Comment by jandrese
1 year ago
This is only a few days after the massive drone attack in Russia. Only a matter of time until we have drones smart enough to dodge bullets (or at least dodge out of where guns are pointing) while flying at breakneck speeds being controlled by AIs we don't fully understand.
The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future.
“What hope can there be for mankind,” I thought, “when there are such men as Felix Hoenikker to give such playthings as ice-nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women are?”
And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?”
It doesn’t take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.
This is it:
“Nothing.”
--Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
Vonnegut’s bleakness is not theoretical which gives it a specific bite. As POV Vonnegut cleaned up the shriveled remains of civilian victims of firebombing.
And Great Britain just announced plans to deliver 100,000 of them to Ukraine. Ukraine lacks the manpower compared to Russia. It seems logical to strengthen their forces by deploying these flying mini terminators. I believe we are not far from large-scale drone warfare. In World War II, we had epic tank and aircraft battles; now, the time has come for autonomous drone battlefields.
Missed that news; https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/britain-p...
I think we're already deep into large-scale drone warfare. Destroying a third of the enemy heavy bomber fleet is pretty substantial. It feels to me like that attack operated like Pearl Harbor, a marker that the old way of surface naval warfare / air attack was being replaced by a new one.
Don't forget that Russia has their own drones. They were the first to deploy the fiber-optic cable drones as an anti-ECM measure. And of course both sides are ordering parts from China.
Current warfare is drone Vs people.
Future warfare will be drone Vs drone, and we might see the main battlefield entirely devoid of people until one or other side runs out of drones.
$4k per drone... ouch.
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The UK has also released some details of a new 'in bulk' RF-based drone takedown DEW. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1vY5efYXMQ
100k kamikaze drones are not that many for the current stage of war. Millions are consumed annually.
Future children will walk through the forests collecting drone motors to make their next school project...
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I hope this scares nations away from warfare altogether, given the unpredictability of outcomes with heavy drone usage. Even China: they may have a lot of the little buggers, but that Ukraine attack took a lot of scheming. I doubt China can out-manufacture human and AI trickery.
I'm afraid they won't have a choice. Without Russia The West and Nato will crush China fast.
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>drones smart enough to dodge bullets
well, there will be similarly smart "predator"/defense drones. The humans will have no chances on such a battlefield populated by thousands drones per square kilometer fighting each other.
>The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future.
And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
>or at least dodge out of where guns are pointing
just a bit of arithmetic comparing new weapons - drones vs. classic guns. Say a radar guided gun takes 1 sec. to train onto a drone and shoot several bullets. The range is max 3 km (an expensive 20mm-30mm autocannon like Pantsir) - 35 seconds for a 200 miles/hour drone. Thus all it takes is maximum 36 such drones coming simultaneously from all the directions to take out that gun. At less than $1000/drone it is many times cheaper than that radar guided gun. (and that without accounting for the drones coming in very low and hiding behind trees, hills, etc and without the first drones interfering with the radar say by dropping a foil chaff clouds, etc.) It is basically a very typical paradigm shift from vertical scaling to horizontal scaling by way of software orchestrated cheap components.
> And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
Drones don't remove people from the battlefield, they further the trend of there being no boundary to "the battlefield", putting everyone on it.
They can, depending on how they are employed, reduce the casualties (total and particularly civilian) on both sides of a conflict for any degree of military impact (Ukraine's recent strike against Russian bombers is an example), or they can increase the civilian death toll for marginal military impact (the accounts of Israeli gun- and missile-armed drones directly targeting civilians in Gaza being an example of what that could look like.)
Note for example, that Ukraine attack, although it caused no civilian casualties... it relied heavily on civilian infrastructure. Ukraine rented warehouses, common trucks, and hid the drones in normal shipping containers.
Thus indeed, this made the battlefield larger instead, now common trucks, warehouses and shipping containers are legitimate targets.
What Ukraine destroyed doesn't help either, for example they destroyed early warning airplanes intended to warn Russia if incoming missiles are nuclear or not. How Russia have to assume incoming missiles are nuclear, specially if they are flying in the regions where their land nuke detectors were destroyed too (I think 1 or 2 years ago Ukraine did that).
Thus Ukraine proved, that civilian equipment can destroy nuclear deterrence. Now common trucks and containers are a threat as big as many advanced military hardware out there. A truck with a bunch of drones can open a hole in your nuclear defense as much as stealth planes were needed for this before.
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>And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
It is very dangerous, since it will mean that an organization with enough drones can dominate society on its own. Much better if humans were battlefield-relevant.
It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant.
And if you look at Russia your logic does fail on that example - no amount of human losses affect Russia's behavior in the current war as they are sure that Ukraine will run out of soldiers before Russia does. So, from Russia's POV the faster the grinder the sooner their victory.
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Don't we already have this in the form of the state?
> And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
I agree with your other points, but this only helps with (physically) extending the battlefield, at least going by the current war in Ukraine. It's not only the line of contact that is now part of the battlefield, there's also a band of 10-15 kilometres (if not more) on each side which is now part of the active battlefield because of the use of drones.
Even though I have to admit that it looks like the very big power asymmetry in favour of cheap drones over almost everything that moves down bellow (from mere soldiers on foot to armoured vehicles) has helped with actually decreasing the number of total casualties (just one of the many paradoxes of war), as it is now way too risky to get out in the open so soldiers do it way less compared with the pre-drone era.
"And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing."
You're mistaking the removal of certain soldiers for "removing people". There will absolutely be people in future battle fields, mainly civilians, or as we call them now, terrorists.
About your last paragraph: High level, I generally agree, but when you dive deeper to look at the numbers, I doubt that you can have 1000 USD drones that can fly at 200 mph/320 km/h. One quarter of that speed, I could believe.
https://youtu.be/oG2GaSMlfdo
Off the shelf parts are available for 200mph quads (that’s without payload though)
quad - no. Plane type - very doable.
I agree, but I'm a bit disappointed it will probably come to this, instead of having a mano a mano like in the movie "Robot Jox".
+1 for mentioning that movie; I watched it a month ago and it's hilarious. Nearest I've seen to live action with giant robot anime sensibilities.
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This is portrayed in Ministry for the Future which describes AI controlled swarms of small drones/bombs that fly apart and come together at their target and are almost impossible to stop.
Fantastic book, highly recommended.
I tried to read the book and to me it came off as little more than doomer and disaster pornography. I found a lot of the situations to be far fetched and didn't feel like it portrayed a realistic image of how the world works.
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That future arrived years ago. Now it's targeting journalists, women and children. Ukraine is just doing it at a lower cost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCfv79C_-I0
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1l29eo5/dr...
Obligatory link to the short film (future documentary) “Slaughterbots” (2017), which depicts exactly this in harrowing detail:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
Let's review what Uncle Ted had to say about this.
See paragraph 87 by searching for "THE MOTIVES OF SCIENTISTS"
https://dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/IndustrialSocietyAnd...
The conclusion is succinct and the stuff leading up to it of dubious quality.
"92. Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research."
yeesh. i made this comparison once and HN told me that campy action movies are bad to base policy on :\
They don’t need to dodge bullets. Just make them small, cheap, fast, and powerful enough to fly to a target and punch a single bullet perfectly through their skull in an instant. Launch a swarm for redundancy. And because they are autonomous, these drones can be entirely unaffected by radio signals once deployed.
Politicians will never go outside again. The only defense is to be loved by all and have no enemies. Or, the more likely scenario: disguises and full anonymity.
No, only our rulers will be anonymous.
We'll simply never know who we're being ruled by.
All hard countered by a laser like the Iron Beam, no? Unless there's a hard counter to the hard counter?
Combined arms is the probable solution for a Ukraine type war. As soon as your expensive laser lights up, it's got a couple of minutes to move before artillery shells arrive.
Of course deeper into Russia that's safe .. but instead you have the problem of a huge area to cover. You can protect a few high value targets but not everywhere. Consider something like the early stages of the Iraq war: target every single civilian electrical substation and petrol station with a drone bombing.
47 second is the best artillery response I've seen in Russia Ukraine war.
Carry the laser output to multiple muzzles on drones via fiber?
a laser needs a line of sight and dwell time. drones flying 3 ft off the ground, in between bushes and trees, at 100+ mph? not an easy situation.
ramp up power levels so dwell time might only be 1/2 second? maybe. but then there is a race for rapid target discrimination. and then ablative armor on the drones (cheap and easy to 3d print), and backup cameras, etc.
And ultimately there's the cost factor. Drones can be mass produced for cheap, laser systems are specialized and expensive. Something I haven't seen yet (but is likely in development) is drone swarms, one operator directing a squad of a hundred drones like it's an RTS game. Only one grenade or kamikaze drone needs to detonate close enough to a laser system to take it out of action. Mind you, the system has a range of up to 10 kilometers, so if the drones are detected from that far out there's enough time to take them all out.
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Plus artillery shells, cruise missiles, high altitude balloons and various other ways to fill the sky with literally tons of foil, chaff, tiny bits of wire, smoke, ball bearings, blaring radio transmitters, balsa wood dummy gliders, whatever is hoped to disrupt the targeting long enough to sneak something nitrogen-rich near to the fiddly optics.
Yeah, an artillery strike, a smoke screen, or fog. I'm also reading the target needs to be stationary or its movements predictable; unpredictable evasive maneuvers should be easy enough to implement (at the cost of speed/range). Plus there's the cost of the device itself, while it says it costs $3 per shot, it's still an (up to) 100 kw device + sensors + power supply setup. It doesn't say how much the system itself costs or its maintenance.
Or attack while it rains. Sure, a laser is great for defending Southern California or a place in the Middle East, but not so great for defending Great Britain
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> Unless there's a hard counter to the hard counter?
Two opposing Iron Beam lasers pointed at the allied one?
But also, low-flying drones using ground cover to get close, and in the final approach attack from multiple angles at the same time so it physically cannot rotate fast enough to reach all targets before impact — if it has a maximum 180° rotation time of 0.2 seconds, and the attacking drone has a terminal speed of 100m/s (~224 mph), the last 20 meters has to be clear of all cover, including the soldiers who are operating the Iron Beam and might find their bodies being kept between the drones and the laser itself until the last moment.
The obvious counter to a laser could be 'more drones'? And maybe just have the drones sneak up close to the ground.
I always hear this sneak up thing and think about how birds can be caught with netting. And all the barbed wire in old battlefields. I don't think drones will be able to meaningfully sneak up to a laser.
Of course more drones works. But more drones here is less drones there. It means lasers are an effective deterrent against opportunistic attacks.
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The problem is the asymmetry. Drones are cheap, can be produced in huge numbers, and can be deployed anywhere by anyone. You can't put laser defences on every target, and the best laser defence could still be overwhelmed by a sufficient number of drones.
I am fucking terrified of drones.
Drones still have the limiting factor that is that they need to be produced at all as a piece of technology. Artillery shell on the other hand has all the explosive bits needed to make that drone blow up half your house, only it is a dummy round being fired from technology that has been globally solved and replicated for what over 100 years now, with huge stocks of surplus available along with popular rudimentary designs used by various guerillas around the world.
Increasingly we are also seeing a world where the technology to shape a cultures mind share can be deployed with a few dozen lines of code and a malware bot net rather than a sophisticated and well funded mass media operation a la the 1960s western cultural revolution supported in part by the CIA. You don't even need to blow up the enemies country, you can convince them it is in their best interest to be subjugated and they will remove their own naysayer internally and roll out the carpet for you when you arrive and proclaim your regional Obergruppenführer to meet production quotas.
Some of this stuff is getting to the point where we will seriously need to have a global talk on whether we should put a pin in this tech or not
The child comments from yours are mentioning nuclear weapons as a parallel but there's one big difference between drone tech and nuclear weapons: plutonium is really hard to make.
We might be able to put a pin in this tech from a policy perspective, but the cat is way out of the bag as far as the tech goes. A cell phone already has all of the sensors you need baked right into it (honestly, we can thank mobile devices for getting the cost down). An ESC for a motor is a cheap microcontroller and a couple of MOSFETs. The frames can be made of cheap plastic. Even if things like ArduPilot didn't exist, a smart EE student could build one from scratch, including the flight control software, using parts from Digikey and relatively basic PID control code.
The cat is definitely out of the bag.
A lunatic will be able to wipe out school children playing outside and have little chance of getting caught, for example.
Nice.
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I'm sure that everyone would agree on that, and that $bad_actor wouldn't take advantage of the fact that everyone else had agreed to lay down their arms. Game theory sucks, but it's hard to get around.
There wouldn't be any pin in it. Drones - automated weapons in the wide sense - will be the new MAD/equalizer weapon accessible to smaller countries who have no chances of getting into the nuclear club. Without such a weapon in the coming new world order - marked specifically by the USA's withdrawal from enforcing international law - they will be an easy prey to the bigger countries. Ukraine is just a preview of that equalizing power.
I guess it falls on me to break it to you then but serious "global talks" happen at the exploding end of ordinance.
There is no Jedi Council to appeal to, no wise group of non-aggressive nations gathering to pacify the troublemakers.
why? if nuclear weapons got the green light, do you expect a different outcome?
Weapon that threatens everyone is better than weapon that threatens only some
Because nuclear weapons got the green light.
As if the billionaires won't simply go "F that noise, more money for me!!!" Ethical concerns are way down the priority list for most AI focused companies.
Technical University Delft. Not a word about ethics of developing these AI technologies. Happy techbros making happy gadgets.
OTOH there's no mass adoption of autonomous drones after 3+ years of real active war between two technologically advanced nations.
There's enormous adoption of autonomous drones.
A large number of front-line FPV drones are equipped with automated last-second targeting systems like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coUwYOyIoAU , based on Chinese NPU IP / CCTV systems and readily available as full solutions on Aliexpress. The basic idea is that if the drone loses control or video link due to EW countermeasures, it can continue to the last target.
Loitering and long-range fixed wing reconnaissance drones have been fully autonomous since the beginning. One common recent technique taken from traditional "big" militaries is the use of loitering autonomous high altitude base stations with Starlink or LTE on them providing coverage to the battlefield below, since it's much harder to jam things when they are flying high above the ground.
You have no idea what you're talking about and your video is just a demo from some chinese account. There are tons of footage from drone units, from both sides, and they are all old school analog FPV until the very last moment.
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Maybe we should come back to this in a few years, I think this will have aged worse than the old dropbox comment.
Governments are falling over themselves to: acquire drones, figure out how to defend against existing and future drones, and to figure out how to exploit them well. Given the recent attack against Russian bombers, I find it hard to take you seriously here.
Hell, the US knows it can't compete with China on aircraft numbers, and is placing its money on collaborative combat aircraft to give it the advantage. That's about as strong an endorsement as you can get.
What the Loyal Wingman program is trying to build is extremely far from what people keep thinking when someone says "drone". The word is overloaded as hell: no one draws a distinction between a quadrotor with a 20 minute flight time and an air breathing jet aircraft costing $20 million a piece.
But then they go and say "drone swarms will defeat all future adversaries!"
Like in the Ukrainian context everyone seems to think the drone swarm was the deciding factor and is saying "this will replace air forces!"...kind of ignoring the multi month infiltration and espionage operation which got those systems in range (they were literally trucked right up to almost the fence line).
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As if the US can compete with china on drone numbers or quality. If drones are the future of war, China will have an enormous advantage in a future war. Let's hope it never comes to that.
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Dude, it's not a prediction, it's what is currently happening. If you follow active drone units (from both sides) you'll see that they're all controlled by operators until the last frame.
These bombers attacks were done with manual control too. These drones had LTE modems and on footage it's clearly visible that they controlled by operator.
People can't read these days, especially if it doesn't match the reality they build in their heads.
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Are you sure?
One of the theories for why there were tires on top of the russian planes that were bombed is that it confuses automatic targeting systems by breaking up the profile of the airplane used in automatic target recognition systems.
Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed to run an autonomous route with or without a radio link connection. This is a huge reason that GPS is just constantly jammed in this part of the world. If you can get a GPS signal on the battlefield, you can tell a drone to go destroy something.
Sigh. The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone who served in russian/soviet army.
> Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed
Lock on a moving target and hit it is not the same as put waypoints in INAV. My point was that there's still no mass adoption of target locking or self-aiming drones, overwhelming majority of hits, on both sides, are done with regular FPV drones with very standard school hardware that's barely modified for combat use (namely: custom frequencies for VTX and ERLS).
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If you can get a GPS fix (or a lat long to start), you can run an INS just as easily.
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An interesting paper just published about the current state of AI in Ukrainian and Russian drones on the battlefield [1].
"Promises of an immediate AI/ML drone revolution are premature as of June 2025, given that both Russian and Ukrainian forces will need to allocate more time, testing, and investment to deploy these drones on the frontlines en masse. Russia and Ukraine will continue improving their ML and machine vision capabilities while training and testing AI capabilities. Russia and Ukraine will then need to tackle the issue of scaling the production of the new AI/ML drones that will require additional time and resources to facilitate. Russia and Ukraine may start to use some AI/ML drones to carry out specific tasks in the meantime, such as striking certain types of targets like armored equipment or aircraft, before learning to fully operate on the battlefield. AI/ML drones are also unlikely to fully replace the need for the mass of tactical FPV drones over the coming months because the latter are cheaper to produce and adapt to the current battlefield conditions at the current state of technology."
[1] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/battlefield-ai-rev...
Remember when TB-2s and grenade bombers were the peak of drone technology in Ukraine? That was like 2 years ago, now the frontlines are draped in equal parts anti-drone netting and fiberoptic threads.
The recent picture of sun rising or setting above a field of fiber threads really drives the point home. At peace time you have to pay $50k to get fiber to the home. At war it’s coming at you at 50mph and you can’t do anything to stop it.
Do you follow this war closely? Show me which drone units adopted anything autonomous, just name it. There are cases when they are used but there's no mass adoption, they all use regular FPV and FO drones.
Anti-anti-drone avoidance systems on Russian zala's is the only example of autonomous action that I can remember.
There is already mass adoption of drones, the AI stuff is only lagging behind slightly.
Please read before responding.
Yeah. I guess military taboo and export control schemes/scare tactics is doing phenomenal jobs restraining and de-escalating use of computers in arms development. Less money spent improving means to kill people might be good, but the long gap between the cutting edge of technology in general to technology applied to military domain feels weird.
I think people are missing the word "autonomous" here, which means you're right .. so far. I wouldn't bet against it changing.
The seeds of the Butlerian Jihad
As long as the end of civilization comes soon, we'll be fine!
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-That you know of.