This was back in 2026, before they released the Dredd series for civilian applications with onboard due processing and agents for prosecution, defense, judge, jury and executioner with millisecond response times, drastically reducing price per perpetrator.

Oof. "Price per perp" is so perfectly aligned with LinkedIn writing style I'm surprised I hadn't seen it already.

I do like the implied moral superiority. “Price per objectively bad guy or gal” or PPOBGOG is being workshopped now.

We've had loitering munitions that choose their own target autonomously for a long time, for example anti-tank weapons that climb up after being released from a plane or helicopter then sit on a parachute until spotting one or more tanks and firing warheads at them.

The superficial new thing here is the exact quadcopter form factor, but the significance is the new price point. You bet the loitering anti-tank weapon costs a fortune. These drones are very cheap.

Of course, mines can be even cheaper, but you unwittingly engage them rather than them engaging you.

I think the difference between a targeting a specific piece of military hardware compared to training an AI model to target humans and infrastructure is quite different. This explains why drones that get misdirected will target oil infrastructure in friendly countries.

Agreed. Even some of the latest IR missiles (AIM-9X I believe) also include a visual seeking component to compliment the IR seeker, and try to identify aircraft types based on their outlines (presumably for orienting the missile for maximum damage).

You just can't make that distinction with people, especially not if just using IR or the likes. The guy with a rifle slung over his shoulder just happens to look like the guy with carrying a rake. Hand gun in hand happens to look the same as a power drill. Someone wearing a beanie looks suspiciously like a soldier with a helmet.

This all feels like a really bad idea.

There are limitations to the technology, but in right scenarios it is perfect.

One should not use it on attack, when people need to distinguish between a soldier and a civilian.

But on a defence, when you need to keep a certain area empty from enemies (and there is nobody else but enemies incoming), then it resembles the usage of mines, only better (both in terms of efficiency and safety/callback/disarm).

Another scenario or cutting the logistics. If you know that a road is only used by military, then letting the automatic drones watch and engage is a great idea.

I think autonomous drone mentioned in the article used some sort of "kill all targets" mode indiscriminently much like traditional munitions.

In the article there's no mention on the targeting works, self guided munitions have machines as targets, usually. A drone by itself might kill civilians and even allies if ot misidentifies a person or animal.

I think the ancestor drones are land and sea mines, or really any kind of trap that dislocates the timing and control of the "trigger" from the person who launched it into the environment.

These newer drones have just gained locomotion instead of having to wait for victims to come to them.

> Which historically is one of the main reasons we think about “Artificial Intelligence” instead of cybernetics (Wiener kind of pissed off the defense dept).

Cybernetics and artificial intelligence are two distinct fields, though? I have friends with degrees in both, it's not some long lost alternative name for AI (though we're unlikely to see something like Project Cybersyn using cybernetics today instead of some overly deep neural net).

Before the rise of modern LLMs, when both AI and cybernetics were just futurists’ speculation, some people saw parallels.

For example, thinking humans wouldn’t be displaced by super intelligent machines, but would instead be augmented by them cybernetically, becoming super intelligent while still having a human soul and body.

I think the line is even fuzzier than you've described. Drones are very much analogous to missiles and torpedoes. Torpedoes have long been used in sea mines, and 'automatically' activated upon detection of acoustic or magnetic signature match.

The gulf war (1991) tv broadcasts of cruise missiles 100 feet above the road sure look(ed) a lot like autonomous drones on their way to killed humans to me.

Wasn't it just flying to a particular GPS, coordinate and exploding? That's quite a bit different than flying to an area and killing anything that moves...

It depends on the system. Some modern systems can react to high-value targets of opportunity, hunt for targets, or switch to a new target if the one they are after is destroyed before they get there. There are different variants of the weapons to deal with different use cases. The 1990s versions were relatively limited though.

Target selection is much more networked, automated, and adaptive than it used to be. Missiles can talk to each other.

I would hope it is. The fact it is even possible for a friendly system to lock onto another friendly system and fire upon it seems like a pretty big damn issue to engineer around. I guess they still haven't though considering kuwait shot down an f15 a couple months ago. You'd think lockheed or raytheon would have figured something clever out to solve this half a century ago.

Gulf war tomahawks didn't use GPS. They flew on terrain following radar (over Iran to improve accuracy), inertial reference, and image correlation for the final phase of attack.

Some cruise missiles have the ability to detect targets based on camera or infra-red match; on the other side, most (currently-deployed) drone types have at most that same capability. I believe that most of the infamous Shahed long-range drones that Russia has launched against Ukraine have been entirely inertial or satellite navigation based, with no independent re-targeting capability.

Right, I agree it is fuzzy. I just think, from an ethical standpoint, it is better to think of them as mines that have more mobility. Reasoning from the other end as projectiles which are slower or have more guidance seems to invite too much optimistic thinking about the level of control. That the victims will be as intended rather than quite indiscriminate and unpredictable.

I realize there is a full, multidimensional continuum here.

On one end are directly-aimed weapons that do their damage while still being aimed by the operator. Their risks include collateral damage limited to things like aiming errors, effect radius, or continuing down-range beyond the target.

Further out are messy things with more active guidance that can turn and seek the target and potentially go off course. But their time to target is still quite limited and more or less being observed by the one who fired it. The risk expands with its potential "cone of maneuvering" and travel range.

Then you get into these things with long dwell times and autonomy where the eventual targeting event happens without supervision and is greatly affected by things happening in the environment which the operator cannot have really predicted nor controlled for. The longer time in operation increases the risk not only from wandering/guidance but from how much the environment can change before it performs its final targeting event.

Another example in this category could be chemical and biological weapons. There is a lot more uncertainty in the targeting effects due to the way it disperses in the environment.

The difference is in "active"/intelligent versus "passive"/dumb targetting that's performed by the machine.

The missile, once fired, has the general vicinity (if not the exact position) of the target and is armed by the operator. Therefore, the operator is fully accountable for the targetting. Same goes for the landmines, once placed. Hitting civilians is reckless at best, and negligent at worst.

An autonomous weapon system (AWS) usually means that the system, once deployed, can do the targetting itself over any arbitrarily bounded location. An AWS can continue finding targets as long as its hardware allows it. For kamikaze drones, it's one time; for other drones, the ammunition & battery are the limits.

We currently rely on human targetting because we assume that A) humans are able to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate targets "well-enough", and if not, B) at least we can hold them accountable (e.g., punish them for war crimes).

An AWS provides a layer of plausible deniability: the operator can claim that the system wasn't developed well enough, while the developer can claim that it wasn't used as intended. Given the inscrutability of modern computational intelligence - i.e., visual-action neural networks - this could potentially lead to very worrying incidents.

From a technical POV, the difference between a manually operated drone and an AWS drone may not be massive. From a military POV, it's just another legal lethal tool in the arsenal.

But from a social/civilian POV, the use of AWS is still 'not normal' and opens a can of worms. Targetting while evading counterattacks and crimes successfully is a bottleneck for manual operation. That's no longer the case with AWS: build 20 thousand drones, for example, and you can trivially win by overwhelming any manual defense of frontlines or cities. And knowing the history of human warfare, winning can range from relatively bloodless regime changes to utter destruction of the loser's civilization.

So, the best outcome is similar to nuclear deterrence or MAD: as long as everyone has 20 thousand AWS drones, they're safe.

> Same goes for the landmines, once placed.

Landmines can be dropped from the air by the thousands and many land mines can survive for decades. Placing a landmine anywhere is essentially the same as firing a bullet blindly through time. And no individual soldier has ever been held accountable for a landmine that killed a civilian years down the road.

Which doesn’t make what you said about drones any less awful. Just that landmines are already uniquely awful.

> Placing a landmine anywhere is essentially the same as firing a bullet blindly through time.

Beautifully said and truly clarifies how evil of a weapon they are.

With that said, are these drones paradoxically more ethical because their loiter time is dramatically shorter and therefore won’t harm civilians after the conflict is over?

But I think there is an extreme ethical boundary we are traversing by putting targeting and trigger-pulling in the hands of a robot. The ways this will later be abused by authoritarian regimes is just staggering. We are reducing the necessary footprint of a loyal junta and automating dictatorships with this technology. It’s very disturbing.

Autonomous drones are much more precise, thus safer for non-combatants, than land mines (which kills for decades after a war), shells, missiles, guided bombs, etc.

I'm not sure I'd consider a trap an "autonomous weapon". The trap cannot select a target. It will go off for anyone unlucky enough to step in its trigger.

An autonomous drone will select a target and pull the trigger. It fills in the position of a human pulling a trigger, which is a decision.

Maybe if robots began deciding where to lay mines, i could hand it to you.

I mean by some measure a trap can be worse, as many people have died from mines years after no conflict.

And who is held responsible when they hallucinate and say, kill the wrong person or mistake a playground for a battlefield?

Big "an AR 15 is just an automatic bow which is basically a spear thrower which is basically a knife which his basically a punch so nothing matters anyways" vibe

> “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”

This is a clear war crime. We don’t need to update any international laws, do we? This is by definition indiscriminate, like landmines or chemical weapons.

Check the reality https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/YW1ldcsYwF

That area is a wasteland . No one lives walk there among civilians with a rare exception more over drive. You probably do not understand what Russia turned these areas to. It was the most populated area in Ukraine . Now it’s an empty land .

Ukraine launches drones into populated Russian cities too though, right? We can justify its use in a wasteland battlefield today, but the fear is that it's used in a Russian or Ukrainian city tomorrow.

(FWIW, and not that it should matter, I support Ukraine in the war. Just not the development of autonomous kill decision drones.)

It's nice to have the luxury of deciding which of the horrible choices Ukrainians face are war crimes. But by that measure, a Grad MLRS is just as much of a war crime. Everything in the grid square it obliterates will also be dead.

(For those who don't know, the Grad is the most produced MLRS ever, and the Russian army's weapon of choice for indiscriminately bombarding enemy territory)

There is nothing but valid targets in those zones. Not different from sending a cruise missile on a military base killing everything there.

It would be my hope that unlike landmines, these might have a remote off switch/signal that can disable them after the war ends. At the very least, the battery will die and it won't fly around anymore.

>This is a clear war crime.

Sure, but does the battlefield have any war crime police on site to enforce those laws? Because without enforcement and punishment, all laws written by man are just fake and meaningless pieces of paper. The only laws that are actually real and non-optional are the law of gravity and such.

The war crime laws were invented as a legal theater for victorious powers to persecute the losers after WW2 with a veneer of legality, for imperialist superpowers to bully the small third countries who refuse to play ball, not for something superpowers to actually abide by themselves.

Because otherwise you could prosecute thousands of western/US personnel and their leaders under the same laws they prosecuted nazi soldiers at Nuremberg for what they did in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc but you're not gonna see that because the US didn't get conquered to have its soldiers and leaders dragged to court. US even has a law that allows it to invade the Hague if its soldiers are ever to be taken to trial there for war crimes. That tells you everything you need to know about the hypocrisy and double standards of "war crime" laws. And same thing will happen to Israel, Netanyahu and other war criminals there.

The reality in the real worlds, is that 'might makes right' trumps the geneva convention and war crime laws. Whoever ends up holding the guns on top of the rubble pile is the one making the rules that everyone else is forced to abide by. That's why the US is forced to constantly outspends all other militaries on the planet combined, to ensure they're the ones writing and enforcing international laws, and never ending up in the position to be held accountable by others, because they know that if they ever do, there's a laundry list of receipts waiting for them.

> The war crime laws were invented as a legal theater for victorious powers to persecute the losers after WW2 with a veneer of legality, for imperialist superpowers to bully the small third countries who refuse to play ball, not for something superpowers to actually abide by themselves

I recommend you watch Judgment at Nuremberg - the 1961 film, not the 2025 one (I've seen both.) the Nuremberg Trials were very much to punish the architects and perpetrators of the Holocaust for their atrocities. you can choose to be cynical, but consider: which "losers" were "persecuted?"

- the Doctors' Trial sentenced the doctors who murdered thousands of disabled Germany's own citizens in the Aktion T4 program.

- the Judges' Trial sentenced the Judges who enforced the Aryan racial purity laws, ordered the castration of "mental defectives" and sent falsely-accused Jews to their deaths.

- the Pohl Trial which sentenced the SS officers who ran the concentration camps and death camps.

sure, the US doesn't have perfectly clean hands, and the victor usually won't prosecute its own the way they prosecute the enemy, but I strongly disagree that the Hague was just an attempt to "persecute the losers." they were prosecuted, not persecuted, and they weren't prosecuted for "losing," they were prosecuted for their atrocities.

just because the Hague is unfair (some men never faced justice, since they were on "our" side) doesn't mean it was unjust (those who were convicted deserved it.)

The world is really at a threshold where it's become openly obvious that technology is not working for the majority of humanity, but a small cabal.

I’m not sure how you construe “country implements desperate measures during time of existential crisis” with technology only working for a small cabal? If anything this shows that this particular technology is more egalitarian than its predecessors, since it’s cheap and being used effectively by a smaller country defending itself against the territorial ambitions of its imperialist neighbor.

Or, Putin could have decided not to invade Ukraine.

Most drone techs and engineers in Ukraine as well as Russia would prefer a civilian job instead of fighting a protracted war.

It’s fun and games when you have the bad guys invading. It’s not so clear cut when that same technology gets used for terrorism against civilians. Indiscriminate killing by a machine should not be clapped at

Something like a proximity mine from a video game. I always did wonder why they didn't just sprinkle a bunch of these in an intermediary zone. Surely it provides incredibly effective area denial. Perhaps it does and you can't get in, perhaps it invites escalation. Definitely seems like widespread automated hunter-seekers will be some kind of terror operation in the next quarter century. Too easy to build, too easy to deploy, and you don't even have to be around when it activates. Controlling the explosives pipeline is surely the only way. I'm surprised it hasn't already happened.

> Something like a proximity mine from a video game.

Or real life. See:

Mark 60 CAPTOR (1979)

General Dynamics MEDUSA/Hammerhead (now)

The meta keeps evolving. I suppose the next step is to create drones designed to intercept each other. Then swarms of drones will battle it out in the sky fully autonomously.

> The meta...

I hate this kind of terminology with such fervent hatred as someone DefTech adjacent.

It's just the sheer callousness of gamifying warfare.

Is this new? I'm sure I've heard about it in the Iran and Gaza wars.

Or is this the first time a soldier was killed, all those other times being civilians?

> “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”

This is also indiscriminate.

I wonder what that means for war crimes responsibility.

Let's say a swarm of these things kills every civilian patient in a hospital or every child in a school. Who is responsible?

I'm surprised Israel wasn't the first to field such weapons.

Not any difference from sending a cruise missile into a hospital killing every patient or every child in a school. The people giving the order to press the button and the people pressing the button can be liable for war crimes (can be because killing civilians by accident isn’t necessarily a war crime or even having collateral civilian causalities).

Seems to me like every single person who enabled the process should be held partially responsible, with whoever gave the final approval holding the largest portion of that responsibility.

It doesn't mean anything new. The country or entity that deployed them is responsible for their behavior.

Whether any particular country or entity can be held responsible is another question.

Imagine sanctions killing a million civilians due to insufficient medical care. Imagine firebombing Tokyo. Imagine dropping a nuclear bomb on a city full of civilians. Imagine genociding Palestinians. Imagine bombing a girl's school, killing hundreds.

Who's responsible, AI or a human? That misses the point that noone seems to be responsible at all, even in democracies.

It's the future of warfare and it will sink the inhibition threshold for starting wars of aggression further.

> Carpet bombing of cities, towns, villages or other areas containing a concentration of protected civilians has been considered a war crime since 1977, through Article 51 of Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpet_bombing

Autonomous weapons have hardly been deployed yet, maybe at the Inner Korean border or some lunatic's backyard. Therefore I don't think there is any legislation for it yet. But it seems a very cruel way of killing, also considering in this particular case they didn't even send footage back. What kind of experiment was this? Maybe they didn't like to see the brutality, perhaps people begging for mercy not to be killed, giving up and showing a white flag. Indeed this isn't possible with carpet-bombing.

I can kill you by having a B-52 level the entire downtown area where you work.

Or, I can have a drone with an LPR slam a mortar round into your car as you drive.

A few thoughts.

First, I advise a modicum of skepticism to be retained in the face of such news. Ukraine is, after all, in the middle of an existential crisis and must take every advantage it can, even if it's just scaring Russian invaders further (I bet both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers are already pretty scared of drones).

Additionally: "“There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing…". So there's no way to know exactly what happened which adds a lot of uncertainty.

Finally: the system was first used two years ago once, then never again. That doesn't sound like it's giving much of an advantage. Sorry, I don't believe that it's a matter of military ethics. If Ukraine could deploy actual Terminator robots to the front line it would do it in a heartbeat. Again: existential crisis. They're fighting for their country's existence. I would use every weapon in my disposal; and I'm a pacifist who hates violence. So I don't think that "test" really worked well at all.

Now, taking the New Scientist's reportage at face value, the announcement seems to describe a system that is only marginally more capable than a self-guided missile. It seems that a quadcopter swarm of undisclosed strength flew to a predetermined location (nothing new to see here), then a target acquisition system was activated.

Is the latter a new capability? Hard to say without more details that we're not likely to know. Maybe the drones simply locked on to whatever moved. Motion sensing is not new technology. Nor is it a great idea to put it on a flying grenade that you fire-and-forget.

Maybe the drones had some on-board machine vision system that tries to identify useful targets like persons and vehicles. That's eminently possible with modern tech, I have a Raspberry Pi-powered quadruped from China that can detect my face, identify balls of different colours etc. All this is more than enough to automate target selection, with a bit of creative cobbling together of existing components and if you don't care too much who the target selected, is.

Without more information it's very hard to guess exactly what happened. However, "Slaughterbots" these don't seem to have been.

Later, a different, human-piloted drone was sent in to inspect the outcome. Why human-piloted? Well, because there's no way to ensure that an autonomous drone will be able to do the job, that's why.

So in other words: we're not there yet. "There" being a nightmare where machines kill humans autonomously and we unlock a new level of horrors and war crimes. There is still time. We can still pull back from the brink. Resistance is not futile.

> They're fighting for their country's existence. I would use every weapon in my disposal; and I'm a pacifist who hates violence.

I'm not sure it's accurate to define yourself as a pacifist if you believe safeguarding the concept of a nation-state is more important than human life, ethics, or the downstream effects of using "every weapon at your disposal".

I don't think you realize the creativity and variety we humans have put to use when designing weapons. If you can imagine a biological, chemical, radiation, concussive, or other weapon, it's been worked on. There has been more than one project to build a "world-ending weapon" and go way beyond the MAD theory.

They're fighting for their own existence. Russia has killed, enslaved, and/or tortured most of the citizens of the regions it's already captured, and replaced them with ethnic Russians.

I think "killed, enslaved, and/or tortured most of the citizens of the regions it's already captured" is an exaggeration. That is not to deny Russian war crimes, which are clearly large-scale and horrendous. But I don't think the majority of people in those regions have been killed or enslaved.

I'm a big supporter of Ukraine and have donated to the war effort and hosted Ukrainian refugees.

You are spreading misinformation and lies. Where in Ukraine people got replaced by Russian people. What a load of bullcrap. Cite sources or retract your stories.

I don’t imagine you get paid by the FSB, so I gotta ask, do you really do this for free?

>> I'm not sure it's accurate to define yourself as a pacifist if you believe safeguarding the concept of a nation-state is more important than human life, ethics, or the downstream effects of using "every weapon at your disposal".

Wait till you hear that I'm also an anti-nationalist :P

But I'm also pragmatic. Nations aren't going away and they have armies and they like to invade each other. If my country were to be invaded (not a zero probability; I'm Greek and if NATO collapses...) I would put the good of my people above my personal beliefs before you could say "peacenick". C'est la vie.

>> I don't think you realize the creativity and variety we humans have put to use when designing weapons.

I think I do but why do you say this? I didn't understand how it connects to the rest of your comment, or to mine.

But don't you think Greece, if nothing else, emphasizes that a country isn't defined by whoever happens to declare it as part of their borders, but the people within those borders? Greece persisted for millennia, even when there was no Greece. The state disappeared but the people persisted.

I'm not at all a pacifist but there is no country I would fight, let alone die, for. Because when we say that we're really speaking of fighting and dying for politicians, not a country. And there is no political group that, in my opinion, deserves anywhere near that level of loyalty.

>I think I do but why do you say this? I didn't understand how it connects to the rest of your comment, or to mine.

not the parent, but i have a guess.

they mention the variety of weapons because some weapons are abhorrent. designed to be maximally painful, for the maximum amount of time, purely to bring about maximum suffering.

"every weapon at your disposal" includes those weapons. and that is really difficult to square with "im a pacifist", even when considering conditional pacifism.

Using every weapon at your disposal would entail, at the extreme end, unleashing weapons which could viably kill every person on this planet - to defend a state. It's not exactly a typical foundation for pacifism.

Being a pacifist doesn’t imply being a doormat. At any rate, I don’t think Ukraine would have attacked Russia under any credible circumstances.

I don't think you realize the creativity and variety we humans have put to use when oppressing conquered peoples if you think resisting an invasion with every means available is the incorrect choice because it kills people.

> If Ukraine could deploy actual Terminator robots to the front line it would do it in a heartbeat.

Completely false. They are beholden to their allies. Ukraine could also reach Moscow with missiles, why doesn't it? It could build a nuclear bomb in 6 months, if not 6 weeks, they have the capabilities, why doesn't it? It's not so simple.

I think the reason Ukraine has not attacked Moscow with missiles is that this would force Russia to retaliate with nuclear missiles. There's a long discussion on this in sources I follow (full disclosure, I tend to listen to John Mearsheimer a lot although I don't believe everything he says) and the consensus is that the latest attacks in Russian land will have consequences.

So I agree that it's not so simple but I also don't believe for a minute that it has anything to do with ethics. Not in that war. And I have to be honest but I can't think of a war were ethics played an important role in determining belligerent's behaviour.

Russia been saying they will nuke everyone since before the war. They never do anything when meet with strength. Russians even didn’t use nukes when Russian land was under occupation for months. They just raised their fist in the air shaking it and said ”we will show you”.

You are misinformed. Ukraine is used as cannon fodder by western institutions. You talk about Ukraine taking decisions. I can tell you that the normal Joe in Ukraine is completely sidelined in decisions. The whole country is controlled by foreign powers. A lot of western people call this Russian propoganda. They can't see that their own governments are at the wrong side of history. In the meantime it's hypocritical behavior is visible all over the world.

Can someone who got past the paywall tell me what the definition of “fully autonomous” is here? I’m guessing it means the software selected targets based on something the human operators decided when they launched the drone? Is the criteria geographic (any humans in a certain zone), or known individuals (facial recognition), or based on enemy uniforms/visual descriptions, or a specific behavioural rule (anyone emerging from this building), or what?

It flies to a defined kill zone and targets everything there.

> The test took place two years ago and involved quadcopter drones that were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover between 3 and 5 kilometres over around 10 minutes and then engage “Terminator mode”, in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets.

> “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”

That’s a war crime, but I have seen unhinged drone operators who prefer to fly these drones than doing anything else because “they like the killing”, exact words said by one.

Technically speaking, it’s not impressive, you can train a simple local object recognition in the companion computer in the drone to fly at that specific object, so just train it on soldiers images and communicate over serial port and let the open source auto pilot do the navigation, again, nothing is that impressive, a weekend project, personally done before but not on humans and it was for good.

What's gonna happen when the redneck militias start building these on their compounds? I'm terrified of domestic implications - police departments can't go buy old military gear to squash these yet.

The early Ukraine war FPV drones were armed with warheads from lightweight anti-tank weapons, like the RPG-7:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPG-7#Ammunition

The newer drones may have dedicated warhead designs now, but the concept is similar. They carry high explosive warheads that aren't sold to civilians. It's the same reason the militias don't already have anti-tank weapons.

You can watch on YouTube people playing with 30mm diameter shaped charges (piercing thick metal plates). The anti-tank warhead is the same shaped charge of 90-130mm diameter.

At some point we just have to accept that we live in a society that relies heavily on trust and care for each other.

I've thought about a parallel version of this since I was a child and learned about the existence of nuclear weapons being a 'nation state' level of difficulty. Over time I assume an individual will wield more destructive power. How long before any individual person can conjure up world-ending munitions?

Fully autonomous Ukrainian drones. We don't know if Russia hadn't used something before them.

The two sides are quite evenly matched

I don't think it is about technology - a camera module with NPU running YOLO can be had for like $30 from AliExpress. And a lot of other technological weapons is possible on a cheap, yet nor Russia, nor Ukraine are doing it.

In case of autonomous drones i don't see them bringing any noticeable benefit over FPV until they are deployed in the numbers an order or two of magnitude larger. Both countries seem yet to reach such number of drones. And the large task here isn't just mere production of the drones, it is the whole system of delivery/deployment/management of those large hives of autonomous drones which also needs to be developed/implemented.

Ukraine does a lot of cheap drones that are highly efficient for their price. Russians do some too but their flagship is based on the Iranian Shaheed which the Ukrainians figured out how to shut them down efficiently. The most devastating and feared russian weapons are the glinding bombs (which are packed with a lot of explosive) but luckily for Ukrainians these gliding bombs lack precision.

You're mixing together different drone types (payload, range, operational role, etc.).

>luckily for Ukrainians these gliding bombs lack precision.

Not really. They don't have 3m CEP, that is true. Yet, a 2000lb bomb doesn't need it. They do hit the targeted buildings, which is enough. The main limitation here is that those bombs require military jet planes to launch. Russia is severely limited here.

If my time playing Pokémon Go is any help, I can just bounce around and dodge the balls the drone lobs at me as it tries to swipe its screen just right, until it inevitably runs out of balls. If a ball sucks me in, I can just wiggle around once or twice and break free, causing the drone to waste more resources on subsequent attempts.

I think we'll be ok.

If you drop a dumb bomb on an area, it kills everyone there.

If you release an autonomous drone in an area, it will probably kill everyone there, but might use its AI to decide not to kill some people there.

Why is the latter worse than the former ?

"Kill everyone in the area" is probably the least harmful for the reason described.

It is much more dangerous when they start to be selective. Then people start trusting the selection capabilities and use them in cases where they wouldn't use a "kill everyone" weapon.

> Why is the latter worse than the former ?

I'm not sure about worse, but think one of the differences would be the size of the 'kill zone' and the cost/availability. 10 quadcopters "cover[ed] between 3 and 5 kilometres ". That would take a lot of bombs and a multiple aircraft sorties with to kill everything there. e.g. During the Vietnam war, a group of 6 B-52 bombers modified for carpet bombings could bomb an area around 1Km x 3Km. Only the US and Russia have heavy bombers that can do that. It could be done with smaller fighter aircraft, but that's more sorties.

That's vs. 10 quadcopter drones.

They can both be bad.

One way in which automated drones might be considered bad, is (if) they cannot accept surrender - but are used in scenarios where human operators could.

"No quarter" is a war crime.

This is a much more difficult distinction to make than you're letting on. Cruise missiles offer no quarter, but manually operated drones might (though there is often no way to capture the opponents). The question is what is the difference between the two weapons systems...

Drones might hunt down enemies running away from the target site, while a missile would only destroy the target - and those not abandoning their post?

One way is that selective killing is more useful and therefore desirable. For example consider the classic slaughterbot video. It's plausible that someone capable might want to kill all democratic senators. It's much less likely that someone capable will want to kill all of them with a massive bomb.

Willingness to play.

It is similar to the problem with the neutron bomb. On the surface the idea of the neutron bomb (a bomb which kills humans via hard radiation but leaves infra intact) is not “worse” than a regular nuclear weapon. The dead die the same way and the living envy them. What CHANGES is the use calculus. I might not want to bomb an industrial valley if doing so destroys the thing I am trying to capture. However, if I have a bomb which kills the people living there and spares the factory, I might pull the trigger.

Similarly, it is cheap (relatively) to indiscriminately launch weapons at a distant place. It is extraordinarily expensive to send human troops in. They need food, water, and generally have families that expect some of them to come home. If putting a rifle on an autonomous vehicle works, then a ground invasion becomes cheaper.

People can be held accountable for war crimes. That's why they are less willing to commit them and obey orders blindly.

Ai is like 8yr old with gun: unpredictable

I did, for one, for your failure to understand the danger and implications of getting rid of all human accountability of the military for killing people.

I hate to burst the New Scientist's bubble, but this is nothing new. We have had systems for decades that operated under "Fire and Forget". We have missles that either go to a pre-designated point or chase a heat or radar signature once they are fired.

Human soldiers kill civilians and other soldiers on the same side. It is called "friendly fire". It is horrible, and should be avoided, but humans are more likely to make this kind of mistake more than a computer or AI model.

The difference is that in those systems a human chose the target. Here, an AI does.

> but humans are more likely to make this kind of mistake more than a computer or AI model

Based on?

What "choosing the target" means has been fuzzy for a long time too. We've had beyond-visible-range missiles for a long time that are basically "fly to this grid square and find a target".

I don't think people realize how much horsepower are in missiles now.

The JSM has at least one multicore computer + IR camera + RF homing for target identification (plus GPS, terrain matching/following and inertial for navigation). It can automatically identify not only the best target (and recognize and ignore decoys etc), but also the optimal weak spots to impact.