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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."
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.
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.
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.