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Comment by zizee | Hacker News Reader

The entire premise of the video is not what is possible right now, but what could be possible in the not to distant future. I.e. that these drones do become available to anyone. Easy to acquire, maintain, operate and keep hidden.

It's also not about warring states, but instead very targeted assassinations, where the perpetrators doesn't have to be anywhere near the target, allowing very little risk of punishment, retaliation, or even identification.

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Aren't assassinations targeted by definition? And surely this kind of thing is already doable if you're motivated enough, e.g. every smart phone is both an identity mechanism and a signal (thanks to all of the tracking/location systems) that could probably be used to guide a weapon system to an intended target. Hell, there was a kiwi engineer who built a cruise missile in his garage almost 20 years ago. I don't know that a killbot system offers much of an improvement over existing methods for the difficulty of execution, with the probable exception of, say, air superiority where the capability of autonomous systems will far surpass human ability. But even there we're probably two generations away from fully autonomous systems; the next generation seems to be robotic wingmen.

What really stops the average person from building these systems isn't necessarily the difficulty of the system itself, but rather the impossibility of getting the components. The drone is just a delivery mechanism for the ordinance, and good luck getting your hands on that.

Also, for said killbots to be anything other than a trivial threat (just jam the signal) they would need pretty decent onboard AI to function independently, which I guess is the point they're trying to make. But there are almost certainly far easier and more cost effective ways to get the same effect that don't rely on currently non-existent technology.

> Aren't assassinations targeted by definition?

Sure. I should have said assassinations and targetted attacks. The video shows the ability to target specific races/genders/demographics.

> The drone is just a delivery mechanism for the ordinance, and good luck getting your hands on that.

I don't know why a shotgun cartridge could not be used in place of a shaped charge. Just pop down to your local Walmart.

You seem to be arguing that this work speculative fiction isn't interesting because we already have a huge number of ways to kill people, and that it's not currently possible. The point of this sort of fiction is to get us to imagine a world where these things are possible, where it is achievable.

A shotgun cartridge would be vastly less effective, and in many countries, even getting your hands on ammunition is difficult.

My objection is that it's mostly fright porn for drumming up mindshare. I don't think it's particularly compelling because a) imagining such systems is trivial, and b) there are already ways for us to achieve the same goal, so it's not even a novel threat.

But of course, that's just my opinion. Others obviously feel differently.

>I don't know why a shotgun cartridge could not be used in place of a shaped charge.

Shotgun shells don't do much without a barrel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SSdLQcGEio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osxBoO9Hs5E

But that's beside the point. There are folks on YouTube making all sorts of dangerous things in their garden sheds on a shoestring budget. If Explosions&Fire can do it, so can a dedicated attacker.

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