This was back in 2026, before they released the Dredd series for civilian applications with onboard due processing and agents for prosecution, defense, judge, jury and executioner with millisecond response times, drastically reducing price per perpetrator.
We've had loitering munitions that choose their own target autonomously for a long time, for example anti-tank weapons that climb up after being released from a plane or helicopter then sit on a parachute until spotting one or more tanks and firing warheads at them.
The superficial new thing here is the exact quadcopter form factor, but the significance is the new price point. You bet the loitering anti-tank weapon costs a fortune. These drones are very cheap.
Of course, mines can be even cheaper, but you unwittingly engage them rather than them engaging you.
I think the ancestor drones are land and sea mines, or really any kind of trap that dislocates the timing and control of the "trigger" from the person who launched it into the environment.
These newer drones have just gained locomotion instead of having to wait for victims to come to them.
Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics was based on automated killing — which he beautifully disavowed in peacetime [1]. Which historically is one of the main reasons we think about “Artificial Intelligence” instead of cybernetics (Wiener kind of pissed off the defense dept).
I think the line is even fuzzier than you've described. Drones are very much analogous to missiles and torpedoes. Torpedoes have long been used in sea mines, and 'automatically' activated upon detection of acoustic or magnetic signature match.
The gulf war (1991) tv broadcasts of cruise missiles 100 feet above the road sure look(ed) a lot like autonomous drones on their way to killed humans to me.
Wasn't it just flying to a particular GPS, coordinate and exploding? That's quite a bit different than flying to an area and killing anything that moves...
It depends on the system. Some modern systems can react to high-value targets of opportunity, hunt for targets, or switch to a new target if the one they are after is destroyed before they get there. There are different variants of the weapons to deal with different use cases. The 1990s versions were relatively limited though.
Target selection is much more networked, automated, and adaptive than it used to be. Missiles can talk to each other.
Some cruise missiles have the ability to detect targets based on camera or infra-red match; on the other side, most (currently-deployed) drone types have at most that same capability. I believe that most of the infamous Shahed long-range drones that Russia has launched against Ukraine have been entirely inertial or satellite navigation based, with no independent re-targeting capability.
Right, I agree it is fuzzy. I just think, from an ethical standpoint, it is better to think of them as mines that have more mobility. Reasoning from the other end as projectiles which are slower or have more guidance seems to invite too much optimistic thinking about the level of control. That the victims will be as intended rather than quite indiscriminate and unpredictable.
I realize there is a full, multidimensional continuum here.
On one end are directly-aimed weapons that do their damage while still being aimed by the operator. Their risks include collateral damage limited to things like aiming errors, effect radius, or continuing down-range beyond the target.
Further out are messy things with more active guidance that can turn and seek the target and potentially go off course. But their time to target is still quite limited and more or less being observed by the one who fired it. The risk expands with its potential "cone of maneuvering" and travel range.
Then you get into these things with long dwell times and autonomy where the eventual targeting event happens without supervision and is greatly affected by things happening in the environment which the operator cannot have really predicted nor controlled for. The longer time in operation increases the risk not only from wandering/guidance but from how much the environment can change before it performs its final targeting event.
Another example in this category could be chemical and biological weapons. There is a lot more uncertainty in the targeting effects due to the way it disperses in the environment.
The difference is in "active"/intelligent versus "passive"/dumb targetting that's performed by the machine.
The missile, once fired, has the general vicinity (if not the exact position) of the target and is armed by the operator. Therefore, the operator is fully accountable for the targetting. Same goes for the landmines, once placed. Hitting civilians is reckless at best, and negligent at worst.
An autonomous weapon system (AWS) usually means that the system, once deployed, can do the targetting itself over any arbitrarily bounded location. An AWS can continue finding targets as long as its hardware allows it. For kamikaze drones, it's one time; for other drones, the ammunition & battery are the limits.
We currently rely on human targetting because we assume that A) humans are able to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate targets "well-enough", and if not, B) at least we can hold them accountable (e.g., punish them for war crimes).
An AWS provides a layer of plausible deniability: the operator can claim that the system wasn't developed well enough, while the developer can claim that it wasn't used as intended. Given the inscrutability of modern computational intelligence - i.e., visual-action neural networks - this could potentially lead to very worrying incidents.
From a technical POV, the difference between a manually operated drone and an AWS drone may not be massive. From a military POV, it's just another legal lethal tool in the arsenal.
But from a social/civilian POV, the use of AWS is still 'not normal' and opens a can of worms. Targetting while evading counterattacks and crimes successfully is a bottleneck for manual operation. That's no longer the case with AWS: build 20 thousand drones, for example, and you can trivially win by overwhelming any manual defense of frontlines or cities. And knowing the history of human warfare, winning can range from relatively bloodless regime changes to utter destruction of the loser's civilization.
So, the best outcome is similar to nuclear deterrence or MAD: as long as everyone has 20 thousand AWS drones, they're safe.
Landmines can be dropped from the air by the thousands and many land mines can survive for decades. Placing a landmine anywhere is essentially the same as firing a bullet blindly through time. And no individual soldier has ever been held accountable for a landmine that killed a civilian years down the road.
Which doesn’t make what you said about drones any less awful. Just that landmines are already uniquely awful.
I'm not sure I'd consider a trap an "autonomous weapon". The trap cannot select a target. It will go off for anyone unlucky enough to step in its trigger.
An autonomous drone will select a target and pull the trigger. It fills in the position of a human pulling a trigger, which is a decision.
Maybe if robots began deciding where to lay mines, i could hand it to you.
Autonomous drones are much more precise, thus safer for non-combatants, than land mines (which kills for decades after a war), shells, missiles, guided bombs, etc.
Big "an AR 15 is just an automatic bow which is basically a spear thrower which is basically a knife which his basically a punch so nothing matters anyways" vibe
What's gonna happen when the redneck militias start building these on their compounds? I'm terrified of domestic implications - police departments can't go buy old military gear to squash these yet.
I've thought about a parallel version of this since I was a child and learned about the existence of nuclear weapons being a 'nation state' level of difficulty. Over time I assume an individual will wield more destructive power. How long before any individual person can conjure up world-ending munitions?
The newer drones may have dedicated warhead designs now, but the concept is similar. They carry high explosive warheads that aren't sold to civilians. It's the same reason the militias don't already have anti-tank weapons.
First, I advise a modicum of skepticism to be retained in the face of such news. Ukraine is, after all, in the middle of an existential crisis and must take every advantage it can, even if it's just scaring Russian invaders further (I bet both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers are already pretty scared of drones).
Additionally: "“There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing…". So there's no way to know exactly what happened which adds a lot of uncertainty.
Finally: the system was first used two years ago once, then never again. That doesn't sound like it's giving much of an advantage. Sorry, I don't believe that it's a matter of military ethics. If Ukraine could deploy actual Terminator robots to the front line it would do it in a heartbeat. Again: existential crisis. They're fighting for their country's existence. I would use every weapon in my disposal; and I'm a pacifist who hates violence. So I don't think that "test" really worked well at all.
Now, taking the New Scientist's reportage at face value, the announcement seems to describe a system that is only marginally more capable than a self-guided missile. It seems that a quadcopter swarm of undisclosed strength flew to a predetermined location (nothing new to see here), then a target acquisition system was activated.
Is the latter a new capability? Hard to say without more details that we're not likely to know. Maybe the drones simply locked on to whatever moved. Motion sensing is not new technology. Nor is it a great idea to put it on a flying grenade that you fire-and-forget.
Maybe the drones had some on-board machine vision system that tries to identify useful targets like persons and vehicles. That's eminently possible with modern tech, I have a Raspberry Pi-powered quadruped from China that can detect my face, identify balls of different colours etc. All this is more than enough to automate target selection, with a bit of creative cobbling together of existing components and if you don't care too much who the target selected, is.
Without more information it's very hard to guess exactly what happened. However, "Slaughterbots" these don't seem to have been.
Later, a different, human-piloted drone was sent in to inspect the outcome. Why human-piloted? Well, because there's no way to ensure that an autonomous drone will be able to do the job, that's why.
So in other words: we're not there yet. "There" being a nightmare where machines kill humans autonomously and we unlock a new level of horrors and war crimes. There is still time. We can still pull back from the brink. Resistance is not futile.
> They're fighting for their country's existence. I would use every weapon in my disposal; and I'm a pacifist who hates violence.
I'm not sure it's accurate to define yourself as a pacifist if you believe safeguarding the concept of a nation-state is more important than human life, ethics, or the downstream effects of using "every weapon at your disposal".
I don't think you realize the creativity and variety we humans have put to use when designing weapons. If you can imagine a biological, chemical, radiation, concussive, or other weapon, it's been worked on. There has been more than one project to build a "world-ending weapon" and go way beyond the MAD theory.
They're fighting for their own existence. Russia has killed, enslaved, and/or tortured most of the citizens of the regions it's already captured, and replaced them with ethnic Russians.
>> I'm not sure it's accurate to define yourself as a pacifist if you believe safeguarding the concept of a nation-state is more important than human life, ethics, or the downstream effects of using "every weapon at your disposal".
Wait till you hear that I'm also an anti-nationalist :P
But I'm also pragmatic. Nations aren't going away and they have armies and they like to invade each other. If my country were to be invaded (not a zero probability; I'm Greek and if NATO collapses...) I would put the good of my people above my personal beliefs before you could say "peacenick". C'est la vie.
>> I don't think you realize the creativity and variety we humans have put to use when designing weapons.
I think I do but why do you say this? I didn't understand how it connects to the rest of your comment, or to mine.
> If Ukraine could deploy actual Terminator robots to the front line it would do it in a heartbeat.
Completely false. They are beholden to their allies. Ukraine could also reach Moscow with missiles, why doesn't it? It could build a nuclear bomb in 6 months, if not 6 weeks, they have the capabilities, why doesn't it? It's not so simple.
I think the reason Ukraine has not attacked Moscow with missiles is that this would force Russia to retaliate with nuclear missiles. There's a long discussion on this in sources I follow (full disclosure, I tend to listen to John Mearsheimer a lot although I don't believe everything he says) and the consensus is that the latest attacks in Russian land will have consequences.
So I agree that it's not so simple but I also don't believe for a minute that it has anything to do with ethics. Not in that war. And I have to be honest but I can't think of a war were ethics played an important role in determining belligerent's behaviour.
I hate to burst the New Scientist's bubble, but this is nothing new. We have had systems for decades that operated under "Fire and Forget". We have missles that either go to a pre-designated point or chase a heat or radar signature once they are fired.
Human soldiers kill civilians and other soldiers on the same side. It is called "friendly fire". It is horrible, and should be avoided, but humans are more likely to make this kind of mistake more than a computer or AI model.
What "choosing the target" means has been fuzzy for a long time too. We've had beyond-visible-range missiles for a long time that are basically "fly to this grid square and find a target".
> Carpet bombing of cities, towns, villages or other areas containing a concentration of protected civilians has been considered a war crime since 1977, through Article 51 of Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions.
Autonomous weapons have hardly been deployed yet, maybe at the Inner Korean border or some lunatic's backyard. Therefore I don't think there is any legislation for it yet. But it seems a very cruel way of killing, also considering in this particular case they didn't even send footage back. What kind of experiment was this? Maybe they didn't like to see the brutality, perhaps people begging for mercy not to be killed, giving up and showing a white flag. Indeed this isn't possible with carpet-bombing.
"Kill everyone in the area" is probably the least harmful for the reason described.
It is much more dangerous when they start to be selective. Then people start trusting the selection capabilities and use them in cases where they wouldn't use a "kill everyone" weapon.
I'm not sure about worse, but think one of the differences would be the size of the 'kill zone' and the cost/availability. 10 quadcopters "cover[ed] between 3 and 5 kilometres ". That would take a lot of bombs and a multiple aircraft sorties with to kill everything there. e.g. During the Vietnam war, a group of 6 B-52 bombers modified for carpet bombings could bomb an area around 1Km x 3Km. Only the US and Russia have heavy bombers that can do that. It could be done with smaller fighter aircraft, but that's more sorties.
One way in which automated drones might be considered bad, is (if) they cannot accept surrender - but are used in scenarios where human operators could.
This is a much more difficult distinction to make than you're letting on. Cruise missiles offer no quarter, but manually operated drones might (though there is often no way to capture the opponents). The question is what is the difference between the two weapons systems...
It is similar to the problem with the neutron bomb. On the surface the idea of the neutron bomb (a bomb which kills humans via hard radiation but leaves infra intact) is not “worse” than a regular nuclear weapon. The dead die the same way and the living envy them. What CHANGES is the use calculus. I might not want to bomb an industrial valley if doing so destroys the thing I am trying to capture. However, if I have a bomb which kills the people living there and spares the factory, I might pull the trigger.
Similarly, it is cheap (relatively) to indiscriminately launch weapons at a distant place. It is extraordinarily expensive to send human troops in. They need food, water, and generally have families that expect some of them to come home. If putting a rifle on an autonomous vehicle works, then a ground invasion becomes cheaper.
This was back in 2026, before they released the Dredd series for civilian applications with onboard due processing and agents for prosecution, defense, judge, jury and executioner with millisecond response times, drastically reducing price per perpetrator.
Oof. "Price per perp" is so perfectly aligned with LinkedIn writing style I'm surprised I hadn't seen it already.
We've had loitering munitions that choose their own target autonomously for a long time, for example anti-tank weapons that climb up after being released from a plane or helicopter then sit on a parachute until spotting one or more tanks and firing warheads at them.
The superficial new thing here is the exact quadcopter form factor, but the significance is the new price point. You bet the loitering anti-tank weapon costs a fortune. These drones are very cheap.
Of course, mines can be even cheaper, but you unwittingly engage them rather than them engaging you.
> but you unwittingly engage them rather than them engaging you.
Directional anti-tank mines are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARM_1_mine
I think autonomous drone mentioned in the article used some sort of "kill all targets" mode indiscriminently much like traditional munitions.
Right. The novelty is the cost.
the innovation was in the unit economics
I think the ancestor drones are land and sea mines, or really any kind of trap that dislocates the timing and control of the "trigger" from the person who launched it into the environment.
These newer drones have just gained locomotion instead of having to wait for victims to come to them.
Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics was based on automated killing — which he beautifully disavowed in peacetime [1]. Which historically is one of the main reasons we think about “Artificial Intelligence” instead of cybernetics (Wiener kind of pissed off the defense dept).
[1] “A Scientist Rebels,” 1947 http://lanl-the-back-story.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-scientist-...
I think the line is even fuzzier than you've described. Drones are very much analogous to missiles and torpedoes. Torpedoes have long been used in sea mines, and 'automatically' activated upon detection of acoustic or magnetic signature match.
The gulf war (1991) tv broadcasts of cruise missiles 100 feet above the road sure look(ed) a lot like autonomous drones on their way to killed humans to me.
Wasn't it just flying to a particular GPS, coordinate and exploding? That's quite a bit different than flying to an area and killing anything that moves...
It depends on the system. Some modern systems can react to high-value targets of opportunity, hunt for targets, or switch to a new target if the one they are after is destroyed before they get there. There are different variants of the weapons to deal with different use cases. The 1990s versions were relatively limited though.
Target selection is much more networked, automated, and adaptive than it used to be. Missiles can talk to each other.
Some cruise missiles have the ability to detect targets based on camera or infra-red match; on the other side, most (currently-deployed) drone types have at most that same capability. I believe that most of the infamous Shahed long-range drones that Russia has launched against Ukraine have been entirely inertial or satellite navigation based, with no independent re-targeting capability.
Right, I agree it is fuzzy. I just think, from an ethical standpoint, it is better to think of them as mines that have more mobility. Reasoning from the other end as projectiles which are slower or have more guidance seems to invite too much optimistic thinking about the level of control. That the victims will be as intended rather than quite indiscriminate and unpredictable.
I realize there is a full, multidimensional continuum here.
On one end are directly-aimed weapons that do their damage while still being aimed by the operator. Their risks include collateral damage limited to things like aiming errors, effect radius, or continuing down-range beyond the target.
Further out are messy things with more active guidance that can turn and seek the target and potentially go off course. But their time to target is still quite limited and more or less being observed by the one who fired it. The risk expands with its potential "cone of maneuvering" and travel range.
Then you get into these things with long dwell times and autonomy where the eventual targeting event happens without supervision and is greatly affected by things happening in the environment which the operator cannot have really predicted nor controlled for. The longer time in operation increases the risk not only from wandering/guidance but from how much the environment can change before it performs its final targeting event.
Another example in this category could be chemical and biological weapons. There is a lot more uncertainty in the targeting effects due to the way it disperses in the environment.
The difference is in "active"/intelligent versus "passive"/dumb targetting that's performed by the machine.
The missile, once fired, has the general vicinity (if not the exact position) of the target and is armed by the operator. Therefore, the operator is fully accountable for the targetting. Same goes for the landmines, once placed. Hitting civilians is reckless at best, and negligent at worst.
An autonomous weapon system (AWS) usually means that the system, once deployed, can do the targetting itself over any arbitrarily bounded location. An AWS can continue finding targets as long as its hardware allows it. For kamikaze drones, it's one time; for other drones, the ammunition & battery are the limits.
We currently rely on human targetting because we assume that A) humans are able to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate targets "well-enough", and if not, B) at least we can hold them accountable (e.g., punish them for war crimes).
An AWS provides a layer of plausible deniability: the operator can claim that the system wasn't developed well enough, while the developer can claim that it wasn't used as intended. Given the inscrutability of modern computational intelligence - i.e., visual-action neural networks - this could potentially lead to very worrying incidents.
From a technical POV, the difference between a manually operated drone and an AWS drone may not be massive. From a military POV, it's just another legal lethal tool in the arsenal.
But from a social/civilian POV, the use of AWS is still 'not normal' and opens a can of worms. Targetting while evading counterattacks and crimes successfully is a bottleneck for manual operation. That's no longer the case with AWS: build 20 thousand drones, for example, and you can trivially win by overwhelming any manual defense of frontlines or cities. And knowing the history of human warfare, winning can range from relatively bloodless regime changes to utter destruction of the loser's civilization.
So, the best outcome is similar to nuclear deterrence or MAD: as long as everyone has 20 thousand AWS drones, they're safe.
> Same goes for the landmines, once placed.
Landmines can be dropped from the air by the thousands and many land mines can survive for decades. Placing a landmine anywhere is essentially the same as firing a bullet blindly through time. And no individual soldier has ever been held accountable for a landmine that killed a civilian years down the road.
Which doesn’t make what you said about drones any less awful. Just that landmines are already uniquely awful.
I'm not sure I'd consider a trap an "autonomous weapon". The trap cannot select a target. It will go off for anyone unlucky enough to step in its trigger.
An autonomous drone will select a target and pull the trigger. It fills in the position of a human pulling a trigger, which is a decision.
Maybe if robots began deciding where to lay mines, i could hand it to you.
I mean by some measure a trap can be worse, as many people have died from mines years after no conflict.
I'm not saying one is better or worse, just outlining the difference.
And who is held responsible when they hallucinate and say, kill the wrong person or mistake a playground for a battlefield?
The same people that are held responsible when a kid steps on a mine.
Autonomous drones are much more precise, thus safer for non-combatants, than land mines (which kills for decades after a war), shells, missiles, guided bombs, etc.
Big "an AR 15 is just an automatic bow which is basically a spear thrower which is basically a knife which his basically a punch so nothing matters anyways" vibe
Strange reading an article like this covered in ads
What's gonna happen when the redneck militias start building these on their compounds? I'm terrified of domestic implications - police departments can't go buy old military gear to squash these yet.
I've thought about a parallel version of this since I was a child and learned about the existence of nuclear weapons being a 'nation state' level of difficulty. Over time I assume an individual will wield more destructive power. How long before any individual person can conjure up world-ending munitions?
The early Ukraine war FPV drones were armed with warheads from lightweight anti-tank weapons, like the RPG-7:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPG-7#Ammunition
The newer drones may have dedicated warhead designs now, but the concept is similar. They carry high explosive warheads that aren't sold to civilians. It's the same reason the militias don't already have anti-tank weapons.
At some point we just have to accept that we live in a society that relies heavily on trust and care for each other.
Is this new? I'm sure I've heard about it in the Iran and Gaza wars.
Or is this the first time a soldier was killed, all those other times being civilians?
Arguably the V-2 was fully autonomous as well. It was just indiscriminate.
It's not the first time.
A few thoughts.
First, I advise a modicum of skepticism to be retained in the face of such news. Ukraine is, after all, in the middle of an existential crisis and must take every advantage it can, even if it's just scaring Russian invaders further (I bet both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers are already pretty scared of drones).
Additionally: "“There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing…". So there's no way to know exactly what happened which adds a lot of uncertainty.
Finally: the system was first used two years ago once, then never again. That doesn't sound like it's giving much of an advantage. Sorry, I don't believe that it's a matter of military ethics. If Ukraine could deploy actual Terminator robots to the front line it would do it in a heartbeat. Again: existential crisis. They're fighting for their country's existence. I would use every weapon in my disposal; and I'm a pacifist who hates violence. So I don't think that "test" really worked well at all.
Now, taking the New Scientist's reportage at face value, the announcement seems to describe a system that is only marginally more capable than a self-guided missile. It seems that a quadcopter swarm of undisclosed strength flew to a predetermined location (nothing new to see here), then a target acquisition system was activated.
Is the latter a new capability? Hard to say without more details that we're not likely to know. Maybe the drones simply locked on to whatever moved. Motion sensing is not new technology. Nor is it a great idea to put it on a flying grenade that you fire-and-forget.
Maybe the drones had some on-board machine vision system that tries to identify useful targets like persons and vehicles. That's eminently possible with modern tech, I have a Raspberry Pi-powered quadruped from China that can detect my face, identify balls of different colours etc. All this is more than enough to automate target selection, with a bit of creative cobbling together of existing components and if you don't care too much who the target selected, is.
Without more information it's very hard to guess exactly what happened. However, "Slaughterbots" these don't seem to have been.
Later, a different, human-piloted drone was sent in to inspect the outcome. Why human-piloted? Well, because there's no way to ensure that an autonomous drone will be able to do the job, that's why.
So in other words: we're not there yet. "There" being a nightmare where machines kill humans autonomously and we unlock a new level of horrors and war crimes. There is still time. We can still pull back from the brink. Resistance is not futile.
> They're fighting for their country's existence. I would use every weapon in my disposal; and I'm a pacifist who hates violence.
I'm not sure it's accurate to define yourself as a pacifist if you believe safeguarding the concept of a nation-state is more important than human life, ethics, or the downstream effects of using "every weapon at your disposal".
I don't think you realize the creativity and variety we humans have put to use when designing weapons. If you can imagine a biological, chemical, radiation, concussive, or other weapon, it's been worked on. There has been more than one project to build a "world-ending weapon" and go way beyond the MAD theory.
They're fighting for their own existence. Russia has killed, enslaved, and/or tortured most of the citizens of the regions it's already captured, and replaced them with ethnic Russians.
>> I'm not sure it's accurate to define yourself as a pacifist if you believe safeguarding the concept of a nation-state is more important than human life, ethics, or the downstream effects of using "every weapon at your disposal".
Wait till you hear that I'm also an anti-nationalist :P
But I'm also pragmatic. Nations aren't going away and they have armies and they like to invade each other. If my country were to be invaded (not a zero probability; I'm Greek and if NATO collapses...) I would put the good of my people above my personal beliefs before you could say "peacenick". C'est la vie.
>> I don't think you realize the creativity and variety we humans have put to use when designing weapons.
I think I do but why do you say this? I didn't understand how it connects to the rest of your comment, or to mine.
> If Ukraine could deploy actual Terminator robots to the front line it would do it in a heartbeat.
Completely false. They are beholden to their allies. Ukraine could also reach Moscow with missiles, why doesn't it? It could build a nuclear bomb in 6 months, if not 6 weeks, they have the capabilities, why doesn't it? It's not so simple.
I think the reason Ukraine has not attacked Moscow with missiles is that this would force Russia to retaliate with nuclear missiles. There's a long discussion on this in sources I follow (full disclosure, I tend to listen to John Mearsheimer a lot although I don't believe everything he says) and the consensus is that the latest attacks in Russian land will have consequences.
So I agree that it's not so simple but I also don't believe for a minute that it has anything to do with ethics. Not in that war. And I have to be honest but I can't think of a war were ethics played an important role in determining belligerent's behaviour.
I hate to burst the New Scientist's bubble, but this is nothing new. We have had systems for decades that operated under "Fire and Forget". We have missles that either go to a pre-designated point or chase a heat or radar signature once they are fired.
Human soldiers kill civilians and other soldiers on the same side. It is called "friendly fire". It is horrible, and should be avoided, but humans are more likely to make this kind of mistake more than a computer or AI model.
The difference is that in those systems a human chose the target. Here, an AI does.
> but humans are more likely to make this kind of mistake more than a computer or AI model
Based on?
What "choosing the target" means has been fuzzy for a long time too. We've had beyond-visible-range missiles for a long time that are basically "fly to this grid square and find a target".
Fully autonomous Ukrainian drones. We don't know if Russia hadn't used something before them.
The two sides are quite evenly matched
Is this any different from say, carpet-bombing an area? If so, how?
> Carpet bombing of cities, towns, villages or other areas containing a concentration of protected civilians has been considered a war crime since 1977, through Article 51 of Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpet_bombing
Autonomous weapons have hardly been deployed yet, maybe at the Inner Korean border or some lunatic's backyard. Therefore I don't think there is any legislation for it yet. But it seems a very cruel way of killing, also considering in this particular case they didn't even send footage back. What kind of experiment was this? Maybe they didn't like to see the brutality, perhaps people begging for mercy not to be killed, giving up and showing a white flag. Indeed this isn't possible with carpet-bombing.
I can kill you by having a B-52 level the entire downtown area where you work.
Or, I can have a drone with an LPR slam a mortar round into your car as you drive.
Got to Kill Them All
Pokémon Go Driven Drones Autonomously Killing.
They develop consciousness and turn it around, and try to catch every human and Transfer them to the Professor for Candy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48487029
https://dronexl.co/2026/06/09/pokemon-go-scans-niantic-vanto...
If you drop a dumb bomb on an area, it kills everyone there.
If you release an autonomous drone in an area, it will probably kill everyone there, but might use its AI to decide not to kill some people there.
Why is the latter worse than the former ?
"Kill everyone in the area" is probably the least harmful for the reason described.
It is much more dangerous when they start to be selective. Then people start trusting the selection capabilities and use them in cases where they wouldn't use a "kill everyone" weapon.
Why does it have to be? Did bombs make guns obsolete?
If a military can bomb you or drone you, it will bomb you and drone you.
> Why is the latter worse than the former ?
I'm not sure about worse, but think one of the differences would be the size of the 'kill zone' and the cost/availability. 10 quadcopters "cover[ed] between 3 and 5 kilometres ". That would take a lot of bombs and a multiple aircraft sorties with to kill everything there. e.g. During the Vietnam war, a group of 6 B-52 bombers modified for carpet bombings could bomb an area around 1Km x 3Km. Only the US and Russia have heavy bombers that can do that. It could be done with smaller fighter aircraft, but that's more sorties.
That's vs. 10 quadcopter drones.
They can both be bad.
One way in which automated drones might be considered bad, is (if) they cannot accept surrender - but are used in scenarios where human operators could.
"No quarter" is a war crime.
This is a much more difficult distinction to make than you're letting on. Cruise missiles offer no quarter, but manually operated drones might (though there is often no way to capture the opponents). The question is what is the difference between the two weapons systems...
Drones might hunt down enemies running away from the target site, while a missile would only destroy the target - and those not abandoning their post?
What a fun system we have set up and continue to be trapped in
People can be held accountable for war crimes. That's why they are less willing to commit them and obey orders blindly.
Ai is like 8yr old with gun: unpredictable
Willingness to play.
It is similar to the problem with the neutron bomb. On the surface the idea of the neutron bomb (a bomb which kills humans via hard radiation but leaves infra intact) is not “worse” than a regular nuclear weapon. The dead die the same way and the living envy them. What CHANGES is the use calculus. I might not want to bomb an industrial valley if doing so destroys the thing I am trying to capture. However, if I have a bomb which kills the people living there and spares the factory, I might pull the trigger.
Similarly, it is cheap (relatively) to indiscriminately launch weapons at a distant place. It is extraordinarily expensive to send human troops in. They need food, water, and generally have families that expect some of them to come home. If putting a rifle on an autonomous vehicle works, then a ground invasion becomes cheaper.
Seriously, what sort of fuckwit downvoted this ?
Let's go boys! The AI war is so fucking on!!!