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Musk-Backed 'Slaughterbots' Video Will Warn the UN About Killer Microdrones (space.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Space.com:
A graphic new video posits a very scary future in which swarms of killer microdrones are dispatched to kill political activists and U.S. lawmakers. Armed with explosive charges, the palm-sized quadcopters use real-time data mining and artificial intelligence to find and kill their targets. The makers of the seven-minute film titled Slaughterbots are hoping the startling dramatization will draw attention to what they view as a looming crisis -- the development of lethal, autonomous weapons, that select and fire on human targets without human guidance.
The Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to mitigating existential risks posed by advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, commissioned the film. Founded by a group of scientists and business leaders, the institute is backed by AI-skeptics Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, among others. The institute is also behind the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of non-governmental organizations which have banded together to call for a preemptive ban on lethal autonomous weapons... The film will be screened this week at the United Nations in Geneva during a meeting of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons... The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is hosting a series of meetings at this year's event to propose a worldwide ban on lethal autonomous weapons, which could potentially be developed as flying drones, self-driving tanks, or automated sentry guns.
"This short film is more than just speculation," says Stuart Russell, a U.C. Berkeley considered an expert in artificial intelligence.
"It shows the results of integrating and miniaturizing technologies we already have."
The Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to mitigating existential risks posed by advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, commissioned the film. Founded by a group of scientists and business leaders, the institute is backed by AI-skeptics Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, among others. The institute is also behind the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of non-governmental organizations which have banded together to call for a preemptive ban on lethal autonomous weapons... The film will be screened this week at the United Nations in Geneva during a meeting of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons... The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is hosting a series of meetings at this year's event to propose a worldwide ban on lethal autonomous weapons, which could potentially be developed as flying drones, self-driving tanks, or automated sentry guns.
"This short film is more than just speculation," says Stuart Russell, a U.C. Berkeley considered an expert in artificial intelligence.
"It shows the results of integrating and miniaturizing technologies we already have."
If it can be thought up it WILL BE built!
Is this like Millennium Challenge where swarms of small, fast boats were able to disable/sink numerous simulated ships? Or, during that same exercise, swarms of cruise missiles overwhelmed the fleet defenses?
I guess, in one respect, at least someone's talking about it.
Seems pretty easy to thwart facial recognition. More concerning is the fact that most of us carry around a homing beacon in our front pocket.
Swarms of microdrones dispatched to kill U.S. politicians? I see no reason to rush through a preemptive ban on this technology.
Speculating on plausible outcomes is the first step towards mitigating the consequences of them.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It's not that these things are more destructive than older weapons. It's that these things give the power of a targeted artillery strike to anyone for pennies of what nation state weapons cost, so it opens up WWI type levels of destructive capability to just about anyone on any budget. WWI really caught people off guard. People had no idea the level of destruction that was going to be unleashed by the industrial revolution. Likewise people have no idea the destructive power that's going to be unleashed by the AI revolution.
swarms of killer microdrones are dispatched to kill political activists and U.S. lawmakers
I know that deadly scenario is scary and romantic, but really, what is more likely to happen is swarms of microdrones delivering chicken mcnuggets and tubes of k-y, not killing political activists.
lucm, indeed.
Another racist term for a Japanese person...
Again, the SJW mod crowd shows they are idiots, but on one thing, you're right. It is a racist term, but it's racist against white people' specially, South African and Rhodesian whites.
Subculture slang is not relevant out of its cultural context. There's a handful of well-known ethnic slurs and we don't need more. It's possible to narrow down to cover smaller populations (such as ice chinks for inuit) but you can't use localized versions for groups that are already covered by a top-level label, otherwise you're just creating confusion.
Also I would like to point out that an ethnic slur is not the same as a racist term. Just like it's not sexist to call a woman a cunt, it's not racist to call an Asian a chink. It's rude but that's not the same as racist. I guarantee you that there's people in nice offices that will silently pass on a resume if the name sounds ebonic or latino but that would never say "the n word", while there's blue collar workers calling each other "pollocks" or "fucking sand n-word" without an ounce of discrimination in mind.
lucm, indeed.
The ignorance of the politically correct echo chamber is revealed yet again.
>> Armed with explosive charges, the palm-sized quadcopters use real-time data mining and artificial intelligence to find and kill their targets.
>> If you can attach a camera to a drone, you can attach a bomb
The cameras used to hobby drones typically weigh 20-100grams. In the US, Fourth of July fireworks sold to the public can weigh 1,000 grams (with 500 grams of explosive inside). So the camera could be replaced with a small firework, which would make the target curious about that popping noise.
1,000 Kg is a decent bomb (1 million grams, or 10,000 times as much as a drone camera).
$500-$1000 quads CAN carry a bit more weight, but at a major reduction in flight time and range, as well as speed and the ability to fly in a stiff breeze. Unladen, a DJI Phantom 3 Professional ($700) can fly for about 23 minutes. Add a 1Kg payload and flight time is less than half that much. At 6MPH it could cover about 1 mile, if there is no breeze at all. With a 5MPH breeze against it, and carrying a 1Kg load would cover a several hundred feet before the battery died.
You're probably better off just throwing the pipe bomb with your hand. Much simpler. If you must go "fancy", a potato gun (plumbing pipe and hairspray) will go just about as far with a 1Kg grenade.
Really? Originally, it was used to describe South-African white males of Dutch descent. Now it is a pejorative term for any white male (males only, because it comes from the male name Jaap)
Where is it used to refer to Japanese people, and why would you assume it is a slur for Japanese in a context where we are talking about Elon Musk, a South-African?
No good deed goes unpunished...
No, but the book The Diamond Age covered all this stuff, we don't need a stupid bad video to point out the risks. If they wanted to do this right, they'd pay Neal Stephenson to do a film adaptation!
The size is a very relevant aspect. Firstly, you need some space to store all the required electronics. Secondly, you cannot generate enough force without reaction/inertial mass. Even the size in the video seems extremely small for what is expected to be accomplished. Even by forgetting about all the required space to store what is needed to more or less autonomously operate in a 3D space, it doesn't seem possible to shoot anything in a position to pass through a skull from a so small (and instable! The fact of being flying around increases the minimal mass requirements) object even under ideal conditions. In a random situation, with that small thing flying over people and shooting from random positions, it is certainly impossible. Same thing with your proposal of injecting whatever: although almost any part of the body and minimal force seem required when talking about a deadly toxin, there are still some constraints that are very difficult or even impossible to be met under the intended conditions.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
It only needs to carry a very small amount of a nerve agent. I don't know microbots are viable, but they needn't carry an explosive charge to be lethal.
There is a big difference between a black cat, and a shaped high explosive charge.
Take for instance, semtex. This is a commercially available plastic explosive used for demolition. (and frequently used by terrorists.)
250 grams of it is enough to destroy an in-flight airplane, if properly placed.
The premise of the video is that a human skull is pretty thin, and not evolved to stop a shaped explosive's concussion wave. If one uses something like this, they can blow half your skull off with just a few grams of material, pretty much exactly like in the video.
A shaped charge explosive works by having a special void in the explosive material on the surface that is to be favored for blast-wave creation. This provides a high velocity path of least resistance, through which combustion products of the explosion will favor being expelled, and giving the explosion a preferred direction for energy delivery. (This is very different from a fire cracker, which explodes basically uniformly.)
Considering that just about any high explosive is many times more powerful per gram than the black powder found inside the black cat mentioned by the grandparent, and are capable of producing shaped shock fronts on detonation, I basically call bullshit on grandparent's dismissal. For reference, military grade C4 plastic explosive detonates with a combustion rate 29,000 feet per second. Black powder? Between 600 and 1400 feet per second. Literally, just replacing that "black cat" with the same weight of C4, increases the explosive force 20 times, at best, and 48 times at worst.
Apples and oranges sir. Your black cat is not even in the same class as the material they are suggesting could be inside these drones.
A gun makes a bullet go fast, and weighs about ten pounds.
Nonsense. A and doesn't weigh even one pound in the case of a pistol.
Handguns are only effective out to about 20 feet,
That's a lot of bullshit.
and even then two or three shots probably won't kill the bad guy.
That depends very much on how good your aim is.
The important bit of the system is the part which aims the gun at a vital part of the target's body and fires at the proper instant. That part is called the marksman. It weighs about 180 pounds.
What does yolo 9000 running on a raspberry pi zero weigh?
Everything you said was wrong.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You jest, but people thought the machine gun was going to make war too terrible to wage.
The New York Times, in 1897, called Maxim’s invention “terrible automatic engines of war,” and suggested their mere existence might convince world leaders to settle conflicts diplomatically.
It seems that the worst things are often the handy work of people trying to prove something.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I did some calculations a while ago. As of last year (or was it the year before?), the ten-year average annual deaths for terrorist attack in the US is less than that for lightning strikes, but greater than that for sharks.
In Australia, the sharks scored more kills than the terrorists.
The point here is that people are absolutely awful at estimating risk. They are highly biased to ignore the common, and consider only the exceptional.