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Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready

nautil.us

11–20 of 129 posts

Re: Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready

#11
post #2

Literally nothing in this article seems like something that will actually come to pass. It's like a bad Black Mirror fanfic.

Really?

I'm just waiting for some dumbass to take a cheap chinese drone, attach a blasting cap with a shape charge laced with sodium cyanide. Anybody nicked with fragments would die.

And it'd cost what, $80-$100 ?

It's the endgame of asymmetric warfare.

Re: Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready

#12

I would like to see a mini quad copter take the recoil of a 1 g "shaped charge" (aka bullet). EDIT: ok, i found a clip of (a fairly big) drone firing a gun and it looks... not stable: https://youtu.be/FI--wFfipvA still, pretty worrisome.

If you actually watch the original video the drones aren't intended to survive.

Re: Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready

#13
post #2

Literally nothing in this article seems like something that will actually come to pass. It's like a bad Black Mirror fanfic.

The scale may be exaggerated and the particulars may be wrong, but there definitely will be new problems that arise from cheap and effective remote/autonomous weapons being available. In addition to cheap IED drones which are already becoming available, what happens when you can pop a vision system + grasper arm securely around a rifle and effectively toss it up on a ridge somewhere? It's probably been technically possible for a while, but soon it'll be (relatively) cheap, and probably hard to monitor.

Re: Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready

#14
When it comes to defending one's citizens, the attitude of "that'll probably never happen, it'll be fine" doesn't exactly sound like a solid foundation. And I doubt any government around the world, worth its salt, has that attitude.

True, it all sounds like scaremongering, but the question is: what's stopping people from actually doing this?

Crime and violence already exist. And if we look at history, it is clear that it has changed with the times. What logical sense is there in thinking they will not follow the changes in technology today?

The events described are but a possibility. Yet, I do feel we should not dismiss it, simply because we don't like it.

Re: Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready

#15
The article drums up a hypothetical scenario ("a semi-trailer full of autonomous drones carrying small shaped charges could kill a million New Yorkers, just for instance!") and then suggests we could counteract the Omniviolence that The World Is Not Ready for by submitting to a Panopticon society or making an AI our Philosopher King.

This is not serious minded analysis, but it's not fun either. It's just bad clickbait.

No system can stop every dedicated attacker to begin with. Technology gives people leverage in all their activities, including doing violence to one another. Writing an article in Nautilus that amounts to idle musing about a comic book villain's murderbot scheme and then trying to burnish it as Very Serious at the end with name dropping and the author's academic credentials is so lame.

Re: Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready

#16

I would like to see a mini quad copter take the recoil of a 1 g "shaped charge" (aka bullet). EDIT: ok, i found a clip of (a fairly big) drone firing a gun and it looks... not stable: https://youtu.be/FI--wFfipvA still, pretty worrisome.

I don't think you technically need to absorb the recoil.

Check out the EFP:

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

EFPs were what turned out Humvees to swiss-cheese in Iraq before we switched over the MRAPs.

Re: Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready

#17
post #9

> In this scenario, the K/K ratio could be perhaps 3/1,000,000, assuming a 10-percent accuracy and only a single one-gram shaped charge per drone. So you "only" need 10 million drones and 10 million grams of plastic explosive? An attack of that magnitude probably requires the resources of a nation-state, so I doubt it will happen. Targeted assassinations seem more plausible.

Yeah, the 3/1000000 case is kind of a pointless extrapolation. 3/1000 is way more threatening if those 1000 are local political/business leaders - you could cripple an entire city (or with careful timing, an entire state).

Re: Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready

#18
post #3
post #2

Literally nothing in this article seems like something that will actually come to pass. It's like a bad Black Mirror fanfic.

Agreed and the vaguely proposed solution for their hypothesized problem sounds far worse than the problem.

Came to say exactly this...

Not quite sure how the author went from "Technology is, in other words, enabling criminals to target anyone anywhere and, due to democratization, increasingly at scale" to "One strategy could be a superintelligent machine—essentially, an extremely powerful algorithm—that’s specifically designed to govern fairly".

Re: Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready

#19

I would like to see a mini quad copter take the recoil of a 1 g "shaped charge" (aka bullet). EDIT: ok, i found a clip of (a fairly big) drone firing a gun and it looks... not stable: https://youtu.be/FI--wFfipvA still, pretty worrisome.

If you actually watch the original video the drones aren't intended to survive.

OK, drones are cheap. How about that projectile firing apparatus?

Re: Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready

#20
post #2

Literally nothing in this article seems like something that will actually come to pass. It's like a bad Black Mirror fanfic.

Consumer grade drones are already being used in combat in the middle east: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2017/01/11/...

(All the better sources for these stories are paywalled, so have fun reading them)

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