Britain and France, notably, hadn't really worked out how to use them effectively and so were left fighting the last war, horribly disadvantaged until they worked out how to catch up (though air power being developed at the same time also had an influence).
So now we have drones, and all those incredibly expensive fighter planes are useless. Aircraft carriers will be replaced with cheap drone swarm carriers, so naval strategy will need to change. Anti-tank drone swarms will make conventional armour more or less ineffective. And so on.
The good news is that there will be anti-drone swarms too. And so we'll end up fighting battles mostly by destroying drones instead of people. Once you've knocked out all the enemy drones, they'll surrender because humans can't fight drones.
Interesting times.
Or will lead to blending in with civilians, more advanced camouflage, or “hugging the enemy” tactics (staying close enough that they risk harming their own people). Or more terrorism rather than open warfare.
It might be that with these killer drones, we will look back on WW2 style armies in the field as equivalent to 18th century musketeers lining up and firing volleys at each other in bright colored shirts.
When the guns were so inaccurate that getting more shots was more important than actually aiming, that's the natural tactic to employ.
Lining up was hugely important for other members of the army to know what you're doing. If you're 1st in line, you shoot. Back of the line you're loading gunpowder (with everyone else). Middle of the line, you're dropping the bullet into the musket. Etc. etc.
Like a choir performance: its more about having tons of other people doing the same thing you're supposed to be doing. So no one in the army ever "misses" a step in the ~1-minute reload process.
Even if you're not that good at singing, you get "better" in a choir because you just follow the crowd. Similarly, even if you've forgotten a few steps in the long reload process, you just mimic the actions of your neighbors.
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Note that the Redcoat beat the US rifles at pretty much every engagement. It was guerilla warfare that allowed George Washington to survive and last through the war.
Rifles took longer to load. Without precision machining, the bullets needed to be wadded up with paper to stick with the rifling, adding a laborious step in the shooting process. Muskets could fire more shots per minute due to the smooth (though inaccurate) barrels. In army vs army battles, aim doesn't matter, your bullet will hit somebody over there, so there's no advantage to the superior aim that rifles have. You've added 20-seconds to your reload process for almost no tactical advantage at all.
USA experimented with rifles / guerilla warfare, but it really wasn't that successful in the 1700s. (It got the job done but... George Washington lost far more battles than he won). Even in the mid 1800s, the British Square formations were doing decently.
Some autonomous weapons blur the line, like the 'sniperbot' recently used to kill an Iranian nuclear scientist as he drove by. The weapon itself was mounted to the back of a truck, and could have lay waiting for days/weeks/months. There is no need for the fighters to blend in, when the weapons can - I imagine in the future where some high ranking military or political figure is sniped by a traffic light (by way of facial recognition or a humble license plate reader)
I'm not fully convinced. The advantage of drones is that they are relatively cheap. That automatically comes with significant range and speed limitations; after all, as someone else mentioned, we already have long-range semi-autonomous drones called missiles. They aren't cheap.
Naval engagements, not to mention aircraft engagements, happen at distances that are just not in the reach of cheap drones. Someone might get a surprise shot at an aircraft carrier in peacetime, but probably not while alert on the open sea. And I'm sure ships will be upgraded with defenses (if they haven't already).
Tanks and infantry, that's a more interesting problem.
They already have CIWS (and a bunch of other stuff) to shoot down incoming supersonic and maneuvering anti-ship missiles. Any drone slower or less difficult to hit than those missiles stands little chance. Drones can extend the eye and ears of a ship but they are not going to be killing ships themselves anytime soon.
If you produce 100 small boats (I'm thinking torpedo-boat size), each of which carry a few thousand cheap drones with a 5km range, then you can do 90% of the job of an aircraft carrier for 10% (or less) of the cost.
Humans aren't that logical.
I think they're perfectly logical. Superior force (in the context being discussed) makes you better at war, but not ruling.
Advances in military tech will probably reduce the overall bodycount of wars, but they don't solve the insurgency problem.
Where bots and swarm bots would be used is likely in asymmetric warfare.
"Aircraft carriers will be replaced with cheap drone swarm carriers" I would argue that Aircraft carriers are the size and cost due to large munitions and maintenance constraints.
Pretty sure runways are the reason. VTOL aircraft are too expensive to operate. Helicopters aren't good at attacking ships. Conventional aircraft need a runway: aircraft carriers have to be that big.
Mostly the need to carry big heavy bombs and missiles to attack big targets, and big heavy radars to find those targets, and big fuel tanks to stay up long enough to get to them, which then requires catapults to get them airborne and arrestor wire landing strips to recover them.
Not useless. The idea seem to be that fighter planes will become something like a command center for the drone swarm. There is value in having a human on site, to take quick decisions for instance, and links to drones can be jammed.
And if you look at the F-35 program, you'll see hints that it is the way we are going. It is a stealth fighter with a heavy emphasis on communication systems. Perfect for managing a fleet of drones. Ok, the execution is far from perfect, but that's another debate.
In the end, it is not entirely unlike the current situation. The difference is that these drones blow themselves up on arrival and are called missiles.
Oh, and swarms of drones won't be cheap, that's the army we are talking about. "Predator" style drones are multi-million dollar machines. A small missile like the Hellfire costs around $100k apiece. Forget your idea of a swarm of hobby quadcopters.
They can still fight the guerilla war among citizens. That's been an incredibly effective strategy because it's so expensive to fight. One might wonder if drones are the key to fighting these wars cheaply. If all you need is a small local base and then a thousand drones to surveil a populace... Well that sounds pretty nightmarish for the citizens, but it would certainly change the nature of war.
This is one piece of possibly good news that it seems like everyone is overlooking.
Automation/Remote control applies not just to drones, but tanks, boats, other aerial vehicles, and maybe troops(after seeing that Boston Dynamics dog robot) etc. Seems like it will be a small squad of highly advanced human troops to move in after the Remotes to secure and maintain control of the area.
So many lives will be spared during wars.
However, this may be unbeatable tech by humans, so any future revolutions will be easily quelled by a gov't with a few drone pilots piloting a drone swarm in a room a thousand miles away.
It'll come down to "how many drones, and of what quality, can your manufacturing base produce?". But this is not that dissimilar from WW2's "how many tanks, and of what quality, can you manufacture?" equation.
Insurgencies will be about getting a small swarm in exactly the right place at the right time.
Cheap, autonomous, easily-deployed tools - weapons drones, sensors, etc - are a huge change that some are adapting to leverage but few have adapted to respond to.
Which is scary considering the "generations of warfare" model where in fourth generation warfare, the boundary between civilian and combatant is blurred..
And it's fascinating seeing the comments here saying "nah, this won't change anything" when it already is changing things.
And yes, the blurring of the lines is a problem. As others have pointed out, hiding drones in civilian populations is easy.
A war like no other?
1. This won’t be your average <$1000 quad copter with a two kilometer range
2. Even if it was it could be hundreds of them
3. The military are developing large aircraft that function as essentially fighter aircraft that can destroy your tiny gun battery from 50-100 km away
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K8LGTwy6Zw
To sum up the conclusion of the several-hour video series: the Aegis Combat System is essentially impenetrable to all but the most overwhelming of forces.
And what happens if these autonomous drones aren't programmed to accept surrounder (as seems likely)?
Then the enemy will build, or buy, more drones. Well-funded armies or terrorist groups don't lose because they run out of weapons.
A drone cannot effectively damage a tank or any other major equipment.
The payload a swarm-drone is just way too small. Why have 100 needles when you can have 1 sword.
We have rockets, which are way more effective than any number drones.
A "drone" that can do proper damage is already the size of a plane. Anything less is only useful for recon.
What is likely to happen is any major nation-state that signs a treaty agreeing to a ban will STILL secretly be researching and building autonomous (or nearly autonomous) weapon systems because they do not want to be left behind.
I suppose nuclear states could in principle rest on their laurels, but at least from a layman’s perspective it doesn’t give an impression of being strategically sound.
But obviously it’s a scary rabbit hole to enter. It’s not fun when game-theoretical considerations or human nature seems to make dubious technological developments inevitable.
It's fairly easy and cheap to make an explosive drone and train a neural network to drive it using off the shelf components and open source software. It follows that it's inevitable that at least semi-autonomous drones will be made to counter radio jamming.
So while the best outcome a treaty could hope for is to prevent mass manufacturing these things by some countries, any motivated small country/individual will be able to craft them.
Regular bombs and guns probably still do most of the killing for quite awhile because of inertia, but I'm pretty firmly of the belief that they are outdated technology or will be soon, especially the regular guns part.
Regular bombs are arguably already outdated by missiles with (frequently autonomous) guidance... but for a lot of applications dumb explosives do work pretty well so those probably stick around for a long time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_prog...
Also I'd really expect HN of all places to understand why banning what is basically computer vision based targeting systems is absurd.
My thought is that ransomware is seeing a resurgence because corporations are increasingly internetworked and hybridized with the global internet, because they have to be. So ransomware has begun to outweigh espionage as a method for extracting money from corporations.
Drones (as used so far, in the remote suicide version) solve a key problem many states have: lack of effective tactical ISR. The US and major powers do not have this problem.
Autonomous drones solve... what problem?
My inclination is that they'll deliver the same value as current-gen ML systems: mass, automated intelligence collection & basic analysis. As well as continuous monitoring and triggering on a pre-configured event (e.g. truck leaves this building, launch missile).
Killing something, once you know what and where it is, is not a problem most militaries have.
Training and paying and allocating large numbers of soldiers to do basic intelligence trawling is absolutely a problem most militaries have.
I think you see this in the US drone approach evolution. Shifting from a single vehicle approach to a survivable system with attritable assets communicating back through stealth communication hubs. Because persistence is the real value.
It would be if there was a real war with a lot of things at once. That statement is only true for peacetime "executive action" wars with a 100:1 force ratio. It is an auxiliary role that has little to do with how things would go if there was a war between somewhat equal powers.
The lessons of enforcing foreign policy on ten people who live in a country with neutral diplomatic status will probably not apply if you change the number ten or the neutral diplomatic status.
They were acting like moving air-landmines. They key part of this is that they are super cheap to make (cost of a car), and operate, and work autonomously. Thousands of them launched, can wreck havock even on a sophisticated military like the US of Russia.
That's why there is a return of modernized cheaper ww2 type of anti aircraft guns.
China’s New Air Defense System Looks Similar To American ‘Stryker’ SHORAD https://eurasiantimes.com/chinas-new-air-defense-system-look...
On the contrary, I would expect a site with a usersbase that screams incessantly about "privacy" and has an intense hatred of data-mining dark patterns, dislikes opaque ML models, would be against the lack of privacy and data-mining culminating in an execution by the state.
You'll still see them used in targeted assassinations and some countries will have illegal military stockpiles, but that's very different from these things being treated like regular guns/ammo, being commercially available or legal to build.
Or is the alarm here about the fact that every man and his dog will be able to get their hands on them, when they cost $1000 instead of $1000000?
whereas this "slaughterbot" idea is smaller, low-cost, and with far less top-down control.
At least, as I understand it.
On the flip side, the hardware for Slaughterbots is basically here: TinyWhoops cost ~$100, say ~$100 to upgrade the ARM processor to one that can process realtime video, ~$100 for a shaped charge. So the hardware is super cheap, and once developed, the software to tie it all together has nearly no incremental cost. Once it's out there, that's the genie leaving the bottle.
Maybe the small difference is that cruise missiles generally are not anti-personnel weapons; maybe the article is seeking a ban in the same sense that Ottawa treaty banned anti-personnel mines but allows anti-tank mines. But I think this is something that would need to be explicitly addressed instead of just spouting sky is falling rhetoric.
>‘It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations’
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n09/jenny-turner/not-no-...
With respect to unconstitutionality, really? Are you also able to acquire and keep on your property a functioning ICBM or nuclear bomb? Arms controls exist in the US despite the 2nd amendment.
This is speculation at best, outright wrong at worst. Prove they're better than humans before employing them.
One soldier made this mistake. What if a faulty image fitting/target classification algorithm deployed in a fleet of autonomous drones was vulnerable to a similar misclassification and started flagging some innocuous objects in people's hands as weapons? Would the rules of engagement be permissive enough for the drones to begin killing those people on their own, would there be human operators in the loop confirming and authorizing the strike?
Any failure of the technology will be scoped away. If the drone blows up a city block targeting a kid with an ice cream cone, the cone will be classified as a potential weapon, therefore tragically the child was a militant.
You will NEVER ever prevent bad guys from creating them by "banning" them.
Look at drugs: all this war / bans / illegality, and the cocaine traffic never ever went down in decades (maybe during covid).
Best course of action is to invest in them to not be left behind
It really burns me to hear AI professors rail against “autonomous weapons” yet go work at Facebook, Google, etc. Information, especially manipulation of it, is a weapon too.
Actually we wouldn't even be able to compete today, things like missiles are already autonomous, and if they weren't we would simply be unable to compete in any battlefield where radio was jammed, and it would give a large force multiplier to adversaries even in battle fields where radio is not jammed.
https://www.droneshield.com/dronegun-tactical
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/o0kzuq/the_security_o...
I can picture there being something like this with drones.
There are problems to this. The major one being that, as mentioned by the posts on this thread, you have to develop the weapon to really know how to counter it.
A more direct science fiction forerunner of this is Bruce Stirling's _Islands in the Net_ (1988). There is a scene where cheap explosive drone swarms are used in terror attacks.
And of course, there's the famous first line of _Count Zero_.
"They sent a Slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW - Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT."
I am thinking of some other more low tech solutions to whittle them down as well: firing a weighted net; sticky silly string type stuff to tangle and gum up the rotors.
Could they not potentially be better than human controlled devices since they should be able to more accurately target things and create less collateral damage?
Of course, there's always the doomsday terminator scenario where they go haywire and decide to start targeting all humans....
Similar logic was applied to bombers in the Second World War. If bombers could fly into enemy territory, hit key targets behind enemy lines and fly out, then the need for armies would go away. Instead we got The Blitz, the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden, and the deadliest war in history.
Maybe this time is somehow different, but it's an important historical context to consider. Often the expansion of our destructive capabilities simply encourages more destruction.
Typically the only thing that stops WMD type weapons (not sure if slaughterbots fall into this category) is the enemy having them as well. Assured mutual destruction seems to be the only viable option.
If you give a swarm of drones a kill zone and time limit, then they try them to kill every human in the area, how is that so different from MLRS salvo?
Cruise missiles are already slaughterbots. You just give them location and they kill everyone in that location.
https://www.stm.com.tr/en/kargu-autonomous-tactical-multi-ro...
Surreal.
During the Cold War you started to see drones being used for reconnaissance. The US had the Ryan Model 147 and D-21. Once computers became significantly advanced you started seeing an explosion of different applications. The tomahawk missile is extensively programmable, allowing the user to give it a flight course consisting of a number of waypoints, and digital images along its intended path. It would then compare those images to what it sees on the route and use that for course corrections, ensuring extreme accuracy against targets a thousand miles away in a time before GPS. (fun fact: during the Gulf War, the Navy had to plan their Tomahawk stikes to go through the Southeastern portion of Iraq instead of a more direct route because they could use the mountains and hills for course corrections, while the direct route went over relatively featureless desert). In the late 1980s Israel would employ loitering munitions. Essentially these were suicide drones intended to take out enemy radars. It would loiter above for hours until detecting an enemy radar and then dive. There were also decoy drones. These didn't have a warhead, they were intended to simply fly around acting as bait. Some decoys are fitted with radar reflectors to make them appear larger on radar than they really are, essentially the opposite of stealth aircraft.
Autonomous weapons have been around for a long time and aren't going anywhere. Frankly, I think this is probably better in terms of reducing civilian casualties. I'd rather have soldiers use a precision guided weapon like this than calling in mortars or artillery.
This would be much fairer than the current system of gamified point-and-click murder.
I'm pretty sure any artificial rules which make war "fairer" will just be ignored when real bullets start flying since "it's better to be judged by twelve than to be carried by six" is an actual unofficial rule in the military.
