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Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready

nautil.us

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

#31

Post by subroutine »

kevingadd wrote: post #21
subroutine wrote: post #5

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.

They're disposable. They don't need to take anything.

Get a...

"very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter that can carry a one-or two-gram shaped charge,”

...and fire a bullet from it, and let me know what goes farther, the bullet or the quad.

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

#32

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

> One strategy could be a superintelligent machine—essentially, an extremely powerful algorithm—that’s specifically designed to govern fairly.

I volunteer to write that fair governing powerful algorithm. You can trust me to make it fair and not make it favor my biases and interests.

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

#33

Post by subroutine »

GhettoMaestro wrote: post #16
subroutine wrote: post #5

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.

Ah this is what I wanted to know. If you ignite a shaped projectile with nothing to push on but air, will it go

"An EFP 20 cm (8 inches) in diameter threw a 3 kg (7 lbs) copper slug at Mach 6, or 2,000 meters per second. (A .50-caliber bullet, among the most devastating projectiles on the battlefield, weighs less than two ounces and has a muzzle velocity of 900 meters per second.)

— Rick Atkinson, The Washington Post"

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

#34

Post by whatshisface »

trentnix wrote: post #6

Bostrom is well-aware of the downsides—corrupt actors in a state could exploit this surveillance for totalitarian ends, or hackers could blackmail unsuspecting victims. Yet the fact is that it may still be a better option than suffering one global catastrophe after another. Aspiring fascists are always trying to save us from ourselves.

If we don't police everyone every second of the day, how will we stop them from joining fascist organizations?

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

#35

Post by [deleted] »

defen wrote: 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.

[deleted]

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

#36

Post by michaelmrose »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #29
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Drone + cluster bomblet, cheep. That sort of thing scares me more than weapons of mass destruction. Because they are usable by non-nation state actors and rouge nation state actors. It's not that I'm worried anyone's going to try to take me out (like why?). It's I'm worried what sort of society we end up with when people like Larry Ellison are terrified of the above.

Larry Ellison in the grand scheme of things is a turd who while he has probably pissed enough people off hasn't pissed off anyone enough to try to flush him with extreme prejudice.

I'd be more worried about people of actual importance like police chiefs, prosecutors, senators, presidents.

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

#37

Post by ctoth »

Jupe wrote: post #18
mrandish wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

> Of course, this is a fantastical proposal. Even the real-world use of AI in the justice system is fraught with problems. But at this point, do we have a better idea for preventing the collapse of the state system under the weight of widespread technological empowerment?

I'm not sure what motivated this sort of soundbite-style quoting without digging in further, but I hope if you first read the comments without the article you realize this is supposed to pose a question, not offer a solution.

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

#38

Post by nostrademons »

subroutine wrote: post #5

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.

Shaped charges are not bullets. They're bits of specially-molded explosives, such that the blast energy of the explosive forms the charge into a jet of molten metal. They don't rely on any kinetic energy at all to penetrate, and can be delivered by sticking a small candle-sized (the little ones, like you might see at a fancy dinner) device onto the targeted surface.

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

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

#39

Post by chongli »

kevingadd wrote: post #21
subroutine wrote: post #5

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.

They're disposable. They don't need to take anything.

And shaped charges are entirely besides the point. They could instead carry a small auto-injector (like an EpiPen) containing a few mg of ricin [1]. It'd be like getting stung by an insect. Within days the symptoms would start to appear.

If this happened to even a few hundred people, let alone thousands, then hospitals would be completely overwhelmed and people would be dying everywhere. It would cause a mass panic.

Injection with ricin was how Georgi Markov was assassinated [2]. It was shocking to say the least.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricin

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_umbrella

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

#40

Post by aaron695 »

Absolutely everything about this has no basis in science or logic.

A 3 million drone attack which would cost $40+ million fails because of windows, and they run out of power after 5 minutes, who puts all of them together with explosives, a Chinese factory?

And one gram of explosives would only maybe blind you if lucky.

I can buy 10,000 small bombs and drop them on a stadium from a plane using tech from the past 100 years, but no one has done it yet......

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