> lit the drone on fire in July, re-assembled and crashed it into my neighbor’s roof in August,
Drones should be handled the same way as weapons! Strict licenses and mandatory insurance!
Drones should be handled the same way as weapons! Strict licenses and mandatory insurance!
A license requirement for a car makes sense - you're dealing with forces well beyond the norm for what a human body has. Small drones though? I just don't see it.
Your 'arguments' of paper planes and human bodies are just strawmanning.
You can't fly a paper airplane a few hundred meters atop easily.
Feel free not to see it, i want to have my air space free and I would also never stand under a drone show.
Because assholes ruin everything for everyone at scale.
> Scooters
Remember when scooters were rare, then some VC's dropped hundreds of thousands of them in major cities so drunk people could plow into the side of your car at 20MPH?
Drones themselves are one of the more wildly dangerous technologies we've really taken off with in the last few decades.
We don't make rules for the good people of the world. We make rules because there's always a part of the population that's willing to take a big'ole shit in your glass of milk and sell it to you as pure milk.
All these demands always seem like rich people wanting to make sure regular people can't do anything.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bGoo3NWzMAzsLQceJ/drone-wmds...
These things almost never happen because people just aren't that evil, at least most of the time. When it happens, it's an extraordinary event.
And yet tens of thousands of us die in the US one or two at a time due to guns.
Humans are odd little copy machines. For example when a big name suicide occurs there tends to be a pretty sharp rise in copycat suicides.
Things tend to add up not in big events, but the long tail sweeps up huge numbers.
As for antipersonnel quads, Ukraine currently uses 7-8 inch ones. They are not small, quite loud and not exceptionally maneuverable. They are also extremely fragile and can be shot down by hitting just about any part of the quad. Also the thing about being difficult to detect using radars is just not true. They have a fairly large radar signature relative to their size which is also fairly unique because the spinning propellers cause Doppler shift on the rotating props. Small autocannons are already being developed for this role and in the urban environments similar systems using nets are being considered. There are also some prototypes of special rifles or rifle attachments for counter drone use being tested in Ukraine for infantry use.
The two most realistic dangers come from concealing them in shipping containers and then deploying them deep behind enemy lines (I am fairly sure this is already illegal in most jurisdictions) and targeted assassinations, where defending against drone threat is not that different than defending against other assassinations threats (concealed bombs, gunmen, snipers etc.).
You know it's easy to get illegal guns right?
Building an autonomous drone swarm capable of nuclear-weapon-tier kill count is far easier than building a nuclear weapon. We already know how dangerous military drones are, and those are still mostly bottlenecked by relying on human-powered target identification. Building drones to indiscriminately kill unarmored civilians is an easier task.
We are literally seeing the large scale use of robotic weapons platforms AT SCALE.
Machine guns create a storm of ballistic objects, and have been doing so for over 100 years. Large scale murder isn't new. We just have systems that have cameras that make it easy to put the footage online now.
This is just as true for guns as drones. Both need fast reactions and fine control. A human cannot control a swarm of drones any better than they can control a swarm of guns, but you can add autonomy (sensors, actuators, compute) to either to get some of those capabilities back.
Conventional munitions will always be more economical. It's hard to beat a few grams of steel in price per kill. Drones are only relatively cheap when compared to rifles, but they're actually replacing bullets/bombs. Great for high value targets, less great for indiscriminate killing.
Where though? It's certainly easier in some parts of the worlds than others, and surely something in the environment makes this easier/harder, I wonder if we could identify what exactly?
Ammunition is a bit harder, but again, there is criminal markets that fill the needs.
> but again, there is criminal markets that fill the needs.
Again, those are bigger in some places in the world, and almost non-existing in most parts of the world, even though it's possible to obtain in the right circles.
If we stop assuming the US's "everyone should have a gun at home" mentality is how it goes everywhere, it's still not "easy to get illegal guns" in most parts of the world.
The pipe is metal. You don't print that part.
Guns are 500+ year old technology at this point, manufacture is possible anywhere, as the industrious artisans of Yemen and Northwest Pakistan have shown.
But this was all in countries where guns were and are outlawed, which does make it harder to acquire guns, since those countries don't suffer from the problem of everyone and their mother having a gun, school shootings and all the other jazz that stuff comes with.
It still isn't "easy to get illegal guns" in those countries, even though it's much easier in other countries that are a bit behind the rest of the world when it comes to safety.
And just because its not easy doesn't mean there needs to be no law. No law means no conviction. There is no 'common sense law' which allows the state to put you in prision because its obvious that using some weapon in an unsave way is illegal.
And yes sometimes society adds protection to normal people so that they don't do stupd things. Plenty of 'smart' people allow others to get killed due to neglect, stupidity etc.
Btw. i'm pretty sure that having easy and quick access to a weapon is also a danger in itself. Sometimes you just need a little bit time of cooling down or talking to someone.
Maybe bureaucrats are fed up of regulating technology as primitive as basic 1960s quality guided missiles. Or whatever. But drones not considered straight up missiles without the bomb part is a bit of a mystery.