STM, the Turkish company that makes the KARGU drone referenced in the article has a promotional video from 2018 showing the unit being demonstrated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqv9yaPLhEk
Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned
31–40 of 186 posts
Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned
#32This 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…
Nah. Humans can't fight cruise missiles either, yet it hasn't changed to where one side gives up when the other has cruise missiles. Humans aren't that logical.
> Humans aren't that logical.
I think they're perfectly logical. Superior force (in the context being discussed) makes you better at war, but not ruling.
Advances in military tech will probably reduce the overall bodycount of wars, but they don't solve the insurgency problem.
Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if fewer weddings get blown up, we'll use them more and more to kill people. I wonder whether the absolute number of killings will go up or down this way.
Wait, why will we use them more and more to kill people if fewer weddings get blown up? I'm not seeing the causal link.
I think they are suggesting current usage is limited by political fallout due to the misidentification rate.
They hypothesize reducing the misidentification rate will increase the usage rate, ultimately killing more people (but fewer wedding parties)
Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if fewer weddings get blown up, we'll use them more and more to kill people. I wonder whether the absolute number of killings will go up or down this way.
Wait, why will we use them more and more to kill people if fewer weddings get blown up? I'm not seeing the causal link.
If they're accurate (or more accurate) then there's less resistance to using them more. They will be used to target an increasingly large number of people (or individuals) with a kind of specificity that present weapon systems cannot be used for and which impedes their use in some cases (because of the risk of collateral damage or the political fallout from a recent incident of bombing a wedding party).
Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned
#35Weapons that have been successfully banned in the past typically had an alternative technology that it could be substituted with. I'm not sure you can say the same of lethal drones. In the case of Azerbaijan vs Armenia, the sum total of the fighter aircraft of BOTH nations combined is just 5. For poorer nations, drones represent a democratization of the battlefield; an extraordinarily cheap technology with a lot of firepower per dollar. I don't think these countries will be willing to give this up easily.
Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned
#36In the book “The Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson there are mist-like swarms of nanobots that act as an immune system for regions against malicious nanobots. I can picture there being something like this with drones. There are problems to this. The major one being that, as mentioned by the posts on this thread, you have to develop the weapon to really know how to counter it.
That's the Extropian "Utility Fog" concept.
A more direct science fiction forerunner of this is Bruce Stirling's _Islands in the Net_ (1988). There is a scene where cheap explosive drone swarms are used in terror attacks.
And of course, there's the famous first line of _Count Zero_.
"They sent a Slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW - Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT."
Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned
#37I, for one, welcome our murderbot overlords. If we can't stop using drones to kill people, we should at least try to reduce collateral damage. With some advancements autonomous drones could be more precise and reliable than human operated ones, meaning that as an outcome fewer weddings will get blown up.
What are you saying? Our current drone strikes are plentifully precise and smart munitions are abundant.
Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned
#38I don't fully understand how there is real difference?
If you give a swarm of drones a kill zone and time limit, then they try them to kill every human in the area, how is that so different from MLRS salvo?
Cruise missiles are already slaughterbots. You just give them location and they kill everyone in that location.
Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned
#39One of the reasons the attempted drone assassination of Maduro in 2018 failed was because police were using radio jammers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Caracas_drone_attack
It's fairly easy and cheap to make an explosive drone and train a neural network to drive it using off the shelf components and open source software. It follows that it's inevitable that at least semi-autonomous drones will be made to counter radio jamming.
So while the best outcome a treaty could hope for is to prevent mass manufacturing these things by some countries, any motivated small country/individual will be able to craft them.
Re: Lethal Autonomous Weapons Exist; They Must Be Banned
#40It always has been scary to me to how weapons evolve over time. Even though they are (thank god) mostly not needed they still keep developing further to be more lethal and efficient just to be "prepared" to what might happen in the future.