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Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

newscientist.com

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Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

#151

Post by machomaster »

trhway wrote: post #87
onemoresoop wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're mixing together different drone types (payload, range, operational role, etc.). >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.

The lack of precision does matter when we are talking about trenches/bunkers and bombs often missing by many dozens and even hundreds of meters.

Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

#152

Post by namegulf »

delichon wrote: post #31

This was back in 2026, before they released the Dredd series for civilian applications with onboard due processing and agents for prosecution, defense, judge, jury and executioner with millisecond response times, drastically reducing price per perpetrator.

Back in 2026?

Are we living in an alternate universe?

Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

#153

Post by joe_mamba »

sterlind wrote: post #146
joe_mamba wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is a clear war crime. Sure, but does the battlefield have any war crime police on site to enforce those laws? Because without enforcement and punishment, all laws written by man are just fake and meaningless pieces of paper. The only laws that are actually real and non-optional are the law of gravity and such. The war crime laws were invented as a legal theater for victorious powers to persecute the losers afte…

> The war crime laws were invented as a legal theater for victorious powers to persecute the losers after WW2 with a veneer of legality, for imperialist superpowers to bully the small third countries who refuse to play ball, not for something superpowers to actually abide by themselves I recommend you watch Judgment at Nuremberg - the 1961 film, not the 2025 one (I've seen both.) the Nuremberg Trials were very much t…

[flagged]

Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

#154

Post by alkonaut »

namuol wrote: post #94

> “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.” This is a clear war crime. We don’t need to update any international laws, do we? This is by definition indiscriminate, like landmines or chemical weap…

An aerial bomb is equally indiscriminate. You make a judgement about the target value and the estimate collateral damage/civilian casualties and you fire if the equation is reasonable. Same here. If it's a muddy square kilometer of trenches do you KNOW there are no civilians? No. But it's not indiscriminate. The target area selection is the key. You can't release an indiscriminate autonomus killer drone into a city of course. But I doubt it'll be long before these drones make target distinction of humans (Vehicle recognition is old at this point).

Just like with land mines it's the military value vs risk of civilian casualties that determine if it's a war crime or not. Some countries have signed the Ottawa treaty, but notably not the US or Russia. And the trend isn't going towards states signing the treaty but rather towards leaving it.

Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

#155

Post by machomaster »

dieortin wrote: post #52
davidfekke wrote: post #51

I hate to burst the New Scientist's bubble, but this is nothing new. We have had systems for decades that operated under "Fire and Forget". We have missles that either go to a pre-designated point or chase a heat or radar signature once they are fired. Human soldiers kill civilians and other soldiers on the same side. It is called "friendly fire". It is horrible, and should be avoided, but humans are more likely to m…

The difference is that in those systems a human chose the target. Here, an AI does. > but humans are more likely to make this kind of mistake more than a computer or AI model Based on?

The stats of USA using human-guided drones to kill people. A civilian/military ratio and numbers was worse that 11.9.

Heck, check the American drone war crime video Wikileaks published. The one that made the USA so angry that it decided to attack and destroy the journalists.

Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

#156

Post by alephnerd »

sterlind wrote: post #147
alephnerd wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The meta... I hate this kind of terminology with such fervent hatred as someone DefTech adjacent. It's just the sheer callousness of gamifying warfare. Edit: can't reply > How would you have me call it Tactics. It's emotionally neutral and sounds less like someone who follows warfare the same way someone follows competitive StarCraft 2 or DoTA.

how did you feel about Hegseth's "double tap" strike?

Double tap is standard terminology since my time on the Hill during Obama 2, and I think originates from the Vietnam War.

On the other hand, I am disgusted by the cuts of strikes that were superimposed with memes and soundtracks at the beginning of the war that were spread on official social media.

Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

#157

Post by pepperoni_pizza »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #120
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Russia been saying they will nuke everyone since before the war. They never do anything when meet with strength. Russians even didn’t use nukes when Russian land was under occupation for months. They just raised their fist in the air shaking it and said ”we will show you”.

At this point I just consider anyone taking Russian nuclear threats seriously a Russian propagandist (knowing or otherwise).

Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

#158

Post by kridsdale1 »

michaelt wrote: post #131
Chu4eeno wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which historically is one of the main reasons we think about “Artificial Intelligence” instead of cybernetics (Wiener kind of pissed off the defense dept). Cybernetics and artificial intelligence are two distinct fields, though? I have friends with degrees in both, it's not some long lost alternative name for AI (though we're unlikely to see something like Project Cybersyn using cybernetics today instead of some ov…

Before the rise of modern LLMs, when both AI and cybernetics were just futurists’ speculation, some people saw parallels. For example, thinking humans wouldn’t be displaced by super intelligent machines, but would instead be augmented by them cybernetically, becoming super intelligent while still having a human soul and body.

Sometimes I feel rather superhuman when my meat head commands my meat hands to invoke Claude on my iPhone.

I shouldn’t have to weld to my flesh to be called a cybernetic organism.

Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

#159

Post by matheusmoreira »

alephnerd wrote: post #138
matheusmoreira wrote: post #132

The meta keeps evolving. I suppose the next step is to create drones designed to intercept each other. Then swarms of drones will battle it out in the sky fully autonomously.

> The meta... I hate this kind of terminology with such fervent hatred as someone DefTech adjacent. It's just the sheer callousness of gamifying warfare. Edit: can't reply > How would you have me call it Tactics. It's emotionally neutral and sounds less like someone who follows warfare the same way someone follows competitive StarCraft 2 or DoTA.

What word would you have me use?

Re: Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

#160

Post by bawolff »

> involving fully autonomous drones set to destroy anything in a given area, with confirmed casualties

I mean, is that really different than a heat seeking misile at the end of the day? If its set to kill everything in the area, its not really using AI for making targeting decisions in the same sense a human would.

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