Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first • Hacker News Board

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#111

Post by aorloff » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 4:39 AM UTC

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #34

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.

Some of this stuff is getting to the point where we will seriously need to have a global talk on whether we should put a pin in this tech or not

I guess it falls on me to break it to you then but serious "global talks" happen at the exploding end of ordinance.

There is no Jedi Council to appeal to, no wise group of non-aggressive nations gathering to pacify the troublemakers.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#112

Post by bamboozled » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 4:53 AM UTC

optomas wrote: post #110

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.

Generally, if you are smart enough to fashion this without being caught, you are too smart to do something like that. Plus, you got a cool and potentially lucrative hobby, designing exterminator machines. Why bother with children at that point? There are much, much better targets to be had. Your point on the dwindling barrier to implementation stands.

It's the barrier to implementation that I find concerning and the lack of defensive innovation just as much of a concern.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#113

Post by marcus_holmes » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 5:19 AM UTC

impossiblefork wrote: post #85

trhway wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant. And if you look at Russia your logic does fail on that example - no amount of human losses affect Russia's behavior in the current war as they are sure that Ukraine will run out of soldiers before Russia does. So, from Russia's POV the faster the grinder the sooner their victory.

No. Here in Sweden we instituted mandatory military service we did so because we wanted to ensure that there was no military class that if they decide to can take over. We knew the cost, and the cost is worth it. In normal times the cost is simply to do ones mandatory military service. This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.

Surely there's a difference between the folks just doing their national service, and the career soldiers (who are the people likely to start a coup)?

In actual coups, it's often a small cadre of well-connected higher officers who do the work. It's not the whole military. By the time the whole military (or country) realises what's happened, it's already happened and there's not a lot they can do.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#114

Post by pasquinelli » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 5:20 AM UTC

optomas wrote: post #110

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.

Generally, if you are smart enough to fashion this without being caught, you are too smart to do something like that. Plus, you got a cool and potentially lucrative hobby, designing exterminator machines. Why bother with children at that point? There are much, much better targets to be had. Your point on the dwindling barrier to implementation stands.

> Why bother with children at that point?

the premise is that the person doing it is very mentally ill. the question, "why would they do that when they could do something else that makes more sense?", doesn't make a lot of sense itself under the premise.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#115

Post by somenameforme » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 5:28 AM UTC

trhway wrote: post #83

impossiblefork wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant. And if you look at Russia your logic does fail on that example - no amount of human losses affect Russia's behavior in the current war as they are sure that Ukraine will run out of soldiers before Russia does. So, from Russia's POV the faster the grinder the sooner their victory.

In a war of attrition (actually any war or even battle for that matter) the war is generally won by the enemy's morale breaking, not by literally running out of soldiers. When one side is losing and they know they're losing (or they see the conflict as not worth dying for), most people would prefer to save their own lives rather than die for nothing.

So you get desertion, refusal to enlist, rapid surrender, and so on. This results in the losing state having to resort to ever more brutal means of conscription such as literally dragging people in off the street, making it illegal to film such actions, making it illegal to leave the country, expanding the age range for conscription, and so on.

That all results in even worse morale which makes your fundamental problems even worse. That, in turn, can motivate the losing nation to expend soldiers/resources on missions which may have some propaganda benefit, but ultimately serve no military purpose whatsoever. And at some point it all just collapses like a house of cards.

---

And I think this fundamental issue of morale will be a perpetual in war. The winner will not be decided by who has the most drones, but by which side's morale breaks first. This is why Afghanistan, in terms of outcomes, is essentially the strongest military nation in the world. They've defeated both the US and the USSR in spite of being orders of magnitude behind in every single measure of military strength - except for morale. Those guys' spirit is simply unbreakable and they will fight you for decades, and to the last man, with absolutely no relenting.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#116

Post by marcus_holmes » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 5:31 AM UTC

Legend2440 wrote: post #74

AngryData wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im more worried about these type of things causing us to blast each other and ourselves back to the 1920s or so during conflicts when small explosive EMPs start being viewed as less damaging than drones and robots. A fast explosive on the back of a neodynium magnet and a few coils of copper can make a hell of an EMP blast. The only reason we don't use them now is due to all the collateral damage, but if drone bombs r…

You could do EMP, but you could also do some sort of point-defense turret. Drones are lightweight and fragile, so it doesn't need to be big - just fast and auto-targeting.

Didn't they try this in Ukraine and it doesn't work? Any point installation is quickly overwhelmed. The only answer to FPV drones so far seems to be more FPV drones. Though they're not using fully-autonomous drones in Ukraine yet, so that might still play out.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#117

Post by energy123 » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 5:43 AM UTC

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.

All hard countered by a laser like the Iron Beam, no? Unless there's a hard counter to the hard counter?

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#118

Post by energy123 » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 5:45 AM UTC

atonse wrote: post #5

Oh man, can anyone imagine a non-Terminator scenario for this? Update: I'm not saying people shouldn't develop this, we're never going to squash human curiosity. But when I see this kind of stuff, I'm deeply troubled by how bad actors (state and non-state) will use this. I hope our security services are working hard on countering these potential threats.

Paul Christiano has thought about these scenarios. I recommend his interview with Dwarkesh a while ago where he goes in depth about it.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#119

Post by WastedCucumber » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 6:18 AM UTC

MangoToupe wrote: post #96

Taek wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same here. I think I hadn't ever felt so hopeful for the future as I was while reading that book. I doubt that our world will turn out so positive.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#120

Post by david-gpu » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 6:34 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #76

NegativeLatency wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the slower speed is a closer fit to combat drones (which have a payload and sometimes a fiber optic cable)? Also watching MultiGP they sorta move/accelerate too fast for me to fully appreciate the maneuvering. Feels kinda similar to the innovation around manned aircraft about 100 years ago when we went from toy/observation platform to killing machine in only a couple of decades. With the ardupilot news toda…

> I imagine the slower speed is a closer fit to combat drones A lot of comments are trying to draw connections to combat drones, but drone racing like this has been a hobby thing for a long time. The capabilities of the drones are set to have an even playing field, not to match combat drones or anything. These aren't meant to have any parallels to combat drones, drones that fly long distances, or drones that carry pa…

We all understand that. People are simply observing that there an obvious path from this technology demonstrator to something similar in the battlefield.