be like handing a Death Note to every citizen on Earth, only you won't need to know their name. I COULD see a ban on murder-drones actually working though, as after the first time a crime family gets whacked, the black market won't touch them; people will go after individual sellers as well. Wearing a mask in public might become the norm... until voice-recognition is used instead.
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I imagine that organized crime would see it as bad for business. All those newly out of work hired killers won't be happy either. In the dystopian future, any sociopathic jerk with a few bucks can be a mafia boss and have a gang of robot killers working for him. I guess you could say that the invention of affordable firearms was a similar disruption, but civilization made it through that. Still, it's going to be a really gruesome couple of years once some factory in god knows where starts spitting these
Re:The problem is they're too easy to mod. (Score:2)
wrong conclusion (Score:3)
swarms of killer microdrones are dispatched to kill political activists and U.S. lawmakers
I know that deadly scenario is scary and romantic, but really, what is more likely to happen is swarms of microdrones delivering chicken mcnuggets and tubes of k-y, not killing political activists.
I Want Mine Better and Stronger (Score:2, Interesting)
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Hmm....so you are saying the Chinese are busy building ships to get them here? Those bastards!!
Slashdot you're letting me down (Score:2)
Fucking auto-playing videos (Score:2)
Can we get a link to a website that doesn't waste my bandwidth by auto-loading and auto-playing videos I have no intention to watch?
WW3 (Score:2)
The situation will only worsen since cars become silent, overpowered, oversized, overweight, and capable to pick up a high speed almost instantly.
It is not only traffic accidents, terrorists got it too. Overpowered cars and automatic guns are being used to attack innocent people in reality. However instead of regulating really harm
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I did some calculations a while ago. As of last year (or was it the year before?), the ten-year average annual deaths for terrorist attack in the US is less than that for lightning strikes, but greater than that for sharks.
In Australia, the sharks scored more kills than the terrorists.
The point here is that people are absolutely awful at estimating risk. They are highly biased to ignore the common, and consider only the exceptional.
"Mechanical Pesticide" (Score:2)
Inspired by recent advances in solar power and energy storage, a young scientist invents insect-sized drones that control pests on crops by piercing them. It's an new, environmentally friendly, chemical-free way of farming: mechanical pesticide. The some bright spark at the pentagon realizes that, in sufficient numbers, the technology can be a new, 4th class of weapon of mass destruction, one that the US is free to openly develop and use
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hosts files can't melt steel beams.
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No, but the book The Diamond Age covered all this stuff, we don't need a stupid bad video to point out the risks. If they wanted to do this right, they'd pay Neal Stephenson to do a film adaptation!
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Calm down, buddy, and take these little pink pills. Now the Vatican has what, exactly, to do with any of this?
Anyway, I did my part. After Mandalay Bay, I called UBS and sold all of my bump stocks.
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Ban bump stocks and the mass shootings will stop.
If you honestly believe this than you're a fucking moron, not to mention banning things has worked so well for us in the past. glad I don't have to worry about my child getting a hold of some heroin on the streets.. They will only use it when the government and their ilk say its ok.
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Did you know many pieces of military equipment are controlled by computers? And many of those computers have a hosts file? Ban hosts files today, and the killing will stop!
Tesla Model C (Score:2)
the "C" is for "Christine". He's a steven king fan.
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You jest, but people thought the machine gun was going to make war too terrible to wage. [theatlantic.com]
The New York Times, in 1897, called Maxim’s invention “terrible automatic engines of war,” and suggested their mere existence might convince world leaders to settle conflicts diplomatically.
It seems that the worst things are often the handy work of people trying to prove something.
Recognizing irony key to transcending militarism (Score:2)
Me being a broken record: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco... [pdfernhout.net]
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace o
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But how would our masters make a profit in a world of abundance?
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Speculating on plausible outcomes is the first step towards mitigating the consequences of them.
Re: Ob (Score:5, Insightful)
Another racist term for a Japanese person...
Again, the SJW mod crowd shows they are idiots, but on one thing, you're right. It is a racist term, but it's racist against white people' specially, South African and Rhodesian whites.
Subculture slang is not relevant out of its cultural context. There's a handful of well-known ethnic slurs and we don't need more. It's possible to narrow down to cover smaller populations (such as ice chinks for inuit) but you can't use localized versions for groups that are already covered by a top-level label, otherwise you're just creating confusion.
Also I would like to point out that an ethnic slur is not the same as a racist term. Just like it's not sexist to call a woman a cunt, it's not racist to call an Asian a chink. It's rude but that's not the same as racist. I guarantee you that there's people in nice offices that will silently pass on a resume if the name sounds ebonic or latino but that would never say "the n word", while there's blue collar workers calling each other "pollocks" or "fucking sand n-word" without an ounce of discrimination in mind.
I don't think you understand casual racism (Score:2)
You point out that these people use the n-word all day long and say they do it without racist intent, but then pass up black or Mexican sounding names. What you're missing is causal and institutionalized racism. It's when you do it without you even know you're doing it. In a lot of ways that's worse than overt racism because it's harder as
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I believe there are many people who believe they aren't sexist and racist
Such as anyone who ever hired a person based on gender or race, regardless of the "social climate".
mod up please (Score:3)
The ignorance of the politically correct echo chamber is revealed yet again.
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And Jock is a Scottish one, Mick is an Irish one and Fritz is a German one. Still, it's good you pointed it out.
It's a funny old world, and no mistake.
Nope, white south african actually (Score:2)
clueless AC, behaving cluelessly, abetted by clueless mods.
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Really? Originally, it was used to describe South-African white males of Dutch descent. Now it is a pejorative term for any white male (males only, because it comes from the male name Jaap)
Where is it used to refer to Japanese people, and why would you assume it is a slur for Japanese in a context where we are talking about Elon Musk, a South-African?
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What about chimpanzees? cats? dogs?
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Pretty much all primates kill for sport, lust and greed - male gorillas kill infants when they want to take over a female, chimps kill in territorial warfare,etc. Hell even our extended family does - plenty of monkeys gang up and kill group members as a social activity. And it is not just them - elephants and dolphins kill for fun without a fight for resources.
Face it, we are not special, just more powerful right now.
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I drive a Tesla Model 3 so hopefully this doesn't apply to me.
That's right, if somebody that advanced wanted to personally target you for assassination, they'd just hack your car and the world would think you died from driving and watching goat pr0n at the same time!