81–90 of 223 posts
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I think the line is even fuzzier than you've described. Drones are very much analogous to missiles and torpedoes. Torpedoes have long been used in sea mines, and 'automatically' activated upon detection of acoustic or magnetic signature match.
The gulf war (1991) tv broadcasts of cruise missiles 100 feet above the road sure look(ed) a lot like autonomous drones on their way to killed humans to me.
Fully autonomous Ukrainian drones. We don't know if Russia hadn't used something before them. The two sides are quite evenly matched
I don't think it is about technology - a camera module with NPU running YOLO can be had for like $30 from AliExpress. And a lot of other technological weapons is possible on a cheap, yet nor Russia, nor Ukraine are doing it. In case of autonomous drones i don't see them bringing any noticeable benefit over FPV until they are deployed in the numbers an order or two of magnitude larger. Both countries seem yet to reach…
Got to Kill Them All Pokémon Go Driven Drones Autonomously Killing. They develop consciousness and turn it around, and try to catch every human and Transfer them to the Professor for Candy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48487029 https://dronexl.co/2026/06/09/pokemon-go-scans-niantic-vanto...
I think we'll be ok.
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I would hope it is. The fact it is even possible for a friendly system to lock onto another friendly system and fire upon it seems like a pretty big damn issue to engineer around. I guess they still haven't though considering kuwait shot down an f15 a couple months ago. You'd think lockheed or raytheon would have figured something clever out to solve this half a century ago.
This is a solved problem, and IFF was invented in the 1930s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_friend_or_foe It is believed that the Kuwaiti aircraft did not have its IFF transponder turned on (IFF is and has always been standard equipment on the F-18).
We've had loitering munitions that choose their own target autonomously for a long time, for example anti-tank weapons that climb up after being released from a plane or helicopter then sit on a parachute until spotting one or more tanks and firing warheads at them. The superficial new thing here is the exact quadcopter form factor, but the significance is the new price point. You bet the loitering anti-tank weapon c…
Something like a proximity mine from a video game. I always did wonder why they didn't just sprinkle a bunch of these in an intermediary zone. Surely it provides incredibly effective area denial. Perhaps it does and you can't get in, perhaps it invites escalation. Definitely seems like widespread automated hunter-seekers will be some kind of terror operation in the next quarter century. Too easy to build, too easy to…
Or real life. See:
Mark 60 CAPTOR (1979)
General Dynamics MEDUSA/Hammerhead (now)
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I don't think it is about technology - a camera module with NPU running YOLO can be had for like $30 from AliExpress. And a lot of other technological weapons is possible on a cheap, yet nor Russia, nor Ukraine are doing it. In case of autonomous drones i don't see them bringing any noticeable benefit over FPV until they are deployed in the numbers an order or two of magnitude larger. Both countries seem yet to reach…
Ukraine does a lot of cheap drones that are highly efficient for their price. Russians do some too but their flagship is based on the Iranian Shaheed which the Ukrainians figured out how to shut them down efficiently. The most devastating and feared russian weapons are the glinding bombs (which are packed with a lot of explosive) but luckily for Ukrainians these gliding bombs lack precision.
>luckily for Ukrainians these gliding bombs lack precision.
Not really. They don't have 3m CEP, that is true. Yet, a 2000lb bomb doesn't need it. They do hit the targeted buildings, which is enough. The main limitation here is that those bombs require military jet planes to launch. Russia is severely limited here.
Is this any different from say, carpet-bombing an area? If so, how?
If you drop a dumb bomb on an area, it kills everyone there. If you release an autonomous drone in an area, it will probably kill everyone there, but might use its AI to decide not to kill some people there. Why is the latter worse than the former ?
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> If Ukraine could deploy actual Terminator robots to the front line it would do it in a heartbeat. Completely false. They are beholden to their allies. Ukraine could also reach Moscow with missiles, why doesn't it? It could build a nuclear bomb in 6 months, if not 6 weeks, they have the capabilities, why doesn't it? It's not so simple.
I think the reason Ukraine has not attacked Moscow with missiles is that this would force Russia to retaliate with nuclear missiles. There's a long discussion on this in sources I follow (full disclosure, I tend to listen to John Mearsheimer a lot although I don't believe everything he says) and the consensus is that the latest attacks in Russian land will have consequences. So I agree that it's not so simple but I a…