The article doesn't get much into what can be the next step - fully autonomous drones that travel by night, charge by day, and find a target by themselves. A bit like landmines, with a shorter half-life, but highly mobile and intelligent enough.
You're aware that the (to my knowledge, which is entirely based on documentaries) primary way drugs are shipped to the USA are drones nowadays? Some via air, some underwater etc
There is just to much area and drones are tiny. It's infeasible to track them without spending insane amounts of money (and creating a total surveillance state as a by-product)
It's not impossible if it's predominantly automated. You have swarms of "police drones" on patrol actively scanning for other drones and when they see one that they don't like (some sort of signed certificate that authenticates the owner and their license) they shoot it down. It works as long as the "police drones" are plentiful and well dispersed to the point of maintaining dominance.
>and creating a total surveillance state as a by-product
that's what i meant when i said this brings its own host of problems. My point's not that our way of life will continue unabated my point is that this particular force multiplier goes both ways, and the defense will be a sort of "drone police corps". The biggest problems will be whatever happens outside of the "margin of error" (ie accidentally shooting down the wrong drones, civilians caught in crossfire, people hurt by falling debris) and the general end of any notion of privacy (not that America isn't already going in that direction anyways).
Floating clouds of molecular drones ever-present designed to destroy other unauthorized drones, and that technology will enable the long walk on a short pier for those that violate phyle rules. Cookie cutters.
For decades we've lived in a society where defending against these kinds of violent acts was far easier than committing them. That's changing, and it only has to change a little bit to have radical effects on society.
The reality is that a majority of people are simply too lazy to do this stuff. We are talking about populations that call a guy to come change a lightbulb - rigging a drone with explosives, figuring out control at a distance - this is beyond the scope of capability for the majority of malcontents. Most would-be pipe bombers end up nabbed at the point where they try to purchase a charge for their devices. Same deal here. Yes, there’s scope for a small number of bad actors to wreak havoc, but the thing about small numbers is that they are readily dealt with through existing law enforcement frameworks.
On a state level, war is war, and arms races are never static. You send flotillas of drones? I manufacture flotillas of counter-drone drones.
Yes, there is an asymmetry currently, but just as air supremacy was once seen as “well, this makes war practically impossible”, and became just another battleground, the same will happen here.
“Further, the process of transformation… is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
The recent advancements in the normalization of hate and suffering, while tech keeps advancing, makes me feel like I have Cassandra Syndrome, aka, I feel like I am taking crazy pills.
We are coming face to face with the concept of exponential growth itself. Humanity versus the feedback loop. And it will take coordinated genius to best such a naturally powerful foe.
The memory of what happens when hate takes control died, literally. The people who survived WWII are mostly gone. Now, without their knowledge, without their shame, we are swinging back to the other side.
My concern is that the swing happens to go the wrong way, at the same time that we happen to have an incredibly asymmetric ability to destroy each other.
We might be 1 or 5 swings away from that being a truly end-of-times situation. At this point, that seems to me like it would be when a pissed off kid, whose parents were killed as "collateral damage," could create a novel pathogen with only a $10k lab.
If tech and hate keeps advancing at the current rate, what is that, 100 years max? We really need to get our shit together.
Isn’t that the answer to your question, then?
In any case, the solar cells should still be visible.
Such cells would be half as efficient I suppose, so would need to be twice as large and probably at least twice as heavy. I wonder how that might affect design and payload constraints as it scales.
Why would that be an issue? Planners have to think further ahead, but the threat is only marginally decreased.
Drones aren't limited to quadcopters.
> Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot.
So do that?
Humans are persistance predators, or so I'm told. We didn't domesticate horses by running faster than them, but by because they had to rest, and when they stopped we'd catch up, and then they'd run again, a cycle that repeated until they couldn't run any more.
But these days, we humans are no longer nomadic: we live in predictable homes, and most of us who work do so at predictable locations.
A drone that takes a year to get to one of us? We could outrace it, or shoot it down… but only if we know it's there.
As someone in the IRA once told Margaret Thatcher, "We only need to be lucky once. You need to be lucky every time".
(For competently designed fixed-wing drones, Canada is "in the area" of San Diego).
Advanced knowledge has only once been used in a terror attack, and not very effectively.
These types of drone would need to collect a lot of not-so-easy-to-get knowledge. You'd need weapons, mechanical design, electronic fuses ... but mostly an AI good enough to make decisions on their own. And frankly, with good AI you could do a lot more damage than this without ever killing anyone.