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How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

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51–60 of 454 posts

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#51
post #15

I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions. You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private? Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian. It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!

It doesn't take much imagination to see what's so disturbing about it, they're swarms of autonomous killing machines. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#52
post #15

I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions. You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private? Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian. It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!

The thing you're missing is that the decision isn't actually made by a machine. It's made by a person much much higher up across a much broader effective surface area. That is, historically to wage war you had to ultimately convince/coerce millions of people to wage that war for you -- continuously for years -- along with millions more to support the effort politically and economically. In the highly automated world,…

Yeah a single rich person might soon have the ability to, without coercing a soldier, decide who gets to die. He might just need to coerce someone to deliver the drones and put them on an (automated) truck.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#53
post #2

Beyond jamming, I imagine some kind of autonomous laser system could also be pretty effective at downing large numbers of drones within a given radius.

I'm thinking the same thing. You don't even need to fully destroy the drone, if you manage to damage the camera sensors or the exposed lithium cell it's game over for the drone.

It still takes few seconds per target with technologies available right now. That's likely the reason why an operational anti drone laser turret is not a thing yet.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#55
post #15

I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions. You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private? Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian. It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!

The stressed private might still have a bit of empathy and humanity. Meanwhile millions of drones can be programmed (or hacked) to kill millions of people without excluding civilians or anyone

We have had weapons which are autonomous for decades. You launch them consciously then you know that it will find and destroy weapons based on some "intelligence" (A homing missile with a radar you know is likely to hit the thing that reflects the radar waves, whatever that is. There are artillery shells which home in on vehicles and so on). The launch decision by the human means "I'm responsible for this thing hitting and the thing that it finds". The kill/no-kill decision is made at launch time. An AA missile might hit a civilan jet, but there is no way the operator will make a new kill/no-kill decision once it reaches the jet. You made the decision at launch.

That's the same with these drones. The smarter they get, the further away the human goes. Today it might be simple to create autonomous weapons who are instructed to kill vehicles matching various known appearances. That too already exists. The strike on the Russian bombers was reportedly carried out manually, but it would have been pretty easy to have that autonomous, since the targets are huge, stationary, easily recognizable and easy to navigate to in the geography.

If you launch a quadcopter and instruct it to kill any adult human it finds, then that's the same thing. You wouldn't launch it into an area where there is a remote possibility of being any civilians. No difference from firing an artillery shell. If there is a civilian, or a soldier waving a white flag or whatever - there is no cancel button for your artillery shell. The decision to kill whatever is in the other end was made when you fired it. There is literally no difference between firing a million drones and firing a million artillery shells down range. It's your human responsibility and your human consciousness when you make the decision.

I don't think we have had widespread use of autonomous human-targeting drones yet, but it's by no means science fiction today. Just a matter of time. We'll see their use in this conflict.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sun Tzu says it better: "A military operation involves deception." He could be telling the truth, he could be lying... A drone programmed to automatically boot up , check its location, and if it's at the right coordinates, take off and crash at some other coordinates (the airfield) is more satisfying to "fans" of automated warfare. For extra fun, add some other code to "look for plane-like objects to crash into", but…

Only need one camera drone capable of identifying targets. And just tells another drone to bomb it.

..in theory. In practice, building such a complex system in a fail safe way is not that easy.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#57
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, that's a relatively buried and brief aspect in the article. Which is otherwise heavy on real-world military realities. Personally, I see anyone fretting about imperfect drones making those decisions as either (1) one of today's 10K, or (2) a performer covering a trending topic. Land mines were deployed at giga-scale over a century ago (WWI). Spring-guns were enough of a problem in England to be outlawed t…

A) land mines are banned in most countries for that reason B) mines don't move by themself, but stay where you deployed them A moving autonomous killer drone has a potentially bigger effect if unleashed on the wrong area. Besides, war is usually fought in civilian areas. If you send the drone to the frontline, but its GPS is jammed, it might move somewhere close by.

A) Most countries also have laws/treaties banning invasions. But when those happen to them anyway, most countries start ignoring the bans on landmines. Which are quick/cheap/easy to produce, even with century-old tech.

B) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_mine Not that anybody's doing Environmental Assessments on land, to determine whether the mines might be washed downstream after a heavy rain, or moved downslope by a landslide, or ...

The problem you describe sounds very much like poorly-directed mortar/artillery fire & strategic bombing - which have been killing civilians at scale since at least WWI.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#58
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drones reportedly flew from their containers to the staging area autonomously, where they were taken over by the pilots for the attack approach.

Source?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJcjt_W8iCo

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#59
post #15

I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions. You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private? Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian. It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!

I was once talking to an F35 pilot about what its like and during the conversation he said something, "If its red, its dead" referring to how the computer classifies things as friend/foe for you. I realised it doesnt mean much to have a human in the loop when theyre making their decisions based completely on info the computer serves up anyway.

Indeed - in a hostile situation you're never going to get an eyeball on most hostile air targets.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"He said that each of the 117 drones launched had its own pilot." https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1ld7ppre9vo

Sun Tzu says it better: "A military operation involves deception." He could be telling the truth, he could be lying... A drone programmed to automatically boot up , check its location, and if it's at the right coordinates, take off and crash at some other coordinates (the airfield) is more satisfying to "fans" of automated warfare. For extra fun, add some other code to "look for plane-like objects to crash into", but…

It's a military airfield, so no civilian 737 there. There seems to be a video from the drone, meaning some kind of connectivity was present with or without autopilot.
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