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Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned

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Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned

#161

Post by Grimm665 »

rightbyte wrote: post #128
Grimm665 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simulation of course, but I'll submit this video for your consideration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K8LGTwy6Zw To sum up the conclusion of the several-hour video series: the Aegis Combat System is essentially impenetrable to all but the most overwhelming of forces.

The resurgence of battle ships? It can't counter cannons right?

Perhaps not, but missile cruisers can :) They try that in a different series, a fully armed WWII battleship group against a modern US carrier group. Guns just don't have the range compared to surface launched missiles and they can't get close enough.

I won't pretend to be some expert on military hardware, I'm a guy interested in flight sims, and that video series just happened to catch my attention. They make a compelling argument though, cruise missiles are one of the methods they try (unsure if supersonic), and they are attacking the carrier group in the absolute worst defensive position it could be in: a narrow gulf surrounded by unfriendly territory on most sides.

Still, not much gets through. If it's not the missile defense system that gets you, it's the F/A-18 patrols. If not them, it's the F-14s that can scramble in minutes. Scary stuff.

Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned

#162

Post by bombcar »

jhgb wrote: post #147
10000truths wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it depends on how much time the bullet spends in the barrel. For a .50 BMG, this might be on the order of a few hundred microseconds.

I assume that the time spent in barrel is more or less constant compared to the other variables (such as angular velocity or angular acceleration of the barrel around the time of firing) and can be considered a fixed time delay in the system?

I think you could have a “free floating” barrel - these are already used to reduce barrel movement before the bullet leaves the barrel.

Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned

#163

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

nonameiguess wrote: post #80
x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...Also I'd really expect HN of all places to understand why banning what is basically computer vision based targeting systems is absurd. On the contrary, I would expect a site with a usersbase that screams incessantly about "privacy" and has an intense hatred of data-mining dark patterns, dislikes opaque ML models, would be against the lack of privacy and data-mining culminating in an execution by the state.

Whether they kill you with a remote-controlled drone, an autonomous drone, some manned platform, or just a man is orthogonal to whether the decision to kill you is based on privacy invasion and inscrutable threat detection algorithms.

It's not orthogonal when the entire killchain is automated.

Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned

#164

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

throwaway316943 wrote: post #145
jcims wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people need killed. Another way to look at this is improving the efficiency and accuracy of that process.

Remember that when the first bus gets blown up by one of these.

It's efficient collateral reducing killing of people who "need to be killed" when it's the West doing it, but uncivilized brutish terrorism when the Other does it.

Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned

#165

Post by marcus_holmes »

ign0ramus wrote: post #127
marcus_holmes wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how much of a missile's weight is payload, and how much is "missile"? I don't know enough about either to be able to say for certainty, but it's probable that the ratio of payload:delivery is different for drones, and possibly better. also, drones can do stupid things like fly underneath tanks, or land on them and then place a charge right up against the armour (or a vision slit, etc). Or even place a charge, back of…

A tomahawk with a 1000 lbs warhead weighs 2900 lbs (or 3500 lbs with a booster)[1]. It's a long range missile so, it is probably possible to achieve a better ratio for something shorter range but I have doubts regarding quadcopters like the ones discussed in the article being able to do so by virtue of how fixed wing craft (which the tomahawk is IMHO). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_(missile)

yeah, but for the cost of 1 tomahawk you could launch 100,000 ish kamikaze drones. Maybe 10,000 if we made them more sophisticated and a bit larger. And if the maths work out that a tomahawk is cheaper than a tank, then there's room to increase those numbers. The maths really favour drones on this.

And the infrastructure is so much easier - the tomahawk needs a specialist launch vehicle, that is in turn vulnerable to being spotted and attacked. Drones need a backpack and a bluetooth connection (for each 100 drones or so).

Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned

#166

Post by marcus_holmes »

dragontamer wrote: post #125
marcus_holmes wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how much of a missile's weight is payload, and how much is "missile"? I don't know enough about either to be able to say for certainty, but it's probable that the ratio of payload:delivery is different for drones, and possibly better. also, drones can do stupid things like fly underneath tanks, or land on them and then place a charge right up against the armour (or a vision slit, etc). Or even place a charge, back of…

> also, drones can do stupid things like fly underneath tanks I'm not sure how this is superior to just shooting a tank with a missile. > Or even place a charge, back off, detonate it, then place a second charge on the same spot and detonate that Now you've halved the payload. If your drone can carry 10kg, you now have 2x 5kg bombs instead of 1x 10kg bomb. If you have a single payload, you have just a shitty, slow mo…

> I'm not sure how this is superior to just shooting a tank with a missile.

armour underneath a tank is usually much lighter, because it's difficult to hit. Missiles have to do fancy armour-penetration stuff to get through the main armour on a tank. If you can get a shaped charge stuck to the underside of a tank, you don't need to do the fancy stuff.

> If you have a single payload, you have just a shitty, slow moving cruise missile.

yes. exactly. Except that for the cost of a single conventional cruise missile, you now have 10,000 shitty slow-moving, intelligent, able-to-do-evasive-maneuvres missiles.

> Al Qaeda was chaining RPGs in the last war together

so it works then? Imagine 10,000 RPG grenades flying by themselves, able to chain-hit a target, with no human operator in sight.

> A drone with a gun can sit in a location for 4 hours waiting for the tank to come, then fire the RPG when the tank comes into position.

The drone is the grenade. It doesn't fire the grenade. It flies to the target, attaches itself, goes bang. Next one flies to the same point, attaches, goes bang. There's thousands of them.

Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned

#168

Post by marcus_holmes »

grey-area wrote: post #156
marcus_holmes wrote: post #11

This feels like the same thing that happened with tanks. The end of WW1 saw tanks deployed effectively. WW2 was then fought using entirely new tactics and strategies enabled by tanks (not least "blitzkrieg"). Britain and France, notably, hadn't really worked out how to use them effectively and so were left fighting the last war, horribly disadvantaged until they worked out how to catch up (though air power being deve…

> And so we'll end up fighting battles mostly by destroying drones instead of people. Once you've knocked out all the enemy drones, they'll surrender because humans can't fight drones. A war like no other?

"war never changes" right? ;)

Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned

#169

Post by ethbr0 »

ardit33 wrote: post #160
ethbr0 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technologists tend to underappreciated relative utility as a driving popularity metric -- does it accomplish a job I need, better / cheaper / faster? My thought is that ransomware is seeing a resurgence because corporations are increasingly internetworked and hybridized with the global internet, because they have to be. So ransomware has begun to outweigh espionage as a method for extracting money from corporations.…

Um... you are way off the mark here. You just missed the latest war of Azerbaijan vs Armenia, where the azeri forces had these drones, that just hovered in the battle field for hours, and when the Armeni forces turned their radars off their would just home on them and destroy them immediately. They were acting like moving air-landmines. They key part of this is that they are super cheap to make (cost of a car), and o…

>> Drones (as used so far, in the remote suicide version) solve a key problem many states have: lack of effective tactical ISR. The US and major powers do not have this problem

That describes Azerbaijan and Armenia's war precisely.

> work autonomously

The TB2 [0] is not capable of autonomous engagement. It's remotely operated for weapons release. And half its key components rely on foreign technology (regardless of what Turkey claims).

The Israeli Harop platform [1] does have autonomous engagement, but intended for the S/DEAD role and is in a different class of technical sophistication and price.

Calling Russian export military equipment "sophisticated" is a bit of a stretch, considering modern delivered models are circa-1995 designs, only recently realized.

Maybe 30 years ago, but they haven't been able to even afford to modernize their own forces, and basically lost 20 years of progress to post-Soviet upheaval and kleptocracy.

We'll see what happens when drones go up against a military keeping pace with the times.

[0] https://baykardefence.com/uav-15.html

[1] https://www.iai.co.il/p/harop

Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned

#170

Post by ufmace »

petermcneeley wrote: post #68
marcus_holmes wrote: post #11

This feels like the same thing that happened with tanks. The end of WW1 saw tanks deployed effectively. WW2 was then fought using entirely new tactics and strategies enabled by tanks (not least "blitzkrieg"). Britain and France, notably, hadn't really worked out how to use them effectively and so were left fighting the last war, horribly disadvantaged until they worked out how to catch up (though air power being deve…

This analysis is slightly off because WWI and WWII were great powers fighting each other. If the great powers were ever to directly fight this would still be nuclear war. Nothing about "swarming bots" has significantly changed this domain. Where bots and swarm bots would be used is likely in asymmetric warfare. "Aircraft carriers will be replaced with cheap drone swarm carriers" I would argue that Aircraft carriers a…

> "Aircraft carriers will be replaced with cheap drone swarm carriers" I would argue that Aircraft carriers are the size and cost due to large munitions and maintenance constraints.

Mostly the need to carry big heavy bombs and missiles to attack big targets, and big heavy radars to find those targets, and big fuel tanks to stay up long enough to get to them, which then requires catapults to get them airborne and arrestor wire landing strips to recover them.

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