Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Is Working on a Secret Military Drone Project
1–10 of 110 posts
Re: Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Is Working on a Secret Military Drone Project
#2Re: Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Is Working on a Secret Military Drone Project
#3maybe not so secret now
Re: Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Is Working on a Secret Military Drone Project
#4He was heavily mentioning drones in the Foreign Affairs piece [1] he wrote in the spring of 2023: "Innovation Power - Why Technology Will Define the Future of Geopolitics"
> Drones offer distinct advantages over traditional weapons: they are smaller and cheaper, offer unmatched surveillance capabilities, and reduce soldiers’ risk exposure. Marines in urban warfare, for example, could be accompanied by microdrones that serve as their eyes and ears. Over time, countries will improve the hardware and software powering drones to outinnovate their rivals. Eventually, autonomous weaponized drones—not just unmanned aerial vehicles but also ground-based ones—will replace soldiers and manned artillery altogether. Imagine an autonomous submarine that could quickly move supplies into contested waters or an autonomous truck that could find the optimal route to carry small missile launchers across rough terrain. Swarms of drones, networked and coordinated by AI, could overwhelm tank and infantry formations in the field.
My take on this is that lacking direct combat experience everything the Americans (and the West more generally) will come up with in terms of drones will be hugely inferior to whatever the Russians are now building, heck, it would be inferior even to what the Ukrainians have managed to build locally (one of the targets the Russians hit recently was an Ukrainian drone factory in Kiev).
Re: Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Is Working on a Secret Military Drone Project
#5He was heavily mentioning drones in the Foreign Affairs piece [1] he wrote in the spring of 2023: "Innovation Power - Why Technology Will Define the Future of Geopolitics" > Drones offer distinct advantages over traditional weapons: they are smaller and cheaper, offer unmatched surveillance capabilities, and reduce soldiers’ risk exposure. Marines in urban warfare, for example, could be accompanied by microdrones tha…
> My take on this is that lacking direct combat experience everything the Americans (and the West more generally) will come up with in terms of drones will be hugely inferior to whatever the Russians are now building
So what?
As someone famous said, "Quantity is a quality on its own"
Re: Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Is Working on a Secret Military Drone Project
#6Maybe it was completely unrelated, but pre-Schmidt Google was nice. Under Schmidt it started its journey towards becoming the creepy stalker it is today.
Never liked the guy, and wouldn't surprise me if he is working on landmines targeting children.
Re: Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Is Working on a Secret Military Drone Project
#7He was heavily mentioning drones in the Foreign Affairs piece [1] he wrote in the spring of 2023: "Innovation Power - Why Technology Will Define the Future of Geopolitics" > Drones offer distinct advantages over traditional weapons: they are smaller and cheaper, offer unmatched surveillance capabilities, and reduce soldiers’ risk exposure. Marines in urban warfare, for example, could be accompanied by microdrones tha…
There are so many assumptions packed in that post it feels weird to try to unpack them; eg, the implication the "local" Ukrainian equipment would be by default inferior to Russian equipment, which doesn't seem obvious at all to me.
But empirically speaking, the idea that Russian equipment will be better than OTAN equipment because of their combat experience is pretty bold considering the current domination of OTAN equipment in the Ukraine-Russia war.
Re: Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Is Working on a Secret Military Drone Project
#8He was heavily mentioning drones in the Foreign Affairs piece [1] he wrote in the spring of 2023: "Innovation Power - Why Technology Will Define the Future of Geopolitics" > Drones offer distinct advantages over traditional weapons: they are smaller and cheaper, offer unmatched surveillance capabilities, and reduce soldiers’ risk exposure. Marines in urban warfare, for example, could be accompanied by microdrones tha…
> My take on this is that lacking direct combat experience everything the Americans (and the West more generally) will come up with in terms of drones will be hugely inferior to whatever the Russians are now building So what? As someone famous said, "Quantity is a quality on its own"
Don't think that the West will go for "quantity over quality" in its arms' race with China/Russia, it has stopped doing that for at least 30 years (since they scrapped most of the Cold War-related arms industry).
Re: Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Is Working on a Secret Military Drone Project
#9I worked for a few years in defense and it was the most meaningful work of my career so far but it is painfully slow and entrenched. There is massive opportunity for innovation. I hope he can move the needle- he was on the Defense Innovation Board a while back so he knows.
Re: Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Is Working on a Secret Military Drone Project
#10He was heavily mentioning drones in the Foreign Affairs piece [1] he wrote in the spring of 2023: "Innovation Power - Why Technology Will Define the Future of Geopolitics" > Drones offer distinct advantages over traditional weapons: they are smaller and cheaper, offer unmatched surveillance capabilities, and reduce soldiers’ risk exposure. Marines in urban warfare, for example, could be accompanied by microdrones tha…
Have you read the book Forever Peace? I think it's a foretelling of this, in part. The book doesn't have drones, but what it does have is mechs that fight wars with human remote pilots. War in the book essentially boils down to who can spend more money building more mechs. No humans get killed except by accident, or if the war happens to be against one of those impoverished nations barbaric enough to use human soldiers.