Attack of the Killer Robots
August 30, 2016 12:06 PM Subscribe
A quadcopter one inch in diameter can carry a one-gram charge. You can write some code to say: ‘Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target’. A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They could be here in two to three years.
"There will be manufacturers producing millions of these weapons that people will be able to buy just like you can buy guns now, except millions of guns don’t matter unless you have a million soldiers."
Name something, anything, that you can easily buy millions of today. Rice grains, maybe? Sheets of paper?
The idea that people will casually buy a million deadly weapons just 'two or three years from now' is hard to believe.
posted by Frayed Knot at 12:17 PM on August 30, 2016 [16 favorites]
Name something, anything, that you can easily buy millions of today. Rice grains, maybe? Sheets of paper?
The idea that people will casually buy a million deadly weapons just 'two or three years from now' is hard to believe.
posted by Frayed Knot at 12:17 PM on August 30, 2016 [16 favorites]
Has Gibson ever wrote anything like this?
posted by lmfsilva at 12:18 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by lmfsilva at 12:18 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
Nothing new to see here, move along now.
(It's been obvious this was coming for the past decade or more.)
Other obscene possibilities: you know those cyborg cockroaches? I'd like you to imagine a cyborg cockroach with a one gram shaped charge and a control backpack that homes in on human feet. Or a cyborg Japanese hornet. Add some state-level biowarfare work and ramp it up to cyborg hornets with stingers charged with tetrodotoxin by the same endosymbiotic bacteria that give puffer fish and blue-ringed octopi their lethal reputations.
The scariest bit is that the price/lethality curve for microdrones and cyborg insects is dropping so fast that in terms of dollars per megadeath they're probably already on a par with atom bombs and well on their way to exceeding the cost effectiveness of H-bombs ... only vastly more precise.
posted by cstross at 12:20 PM on August 30, 2016 [22 favorites]
(It's been obvious this was coming for the past decade or more.)
Other obscene possibilities: you know those cyborg cockroaches? I'd like you to imagine a cyborg cockroach with a one gram shaped charge and a control backpack that homes in on human feet. Or a cyborg Japanese hornet. Add some state-level biowarfare work and ramp it up to cyborg hornets with stingers charged with tetrodotoxin by the same endosymbiotic bacteria that give puffer fish and blue-ringed octopi their lethal reputations.
The scariest bit is that the price/lethality curve for microdrones and cyborg insects is dropping so fast that in terms of dollars per megadeath they're probably already on a par with atom bombs and well on their way to exceeding the cost effectiveness of H-bombs ... only vastly more precise.
posted by cstross at 12:20 PM on August 30, 2016 [22 favorites]
Has Gibson ever wrote anything like this?
Slamhounds?
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 through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT
posted by selfnoise at 12:20 PM on August 30, 2016 [22 favorites]
Slamhounds?
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 through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT
posted by selfnoise at 12:20 PM on August 30, 2016 [22 favorites]
Of course he did.
posted by lmfsilva at 12:23 PM on August 30, 2016 [16 favorites]
posted by lmfsilva at 12:23 PM on August 30, 2016 [16 favorites]
The idea that people will casually buy a million deadly weapons just 'two or three years from now' is hard to believe.
You know, I think I'd still be pretty worried if, say, the douches who shot up the Black Lives Matter protest here could buy five or ten of these. They don't have to carry a payload that can punch through steel, either, since so few of us walk around encased in steel. Picture that type of person - no impulse control or common sense, lots of hatred - and a few cheap flying weapons. That has an immediacy which scares me more almost more than state actors since states have some disincentive to keep them from killing, like, women who object to sexism in video games, kids who say that racism still exists, etc.
I am totally ready for scientifically knowledgeable mefites to talk me down, so go right ahead.
posted by Frowner at 12:23 PM on August 30, 2016 [18 favorites]
You know, I think I'd still be pretty worried if, say, the douches who shot up the Black Lives Matter protest here could buy five or ten of these. They don't have to carry a payload that can punch through steel, either, since so few of us walk around encased in steel. Picture that type of person - no impulse control or common sense, lots of hatred - and a few cheap flying weapons. That has an immediacy which scares me more almost more than state actors since states have some disincentive to keep them from killing, like, women who object to sexism in video games, kids who say that racism still exists, etc.
I am totally ready for scientifically knowledgeable mefites to talk me down, so go right ahead.
posted by Frowner at 12:23 PM on August 30, 2016 [18 favorites]
Yes, yes, whatever. The big question is "how will the porn industry use technology to enhance us getting off?"
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:24 PM on August 30, 2016 [11 favorites]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:24 PM on August 30, 2016 [11 favorites]
Can non-state actors also deploy something? Will this be Poor Man's Air Force v2.0?
Non-state actors are already building gun-platform drones, so I'm sure they can.
But the kind of scaled up terror attack being described in the pull quote seems silly. If you have access to 22,000LBS of high grade explosives, you don't really need a bunch of drones to deliver it or to make it terrifying.
And if you have access to whatever obscene amounts of money 10 million 1 inch drones will cost, there's probably much more destructive things you can do with it.
the douches who shot up the Black Lives Matter protest here could buy five or ten of these.
There's nothing stopping them from attaching pipe-bombs to consumer drones and doing this already. Or, you know, just throwing pipe bombs around.
Honestly this strikes me as applying engineer's disease to terrorism.
posted by mayonnaises at 12:25 PM on August 30, 2016 [35 favorites]
Non-state actors are already building gun-platform drones, so I'm sure they can.
But the kind of scaled up terror attack being described in the pull quote seems silly. If you have access to 22,000LBS of high grade explosives, you don't really need a bunch of drones to deliver it or to make it terrifying.
And if you have access to whatever obscene amounts of money 10 million 1 inch drones will cost, there's probably much more destructive things you can do with it.
the douches who shot up the Black Lives Matter protest here could buy five or ten of these.
There's nothing stopping them from attaching pipe-bombs to consumer drones and doing this already. Or, you know, just throwing pipe bombs around.
Honestly this strikes me as applying engineer's disease to terrorism.
posted by mayonnaises at 12:25 PM on August 30, 2016 [35 favorites]
They could be here in two to three years.
My hovercar is expected to have anti-drone devices by then, so ALLS GOOD.
NSAs, lone wolves and nutjobs are going to keep to nice, low-tech devices. Why bring about Runaway when a runaway truck or gun-show semiauto is here now?
posted by Ogre Lawless at 12:26 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
My hovercar is expected to have anti-drone devices by then, so ALLS GOOD.
NSAs, lone wolves and nutjobs are going to keep to nice, low-tech devices. Why bring about Runaway when a runaway truck or gun-show semiauto is here now?
posted by Ogre Lawless at 12:26 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
That being said, state actors using automated kill platforms is very scary and very real issue and is something I'm very glad there are people out there trying to fix.
Just look at the havoc land mines have caused. Those are low-tech versions of these.
posted by mayonnaises at 12:27 PM on August 30, 2016 [5 favorites]
Just look at the havoc land mines have caused. Those are low-tech versions of these.
posted by mayonnaises at 12:27 PM on August 30, 2016 [5 favorites]
Drones don't have very long range, so you have to be pretty close to use them. Close enough you probably could have used a rifle instead.
Plus, drones are slow and loud. They're pretty avoidable if they tried to catch you.
I wouldn't say they're not threatening at all, but not absurdly threatening like they're being presented.
posted by Mitrovarr at 12:27 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
Plus, drones are slow and loud. They're pretty avoidable if they tried to catch you.
I wouldn't say they're not threatening at all, but not absurdly threatening like they're being presented.
posted by Mitrovarr at 12:27 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
tbf though if you were writing a comic book with a silicon valley supervillain, this would totes be a great sinister plot for him to carry out.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:36 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:36 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
cstross: "Nothing new to see here, move along now.
(It's been obvious this was coming for the past decade or more.)"
You know, things can be obvious to people who are close to the subject, and still come as a surprise to the public at large. This type of article can be useful to the latter.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:39 PM on August 30, 2016 [8 favorites]
(It's been obvious this was coming for the past decade or more.)"
You know, things can be obvious to people who are close to the subject, and still come as a surprise to the public at large. This type of article can be useful to the latter.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:39 PM on August 30, 2016 [8 favorites]
Actually kinda missing the whole point; yes, the pull quote "a million drones" is bullshit, but the real issue is say a dozen of these drones in the hands of someone pissed off at you (your ex, the guy you cut off on the freeway, etc). You don't even need fancy targeting software, either - just enough fly-by-wire smarts and you've got your own personal cruise missile. $500 or so and you too can take out the hipster that stole the last parking spot in front of Starbucks!
posted by Old'n'Busted at 12:42 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Old'n'Busted at 12:42 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
Hey, didn't Doctor Doom do that in Ultimate Marvel? So, you know, super-villains...
posted by alasdair at 12:43 PM on August 30, 2016
posted by alasdair at 12:43 PM on August 30, 2016
Except, Old'n'Busted, I can do that today, with nothing more than a gun, for a lot less than $500. So what's new here?
posted by Frayed Knot at 12:46 PM on August 30, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by Frayed Knot at 12:46 PM on August 30, 2016 [6 favorites]
I don't know if we have to worry about swarms of these things. Explosives (especially the kind that can be made into shaped charges and can punch through 9 mm of steel with a gram) are controlled enough that they're not super trivial to get, and millions of one-dollar drones are still millions of dollars, and then you have the problems with buying, importing, configuring and deploying the things without getting caught.
However, Gibson's Slamhound, now that's a likely scenario. Targeted assassination will get a lot simpler, with pipe bombs, guns, or things inbetween (think directed shrapnel, like a miniature Claymore mine, which already exists, 910 grams, 50m effective range, ideal range 30 meters with a fragmentation zone of 23x2 meters with at least five hits per square meter). Most larger drones could carry those, and you could go up high, spot your target, and drop down on top of it really fast. Not a lot you can do in the way of countermeasures in open spaces, and if you want to be really sure, you can do 3 or 4 of them at the same time. That's manageable in terms of cost and risk.
But no, we're not going to be cowering in shelters from swarms of flying killer robots any time soon.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 12:47 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
However, Gibson's Slamhound, now that's a likely scenario. Targeted assassination will get a lot simpler, with pipe bombs, guns, or things inbetween (think directed shrapnel, like a miniature Claymore mine, which already exists, 910 grams, 50m effective range, ideal range 30 meters with a fragmentation zone of 23x2 meters with at least five hits per square meter). Most larger drones could carry those, and you could go up high, spot your target, and drop down on top of it really fast. Not a lot you can do in the way of countermeasures in open spaces, and if you want to be really sure, you can do 3 or 4 of them at the same time. That's manageable in terms of cost and risk.
But no, we're not going to be cowering in shelters from swarms of flying killer robots any time soon.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 12:47 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
This seems like a really inefficient and expensive way to deliver a lot of bullet-sized payloads. I would continue to be much more concerned about someone just getting a regular old rifle and spraying bullets everywhere. I could see something like this having a niche use within the militaries of developed countries, but murderers and terrorists will likely continue to use regular old guns and bombs for some time. If all you want to do is create havoc and destruction, there are already many, many ways of doing that which are much more accessible, expedient, inexpensive, and effective. This is silly.
Drone swarms have lots of applications, but I don't see this being a significant one. Even if we want to stay within the realm of drones, it would seem much more likely to me that someone would simply mount an automatic weapon to one of the current generation of quadcopters and do their crime with that.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 12:48 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
Drone swarms have lots of applications, but I don't see this being a significant one. Even if we want to stay within the realm of drones, it would seem much more likely to me that someone would simply mount an automatic weapon to one of the current generation of quadcopters and do their crime with that.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 12:48 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
and i, for one, welcome our grey goo overlords. i would like to remind them that as a trusted web personality....
posted by entropicamericana at 12:49 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by entropicamericana at 12:49 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
Basically, this whole thing sounds like some kind of weird dystopia porn to me. Flying swarms of deadly micro-drones have a certain cyberpunk cachet to be sure, but I don't think they're really worth wasting time worrying about. There are many already-existing things that are much more concerning, and while there's a lot of scary shit on the horizon as well, I feel like attention is being drawn to this particular one more because it's "cool" (in a sick, shitty way) than because it's actually likely.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 12:53 PM on August 30, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 12:53 PM on August 30, 2016 [6 favorites]
What's new with this kind of thing is the addition of a sort of anonymity. If you have a gun, you have to aim and pull the trigger yourself. If you have a suicide drone, a few taps, clicks, or keystrokes and you can distance yourself, because after all, it's not like you pulled the trigger, the machine blew itself up. I'm not worried about it, but it doesn't strike me as implausible to think someone might try and pull something like this off at some point, although I do have a hard time seeing genuine swarms of them, but I could imagine a handful of them.
posted by feloniousmonk at 12:54 PM on August 30, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by feloniousmonk at 12:54 PM on August 30, 2016 [5 favorites]
"There will be manufacturers producing millions of these weapons"
I thought the terrorists would be making them at home with their 3d printers.
posted by Tenuki at 1:01 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
I thought the terrorists would be making them at home with their 3d printers.
posted by Tenuki at 1:01 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
If you have a gun, you have to aim and pull the trigger yourself. If you have a suicide drone, a few taps, clicks, or keystrokes and you can distance yourself, because after all, it's not like you pulled the trigger
See, this is the motivation that I worry about, although I admit that I am mostly talked down now.
Those guys who shot up the BLM protest - they were being really stupid. You have only to watch the video that came out or read their online stuff. It was just amazingly stupid to macho themselves into bringing guns to a protest and then getting into it with people for no reason. Even for the type of personality where someone is like "I think I will go to this protest just to fuck with people", that's really stupid. Those are the people I worry about if mini drones are widely available - people who are intelligent enough to buy and arm them but utterly lacking in common sense in every other way, people who don't actually especially want to kill someone but who are just too stupid to realize that their actions could readily do that.
But I suppose if they were going to, they'd already be trying it out with existing drones, as is pointed out upthread.
posted by Frowner at 1:05 PM on August 30, 2016 [4 favorites]
See, this is the motivation that I worry about, although I admit that I am mostly talked down now.
Those guys who shot up the BLM protest - they were being really stupid. You have only to watch the video that came out or read their online stuff. It was just amazingly stupid to macho themselves into bringing guns to a protest and then getting into it with people for no reason. Even for the type of personality where someone is like "I think I will go to this protest just to fuck with people", that's really stupid. Those are the people I worry about if mini drones are widely available - people who are intelligent enough to buy and arm them but utterly lacking in common sense in every other way, people who don't actually especially want to kill someone but who are just too stupid to realize that their actions could readily do that.
But I suppose if they were going to, they'd already be trying it out with existing drones, as is pointed out upthread.
posted by Frowner at 1:05 PM on August 30, 2016 [4 favorites]
A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone’s head. — Stuart Russell, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California Berkeley
This is rather inflammatory. About five to eight grams of HE (high explosives) can do this on a lab bench under very controlled circumstances. Shaped charges are not off-the-shelf technology, especially on that scale. If you are going to launch any projectile, you would have to back that up with equally substantial inertial mass.
Eight grams of HE hanging from a drone could fuck you up, but it's not lethal.
posted by Uncle Grumpy at 1:11 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
This is rather inflammatory. About five to eight grams of HE (high explosives) can do this on a lab bench under very controlled circumstances. Shaped charges are not off-the-shelf technology, especially on that scale. If you are going to launch any projectile, you would have to back that up with equally substantial inertial mass.
Eight grams of HE hanging from a drone could fuck you up, but it's not lethal.
posted by Uncle Grumpy at 1:11 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
I recommend Normal by Warren Ellis and The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem
posted by fallingbadgers at 1:13 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by fallingbadgers at 1:13 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
Except, Old'n'Busted, I can do that today, with nothing more than a gun, for a lot less than $500. So what's new here?
Facial recognition software and autonomous swarms. Feed your software a list of faces you want erased, and release the drones.
Or say there's a troublesome city you'd like depopulated, but you want to keep the infrastructure. A few semi-trailers parked on the outskirts of town, and they can reload and recharge at their mobile deployment platforms without needing to stop.
The secret sauce is automated behavior - a drone that needs to be actively piloted isn't the threat, and those have already been weaponized and used by mercenaries to break up a miner's strike in South Africa.
What is a threat is a cloud of cheap gun platforms that need little or no human direction. It is more precise and directed than missiles and smartbombs, and those are stupid expensive and more expensive still to deploy in-theater with aircraft.
posted by Slap*Happy at 1:17 PM on August 30, 2016 [8 favorites]
Facial recognition software and autonomous swarms. Feed your software a list of faces you want erased, and release the drones.
Or say there's a troublesome city you'd like depopulated, but you want to keep the infrastructure. A few semi-trailers parked on the outskirts of town, and they can reload and recharge at their mobile deployment platforms without needing to stop.
The secret sauce is automated behavior - a drone that needs to be actively piloted isn't the threat, and those have already been weaponized and used by mercenaries to break up a miner's strike in South Africa.
What is a threat is a cloud of cheap gun platforms that need little or no human direction. It is more precise and directed than missiles and smartbombs, and those are stupid expensive and more expensive still to deploy in-theater with aircraft.
posted by Slap*Happy at 1:17 PM on August 30, 2016 [8 favorites]
I refuse to be cowed by a terrorist threat that can be defeated by a stiff breeze. Seriously, have any of these people actually used a fucking quadracopter?
I can carry a folding fan as self defence
posted by phooky at 1:19 PM on August 30, 2016 [10 favorites]
I can carry a folding fan as self defence
posted by phooky at 1:19 PM on August 30, 2016 [10 favorites]
As I see it the dangers/differences with remote weapons are that that they allow physical cowards to circumvent their cowardice, and, even more than this, that they prevent people who talk a big game about being awful from realizing at the last minute that their actions have consequences and then backing down before they do anything actually awful.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:20 PM on August 30, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:20 PM on August 30, 2016 [6 favorites]
fwiw, via @FrankPasquale...
The US Defense Industry and the 'Weaponization' of American Foreign Policy - "When the US provides 'security assistance' and exports weapons to places like Ukraine and Saudi Arabia, it often benefits nobody besides weapons manufacturers. [US] weapon makers have told investors that they are relying on tensions with Russia to fuel new business."
posted by kliuless at 1:23 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
- When the Robots Rise - "As automation advances, the elites' costs of suppressing democracy will fall."
- The Drone Presidency - "It is the drone's very promise of precision that gives allegations of causing civilian casualty their force."
- Is Cyberwar Turning Out to Be Very Different From What We Thought? - "The scout, the airplane and the drone—what started out as a reconnaissance platform eventually was weaponized."
- Pentagon Study Scrutinizes The Future Of Autonomous Robot War - "The overwhelming majority of potential military applications for autonomy are non-lethal and offer the potential for improved efficiencies or entirely new capabilities. Skepticism about the employment of autonomy in military operations is almost wholly focused on the use of autonomous weapons systems with potential for lethality. For this reason, any new autonomous capability may meet with resistance unless DoD makes clear its policies and actions across the spectrum of applications."
The US Defense Industry and the 'Weaponization' of American Foreign Policy - "When the US provides 'security assistance' and exports weapons to places like Ukraine and Saudi Arabia, it often benefits nobody besides weapons manufacturers. [US] weapon makers have told investors that they are relying on tensions with Russia to fuel new business."
posted by kliuless at 1:23 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
rtfta:
"[LAWS] are generally broken down into three categories. Most simply, there’s humans in the loop — where the machine performs the task under human supervision, arriving at the target and waiting for permission to fire. Humans on the loop — where the machine gets to the place and takes out the target, but the human can override the system. And then, humans out of the loop — where the human releases the machine to perform a task and that’s it — no supervision, no recall, no stop function. The debate happening at the UN is which of these to preemptively ban, if any at all..."
So, of the three, which do you think will be the go to paradigm? Hmm? If the choice seems too dificult, there is a fourth category, "All of the above."
We may have to wait for John Conner to come back with some ideas.
posted by mule98J at 1:28 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
"[LAWS] are generally broken down into three categories. Most simply, there’s humans in the loop — where the machine performs the task under human supervision, arriving at the target and waiting for permission to fire. Humans on the loop — where the machine gets to the place and takes out the target, but the human can override the system. And then, humans out of the loop — where the human releases the machine to perform a task and that’s it — no supervision, no recall, no stop function. The debate happening at the UN is which of these to preemptively ban, if any at all..."
So, of the three, which do you think will be the go to paradigm? Hmm? If the choice seems too dificult, there is a fourth category, "All of the above."
We may have to wait for John Conner to come back with some ideas.
posted by mule98J at 1:28 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
Yes, yes, whatever. The big question is "how will the porn industry use technology to enhance us getting off?"
I think for a certain personality type, this already is porn that's getting them off.
posted by biogeo at 1:28 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
I think for a certain personality type, this already is porn that's getting them off.
posted by biogeo at 1:28 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
There aren't enough diseases and miseries in the world, we need assholes to use their intelligence and learning to make more?????
posted by Twang at 1:31 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Twang at 1:31 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
But what if every inch-diameter hover-powered selfie death drone also carried a 13-megapixel camera, capable of snapping perfect shots of you and your friends in 4G real time video as you all disintegrate into a red vapour then automatically uploading it to your social media accounts? What then?
posted by Sonny Jim at 1:37 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Sonny Jim at 1:37 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
oh, for pete's sake, when you've got thousands and thousands of wires hanging all over the place, why bother with hunting people?
i'm not going to get into the details, but it's dead cheap, dead simple, very effective and drones could do it
posted by pyramid termite at 1:44 PM on August 30, 2016
i'm not going to get into the details, but it's dead cheap, dead simple, very effective and drones could do it
posted by pyramid termite at 1:44 PM on August 30, 2016
This is the dumbest thing I've read on metafilter in the past year. With everything that is actually going on in the would you're going to choose Buzzfeed-branded terror bait as your daily freak out?
posted by danny the boy at 1:50 PM on August 30, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by danny the boy at 1:50 PM on August 30, 2016 [6 favorites]
The article is talking about state actors mostly, not terrorists.
> There's nothing stopping them from attaching pipe-bombs to consumer drones and doing this already. Or, you know, just throwing pipe bombs around.
Honestly this strikes me as applying engineer's disease to terrorism.
An example would Timothy Mcveigh's truck bomb.
posted by sebastienbailard at 1:54 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
> There's nothing stopping them from attaching pipe-bombs to consumer drones and doing this already. Or, you know, just throwing pipe bombs around.
Honestly this strikes me as applying engineer's disease to terrorism.
An example would Timothy Mcveigh's truck bomb.
posted by sebastienbailard at 1:54 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
ISIS 1 - We could make thousands and thousands of drones to make terrorist attacks
ISIS 2 - Oh, but the CCW just outlawed that!
(pause)
ISIS 1 and 2 - Ha ha ha ha ha
posted by pyramid termite at 2:00 PM on August 30, 2016
ISIS 2 - Oh, but the CCW just outlawed that!
(pause)
ISIS 1 and 2 - Ha ha ha ha ha
posted by pyramid termite at 2:00 PM on August 30, 2016
I remember reading how the history of war shows that changing technology causes the balance of power to alternate from defender to attacker and back again. For example the machine guns used in WW I gave defenders a decided advantage until they forced technology to advance and the tank was developed. While there isn't a completely clear and linear path all the time it is a useful way to think about human conflict. It also makes sense to me. I remember first hearing about drones in the First Gulf War and how clean and precise they were, they were a miracle and could prevent millions of unnecessary casualties, followed by the eventual news sneaking out that the way they are used mainly is by the US killing civilians in Pakistan that they define as legitimate targets, meaning any one in the rough vicinity of anyone that they think is someone on their private hit list.
I'm not too worried about random evil people arming themselves with drones the same way I am not too worried about someone arming themself with a gun and starting a massacre in my vicinity. It has always been some removes away, like at my old school, nearly twenty years after I left it, and fifteen years after I moved entirely away from that city, so while it could happen to me, I think I am still more likely to be killed by someone doing a right turn on red.
I am more concerned with random military authorities using them against civilian populations to "control unrest" If the US government is willing to cut off the water and sewage infrastructure to the First Nations protestors in attempt to silence their efforts to protect their clean water, how long will it be before someone in authority orders the release of this kind of drones against a civilian population doing something they don't like, such as being on the wrong side of an arbitrary line, or a member of a population that is purported to have a high rate of drug use, or whatever they are using to define people as bad because they cannot control them?
It's not random angry, unemployed forty-year-old white males who will launch the drones. It's legitimate authorities - you know, Congress and the kind of politicians who passed the Patriot Act. Would you trust Congress not to launch drones against a popular movement trying to reform politics and take the oligarchy out of control? Would you trust Donald Trump? How about Obama or a Democrat successor to Obama? If you would trust someone like Obama or Clinton, I suggest you ask a Pakistani National if they believe that civilians are safe from high tech assaults.
With the rising tribalism it wouldn't take much to find yourself on the wrong side of powerful group of leaders - if you are "white" you could easily end up being called a radical. If you are brown you are already on the wrong side. It is easy for me to envisage, say, thousands of unemployed truckers and transportation vehicle operators banding together when their jobs are lost to self-driving vehicles, wanting the government to provide protection for them, and somehow reverse the loss of their livelihoods, and their group becoming an inconvenience, an irritant and a threat to the government and all the other people who have not lost their jobs, or who lost their jobs first. Should the truckers gather in one location it will look like an army gathering to leaders who resent and fear people who don't support them, and the first time the order goes out it will begin with an order to disperse or the sub-lethal drones will come out, but will then turn into something like the Gaza Strip because the truckers can no more disperse and go disappear into the peaceful populace than young black men like Tamir Rice can.
I'm not predicting it will be truckers or First Nations, or BLM protestors, or anti-abortionists. I have no idea who it will be, but it seems to me likely that it will be someone, whoever is most annoying to the powers that be in another three to fifteen years. Dropping a nuke has a deterrent, of what-would-the-neighbours think. But sending one drone to kill one sniper has no deterrent to speak of. So first it will be one drone for one bad guy, down the slippery sloe, then it will be one drone for six bad guys, then it will be three drones for a dozen bad guys and before long it will be a "classified" number of drones against "an estimated 100 armed militants", several of which will be too young to enroll in Kindergarten, not that the powers that launched the drones wanted to kill them but they did need to take out those threatening bad guys who were near them and after all the drones only killed an "unknown" number of kids, where heavy weapons would have taken out a much larger "unknown" number, so we ought to be grateful that only a mere handful on underage insurrectionist were injured - minor burns, you know, as they were using crowd dispersal drones, not the lethal explosive payload drones which would have killed people, Napalm's contemporary cousin is much more merciful.
I do predict that it will take place somewhere not in the US for the most part, until the people in the US get used to the idea, as it is much easier to kill Syrian invaders/refugees in Yemen than it is to eradicate Occupy protestors in the centre of New York City and not end up being talked about and embarrassing the person who signed the launch order. So various Georgian Republic, or Congo, or Kazakhstan neighbourhoods will be the practice grounds for this type of pacification. If it all starts in some negligible countries that no ordinary American can find on a map who will really notice? It's not like the US authorities will necessarily be the only, let alone the first nation to use such means of protecting its interests. It's much more likely to be Turks pacifying Kurds and most people giving up trying to figure out the implications after a failed search to locate Kurdistan on the map.
posted by Jane the Brown at 2:09 PM on August 30, 2016 [15 favorites]
I'm not too worried about random evil people arming themselves with drones the same way I am not too worried about someone arming themself with a gun and starting a massacre in my vicinity. It has always been some removes away, like at my old school, nearly twenty years after I left it, and fifteen years after I moved entirely away from that city, so while it could happen to me, I think I am still more likely to be killed by someone doing a right turn on red.
I am more concerned with random military authorities using them against civilian populations to "control unrest" If the US government is willing to cut off the water and sewage infrastructure to the First Nations protestors in attempt to silence their efforts to protect their clean water, how long will it be before someone in authority orders the release of this kind of drones against a civilian population doing something they don't like, such as being on the wrong side of an arbitrary line, or a member of a population that is purported to have a high rate of drug use, or whatever they are using to define people as bad because they cannot control them?
It's not random angry, unemployed forty-year-old white males who will launch the drones. It's legitimate authorities - you know, Congress and the kind of politicians who passed the Patriot Act. Would you trust Congress not to launch drones against a popular movement trying to reform politics and take the oligarchy out of control? Would you trust Donald Trump? How about Obama or a Democrat successor to Obama? If you would trust someone like Obama or Clinton, I suggest you ask a Pakistani National if they believe that civilians are safe from high tech assaults.
With the rising tribalism it wouldn't take much to find yourself on the wrong side of powerful group of leaders - if you are "white" you could easily end up being called a radical. If you are brown you are already on the wrong side. It is easy for me to envisage, say, thousands of unemployed truckers and transportation vehicle operators banding together when their jobs are lost to self-driving vehicles, wanting the government to provide protection for them, and somehow reverse the loss of their livelihoods, and their group becoming an inconvenience, an irritant and a threat to the government and all the other people who have not lost their jobs, or who lost their jobs first. Should the truckers gather in one location it will look like an army gathering to leaders who resent and fear people who don't support them, and the first time the order goes out it will begin with an order to disperse or the sub-lethal drones will come out, but will then turn into something like the Gaza Strip because the truckers can no more disperse and go disappear into the peaceful populace than young black men like Tamir Rice can.
I'm not predicting it will be truckers or First Nations, or BLM protestors, or anti-abortionists. I have no idea who it will be, but it seems to me likely that it will be someone, whoever is most annoying to the powers that be in another three to fifteen years. Dropping a nuke has a deterrent, of what-would-the-neighbours think. But sending one drone to kill one sniper has no deterrent to speak of. So first it will be one drone for one bad guy, down the slippery sloe, then it will be one drone for six bad guys, then it will be three drones for a dozen bad guys and before long it will be a "classified" number of drones against "an estimated 100 armed militants", several of which will be too young to enroll in Kindergarten, not that the powers that launched the drones wanted to kill them but they did need to take out those threatening bad guys who were near them and after all the drones only killed an "unknown" number of kids, where heavy weapons would have taken out a much larger "unknown" number, so we ought to be grateful that only a mere handful on underage insurrectionist were injured - minor burns, you know, as they were using crowd dispersal drones, not the lethal explosive payload drones which would have killed people, Napalm's contemporary cousin is much more merciful.
I do predict that it will take place somewhere not in the US for the most part, until the people in the US get used to the idea, as it is much easier to kill Syrian invaders/refugees in Yemen than it is to eradicate Occupy protestors in the centre of New York City and not end up being talked about and embarrassing the person who signed the launch order. So various Georgian Republic, or Congo, or Kazakhstan neighbourhoods will be the practice grounds for this type of pacification. If it all starts in some negligible countries that no ordinary American can find on a map who will really notice? It's not like the US authorities will necessarily be the only, let alone the first nation to use such means of protecting its interests. It's much more likely to be Turks pacifying Kurds and most people giving up trying to figure out the implications after a failed search to locate Kurdistan on the map.
posted by Jane the Brown at 2:09 PM on August 30, 2016 [15 favorites]
Can non-state actors also deploy something?
Cheap, powerful lasers, mosquito fence-style.
The availability of cheap, powerful lasers brings a whole raft of new problems though.
posted by Leon at 2:29 PM on August 30, 2016
Cheap, powerful lasers, mosquito fence-style.
The availability of cheap, powerful lasers brings a whole raft of new problems though.
posted by Leon at 2:29 PM on August 30, 2016
This feels like the bender quote about the themepark with hookers and blackjack. "A quadcopter one inch in diameter can carry a one-gram charge." Great, so I've discovered how to buy one-gram of explosive and get it into NYC. "You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer."Woo! so now I'm sitting with a 3KG block of explosive."You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City." Alright, bonus points! So now I'm sitting with a 10KG block of explosive in NYC.
Do I really need to bother with the 10 million drones?
posted by Static Vagabond at 2:31 PM on August 30, 2016 [6 favorites]
Do I really need to bother with the 10 million drones?
posted by Static Vagabond at 2:31 PM on August 30, 2016 [6 favorites]
> ISIS 1 - We could make thousands and thousands of drones to make terrorist attacks
ISIS 2 - Oh, but the CCW just outlawed that!
(pause)
ISIS 1 and 2 - Ha ha ha ha ha
So ISIS 1 is Mallory Archer and ISIS 2 is Krieger, right?
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 2:35 PM on August 30, 2016 [4 favorites]
Do I really need to bother with the 10 million drones?
Well, yeah. They're gonna look so freaking cool as they deploy out the back of a semi in waves. (What's the flying time on those things, by the way?)
posted by Leon at 2:35 PM on August 30, 2016
Well, yeah. They're gonna look so freaking cool as they deploy out the back of a semi in waves. (What's the flying time on those things, by the way?)
posted by Leon at 2:35 PM on August 30, 2016
We will all carry ping pong paddles, and wear reflecting face gear on the street. Of course we could also wear Zorro capes, and sort of bull fight the little bastards out of the air.
posted by Oyéah at 2:43 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Oyéah at 2:43 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
Yeah, I don't think the issue is drone swarms terrorizing the populace. But if I was guarding a head of state, I'd be a bit concerned. If you've got a dozen security guards in a location, and someone released 100 drones bent on assassination from a mile away, the odds get a bit uncomfortable.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 2:44 PM on August 30, 2016
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 2:44 PM on August 30, 2016
As others have said, you can defeat drones with netting. Signal jammers are a thing too.
Let's not get to freaked out about cyberpunk dystopia.
posted by Ferreous at 2:44 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
Let's not get to freaked out about cyberpunk dystopia.
posted by Ferreous at 2:44 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
Do I really need to bother with the 10 million drones?
As horrible as the lone gunman or suicide bomber in a vest or in a car it's limited targeting, one building. Thousands/millions of tiny almost undetectable bombs with variable targets will change the game in ways we can not predict but likely a new version MAD. Only a crazy unpredictable MAD available to any actual mad player with a 3D printer.
posted by sammyo at 2:49 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
As horrible as the lone gunman or suicide bomber in a vest or in a car it's limited targeting, one building. Thousands/millions of tiny almost undetectable bombs with variable targets will change the game in ways we can not predict but likely a new version MAD. Only a crazy unpredictable MAD available to any actual mad player with a 3D printer.
posted by sammyo at 2:49 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
"This feels like the bender quote about the themepark with hookers and blackjack. "A quadcopter one inch in diameter can carry a one-gram charge." Great, so I've discovered how to buy one-gram of explosive and get it into NYC. "You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer."Woo! so now I'm sitting with a 3KG block of explosive."You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City." Alright, bonus points! So now I'm sitting with a 10KG block of explosive in NYC."This is why Americans can't have nice things like metric...
1 gram x 3 million = 3000kg = 3 tonnes.
1 gram x 10 million = 10000kg = 10 tonnes.
posted by Pinback at 2:57 PM on August 30, 2016 [6 favorites]
> Let's not get too freaked out about cyberpunk dystopia.
easy for you to say. you've got a body. ever since my little run-in with that military-grade Russian ICE, I've been stuck on a damn silicon chip. You try not freaking out about cyberpunk dystopia when you've got phantom limb pain where your whole body used to be...
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 3:07 PM on August 30, 2016 [11 favorites]
easy for you to say. you've got a body. ever since my little run-in with that military-grade Russian ICE, I've been stuck on a damn silicon chip. You try not freaking out about cyberpunk dystopia when you've got phantom limb pain where your whole body used to be...
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 3:07 PM on August 30, 2016 [11 favorites]
Has Gibson ever wrote anything like this?
The Peripheral is full of this sort of thing.
posted by My Dad at 3:21 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
The Peripheral is full of this sort of thing.
posted by My Dad at 3:21 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
Over the past couple of weeks there have been half a dozen reported stampedes of people who thought they were fleeing terror attacks. You don't need millions of drones with armor-piercing explosives to set something like that off – you don't necessarily need anything – but you could probably do it very nicely with a few off-the-shelf drones and some cherry bombs.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:31 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:31 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
oh hey, one more...
"A brutal enforcement droid is much more viable than a pleasant robot servant."
posted by kliuless at 3:34 PM on August 30, 2016
"A brutal enforcement droid is much more viable than a pleasant robot servant."
posted by kliuless at 3:34 PM on August 30, 2016
> Over the past couple of weeks there have been half a dozen reported stampedes of people who thought they were fleeing terror attacks. You don't need millions of drones with armor-piercing explosives to set something like that off – you don't necessarily need anything – but you could probably do it very nicely with a few off-the-shelf drones and some cherry bombs.
Nah all you gotta you do is you call up the police and place an anonymous tip about terrorists setting bombs full of Blue Nine in a given district, then trade some hot RAM to the Panther Moderns in exchange for them hacking into the intercoms for a building in that district and sending out a warning that the bone-melting biochemical HsG has been released into the ventilation system. The people in the building will charge out frantically screaming, the riot cops will show up expecting to find a bunch of Blue Nine-crazed murderous lunatics, and in the chaos that ensues you can get in and get out with whatever you want.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 4:00 PM on August 30, 2016 [5 favorites]
Nah all you gotta you do is you call up the police and place an anonymous tip about terrorists setting bombs full of Blue Nine in a given district, then trade some hot RAM to the Panther Moderns in exchange for them hacking into the intercoms for a building in that district and sending out a warning that the bone-melting biochemical HsG has been released into the ventilation system. The people in the building will charge out frantically screaming, the riot cops will show up expecting to find a bunch of Blue Nine-crazed murderous lunatics, and in the chaos that ensues you can get in and get out with whatever you want.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 4:00 PM on August 30, 2016 [5 favorites]
mayonnaises: "If you have access to 22,000LBS of high grade explosives, you don't really need a bunch of drones to deliver it or to make it terrifying.
And if you have access to whatever obscene amounts of money 10 million 1 inch drones will cost, there's probably much more destructive things you can do with it."
The proposed scale here is problematic and overkill. Scale it back to a kilogram of explosive and a thousand drones (or a hundred drones). Well within the means of pretty much any disgruntled attacker. A distributed, targeted attack like that is going to be a lot more effective than the same explosive built into a few bombs. Especially if you develop the targeting to say only attack people wearing hijabs or bikinis.
Mitrovarr: "Drones don't have very long range, so you have to be pretty close to use them. Close enough you probably could have used a rifle instead."
Rifles need line of sight. A massed drone attack greatly increases the threat profile. This sort of attack used by a team like the belt way snipers could be very effective.
CheeseDigestsAll: " I don't think the issue is drone swarms terrorizing the populace. But if I was guarding a head of state, I'd be a bit concerned. If you've got a dozen security guards in a location, and someone released 100 drones bent on assassination from a mile away, the odds get a bit uncomfortable."
Yep. Drones must give the Secret Service in charge of guarding Hillary the creeping fantoids. A Spreading Wings S900 can lift 5+kgs with a flight time of 18 minutes and costs $1400. 5kgs of a black powder pipe bomb is quite a bit. You could set up a dozen of these things to target a person for the price of a cheap new car. Drive by within a couple kilometers of an open air event with a pickup loaded with these things and launch away.
posted by Mitheral at 4:26 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
And if you have access to whatever obscene amounts of money 10 million 1 inch drones will cost, there's probably much more destructive things you can do with it."
The proposed scale here is problematic and overkill. Scale it back to a kilogram of explosive and a thousand drones (or a hundred drones). Well within the means of pretty much any disgruntled attacker. A distributed, targeted attack like that is going to be a lot more effective than the same explosive built into a few bombs. Especially if you develop the targeting to say only attack people wearing hijabs or bikinis.
Mitrovarr: "Drones don't have very long range, so you have to be pretty close to use them. Close enough you probably could have used a rifle instead."
Rifles need line of sight. A massed drone attack greatly increases the threat profile. This sort of attack used by a team like the belt way snipers could be very effective.
CheeseDigestsAll: " I don't think the issue is drone swarms terrorizing the populace. But if I was guarding a head of state, I'd be a bit concerned. If you've got a dozen security guards in a location, and someone released 100 drones bent on assassination from a mile away, the odds get a bit uncomfortable."
Yep. Drones must give the Secret Service in charge of guarding Hillary the creeping fantoids. A Spreading Wings S900 can lift 5+kgs with a flight time of 18 minutes and costs $1400. 5kgs of a black powder pipe bomb is quite a bit. You could set up a dozen of these things to target a person for the price of a cheap new car. Drive by within a couple kilometers of an open air event with a pickup loaded with these things and launch away.
posted by Mitheral at 4:26 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
Hey, I remember when we were all going to die from suitcase nukes, or was it exploding sea containers? Perhaps it was 3D printed hand-guns.
More seriously, making a lot of anything renders you very susceptible to things like supply chain monitoring and other surveillance, It would be very hard to go through development, manufacture and deployment without attracting attention somehow, and an awful lot of terroristic activities which sound like they'll be real problems are susceptible to good old fashioned (and new-fangled data wrangling) policing techniques.
I'm more worried about bad people and CRISPR.
posted by Devonian at 4:47 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
More seriously, making a lot of anything renders you very susceptible to things like supply chain monitoring and other surveillance, It would be very hard to go through development, manufacture and deployment without attracting attention somehow, and an awful lot of terroristic activities which sound like they'll be real problems are susceptible to good old fashioned (and new-fangled data wrangling) policing techniques.
I'm more worried about bad people and CRISPR.
posted by Devonian at 4:47 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
This seems like mainly a cause for concern only for presidents and other elites. The rest of us are walking around entirely undefended already, and nothing's to stop an attacker from running up and stabbing or shooting us except the threat of legal repercussions and because we're a bunch of nobodies. These same protections will exist when everyone is as supplied with bomb-drones as they already are with guns. It will probably be no easier to assassinate someone with an untraceable drone than it is with an untraceable gun -- ie, the threat of the police catching you in both cases will be sufficient to deter the tiny minority of reasons-responsive people who might engage in such things, and meanwhile, the nuts will just continue as they have with unpremeditated gun murder. And as for mass murder, as others have pointed out, this doesn't really change the logistics very substantially -- you still need a lot of total explosives and a lot of people in a relatively small space, and in any case, that sort of thing is still extremely rare. So the only folks for whom this really matters are people who attract enough negative attention that they already need protection -- politicians, celebrities, etc. Those folks are indeed going to have much more trouble in the near future. That's too bad, especially for the celebrities; the politicians, at least, might start considering the repercussions of a decade of drone assassination -- but much more likely we'll just see yet another arms race instead.
posted by chortly at 5:04 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by chortly at 5:04 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
I remember reading a very similar "we could make thousands of cheap flying bombs" prediction, but about hang gliders in the late 70s.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 6:32 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 6:32 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
The battery life on a micro drone is already going to be terrible, and add in that it'll need to be running GPS and advanced, real-time computer vision at the same time.
posted by Pyry at 6:34 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Pyry at 6:34 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
Or say there's a troublesome city you'd like depopulated, but you want to keep the infrastructure.
Trying to hunt down every human being in even a small city with microdrones is a lot less efficient (and effective) than good 'ol poison gas. Or, for that matter, surrounding the place, cutting off supplies, and waiting for nature to take its course.
Rifles need line of sight. A massed drone attack greatly increases the threat profile.
Drones need a means to receive orders from their pilots. If you're doing something like flying them around to kill a specific human being, you'll need some bandwidth, too. Maybe the age of open networks and ubiquitous cell phone range is coming to a close?
posted by AdamCSnider at 7:43 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
Trying to hunt down every human being in even a small city with microdrones is a lot less efficient (and effective) than good 'ol poison gas. Or, for that matter, surrounding the place, cutting off supplies, and waiting for nature to take its course.
Rifles need line of sight. A massed drone attack greatly increases the threat profile.
Drones need a means to receive orders from their pilots. If you're doing something like flying them around to kill a specific human being, you'll need some bandwidth, too. Maybe the age of open networks and ubiquitous cell phone range is coming to a close?
posted by AdamCSnider at 7:43 PM on August 30, 2016 [2 favorites]
Is it the time of year for "This new technology from our boffin overlords will fuck you up" headlines? Because existing cheaper ways use fewer moving parts, require less of a clue, and will be used by anyone not putting on a DARPA dog and pony show.
posted by zippy at 7:59 PM on August 30, 2016
posted by zippy at 7:59 PM on August 30, 2016
I actually went over to my bookshelf and puttered around looking for it, but I remember a quote from some book on (I think?) WWII from a captain in the Pacific theater about marines who received new rifles rolling them around in the dirt, throwing them, hitting trees with them, etc. When the new guns uniformly fell apart under the treatment, they demanded that they get their old ones back. Because reliability, not novelty or even necessarily efficiency, is very often the key battlefield feature.
posted by AdamCSnider at 8:05 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by AdamCSnider at 8:05 PM on August 30, 2016 [1 favorite]
I have no idea why the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots isn't selling a T-shirt to raise funds, unless they're afraid that that's the first thing that the killer robots would target.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:08 PM on August 30, 2016
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:08 PM on August 30, 2016
More seriously, making a lot of anything renders you very susceptible to things like supply chain monitoring and other surveillance, It would be very hard to go through development, manufacture and deployment without attracting attention somehow, and an awful lot of terroristic activities which sound like they'll be real problems are susceptible to good old fashioned (and new-fangled data wrangling) policing techniques.
How hard is it to get a dozen quadcopters and separately gunpowder or ammonium nitrate, and how is big data or the NSA going to flag everyone with a gunsmith's shingle or a hobby farm?
I don't think we have to worry yet about domestic terrorists building hundreds of tiny bomb-drones at a time, but a dozen medium-size ones? Easy. And we haven't netted off every parade route, transit stop, or shopping center.
Consulting this compliation of terrorist attacks and related incidents, it's mostly shootings, but there's a fair handful of truck bombs, car bombs, and mail bombs. Skimming google news, there are lots of pipe bombs.
The one saving grace is that a lot of these yahoos are generally fuckups, and tend to fuck up when it's anything more complicated than "run around shooting innocents with a rifle and large-capacity magazines".
posted by sebastienbailard at 10:20 PM on August 30, 2016
How hard is it to get a dozen quadcopters and separately gunpowder or ammonium nitrate, and how is big data or the NSA going to flag everyone with a gunsmith's shingle or a hobby farm?
I don't think we have to worry yet about domestic terrorists building hundreds of tiny bomb-drones at a time, but a dozen medium-size ones? Easy. And we haven't netted off every parade route, transit stop, or shopping center.
Consulting this compliation of terrorist attacks and related incidents, it's mostly shootings, but there's a fair handful of truck bombs, car bombs, and mail bombs. Skimming google news, there are lots of pipe bombs.
The one saving grace is that a lot of these yahoos are generally fuckups, and tend to fuck up when it's anything more complicated than "run around shooting innocents with a rifle and large-capacity magazines".
posted by sebastienbailard at 10:20 PM on August 30, 2016
"A brutal enforcement droid..."
Fellow executives, it gives me great pleasure to introduce you to the future of law enforcement.
posted by mikelieman at 10:22 PM on August 30, 2016
Fellow executives, it gives me great pleasure to introduce you to the future of law enforcement.
posted by mikelieman at 10:22 PM on August 30, 2016
Except, Old'n'Busted, I can do that today, with nothing more than a gun, for a lot less than $500. So what's new here?
Most people can't hit shit with a gun. Tons of people have never even shot a gun. Look at stories like this where someone inexperienced read the instructions in their car for the gun, and while people died most shots they fired hit no one.
My personal concern with stuff like this is if all you have to do is select a target on your phone or whatever, you don't have to know how to actually hit someone with the weapon. People who don't know how to shoot a gun can kill someone by firing a whole bunch of shots. Someone with a robotic weapons system, whether it's one shot per bot or however many, are going to basically kill as many people as their weapon has shots if thats their goal.
Someone who has literally never picked up something like this in their life could kill 100 people if that's the capacity of the machine. It's like the difference between transcribing something by hand and a photocopier.
I'm not concerned about someone buying millions of these. I'm concerned about someone buying one box of 20 and killing 20 people basically instantly. And yea, i think the whole tiny-drone-shape-charge thing is completely overwrought and silly, but a medium sized drone that blows up a lot bigger or auto-shoots people or something? That's completely realistic. And i don't think any kind of regulation on weapons or explosives is really going to stop people if the entire thing is legal except for one part you can just make or buy elsewhere on the internet, which is probably what will happen.
Also, put me down on the side of the scorecard where the part that bothers me here is the fact that someone could execute this remotely without being in any physical danger. I think everyone is wayyy overthinking computer vision and all that too. There's a million cases in which "go to this location, at this height, and do your thing" is way more than enough if the goal is say, blow a ton of shrapnel everywhere or something. If someone just wants to fuck a bunch of people up they don't need facial recognition. They just need to fly into the room and do a bunch of damage before anyone even realizes what's going on.
I bought a 550 or something quadcopter for... $30? The thing can pick up my phone. And that's not one gram, that's like... 130?
Who says these things have to be tiny? they just have to fit through a window or a door. Literally since i bought that cheap ass thing i've been wondering how long it's going to be until an FPP on here is about someone flying 20 of them into somewhere and doing something like this.
posted by emptythought at 11:04 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
Most people can't hit shit with a gun. Tons of people have never even shot a gun. Look at stories like this where someone inexperienced read the instructions in their car for the gun, and while people died most shots they fired hit no one.
My personal concern with stuff like this is if all you have to do is select a target on your phone or whatever, you don't have to know how to actually hit someone with the weapon. People who don't know how to shoot a gun can kill someone by firing a whole bunch of shots. Someone with a robotic weapons system, whether it's one shot per bot or however many, are going to basically kill as many people as their weapon has shots if thats their goal.
Someone who has literally never picked up something like this in their life could kill 100 people if that's the capacity of the machine. It's like the difference between transcribing something by hand and a photocopier.
I'm not concerned about someone buying millions of these. I'm concerned about someone buying one box of 20 and killing 20 people basically instantly. And yea, i think the whole tiny-drone-shape-charge thing is completely overwrought and silly, but a medium sized drone that blows up a lot bigger or auto-shoots people or something? That's completely realistic. And i don't think any kind of regulation on weapons or explosives is really going to stop people if the entire thing is legal except for one part you can just make or buy elsewhere on the internet, which is probably what will happen.
Also, put me down on the side of the scorecard where the part that bothers me here is the fact that someone could execute this remotely without being in any physical danger. I think everyone is wayyy overthinking computer vision and all that too. There's a million cases in which "go to this location, at this height, and do your thing" is way more than enough if the goal is say, blow a ton of shrapnel everywhere or something. If someone just wants to fuck a bunch of people up they don't need facial recognition. They just need to fly into the room and do a bunch of damage before anyone even realizes what's going on.
I bought a 550 or something quadcopter for... $30? The thing can pick up my phone. And that's not one gram, that's like... 130?
Who says these things have to be tiny? they just have to fit through a window or a door. Literally since i bought that cheap ass thing i've been wondering how long it's going to be until an FPP on here is about someone flying 20 of them into somewhere and doing something like this.
posted by emptythought at 11:04 PM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]
You set up a breeding lab and just breed like ten hives of hornets, the big, nasty red ones or those psycho Japanese ones. Stick them in a bag, bring the bag to an hvac system in the building you want to empty and viola! Or dump them in the middle of civil unrest and etc etc etc.
Hornets are mean. And likely cheaper than a bunch of frickin drones and explosives (which would be totally traceable.)
The mini-drone fantasy is cool and all but pretty much only fiction.
posted by From Bklyn at 1:25 AM on August 31, 2016
Hornets are mean. And likely cheaper than a bunch of frickin drones and explosives (which would be totally traceable.)
The mini-drone fantasy is cool and all but pretty much only fiction.
posted by From Bklyn at 1:25 AM on August 31, 2016
What are the odds that within three years the FBI will have arrested a moron for a smaller version of this plot, who they also supplied with both drone(s) and fake explosives?
Also, I can't believe my sarcasm got in the way of simple math! 10,000 KG of explosives **sigh**
posted by Static Vagabond at 5:06 AM on August 31, 2016
Also, I can't believe my sarcasm got in the way of simple math! 10,000 KG of explosives **sigh**
posted by Static Vagabond at 5:06 AM on August 31, 2016
Pigeons are inexpensive, have a longer range, and can be trained to do all sorts of things, yet no one has recently strapped to them explosive backpacks and tiny goggles and loosed them on the populace.
Let's save the anxiety for November.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:20 AM on August 31, 2016
Let's save the anxiety for November.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:20 AM on August 31, 2016
>hard as hell to stop
Not really hard, just high collateral damage. One good burst of EMP and all the killer dronelets drop out of the sky at once. So does your smart phone. . What I worry about are NoKo nukes in fishing trawlers
posted by Fupped Duck at 8:21 AM on August 31, 2016
Not really hard, just high collateral damage. One good burst of EMP and all the killer dronelets drop out of the sky at once. So does your smart phone. . What I worry about are NoKo nukes in fishing trawlers
posted by Fupped Duck at 8:21 AM on August 31, 2016
Video of said drones in action
(Not really, I just wanted an excuse to post this)
posted by ymgve at 12:39 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
(Not really, I just wanted an excuse to post this)
posted by ymgve at 12:39 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
I think the engineering challenge is really under-estimated. Building a fleet of micro-drones and processing the absurd amounts of data each drone generates is going to be really expensive and beyond the capabilities of off the shelf gear and existing technologies.
posted by humanfont at 2:48 PM on August 31, 2016
posted by humanfont at 2:48 PM on August 31, 2016
I think the engineering challenge is really under-estimated.
Very likely, but off the shelf drones right now are capable of doing amazing things. Stability isn't an issue anymore, they have collision detection, and I've seen videos of close-formation flying that nearly made me fall off my chair. These drones carry cameras; there's no reason why they can't carry explosives as well. And, from reading accounts of present drone warfare, I think they can already lock on to and follow moving targets, so the "facial recognition" might be done remotely.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:40 PM on August 31, 2016
Very likely, but off the shelf drones right now are capable of doing amazing things. Stability isn't an issue anymore, they have collision detection, and I've seen videos of close-formation flying that nearly made me fall off my chair. These drones carry cameras; there's no reason why they can't carry explosives as well. And, from reading accounts of present drone warfare, I think they can already lock on to and follow moving targets, so the "facial recognition" might be done remotely.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:40 PM on August 31, 2016
As a rule, there is no threat from homemade weapons, including up-cycled weapons like this discusses, 3d printed guns, etc. There are simply too few people with the interest in killing someone who also posses the knowledge to write C code, sew, or even load a printer cartridge for that matter. Yes, there are a few prospective murderers who can say run a soldering iron, but letter bombs would do the job way better. And these home made tech toys still fail rather frequently.
There is a real threat not so disconnected from this however : America's ongoing project to establish the rights of nations to murder other nations' civilians who it finds objectionable.
We've always had some degree of low level violence, including assassination, but normally its between close neighbors, kinda randomized, and cloaked in mistakes, like Turkey bombing the PKK any chance they get. We copied our drone assassination program form the Israelis' targeted killing program. Ain't gonna stop with the Israelis and Americans though. Russia happily assassinates dissidents abroad. etc.
American assassinating civilians all over Yemen at the behest of it's oil buddies in Saudi Arabia sounds like a pretty nakedly economically inspired assassination program. If that's okay for us, then why shouldn't a nation who finds itself outclasses in a particular market by a particular foreign competitor attempt to quietly assassinate a couple key employees like a CTO or whatever?
Yes, you keep it secret, or blame the mafia if it comes out. Yet, ultimately anyone who gives this order is a fairly uninspired politician, so the reason they do it is because it's become normal.. because American made it normal.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:53 AM on September 2, 2016
There is a real threat not so disconnected from this however : America's ongoing project to establish the rights of nations to murder other nations' civilians who it finds objectionable.
We've always had some degree of low level violence, including assassination, but normally its between close neighbors, kinda randomized, and cloaked in mistakes, like Turkey bombing the PKK any chance they get. We copied our drone assassination program form the Israelis' targeted killing program. Ain't gonna stop with the Israelis and Americans though. Russia happily assassinates dissidents abroad. etc.
American assassinating civilians all over Yemen at the behest of it's oil buddies in Saudi Arabia sounds like a pretty nakedly economically inspired assassination program. If that's okay for us, then why shouldn't a nation who finds itself outclasses in a particular market by a particular foreign competitor attempt to quietly assassinate a couple key employees like a CTO or whatever?
Yes, you keep it secret, or blame the mafia if it comes out. Yet, ultimately anyone who gives this order is a fairly uninspired politician, so the reason they do it is because it's become normal.. because American made it normal.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:53 AM on September 2, 2016
Russia has a thousand years of experience trying to assassinate dissidents at home and abroad. They didn't learn anything from the US and the US didn't learn anything from Israel. The charge that America's drone problem is normalizing assasination is also at odds with historical precedent. Also various state and non-stare actors have shown that they have effective methods to terrorize Americans. why bother with a drone when you can use a tractor trailer, airplane, roadside bomb, mass shooter, suicide vest, sniper or any number of other low tech, low cost options.
Also business executives around the world already face these dangers. FARC in Columbia routinely kidnapped and extorted various executives and companies. Red Army Faction in West Germany in the 1970s-1980s was bombing, kidnapping and killing Germans with covert support from the Soviets.
posted by humanfont at 9:49 AM on September 2, 2016
Also business executives around the world already face these dangers. FARC in Columbia routinely kidnapped and extorted various executives and companies. Red Army Faction in West Germany in the 1970s-1980s was bombing, kidnapping and killing Germans with covert support from the Soviets.
posted by humanfont at 9:49 AM on September 2, 2016
re: 'vector normalization'...
Why is Putin so paranoid about a US govt role in 'color revolutions'? US secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest and undermine government - "USAid started ZunZuneo, a social network built on texts, in hope it could be used to organize 'smart mobs' to trigger Cuban spring."
posted by kliuless at 10:21 AM on September 2, 2016
Why is Putin so paranoid about a US govt role in 'color revolutions'? US secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest and undermine government - "USAid started ZunZuneo, a social network built on texts, in hope it could be used to organize 'smart mobs' to trigger Cuban spring."
posted by kliuless at 10:21 AM on September 2, 2016
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Can non-state actors also deploy something? Will this be Poor Man's Air Force v2.0?
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 12:15 PM on August 30, 2016 [4 favorites]