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Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

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Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#91

Post by allturtles »

jandrese wrote: post #4

This is only a few days after the massive drone attack in Russia. Only a matter of time until we have drones smart enough to dodge bullets (or at least dodge out of where guns are pointing) while flying at breakneck speeds being controlled by AIs we don't fully understand. The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future.

“What hope can there be for mankind,” I thought, “when there are such men as Felix Hoenikker to give such playthings as ice-nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women are?”

And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?”

It doesn’t take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.

This is it:

“Nothing.”

--Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#92

Post by tonyarkles »

bamboozled wrote: post #81
tonyarkles wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The child comments from yours are mentioning nuclear weapons as a parallel but there's one big difference between drone tech and nuclear weapons: plutonium is really hard to make. We might be able to put a pin in this tech from a policy perspective, but the cat is way out of the bag as far as the tech goes. A cell phone already has all of the sensors you need baked right into it (honestly, we can thank mobile devices…

A lunatic will be able to wipe out school children playing outside and have little chance of getting caught, for example. Nice.

I mean... yeah, that’s a definite possibility. If a lunatic has access to explosives, there’s an infinite number of ways they could do that.

The hard part is that there is no effective way to regulate anything in the supply chain involved except for the explosives themselves. Everything else is super commoditized at this point and, other than the props, very multi-purpose. The first significant hexcopter I built used a BeagleBone Blue for processing, generic ESCs and BLDCs for the motors, and an aluminum frame that I cut out of aluminum tubes from Home Depot. Max takeoff weight was 55lb, because that’s the heaviest it could legally take off with. This was 7 years ago.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#93

Post by bamboozled »

bravoetch wrote: post #90
bamboozled wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lunatic will be able to wipe out school children playing outside and have little chance of getting caught, for example. Nice.

Yes, and so far it's much easier to drive a van into a crowd of people. Nobody has tried to mandate tech in cars that detects and prevents such malicious behavior.

Can you drive a van into a group of people without even being physically present though ?

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#94

Post by Taek »

chrisweekly wrote: post #23
insane_dreamer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is portrayed in Ministry for the Future which describes AI controlled swarms of small drones/bombs that fly apart and come together at their target and are almost impossible to stop.

Fantastic book, highly recommended.

I tried to read the book and to me it came off as little more than doomer and disaster pornography. I found a lot of the situations to be far fetched and didn't feel like it portrayed a realistic image of how the world works.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#96

Post by MangoToupe »

Taek wrote: post #94
chrisweekly wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fantastic book, highly recommended.

I tried to read the book and to me it came off as little more than doomer and disaster pornography. I found a lot of the situations to be far fetched and didn't feel like it portrayed a realistic image of how the world works.

Interesting! I found it to be almost too optimistic or unbelievably hopeful.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#97

Post by TacticalCoder »

bamboozled wrote: post #93
bravoetch wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and so far it's much easier to drive a van into a crowd of people. Nobody has tried to mandate tech in cars that detects and prevents such malicious behavior.

Can you drive a van into a group of people without even being physically present though ?

> Can you drive a van into a group of people without even being physically present though ?

It's probably totally doable by now. We literally have self-driving cars.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#98

Post by MangoToupe »

impossiblefork wrote: post #82
trhway wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>drones smart enough to dodge bullets well, there will be similarly smart "predator"/defense drones. The humans will have no chances on such a battlefield populated by thousands drones per square kilometer fighting each other. >The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future. And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing. >or at least dodge out of where guns are pointing just…

>And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing. It is very dangerous, since it will mean that an organization with enough drones can dominate society on its own. Much better if humans were battlefield-relevant.

Don't we already have this in the form of the state?

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#99

Post by roughly »

itishappy wrote: post #62
snewman wrote: post #61

A few questions / thoughts: 1. I didn't see it stated explicitly, but I presume the neural net is on the far end of a radio link somewhere, not running on hardware physically mounted on the drone? 2. After viewing the FPV video on the linked page: how the hell do human pilots even come close to this pace? Insane (even assuming that the video they're seeing is higher quality than what's shown on YouTube – is it?) 3. T…

1. It's entirely onboard. 2. The video they're seeing is worse. Spectators typically see the frames saved directly from the camera, but the pilot will be seeing them compressed and beamed over the air to their headset. See vid. 3. The human pilots do actually have access to it. Not directly, but the flight controller translates their inputs and makes use of the IMU to do so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMGRLGkm0Q…

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMGRLGkm0QE

I’m reminded of when the US military figured out it should just replace all its proprietary field drone controllers with Xbox controllers because every single grunt that enlisted already had 10,000 hours on the things. If the future of warfare is drones, Christ, that video is terrifying.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#100

Post by Leo-thorne »

I’ve seen AI beat humans in simulations before, but doing it on a real track with the same hardware is honestly kind of amazing. What surprised me the most is they didn’t use any traditional flight controller. They just let the neural network handle the flying.

I’m really curious how this would perform in messier, less controlled environments.

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