Killer Flying Robots Are Here. What Do We Do Now? | Hacker News Reader

Killer Flying Robots Are Here. What Do We Do Now?

foreignpolicy.com

20 pointssebwi13 comments

It's been a century of carpet bombing, 6 decades of ICBMs and conventional guided missiles, 4 decades of cruise missiles and somehow it's the collateral damage minimizing drones that are breaking the camels back?

A lot of modern military tech is built around killing less and less, only as much as necessary but the fear density (fear per victim) keeps going up. My guess is that the lack of deaths makes each death more significant and visible. It becomes much easier to connect to those deaths than to the 140000 nameless Japanese citizen living in Hiroshima who died from a single bomb.

On the flip side, carpet bombing or nuking cities is something that instantly raises the stakes and can't be done in secret. When fewer people are killed, there will be less consequences.

The same issue applies to non-lethal weapons. In theory they represent great moral progress, but by reducing the stakes their use for totalitarian repression becomes less controversial and no longer produces martyrs.

At what point does war become simply murdering the people that oppose you? No one will be prosecuted, congress will have no say, hell no one outside the party in office will even get a chance to check the reasoning or intelligence. A perfect weapon will be used with impunity.

The difference is that ICBMs, cruise missiles etc. are in the hands of major organized militaries. The article doesn't complain too much about organized militaries using drones.

In 10-20 years, "small killer robot swarm" will be achievable for a single individual. It won't be as terrible as a world war, but I'm not looking forward at extremists randomly blowing up people with lightly modified COTS drones.

> In 10-20 years, "small killer robot swarm" will be achievable for a single individual.

There's a Black Mirror episode on this IIRC.

Killer bees are in S02E06 "Hated in the Nation", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation

There is another one with killer dogs in an apocalyptic wasteland (in black and white), S04E05 "Metalhead".

The short film "Slaughterbots" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw) fits it even more precisely though, I'd say.

I can't read that article but I've found https://archive.is/w2wkZ

Thanks!

Scary. Anonymized assassination will be good for cryptocurrencies because it will create incentives for powerful people to further hide themselves. To do this, they will have to disconnect themselves from centralized financial systems which are easily traceable (due to their reliance on laws which identify them by name and profile photo).

Power is going to become even more hidden than it already is; not only will powerful people need to hide from the public, they will need to hide from each other.

The cyberpunks were by far the most prophetic sci-fi writers.

I am reminded of a Hollywood grade-B movie where it depicted a small foot-long air-to-surface missile that can assassinate by identity. I don’t recall the name of the movie there.

Much like the 1976 movie “Drive-In” showed how an airplane can crash into a skyscraper, such inspiration is misguided.

“Drive-In” IMDB: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0074433/?ref_=fn_al_tt_0

> such inspiration is misguided.

Are you saying that the movie "Drive-In" inspired people to fly planes into skyscrapers?

> such inspiration is misguided.

Are you saying that the movie "Drive-In" inspired people to fly planes into skyscrapers? Are you also saying that people shouldn't create terrible acts in fiction because they might inspire people to perform them in real-life?

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