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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

I am actually surprised that we haven't seen assassinations by drones yet (I mean non USAF drones). Consumer drones can't carry a big payload, but I'd guess they can carry enough explosive to kill someone. And even someone super protected like a US president would be helpless facing 5 drones travelling at 50km/h coming his way. I guess most terrorists are dumb and all recent attacks in the west have shown to be low tech, but I'd rather not count on that to protect us.

But in the US it's fine, since the drones have to carry a license number. That will protect us!

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Agreed, and I can't imagine why you were modded down.

It's certainly true that most terrorists are complete dumbasses, but not all of them are. In this case, the scenario includes technology that can carry out asymmetric warfare without placing the bad guy in any personal peril, allowing fanatics other than the suicidal variety to play the game.

I don't think there's much that can (or necessarily should) be done to mitigate the risk, but I'm sure that efforts will be made soon enough.

Disney film crews, can take down drones, Secret Service can too.

Ha ha. The Secret Service is not nearly as vicious as Disney film crews...

"drones don't kill people, people kill people"

- AUVSI, in the future

I am not arguing that drones should be banned. But I'm just surprised it hasn't happened already.

I think you are right; and what you're saying reminds me of a story from Malcolm Gladwell about the 1981 Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament [1] that Doug Lenat won. He used some type of genetic algorithm (he never released his source) to find that swarming the challenger with many small boats would dominate as a tactic. Miniature swarms, which drones are cheap enough and more than capable for, are not a tactic that people are use to. I fear that a swarm could be terrible in its destruction if used to hurt people, individually targeted or for mass harm.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/11/how-david-beats...

Same idea as Gen. Paul Van Riper's strategy in the Millennium Challenge war games ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 ). He spammed the enemy with cheap speedboats and motorcycles, forcing the organizers to rewrite the rules to make the game "fair."

I guess a cloud of drones can probably be shot down with some sort of EMP. It's unclear to me how to ensure the EMP is powerful enough to go through the shields of the drone without damaging the systems of the warship it protects.

Both of these articles are fascinating - underdogs with clearly superior strategies dominate, and rather than learning from that, the powers that be just change the rules to prove themselves right. How shortsighted

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