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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

#251

Post by actionfromafar »

impossiblefork wrote: post #230
david-gpu wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decision-making in the armed forces is always performed by a "warrior class". The people who operate heavy war machinery are also career soldiers; conscripts are light infantry. And there is a very real economic cost to mandatory military service. It only makes sense in the context of a small country (in terms of population) bordering a large aggressive neighbor, such as Finland or (possibly) Canada.

No, conscripts operate also tanks and artillery. They also load and prepare combat aircraft. Artillery and tanks will have some kind of professional officer though.

Armed forces culture is also incredibly important. Goal/mission oriented organizations are harder to co-opt than top-down command structure organizations.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#252

Post by XorNot »

switchbak wrote: post #244
XorNot wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the Loyal Wingman program is trying to build is extremely far from what people keep thinking when someone says "drone". The word is overloaded as hell: no one draws a distinction between a quadrotor with a 20 minute flight time and an air breathing jet aircraft costing $20 million a piece. But then they go and say "drone swarms will defeat all future adversaries!" Like in the Ukrainian context everyone seems to…

"when someone says", "no one draws" ... who are these people you're talking about? The folks I listen to make it very clear the kinds of platforms they're talking about, and use different terms to describe things at different levels of specificity. Many/most folks use the term "drone" to talk about CCA's and other expensive platforms. In fact, "drone warfare" predates the common application to quadcopters, people wer…

The general public. If the people you're talking to are military or professionals, then fairly obviously they'll be setting up very precise language and expectations.

But every post vaguely about drones on HN has a whole bunch of people acting like a 1000 quadcopters will replace an F-35.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#253

Post by ponector »

IshKebab wrote: post #247
pjc50 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missed that news; https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/britain-p... I think we're already deep into large-scale drone warfare. Destroying a third of the enemy heavy bomber fleet is pretty substantial. It feels to me like that attack operated like Pearl Harbor, a marker that the old way of surface naval warfare / air attack was being replaced by a new one. Don't forget that Russia has their own drones. T…

$4k per drone... ouch.

Kamikaze FPV drones starts from $400 (without warhead), from $1000 if it has 20km of optic fiber or is an interceptor. If it is not a kamikaze, like heavy bomber or reconnaissance - $10k+.

Extremely affordable!

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#254

Post by fc417fc802 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #159
lazide wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a laser needs a line of sight and dwell time. drones flying 3 ft off the ground, in between bushes and trees, at 100+ mph? not an easy situation. ramp up power levels so dwell time might only be 1/2 second? maybe. but then there is a race for rapid target discrimination. and then ablative armor on the drones (cheap and easy to 3d print), and backup cameras, etc.

And ultimately there's the cost factor. Drones can be mass produced for cheap, laser systems are specialized and expensive. Something I haven't seen yet (but is likely in development) is drone swarms, one operator directing a squad of a hundred drones like it's an RTS game. Only one grenade or kamikaze drone needs to detonate close enough to a laser system to take it out of action. Mind you, the system has a range of…

> Something I haven't seen yet (but is likely in development) is drone swarms

Various entities related to the US military have been simulating and physically testing various approaches to that for years. There are blurbs in the press here and there. In some cases source code even got published (not clear if that was intentional though).

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#255

Post by fc417fc802 »

krisoft wrote: post #150
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.

> It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant. Battlefields have the inconvenient property of sometimes coming to where you are. Even if you would rather not participate in any way. Currently in democratic countries one of the brakes on war is that you need "boots" on the ground, and "boots" on the ground results in caskets draped in flags on TV. Which result in peopl…

> Fourth order effects are all the constraints and weird technology restrictions they will put on tech trying to stop the proliferation of autonomous drones.

I'm still concerned about the worst case scenario there being Microsoft getting their trusted computing wet dream. However I'm hopeful that it ends up being nothing more than embedded microscopic serial numbers in anything resembling a microcontroller, ID requirements to place purchases, and legal requirements for disposal (no more garage sale electronics).

The other scenario that I think might be more likely is radar and video surveillance covering every inch of every city and a related domestic agency capable of fielding rapid, tightly targeted anti-aircraft measures on a large scale.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#256

Post by ponector »

randomtoast wrote: post #141
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.

And Great Britain just announced plans to deliver 100,000 of them to Ukraine. Ukraine lacks the manpower compared to Russia. It seems logical to strengthen their forces by deploying these flying mini terminators. I believe we are not far from large-scale drone warfare. In World War II, we had epic tank and aircraft battles; now, the time has come for autonomous drone battlefields.

100k kamikaze drones are not that many for the current stage of war. Millions are consumed annually.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#257

Post by fc417fc802 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #234
graemep wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did not historically stop conscription in the US though, so I do not think it would do so anywhere else.

The Second Amendment was expressly (its even in the text) to protect the ability of the state to have and rely on a militia to mobilize against internal and external security threats, not to deny the state the ability to do so and force it rely on professional forces. Large, permanent, professional internal and external security forces were not something the framers of the Constitution trusted, and the Second Amendme…

> not to deny the state the ability to do so

> were not something the framers of the Constitution trusted

If you follow the reasoning through those two claims appear to be at odds. That said I think there's plenty of evidence that your first claim is false depending on how you define the particulars of "deny the state".

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#258

Post by deadbabe »

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.

They don’t need to dodge bullets. Just make them small, cheap, fast, and powerful enough to fly to a target and punch a single bullet perfectly through their skull in an instant. Launch a swarm for redundancy. And because they are autonomous, these drones can be entirely unaffected by radio signals once deployed.

Politicians will never go outside again. The only defense is to be loved by all and have no enemies. Or, the more likely scenario: disguises and full anonymity.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#259

Post by burningChrome »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #41
burningChrome wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first worry wouldn't be this. I got out of doing drone work because of all the FAA restrictions on where you can fly drones now. Within 30 miles of a major metro area? Nope. Within 20 miles of an airport? Nope. I'm exaggerating of course, but it got to a point where I was having real problems trying to find areas where you can fly a drone just for fun so I just gave up and quit. My more immediate fear would be how…

Jam what signal? You'd need a HERF gun to stop an autonomous drone -- a real one, not something made from recycled microwave oven parts -- and an EMP bomb of some sort to stop a swarm of them.

Uh, jamming has been used since the beginning of the Russian/Ukrainian war. Its literally one of the main areas that has become a game of cat and mouse on both sides.

The Black Eye is a suitcase-sized radio noisemaker that can muddle the signals that control all but the best fiber-optic drones. According to an electronic warfare expert who writes under the pseudonym “Roy,” Black Eye can ground surveillance and attack drones from as far as 4 kilometers away, “when located high enough.”

Unlike many other jammers, which target the drone, the Black Eye targets the drone’s operator—blocking a drone’s command signal at its source. The new jammer “is appearing across the whole front,” Roy wrote. “This is a serious development for Ukraine.”

https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/05/06/blackeyejammers/

More recently:

Kvertus’ innovative EW backpack system provides Ukrainian troops with a mobile counter-drone shield for just $7,000. Operating in the 720-1050 MHz range, it jams and disables threatening Russian drones.

https://euromaidanpress.com/2024/05/17/the-ew-backpack-revol...

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#260

Post by dragonwriter »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #257
dragonwriter wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Second Amendment was expressly (its even in the text) to protect the ability of the state to have and rely on a militia to mobilize against internal and external security threats, not to deny the state the ability to do so and force it rely on professional forces. Large, permanent, professional internal and external security forces were not something the framers of the Constitution trusted, and the Second Amendme…

> not to deny the state the ability to do so > were not something the framers of the Constitution trusted If you follow the reasoning through those two claims appear to be at odds. That said I think there's plenty of evidence that your first claim is false depending on how you define the particulars of "deny the state".

> If you follow the reasoning through those two claims appear to be at odds.

No, the claim that the purpose of the second amendment was to assure that the state could rely on a citizen militia for internal and external security instead of denying them that ability and forcing them to rely on professional forces is not at all at odds with the claim that large professional internal and external security forces were not something that the framers trusted.

Your excerpting a verb phrases from each of the two claims to claim a conflict while ignoring the rest of the claims may suggest the source of your misreading -- because you seen to think that the thing that I said that the 2A was not meant to deny the states was the same thing the framers didn't trust, rather than something that was an alternative to it.

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