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Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

... Am I the only one who thought "Well damn, who'd have guessed making landmines that fly would be adding one terrible idea on top of another?"

I can't be the only one.

Please tell me I'm not.

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Landmines are simple and can't be hacked - a drone on the other hand is just software - Iranians spoofed the GPS systems of an US drone and made it land

They are now producing knockoff's of said drone.

It wouldn't surprise if hacking will decide wars. It doesn't matter how many drones you have if the enemy has all of them.

The problem with mines is the indiscriminate murder. The mines can't be hacked, but they don't know the difference between an enemy soldier in $YEAR and a playing child in $YEAR+10

I think we can probably all agree that while these things are different, we're really just talking about different flavors of disastrous. Sure, right now landmines have the lead in unintentional injuries/deaths, but in the grand scheme of things it's the early days, and bad quality automation (or good quality automation put to awful tasks) has yet to show its true potential. Then again it's hard to compete with the 60,000,000+ unexploded landmines estimated to be out in the wild.

May we not see the day with 69M autonomous drones, recharging off utility lines or solar, and hunting humans relentlessly with shitty visual recognition algorithms.

Edit: 69 was a typo, but I'll keep it.

I think 60M is the lower end of the estimate, which at the high end is around 75M, so I suppose 69 isn't a bad middle ground.

And yeah, as I wrote my comment I also envisioned self-recharging drones as a logical next step. If you're going fully autonomous, why keep any requirement to come back to base? The one in this story was kamikaze, but if you needed something with more of a punch that became expensive enough to require reusability, then you could have it come home, or just station autonomous ammunition stations at strategic locations.

More important: landmines are not offensive weapons, but drones are. It's the difference between a trench and a tank.

Do we need to say that is The problem with mines? Feels like there could be multiple.

The US military has had "landmines that swim" since 1979.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_60_CAPTOR?wprov=sfla1

Landmines are made to not be detected and last 100 years.

These fall to the ground after 30 mins.

Unexploded bombs also bury themselves.

These will be attractive to children (boys) but since they can only go 5 km the children are already part of the battle.

Sure I'd add a further mode to land early and have a low power sensor to blow up when it detects a person in some cases but there's little reason to think this story is even true yet.

Wow, adding some gender to it is beautiful. And how child labor is limited. I like that you went with a third paragraph of ideas instead of just self reflection and deletion. Strong take.

> Wow, adding some gender to it is beautiful.

Unexploded ordinances predominantly kill young boys.

Even though it saves lives how we direct education campaigns, Twitter won't allow us to discuss this? What a world we live in, it's honestly falling apart.

"the effects of unexploded ordnance in Afghanistan. In this case, 81% of those injured were civilians, 92% were men and boys, and 46% were younger than 16" - https://reliefweb.int/report/world/differing-effects-explosi...

> child labor is limited.

For labour it's a farming and digging issue for adults but for the children killed it's mostly about play I'm not sure where this is coming from?

As I said given Kargu-2 are going to be on the surface or returned to base they will be quickly cleaned up. Also unless they have gone to suicide mode and missed they should be relatively harmless.

Without added programming they are not like mines.

Add a small radio receiver that turns the drone on when it picks up a signal from a handheld radio or cellphone within flight range. Add small solar panels to trickle charge the battery while it waits. What’s the shelflife of LiPo batteries?

At least landmines don't actively seek out targets. They're a disaster, absolutely, but this seems to go a step beyond that.

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