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."

Comments

Pointless

[Templer421]

If it can be thought up it WILL BE built!

Re:Pointless

[JoshuaZ]

Nuclear bombs which are highly cobalt salted to increase fallout have been thought of but the evidence is that no nuclear power has built them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb. Similarly currently, we know how to make a massive number of different types of chemical weapons, but the vast majority of countries have none in their arsenals.

Re:Pointless

[eth1]

Nuclear bombs which are highly cobalt salted to increase fallout have been thought of but the evidence is that no nuclear power has built them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb. Similarly currently, we know how to make a massive number of different types of chemical weapons, but the vast majority of countries have none in their arsenals.

The weapons you mention are indiscriminate, and can easily cause just as many problems for those that deploy them as they do for the targets. There are very good reasons not to use or bother building them. The whole point of the drones is that they're cheap, surgical, and can be deployed with little to no consequence for the attackers.

What's the problem, exactly?

[FritzTheCat1030]

Swarms of microdrones dispatched to kill U.S. politicians? I see no reason to rush through a preemptive ban on this technology.

The problem is they're too cheap

[TheNarrator]

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.

Re:The problem is they're too cheap

[mentil]

Forget artillery strikes. What's really gonna stir shit up is when drone attacks allow for anonymous murder. What society could cope with that? It's gonna be like handing a Death Note to every citizen on Earth, only you won't need to know their name. I COULD see a ban on murder-drones actually working though, as after the first time a crime family gets whacked, the black market won't touch them; people will go after individual sellers as well. Wearing a mask in public might become the norm... until voice-recognition is used instead.

Re: Ob

[lucm]

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.

Re:A firecracker, not a bomb

[Kjella]

A more realistic weapon for a palm-sized drone would be a wasp-style injection, just ram the target and have a spring released needle to punch through the clothing and skin or shoot from close range like a taser gun. There are plenty toxins you could deliver that would be fatal with even a very tiny dose. But the topic wasn't really if a drone attack is practical, but whether an autonomous drone attack is more practical. I don't really see it, if there's only one target then human RC will do fine. If there's many targets, gathered in a relatively small space like some form of meeting or conference, why wouldn't you just hit that with one big bang? I mean the assumption here is that you're willing to commit mass murder, are you going to care if there's a little collateral?

I'd think the only reason you'd care is because you're trying to be the good guys, like IS is using human shields or they're in a camp with women and children or whatever and you want to make precision kills without harming the rest. In any case there's probably good reasons to build all this technology for non-lethal purposes, swapping out some non-critical function with some kind of trigger/detonator is always going to be easy. It's like trying to build an alarm clock that can't be rigged to blow up a bomb when the alarm goes off. What are you going to do, ban alarm clocks?

Re:Going a little larger

[wierd_w]

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.