Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

In the future, miniature exploding drones could indeed autonomously, distinguish between cranium and body, plot a flight route and divebomb at their victim.

But, I don't think these skull-crackers will be fully autonomous, even with significant advances and development. Given the chance of collateral damage and the "fuzziness" of algorithms, the kill command or sequence will be still left to a human operator, like how America does so in the skies of Pakistan or with the machine-gun robots of the Middle-East[1].

In my mind, the the computer would display potential targets via live capture, and the human in the chair would cycle through them, and after filtering out the mistakes (a human dummy, a picture on the wall), type "y".

Militaries would have this check less out of "consider the ethics and morality!" and more out of rational avoid-friendly-fire and ensure-maximum accuracy-of-the-payload.

One exception to this approach could be indiscriminate killing; where the designers intentionally program the drones to lobotomize any target within a geographic range or a time, as long as that target exceeds a certain threshold. This approach is guaranteed to result in a lot of false positives, but would still be remarkably efficient for the purpose of terror or localized warfare. [2]

On a side note, YouTube recommended a follow up video, depicting a real-life swarm, howling and circling around a target. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYLP0pAGbE0

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster-Miller_TALON

[2]: Even remote controlled drones strikes are pretty iffy on who they kill, so it's not like unlikely that less savory actors won't mind blanketing swaths of countries with skull-crackers. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/world/asia/drone-strikes-...

The first AI War is going to be a really brutal wakeup call. The part in sci-fi where anyone actually has to aim to kill an enemy was a big romantic lie. The robots don't miss and they draw and shoot before the humans even know they're there. William Gibson, to his credit, did anticipate this with the Slamhound assassin robots in Count Zero.

Where is no "politely agree" nor "gentlemen's agreements" in international relationships, only sheer power. MAD is an example of power forcing to not fight a war at all. Falkland war was fought without bombing Buenos Aires or any other action outside of immediate war zone. Ukraine/Russia war in Donbass was limited to that area because of possible repercussions to either side for letting it spill out (and for the same reason both sides in general, with some exceptions, didn't indiscriminantly target civilians). US and other developed countries limit sending its soldiers in harms ways and hitting enemy civilians because of internal and external political repercussions. So it is always a power calculation, and as a result in this more and more interconnected and densely populated world we have 2 tendencies - restricting conflicts to specific localities and minimizing human involvement. Those 2 tendencies ultimately lead to drone wars confined to specific areas (preferably in space or in cyberspace - notice how much of adversarial activity happens more and more in cyberspace, yet nobody is going for real life action over it). Attempt to bomb each other's cities will be (and pretty much is already today) unthinkable like in case of Falkland war. Of course, when there is no containing power in sight, we immediately have what Saudis do in Yemen right now - it isn't even a war, it is just pure genocide.