This feels like the same thing that happened with tanks. The end of WW1 saw tanks deployed effectively. WW2 was then fought using entirely new tactics and strategies enabled by tanks (not least "blitzkrieg").<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>Interesting times.
The problem with arms races is that they are races: no one wants to be left behind.<p>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.
One of the reasons the attempted drone assassination of Maduro in 2018 failed was because police were using radio jammers: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Caracas_drone_attack" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Caracas_drone_attack</a><p>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.<p>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.
Banning autonomous weapons is a good idea, but history indicates that the bad guys might very well continue to develop them while claiming that they are not. For example, see the biological weapons program pursued by the former Soviet Union in secret despite being signatories of the international ban on biological weapons[1].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_program" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_prog...</a>
There's an interesting similarity between autonomous weapon systems and ransomware discussions. Both have just come to the attention of the mainstream audience (or audiences outside their usual niche) and discussion in those spaces is about where it was 5 years ago.<p>Also I'd really expect HN of all places to understand why banning what is basically computer vision based targeting systems is absurd.
Are these drone-based 'lethal autonomous weapons' markedly different to cruise missiles?<p>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?
STM, the Turkish company that makes the KARGU drone referenced in the article has a promotional video from 2018 showing the unit being demonstrated: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqv9yaPLhEk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqv9yaPLhEk</a>
Weapons that have been successfully banned in the past typically had an alternative technology that it could be substituted with. I'm not sure you can say the same of lethal drones. In the case of Azerbaijan vs Armenia, the sum total of the fighter aircraft of BOTH nations combined is just 5. For poorer nations, drones represent a democratization of the battlefield; an extraordinarily cheap technology with a lot of firepower per dollar. I don't think these countries will be willing to give this up easily.
How silly. How can such a ban be enforced? Will Al Qaeda and ISIS sign the treaty? Will Assad sign it? Will he respect it any more than he respected the ban on chemical weapons?
I, for one, welcome our murderbot overlords. If we can't stop using drones to kill people, we should at least try to reduce collateral damage. With some advancements autonomous drones could be more precise and reliable than human operated ones, meaning that as an outcome fewer weddings will get blown up.
This is dumb and childish on so many levels.<p>You will NEVER ever prevent bad guys from creating them by "banning" them.<p>Look at drugs: all this war / bans / illegality, and the cocaine traffic never ever went down in decades (maybe during covid).<p>Best course of action is to invest in them to not be left behind
Autonomous weapons should be embraced, otherwise less scrupulous people will embrace them, and they will win. Non-autonomous weapons will simply not be able to compete long term.<p>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.
We have hand held weapons to combat drones today. See<p><a href="https://www.droneshield.com/dronegun-tactical" rel="nofollow">https://www.droneshield.com/dronegun-tactical</a><p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/o0kzuq/the_security_on_the_biden_king_phillippe_meeting/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/o0kzuq/the_security_o...</a>
In the book “The Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson there are mist-like swarms of nanobots that act as an immune system for regions against malicious nanobots.<p>I can picture there being something like this with drones.<p>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.
I see lots of people offering elaborate solutions to take down a swarm of drones. I may be wildly off the mark here but would it not be feasible to fly over them with a jet fighter and let the supersonic shockwave take out a lot of them?<p>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.
They seem to be only presenting the negative aspects of "slaughterbots".<p>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?<p>Of course, there's always the doomsday terminator scenario where they go haywire and decide to start targeting all humans....
I don't fully understand how there is real difference?<p>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?<p>Cruise missiles are already slaughterbots. You just give them location and they kill everyone in that location.
It always has been scary to me to how weapons evolve over time. Even though they are (thank god) mostly not needed they still keep developing further to be more lethal and efficient just to be "prepared" to what might happen in the future.
Product page for the UAV in question:<p><a href="https://www.stm.com.tr/en/kargu-autonomous-tactical-multi-rotor-attack-uav" rel="nofollow">https://www.stm.com.tr/en/kargu-autonomous-tactical-multi-ro...</a>
Whenever these discussions are brought up I feel the need to remind everyone that autonomous weapons and drones are not new inventions. The first remotely controlled weapons were developed and tested in the 1910s: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettering_Bug" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettering_Bug</a> . You also saw the emergence of drones being used as targets, to train air crews and anti-aircraft gunners. WW2 saw numerous instances of autonomous weapons being used in combat. The obvious examples are the V1 and V2, which both used internal guidance systems. There's also the Fritz X, a radio-controlled air-launched anti-ship missile. There was also Operation Aphrodite (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aphrodite" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aphrodite</a> ) in which the Allies loaded up a b-17 bomber with explosives, re-worked to be radio controlled with TV guidance, and flown into hard targets. Similarly, you have the German Mistel (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistel" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistel</a> ) which involved a drone loaded to capacity with explosives and guided to a target, but in this case the drone is carried by an aircraft and dropped, making this the first air-launched cruise missile used in combat.<p>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.<p>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.
Not only should there should be no autonomous drones, the non-autonomous remote controller hardware should be wired up such that if they are shot out of the sky, this kills the human operator and anyone sitting nearby.<p>This would be much fairer than the current system of gamified point-and-click murder.
Not with current tech but let’s say 5 years from now can’t a country or even a terrorist organization deploy hundreds of autonomous drones with charging stations that will effectively shoot everyone on sight?
It’s like a school massacre but at a city scale or worse.
Sure eventually everyone will go inside or underground but there is still incredible damage to be made in the meanwhile.
You can equip these with heat vision and they will even hunt you at night.
This is also incredible tech for hunting fugitives.
In the US the population has enough handguns that they can probably fight these off to some extent but in Europe it would be impossible.