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Comment by tibbydudeza | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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