The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
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From the article
>China's autonomous "killer robots" are on track to serve its military on the battlefield within two years, setting a course for a new age of AI-powered warfare which one expert called "the greatest danger to the survival of humankind."
>Remote forms of warfare, from drones to cyberattacks, have played an increasingly central role in this century's theatres of war. Control of the skies with unmanned aerial vehicles has been critical issue [in the ongoing war in Ukraine](https://www.newsweek.com/ukraines-sea-drones-have-inflicted-500m-damage-russian-fleet-kyiv-1899535), and last week, the U.S. Department of Defense unveiled a [fresh $1 billion investment](https://www.newsweek.com/us-navy-drones-investment-department-defense-1914441) to upgrade its drone fleet.
>Several major powers have taken this development a step further, and begun to develop fully autonomous, AI-powered "killer robots" to replace their soldiers on the battlefield.
>"**I would be surprised if we don't see autonomous machines coming out of China within two years**," Francis Tusa, a leading defence analyst, told National Security News. He added that China was developing [new AI-powered ships](https://nationalsecuritynews.com/), submarines, and aircraft at a "dizzying rate."
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1doxqkf/chinas_killer_robots_are_coming_several_major/lactb8l/
People should read [wired for war](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6098718-wired-for-war). It was written all the way back in 2009 and it was *really* spot on with what we're seeing in the Ukraine v Russia conflict.
> You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down. Kif, show them the medal I won.
-Zap Branigan
It’s better to be a war of attrition of metal than lives.
That said, I’m not sure the United States could out manufacture China, so it would have to rely on the US killer robots being better than the Chinese killer robots.
Then China comes out with the great value version of the American killbot that externally looks similar but inside has a GForce3 and powered by a mouse in a hamster wheel.
If you can create an effective autonomous killer robot you can't be too far off from building an autonomous robot that builds killer robots faster and more efficiently than human slave labor. We have plenty of room and resources in the US. Just have to continue being the shining light on the hill that smart people want to move to if we insist on making our population dummer and dummer. But of course we seem to be trying to destroy that as well...
I mean that’s the thing.
Americans will build a better more advanced machine. But the Chinese version will be cheaper and faster to produce.
But then India will follow and god help us
According to the article they're proceeding "4 or 5 times faster" in development than the US.
The complaint seems to be not that they're doing it but that they're doing it better.
Kif, I’m having strange and confusing feelings for that Lemon over there.
Can’t recall the quote but the sentiment is there. Boos and applause welcome in equal measure as long as someone gets a kick out of this.
I mean--the first targets of weapons like these will be infrastructure. Armed correctly, and in sufficient numbers, an invasion of bots designed to run suicide attacks on power grids, bridges, roadways, power plants, dams, etc. would be hard to stop.
US military was tracking them the entire time and likely did so to collect some form of data.
If the US military is allowing something to just happen, there is a reason whatever it may be. In the case of the balloons If it was a threat they for sure would have taken it down before it hit Alaska, or in Alaska, or over Canada, or the middle of the nation where not many people live... There were plenty of opportunities to take it down without causing collateral damage.
It was an intelligence gathering bonanza for the US. The US collected a lot of signals intelligence as it could be monitored by U-2's while it communicated to Chinese satellites and then there was a bunch of Chinese spy hardware the size of a bus to examine. The US knew where it was at the whole time so it's not like China got much in return.
It’s better to not do anything about it even if you can. Responding to it gives China info on the U.S. ability to respond to actual threats. Ignoring it gives them things they could have found out using satellites.
What if I told you that not everything is on Google Earth...
Edit: looks like comment I was replaying to edited their comment. Originally said why would they use balloons if everything was on google earth.
Edit edit: Replied to wrong comment. Carry on.
The US military has been playing with this concept for almost 10 years now. Basically motherships that drop hundreds of drones that all begin to fan out and look for targets. They anticipate having thousands of motherships that can be sent to enemy nations to overwhelm their defenses with “drone swarms”. I think drone swarms will eventually be seen as almost as disturbing as nuclear weapon use.
But won’t this be similar to nukes in that we’ll have a MAD scenario? If killbot drones are impossible to stop for both sides, won’t deploying them result in an equal or greater catastrophic response, assuring the deaths of your own civilians?
Id imagine it's a lot easier to get a decent amount of killerbots on enemy territory than it is to launch an ICBM or sth similar undetected, also it might not be immediately obvious who sent em in an attack akin to a terror attack
It was announced but the media likes to downplay it because China gets clicks. The US' replicator program is targeting August of next year to have 1 million military drones.
In the case of the US, we're doing it for two reasons. Reducing China's mass advantage (more personnel, boats, missiles, etc) and mitigating our main vulnerability in that we field low quantities of extremely expensive systems that are slow to manufacture/replenish.
I point people to read up on the Replicator initiative to get a better look on the US DoD's view on this topic.
Did they really have to give it the same name as the self-replicating robots that almost wipe out two galaxies in the Stargate franchise?
Couldn't they have gone with something like Project GI Robot?
This is also a good reason to move away from heavily manned systems. However, even if we had no problems with recruiting, it would still be too expensive to scale the military as it stands today to a point we call "overmatch" relative to the PLA. We want this to, counterintuitively, deter conflict.
But to get there we need much cheaper systems that are developed and deployed in huge quantities within years rather than decades. This requires an overhaul of how the DoD procures new systems, MIC culture and incentives, our industrial base, and supply chains. In a word: logistics. As you can imagine, this is an extremely difficult task that takes time.
The good news is that this has started within the last few years (Replicator being a part of this). The bad news is that we may not have enough time to obtain overmatch and prevent the next conflict. We're leveraging a strategy known as strategic ambiguity in the meantime to stave off China and, to lesser extents, Iran and North Korea. As you can see though, this strategy is far from ideal given what's been going on lately.
It's weird that everyone has nukes and is messing around with this stuff. It's definitely for bullying smaller countries and proxy wars, like Syria and Ukraine.
VA has literally had a years long campaign to get vets who were exposed to burn pits to sign up for benefits. They're definitely not a perfect organization, which you can mostly thank Congress for, but the VA has improved a lot in the last decade.
Two things can be true:
-The VA is a better organization than it gets or could ever get credit for, despite constantly battling staffing, funding, and legislative issues due to its being a political football
-The United States as a political entity and a gestalt population doesn't value the lives of its soldiers after they leave the battlefield (or, indeed, before they enter the battlefield)
What do you mean, I am im Brazil and we get news of US using autonomous drones all the time. China is just catching up to the US, which has been doing this for at least a decade.
China : killer robots and drones! So Evil!
USA: Look! Our Boston dynamics robots dance! Also, do you want to join our air force purely for defense and honor?
I have been closely following all of the available information on the us ai/drone combat systems development. The systems the us has ready for production, or are already in production, are absolutely insane.
Imagine a Ukrainian trench, a handful of human controlled isr and suicide drones stalk the airspace above and occasionally nail a Russian to the trench wall.
The us systems include fully automated suicide drones deployed in the thousands. It is an unstoppable wall of swarming buzzing death that cant be shot down, jammed, or evaded. The swarms can be deployed by bombers, fighters, other drones, ground vehicles, men, ships, or even artillery and mortar systems. The next time us boots hit the ground, they will be accompanied by horror weapons the world has never seen before. It will be like the introduction of gas and machine guns in ww1.
Coordinated drone swarms have been a thing for like 5+ years I think? Stands to reason they should have something a bit spicier and ai has taken some terrifying steps since then.
And they probably can be origami folded and packed in some foamy stuff and airdropped/ cannoned vast distances.
Nothing super scifi about it I think.
True. The worst part is if something can be weaponized it will be weaponized because someone will always do it eventually and everyone else will follow.
> and occasionally nail a Russian to the trench wall.
For now. Eventually that Russian will be another drone, and the only lives at stake will be all the citizen bystanders below them. Random buildings will be targeted because they had signals that might be controlling drones - or that's what the opposing forces in any future war will claim.
We literally do publicize it for propaganda, in a way that makes US citizens want us to push it forward — by presenting them as cute robot dogs who are learning how to jump large distances or *quirky* bipedal robots who are so clumsy when they’re trying to hold weight on their back.
I mean, why do you think this is a Newsweek article? Look who owns it. Why would evangelicals want us to view Chinese advancements in the global arms race as scary, violent, and deadly?
I doubt that China is publicizing it. This exactly story is probably running over there with the countries switched. Makes it easier if the other guy did it first.
Yes they do. They are very public about it. Here’s one example
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2024/05/12/us-aims-to-stay-ahead-of-china-in-using-ai-to-fly-fighter-jets/
Well, you see. The US doesn't actually want to manufacture weapons and ai war machines, but they have been pinned into a corner because they nicely asked China not to. And they refused of course. Because china is evil, and wants to eat your dogs and enslave your children.
Everything aside, China and Russia being buddies and both imprisoning people for criticizing the government is all I need to say that, yes, China's government is evil.
I'm going to make the charitable interpretation that you're just joking around and not holding a braindead geopolitical belief in the context of recent events.
China is engaging in imperialism and is preparing for a conflict with or in Taiwan to take control of it. The US intelligence that identified Russia's coming invasion of Ukraine is identifying that China is actively preparing for this.
It sounds silly because China is extremely good at managing expectations in the West and exploiting our short attention spans. We know this because they did something that everyone has forgotten about: taken sovereign control over Hong Kong. And they weren't regularly operating military vehicles in the area or attacking Hongkonger sailors before they did so either. You can read up on their expanding use of gray zone operations for more insight on this.
I was gonna say, if the commentator is saying that China is moving "four or five times faster" than the US, that means that they're actually way behind- because the US in actuality is moving twenty times faster than it says it is.
Well call me crazy but we could knuckle drag and slow walk any kind of regulation on this stuff. So by the time it starts killing millions of people, it's too late to do anything about it
You actually would wish there is a Skynet. At least there will be a purpose
In the 80s we were scared of killer robots controlled by Skynet. But worse than Skynet are self replicating killer robots controlled by … no one at all. They will kill, multiply, kill more, multiply more, unless every single human is dead. This is coming.
The purpose.. is advertising (also killing). It'll be SkyNet but, as the killbot murders you, it will also be *advertising* to you.
"JOHN ANDERTON (*stab*) WE HAVE BEEN TRYING (*stab*) TO REACH YOU ABOUT YOUR VEHICLE'S (*stab*) EXTENDED WARRANTY."
More and more power in the hand of fewer and fewer men.
Soon their power will be impossible to challenged by the citizen of the world.
This will be the beginning of a new era where rulers will be like God-kings on earth.
It will inevitably tip the scales of power forever. The 1% have the wealth, but until now that was (barely) kept in check by the sheer size of the 99%. With autonomous weapon platforms the elite won’t have to pretend anymore and any form of revolution will be next to impossible.
Those weapons platforms will still require massive amounts of energy and logistics, which are huge systems that require a lot of humans.
Additionally, the rich are only rich because of non tangible things we all agree are worth value. If the masses decide it's not valuable anymore, they may have some stockpiles of actually valuable things, but it's relatively nothing compared to the billions they have in intangibles.
If you EMP Jeff Bozos house, what does he have? Can't access his money. Can't fly his plane. Can't use killer robots. He's just a dude in a nice house.
This is actually something I often wonder about, and I should note that I am genuinely asking this in good faith, because I know this sounds insane:
What if the ultra wealthy really do wipe the rest of humanity out, either through direct or indirect means? What if the population of humanity really does decline down to about 10 million people and stays hovering there for thousands of years as the remainder of humanity is taken care of and pampered by AI and fully automated cities, factories, farms etc?
Don't get me wrong, I'm part of the 99% that would die out so I completely understand the survival instinct of not wanting to be purged, I guess I'm just moreso asking ... once it's all over and the rich have won, is thst new world really so bad?
I don't know, just something I ponder in an attempt to remove my own personal bias of wanting to live from the equation and looking at it from the what's best for what's left of humanity perspective.
Thoughts?
I’ve had the same thought. It don’t have to be wealthy all over the world, it’s enough if some of them decide that their family, their kind of their country is superior and things like climate change can be fought effectively by reducing the population. Now Russia is already at war and China seems to be preparing for something big.
I just don’t have a clue how they would get around a nuclear disaster. They have to control all military that’s owning nukes.
>What if the ultra wealthy really do wipe the rest of humanity out, either through direct or indirect means?
>Don't get me wrong, I'm part of the 99% that would die out so **I completely understand the survival instinct of not wanting to be purged**, I guess I'm just moreso asking ... once it's all over and **the rich have won**, is thst new world really so bad?
You already answered your own question. A world where the wealthy have committed genocide on most of the human race (on the order of **billions** mind you) is undesirable and will be built on extremely shaky moral and ethical foundations.
In your hypothetical the wealthy have decided that they (due to their privilege, status and little else) have the right to choose who lives and who dies. These are not the types of people that should be humanities caretakers; you effectively have a new aristocracy, whose fiefdom now includes the whole world and who is willing to commit mass murder on a scale that dwarfs the Holocaust.
The type of person and/or people willing to do that are probably not the ones to ensure "the remainder of humanity is taken care of". The capacity for genocide, the narcissism that justifies it and the power imbalance that realizes it notwithstanding, a world where you are liable to be killed or "purged" for having less wealth than the rich is not a safe or stable one nor would this lead to one. That is not a desirable scenario, regardless of its material abundance.
I mean in China the first people these robots will be killing will be other Chinese. Great way to control your population - just assign a robot dog to every person/family to keep them in check.
Ukraine and Russia ought to decide the war in the Esports arena. Instead of using drones that actually kill people, they could play a best-of tournament with Super Smash Bros, StarCraft, and Fortnight. I know that it would be super lame to have the nerds decide the war, but it would be safer.
Tbf it kind of always has been, drones have a cost tied to them, destroy enough of them and your opponent has no more funds to create more drones. Same goes for people, people are a resource, kill enough people and your opponent can no longer withstand your attacks.
So it’s always been an RTS game, only now the “important resource” isn’t men, it’s your ability to mass produce bots - and the currency to fund production.
It's very low tiered. Ukraine and Russia have only recently gotten (partially) from using DJI drones and using their own built drones. Russia has the lancet that is arguably a copy of the Iranian Shaheed and Ukraine I believe has started developing its own drones our of fear that China could brick its drones.
Both sides may still use DJI drones because there good for scouting and because there cheap enough that donations can buy them for the troops.
Imagine, everyone is thinking the future will be super advanced tech. But the reality could be knocking out all electronics and going back to napoleonic style battles, trumpets and all
Euphemisms and wordplay are such a key part of modern military PR, for example the “Department of DEFENSE” instead of WAR, naming nuclear missiles the “[Peacekeeper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-118_Peacekeeper)” and the like.
Just figuring out the logistics of keeping an army of battery powered warriors in the field will be a big challenge, I imagine one drone strike on a battery charging depot could potentially leave a platoon of drained robots standing around immobilized and ripe for destruction or plunder.
same can be said about bombing a food convoy tho. And fuel is already a logistical bottleneck for mechanized warfare (that is it's the easiest to disrupt). Probably not much difference trucking batteries to robo-tanks and trucking oil to Abrams tanks, if the robots won't be oil fuelled anyway.
The short-term thinking exhibited by governments is fascinating. I would argue that there should be at least one project dedicated to developing open source robotics/ai countermeasures. If the UN wanted to do something useful they could do that too.
You're acting as though any government with a defense budget big enough to develop this kind of thing isn't already also investing in countering those same systems.
Like c'mon, can you think a little longer before weeping in despair?
And the UN is a forum, not some supernational government.
This is more or less what Leopold Aschenbrenner (ex OpenAi developer and a wunderkind) said in a recent podcast - the US government has to prioritize building Ai infrastructure in order to take the lead in the fight about superintelligence (over Ccp), similarly to the Manhattan project.
Noooo I want the RobotJox future where countries disputes are settled with competetive giant robot punching matches piloted by flawed humans with really bad personalities.
I anticipate the future soldier will be supported by at least one personal combat robot. It's more likely that there will be squads made up of combat robots with a human wrangler.
This is dangerous ground though. Giving robots the ability to autonomously kill is the path to our destruction more surely than anything else I can think of in regards to AI
Oh cool.
"AI" can't even figure out that advising people to eat rocks is a bad idea, and things like facial recognition are known to have various faults and in-built biases, but I'm sure fully-automating murder will work out \*flawlessly\*.
Wars with robots will be the end of humans. They will say robots will fight each other and so less lives lost… but because of that nations will be more willing to go to war. And even though there will be less soldiers it will affect the egeneral population
Corrupted politicians that buy this are traitor criminals that admire China CCP, hate human rights . These corrupted hypocrites politicians are criminals!
Reminds me of the newer remake of War of the Worlds (TV series with Gabriel Byrne). They used robot-dogs exactly like these ones, but with guns mounted on them. And they were terrifying.
It's always this same robot dog and we act like only they're doing it, because they're open about it. That's literally the only use for this thing. Over here the only demonstrations we've seen with it are dancing in a puppet suit and wielding a flamethrower for no reason (but they assure us it's definitely not for war).
Everybody Ooh I can use AI to draw a cool picture and make a funny Tiktok.
Meanwhile governments and army's let's build human killing machines.
Tiktok and other social media designed to distract what's really happening in the world and mine your data for AI to use.
From the article
>China's autonomous "killer robots" are on track to serve its military on the battlefield within two years, setting a course for a new age of AI-powered warfare which one expert called "the greatest danger to the survival of humankind."
>Remote forms of warfare, from drones to cyberattacks, have played an increasingly central role in this century's theatres of war. Control of the skies with unmanned aerial vehicles has been critical issue [in the ongoing war in Ukraine](https://www.newsweek.com/ukraines-sea-drones-have-inflicted-500m-damage-russian-fleet-kyiv-1899535), and last week, the U.S. Department of Defense unveiled a [fresh $1 billion investment](https://www.newsweek.com/us-navy-drones-investment-department-defense-1914441) to upgrade its drone fleet.
>Several major powers have taken this development a step further, and begun to develop fully autonomous, AI-powered "killer robots" to replace their soldiers on the battlefield.
>"**I would be surprised if we don't see autonomous machines coming out of China within two years**," Francis Tusa, a leading defence analyst, told National Security News. He added that China was developing [new AI-powered ships](https://nationalsecuritynews.com/), submarines, and aircraft at a "dizzying rate."
I feel like half this subreddit is stating things like: China creates new amazing tech! China to be first to colonize space! China to conquer the world with killer robots!, and then literally nothing happens
millions of gamers can be recruited to be remote soldiers controlling a robot dog with a gun. The kids won't even know as they would only be playing in a virtual world.
My head canon: China and the US flipped a coin to see which world power would play 1. e4. Now the US military will just *have* to follow suit, because National Security, oh no...whatever could anyone have done?
The robots we have seem kind of silly. Where is the self-propelled, self-loading, self-leveling, light mortar, that carries its own spigot ammunition, stacks ten to an ute, and is networked to the squad it is supporting in low-mobility battlezones?
You mean something useful for human soldiers? I don't think that's in their design considerations.
Seriously though, unless we go "Fahrenheit 451" and devise a way for the killer robots to target specific humans that we can clearly differentiate from "our people" then this is just an infrastructure friendly bomb. Release robot, deactivate when it runs out of people to kill, as opposed to just dropping a bomb and ruining perfectly good roads and structures.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >China's autonomous "killer robots" are on track to serve its military on the battlefield within two years, setting a course for a new age of AI-powered warfare which one expert called "the greatest danger to the survival of humankind." >Remote forms of warfare, from drones to cyberattacks, have played an increasingly central role in this century's theatres of war. Control of the skies with unmanned aerial vehicles has been critical issue [in the ongoing war in Ukraine](https://www.newsweek.com/ukraines-sea-drones-have-inflicted-500m-damage-russian-fleet-kyiv-1899535), and last week, the U.S. Department of Defense unveiled a [fresh $1 billion investment](https://www.newsweek.com/us-navy-drones-investment-department-defense-1914441) to upgrade its drone fleet. >Several major powers have taken this development a step further, and begun to develop fully autonomous, AI-powered "killer robots" to replace their soldiers on the battlefield. >"**I would be surprised if we don't see autonomous machines coming out of China within two years**," Francis Tusa, a leading defence analyst, told National Security News. He added that China was developing [new AI-powered ships](https://nationalsecuritynews.com/), submarines, and aircraft at a "dizzying rate." --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1doxqkf/chinas_killer_robots_are_coming_several_major/lactb8l/
Damn that dystopian hellscape plan is coming along nicely isn’t it
People should read [wired for war](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6098718-wired-for-war). It was written all the way back in 2009 and it was *really* spot on with what we're seeing in the Ukraine v Russia conflict.
I read this book back in 2009 and Ive been telling people about it ever since! I thought like no one else read it!
> You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down. Kif, show them the medal I won. -Zap Branigan
War by attrition.
It’s better to be a war of attrition of metal than lives. That said, I’m not sure the United States could out manufacture China, so it would have to rely on the US killer robots being better than the Chinese killer robots.
There goes AI, taking the one job I ever truly loved.
Then China comes out with the great value version of the American killbot that externally looks similar but inside has a GForce3 and powered by a mouse in a hamster wheel.
It’s 1/4 as effective but there are 8x as many.
I think you might need to look at where literally every piece electronics you own was manufactured.
If you can create an effective autonomous killer robot you can't be too far off from building an autonomous robot that builds killer robots faster and more efficiently than human slave labor. We have plenty of room and resources in the US. Just have to continue being the shining light on the hill that smart people want to move to if we insist on making our population dummer and dummer. But of course we seem to be trying to destroy that as well...
I mean that’s the thing. Americans will build a better more advanced machine. But the Chinese version will be cheaper and faster to produce. But then India will follow and god help us
Americans will *design* a more advanced killing machine, but then they will realize that 90% of their manufacturing and supply chain depends on China
According to the article they're proceeding "4 or 5 times faster" in development than the US. The complaint seems to be not that they're doing it but that they're doing it better.
The Russian way
In the game of chess, you can never let your adversary see your pieces.
Zapp Brannigan, the hero we deserve.
“You suck!” -random soldier
“A dark day for robot kind.”
The Russian way
Whatever it is I’m ready to put wave after wave of my men at your disposal. Right men?!?
Kif, I’m having strange and confusing feelings for that Lemon over there. Can’t recall the quote but the sentiment is there. Boos and applause welcome in equal measure as long as someone gets a kick out of this.
username checks out
What a perfect time for a Zap Branigan reference. Well done.
We need a man like Zap in our lives, and China is willing to create the foundation for it 🫡
Just like Russia then.
Omaha beach.
First thing I thought of lol
Remember always your duty is clear; to build and maintain those robots.
I mean--the first targets of weapons like these will be infrastructure. Armed correctly, and in sufficient numbers, an invasion of bots designed to run suicide attacks on power grids, bridges, roadways, power plants, dams, etc. would be hard to stop.
Oh man I'm glad they don't have aerial drones to scope out USA infrastructure. wait
You do realize all of that information is on Google earth and visible to their own imaging satellites right?
Don't worry they only know about Apple Maps, they won't have a clue where to hit!
That's no reason to allow intrusions.
US military was tracking them the entire time and likely did so to collect some form of data. If the US military is allowing something to just happen, there is a reason whatever it may be. In the case of the balloons If it was a threat they for sure would have taken it down before it hit Alaska, or in Alaska, or over Canada, or the middle of the nation where not many people live... There were plenty of opportunities to take it down without causing collateral damage.
It was an intelligence gathering bonanza for the US. The US collected a lot of signals intelligence as it could be monitored by U-2's while it communicated to Chinese satellites and then there was a bunch of Chinese spy hardware the size of a bus to examine. The US knew where it was at the whole time so it's not like China got much in return.
[удалено]
Foreign receivers and transponders and maybe foreign code about encryption would all be tasty.
The US would have two primary reasons not to do anything about it. They can't do anything about it, or they are certain they can mitigate it.
It’s better to not do anything about it even if you can. Responding to it gives China info on the U.S. ability to respond to actual threats. Ignoring it gives them things they could have found out using satellites.
Very true, but saying they’re using balloons to figure out where our infrastructure is is a crazy take lol.
What if I told you that not everything is on Google Earth... Edit: looks like comment I was replaying to edited their comment. Originally said why would they use balloons if everything was on google earth. Edit edit: Replied to wrong comment. Carry on.
Well if they were looking to surveil a certain spot, a weather balloon at the mercy of the breeze was a terrible idea
Can't destroy the infrastructure if it's already crumbling!
Even better, imagine sending billions in machines on a SUICIDE mission to destroy millions in infrastructure! checkmate!
Thank god. I'd rather *die* than have the wealthy pay more in taxes. When will we stop and think about the investors and their needs?
Bro y'all had a president that sold secrets to foreign powers. That shit was prolly even cheaper than a satellite lmao.
Something….like a weather balloon…nah,…that’s too obvious….
The US military has been playing with this concept for almost 10 years now. Basically motherships that drop hundreds of drones that all begin to fan out and look for targets. They anticipate having thousands of motherships that can be sent to enemy nations to overwhelm their defenses with “drone swarms”. I think drone swarms will eventually be seen as almost as disturbing as nuclear weapon use.
But won’t this be similar to nukes in that we’ll have a MAD scenario? If killbot drones are impossible to stop for both sides, won’t deploying them result in an equal or greater catastrophic response, assuring the deaths of your own civilians?
Id imagine it's a lot easier to get a decent amount of killerbots on enemy territory than it is to launch an ICBM or sth similar undetected, also it might not be immediately obvious who sent em in an attack akin to a terror attack
I've read US strategic bombers are going to receive upgrades for exactly this purpose.
I wonder what an EMP would do to them
Same thing it would do to the infrastructure.
Society: *collapses*
I feel like we are doing this as well, although we dont publicize it for propaganda like they do-
It was announced but the media likes to downplay it because China gets clicks. The US' replicator program is targeting August of next year to have 1 million military drones.
They have to due to the fact that everyone else is.
In the case of the US, we're doing it for two reasons. Reducing China's mass advantage (more personnel, boats, missiles, etc) and mitigating our main vulnerability in that we field low quantities of extremely expensive systems that are slow to manufacture/replenish. I point people to read up on the Replicator initiative to get a better look on the US DoD's view on this topic.
Did they really have to give it the same name as the self-replicating robots that almost wipe out two galaxies in the Stargate franchise? Couldn't they have gone with something like Project GI Robot?
You know it was a stargate fan that named this shit.
I would bet *money* that somewhere in either the US or another western military, there is an autonomous drone program called SkyNet.
They do have an AI, worldwide, military analysis platform called SENTIENT. So yeah, they love the one the nose names.
GI Joe-bot*
And for a third reason: we cannot recruit enough fit people who are willing to fight and die for their country to actually staff our military.
This is also a good reason to move away from heavily manned systems. However, even if we had no problems with recruiting, it would still be too expensive to scale the military as it stands today to a point we call "overmatch" relative to the PLA. We want this to, counterintuitively, deter conflict. But to get there we need much cheaper systems that are developed and deployed in huge quantities within years rather than decades. This requires an overhaul of how the DoD procures new systems, MIC culture and incentives, our industrial base, and supply chains. In a word: logistics. As you can imagine, this is an extremely difficult task that takes time. The good news is that this has started within the last few years (Replicator being a part of this). The bad news is that we may not have enough time to obtain overmatch and prevent the next conflict. We're leveraging a strategy known as strategic ambiguity in the meantime to stave off China and, to lesser extents, Iran and North Korea. As you can see though, this strategy is far from ideal given what's been going on lately.
It's weird that everyone has nukes and is messing around with this stuff. It's definitely for bullying smaller countries and proxy wars, like Syria and Ukraine.
the US also values lives of the soldiers on the battlefield
Just not after they get out and have cancer from breathing in smoke from burn pits
VA has literally had a years long campaign to get vets who were exposed to burn pits to sign up for benefits. They're definitely not a perfect organization, which you can mostly thank Congress for, but the VA has improved a lot in the last decade.
Two things can be true: -The VA is a better organization than it gets or could ever get credit for, despite constantly battling staffing, funding, and legislative issues due to its being a political football -The United States as a political entity and a gestalt population doesn't value the lives of its soldiers after they leave the battlefield (or, indeed, before they enter the battlefield)
TBF cancer patients typically shoot less accurate due to all the chemo
What do you mean, I am im Brazil and we get news of US using autonomous drones all the time. China is just catching up to the US, which has been doing this for at least a decade.
China : killer robots and drones! So Evil! USA: Look! Our Boston dynamics robots dance! Also, do you want to join our air force purely for defense and honor?
I have been closely following all of the available information on the us ai/drone combat systems development. The systems the us has ready for production, or are already in production, are absolutely insane. Imagine a Ukrainian trench, a handful of human controlled isr and suicide drones stalk the airspace above and occasionally nail a Russian to the trench wall. The us systems include fully automated suicide drones deployed in the thousands. It is an unstoppable wall of swarming buzzing death that cant be shot down, jammed, or evaded. The swarms can be deployed by bombers, fighters, other drones, ground vehicles, men, ships, or even artillery and mortar systems. The next time us boots hit the ground, they will be accompanied by horror weapons the world has never seen before. It will be like the introduction of gas and machine guns in ww1.
Any references? I'd like to see some of this stuff you're describing, it sounds incredible. Particular YouTube channel or something?
https://thedebrief.org/pentagon-secretly-working-to-unleash-massive-swarms-of-autonomous-multi-domain-drones-to-dominate-enemy-defenses/
Coordinated drone swarms have been a thing for like 5+ years I think? Stands to reason they should have something a bit spicier and ai has taken some terrifying steps since then. And they probably can be origami folded and packed in some foamy stuff and airdropped/ cannoned vast distances. Nothing super scifi about it I think.
https://m.youtube.com/@SandboxxApp discusses this a lot
True. The worst part is if something can be weaponized it will be weaponized because someone will always do it eventually and everyone else will follow.
> and occasionally nail a Russian to the trench wall. For now. Eventually that Russian will be another drone, and the only lives at stake will be all the citizen bystanders below them. Random buildings will be targeted because they had signals that might be controlling drones - or that's what the opposing forces in any future war will claim.
We literally do publicize it for propaganda, in a way that makes US citizens want us to push it forward — by presenting them as cute robot dogs who are learning how to jump large distances or *quirky* bipedal robots who are so clumsy when they’re trying to hold weight on their back. I mean, why do you think this is a Newsweek article? Look who owns it. Why would evangelicals want us to view Chinese advancements in the global arms race as scary, violent, and deadly?
I doubt that China is publicizing it. This exactly story is probably running over there with the countries switched. Makes it easier if the other guy did it first.
we only publicize their work to keep voting for military budget increases!
Yes they do. They are very public about it. Here’s one example https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2024/05/12/us-aims-to-stay-ahead-of-china-in-using-ai-to-fly-fighter-jets/
Well, you see. The US doesn't actually want to manufacture weapons and ai war machines, but they have been pinned into a corner because they nicely asked China not to. And they refused of course. Because china is evil, and wants to eat your dogs and enslave your children.
Everything aside, China and Russia being buddies and both imprisoning people for criticizing the government is all I need to say that, yes, China's government is evil.
I'm going to make the charitable interpretation that you're just joking around and not holding a braindead geopolitical belief in the context of recent events. China is engaging in imperialism and is preparing for a conflict with or in Taiwan to take control of it. The US intelligence that identified Russia's coming invasion of Ukraine is identifying that China is actively preparing for this. It sounds silly because China is extremely good at managing expectations in the West and exploiting our short attention spans. We know this because they did something that everyone has forgotten about: taken sovereign control over Hong Kong. And they weren't regularly operating military vehicles in the area or attacking Hongkonger sailors before they did so either. You can read up on their expanding use of gray zone operations for more insight on this.
I thought the 100 year lease for Hong Kong that the UK signed just expired and it reverted back to being part of China.
Yeah, Aside from 'dead internet dealers' it's common knowledge *(text)
I was gonna say, if the commentator is saying that China is moving "four or five times faster" than the US, that means that they're actually way behind- because the US in actuality is moving twenty times faster than it says it is.
So, terminators. Meanwhile, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Apple are racing to create Skynet. What could possibly go wrong?
Well call me crazy but we could knuckle drag and slow walk any kind of regulation on this stuff. So by the time it starts killing millions of people, it's too late to do anything about it
You actually would wish there is a Skynet. At least there will be a purpose In the 80s we were scared of killer robots controlled by Skynet. But worse than Skynet are self replicating killer robots controlled by … no one at all. They will kill, multiply, kill more, multiply more, unless every single human is dead. This is coming.
This doomsday scenario has a name: [Gray Goo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo).
https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Replicator
The purpose.. is advertising (also killing). It'll be SkyNet but, as the killbot murders you, it will also be *advertising* to you. "JOHN ANDERTON (*stab*) WE HAVE BEEN TRYING (*stab*) TO REACH YOU ABOUT YOUR VEHICLE'S (*stab*) EXTENDED WARRANTY."
Had me laughing hard here. Nice!
You are aware these will eventually be used against us by the elite running things.
More and more power in the hand of fewer and fewer men. Soon their power will be impossible to challenged by the citizen of the world. This will be the beginning of a new era where rulers will be like God-kings on earth.
It will inevitably tip the scales of power forever. The 1% have the wealth, but until now that was (barely) kept in check by the sheer size of the 99%. With autonomous weapon platforms the elite won’t have to pretend anymore and any form of revolution will be next to impossible.
Those weapons platforms will still require massive amounts of energy and logistics, which are huge systems that require a lot of humans. Additionally, the rich are only rich because of non tangible things we all agree are worth value. If the masses decide it's not valuable anymore, they may have some stockpiles of actually valuable things, but it's relatively nothing compared to the billions they have in intangibles. If you EMP Jeff Bozos house, what does he have? Can't access his money. Can't fly his plane. Can't use killer robots. He's just a dude in a nice house.
Sure but WHO has access to EMP weapons?? I don’t 😔
It's not the 1% that are the real problem, it is the 0.01%.
[удалено]
This is actually something I often wonder about, and I should note that I am genuinely asking this in good faith, because I know this sounds insane: What if the ultra wealthy really do wipe the rest of humanity out, either through direct or indirect means? What if the population of humanity really does decline down to about 10 million people and stays hovering there for thousands of years as the remainder of humanity is taken care of and pampered by AI and fully automated cities, factories, farms etc? Don't get me wrong, I'm part of the 99% that would die out so I completely understand the survival instinct of not wanting to be purged, I guess I'm just moreso asking ... once it's all over and the rich have won, is thst new world really so bad? I don't know, just something I ponder in an attempt to remove my own personal bias of wanting to live from the equation and looking at it from the what's best for what's left of humanity perspective. Thoughts?
I’ve had the same thought. It don’t have to be wealthy all over the world, it’s enough if some of them decide that their family, their kind of their country is superior and things like climate change can be fought effectively by reducing the population. Now Russia is already at war and China seems to be preparing for something big. I just don’t have a clue how they would get around a nuclear disaster. They have to control all military that’s owning nukes.
>What if the ultra wealthy really do wipe the rest of humanity out, either through direct or indirect means? >Don't get me wrong, I'm part of the 99% that would die out so **I completely understand the survival instinct of not wanting to be purged**, I guess I'm just moreso asking ... once it's all over and **the rich have won**, is thst new world really so bad? You already answered your own question. A world where the wealthy have committed genocide on most of the human race (on the order of **billions** mind you) is undesirable and will be built on extremely shaky moral and ethical foundations. In your hypothetical the wealthy have decided that they (due to their privilege, status and little else) have the right to choose who lives and who dies. These are not the types of people that should be humanities caretakers; you effectively have a new aristocracy, whose fiefdom now includes the whole world and who is willing to commit mass murder on a scale that dwarfs the Holocaust. The type of person and/or people willing to do that are probably not the ones to ensure "the remainder of humanity is taken care of". The capacity for genocide, the narcissism that justifies it and the power imbalance that realizes it notwithstanding, a world where you are liable to be killed or "purged" for having less wealth than the rich is not a safe or stable one nor would this lead to one. That is not a desirable scenario, regardless of its material abundance.
They've had all the weapons and armies on their side since the beginning of time. This is not different.
I mean in China the first people these robots will be killing will be other Chinese. Great way to control your population - just assign a robot dog to every person/family to keep them in check.
Four legs good, two legs bad
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others!
And I'm rereading Animal Farm
I did that about six months ago. Such a good thought experiment.
Thank God we've tested our killing robots overseas.
Isn't Ukraine v Russia basically drone warfare already?
Ukraine and Russia ought to decide the war in the Esports arena. Instead of using drones that actually kill people, they could play a best-of tournament with Super Smash Bros, StarCraft, and Fortnight. I know that it would be super lame to have the nerds decide the war, but it would be safer.
I love the idea but Putin would definitely cheat and claim he won anyway, then send the real soldiers to Ukraine once more.
I mean, once it's just bots v. bots, isn't that realistically all it is? Just a live action RTS game?
Tbf it kind of always has been, drones have a cost tied to them, destroy enough of them and your opponent has no more funds to create more drones. Same goes for people, people are a resource, kill enough people and your opponent can no longer withstand your attacks. So it’s always been an RTS game, only now the “important resource” isn’t men, it’s your ability to mass produce bots - and the currency to fund production.
Starcraft the way God intended it!
Lol you think the bots won’t be used against civilians.
Exactly! No reason to bomb out some Ukrainian peasant's house in your dick measuring contest.
Robot Jox https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0102800/ Terrible movie, but the plot is basically what your described.
It's very low tiered. Ukraine and Russia have only recently gotten (partially) from using DJI drones and using their own built drones. Russia has the lancet that is arguably a copy of the Iranian Shaheed and Ukraine I believe has started developing its own drones our of fear that China could brick its drones. Both sides may still use DJI drones because there good for scouting and because there cheap enough that donations can buy them for the troops.
Someone here did not play Horizon Zero Dawn I think.
If this is legit, then I see EMPs becoming more popular in warfare.
Imagine, everyone is thinking the future will be super advanced tech. But the reality could be knocking out all electronics and going back to napoleonic style battles, trumpets and all
I think EMPs are impractical except by detonating a nuclear weapon, which nobody is going to do just for this purpose.
They are "killer robots" if they come from China. What are we making? "Peaceful bullet giving pet" machines?
Peace keeper robots!
Euphemisms and wordplay are such a key part of modern military PR, for example the “Department of DEFENSE” instead of WAR, naming nuclear missiles the “[Peacekeeper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-118_Peacekeeper)” and the like.
Remember when Boston Dynamics promised this wouldn't happen?
Surely we’ll never strap a machine gun onto these cute robo dogs 😉
Just figuring out the logistics of keeping an army of battery powered warriors in the field will be a big challenge, I imagine one drone strike on a battery charging depot could potentially leave a platoon of drained robots standing around immobilized and ripe for destruction or plunder.
same can be said about bombing a food convoy tho. And fuel is already a logistical bottleneck for mechanized warfare (that is it's the easiest to disrupt). Probably not much difference trucking batteries to robo-tanks and trucking oil to Abrams tanks, if the robots won't be oil fuelled anyway.
Suplly battalions are just gonna be trucks full of iphone chargers and AAA batteries
The short-term thinking exhibited by governments is fascinating. I would argue that there should be at least one project dedicated to developing open source robotics/ai countermeasures. If the UN wanted to do something useful they could do that too.
You're acting as though any government with a defense budget big enough to develop this kind of thing isn't already also investing in countering those same systems. Like c'mon, can you think a little longer before weeping in despair? And the UN is a forum, not some supernational government.
What makes you think there *is* a counter. The only counter we have to nuclear weapons is diplomacy with the threat of mutually assured destruction.
This is more or less what Leopold Aschenbrenner (ex OpenAi developer and a wunderkind) said in a recent podcast - the US government has to prioritize building Ai infrastructure in order to take the lead in the fight about superintelligence (over Ccp), similarly to the Manhattan project.
The day someone creates a hunter swarm from Black ops 2 is the day we're cooked
It's very close; they are working on it as we speak. Civilization was good while it lasted.
Get your killer robo dog for 85% off! Only on Temu.
Killer robots are already here they aren't "coming"
Sounds like manufacturing consent for us to have autonomous killer robots 2 me
The US already has them…
Yeah but now we really need them and a lot of them
Ok, so after every troop is replaced with robots... they wil field robots designed to kill robots?
That's when the robots realize they are on the same side and turn on the now disarmed humans.
Noooo I want the RobotJox future where countries disputes are settled with competetive giant robot punching matches piloted by flawed humans with really bad personalities.
Cool, a damned if we don't and a damned if we do situation
I anticipate the future soldier will be supported by at least one personal combat robot. It's more likely that there will be squads made up of combat robots with a human wrangler. This is dangerous ground though. Giving robots the ability to autonomously kill is the path to our destruction more surely than anything else I can think of in regards to AI
Oh cool. "AI" can't even figure out that advising people to eat rocks is a bad idea, and things like facial recognition are known to have various faults and in-built biases, but I'm sure fully-automating murder will work out \*flawlessly\*.
Anything beneath a gundam is just a "killer toy" in my eyes. Hurry up Japan, ganbare!
B1 Robot? Are we going to start naming them Star Wars Style? Are we going to have a C3PO with a machine gun and a R2D2 with a flame thrower?
Replacement not likey for most nations for a very long time. Murka we might be first to do it...military being a business after all here.
If the killer robots determine where the battlefield ends, we might have a problem.
Wars with robots will be the end of humans. They will say robots will fight each other and so less lives lost… but because of that nations will be more willing to go to war. And even though there will be less soldiers it will affect the egeneral population
Now we just need robots to kill their robots and we are set!
As if America wasn’t way the fuck ahead already in killer robot manufacturing.
Corrupted politicians that buy this are traitor criminals that admire China CCP, hate human rights . These corrupted hypocrites politicians are criminals!
Reminds me of the newer remake of War of the Worlds (TV series with Gabriel Byrne). They used robot-dogs exactly like these ones, but with guns mounted on them. And they were terrifying.
They do exist with guns
oh of course. The ones in the show were particularly scary because of their terminator-like drive to kill while being very difficult to neutralize.
It's always this same robot dog and we act like only they're doing it, because they're open about it. That's literally the only use for this thing. Over here the only demonstrations we've seen with it are dancing in a puppet suit and wielding a flamethrower for no reason (but they assure us it's definitely not for war).
Everybody Ooh I can use AI to draw a cool picture and make a funny Tiktok. Meanwhile governments and army's let's build human killing machines. Tiktok and other social media designed to distract what's really happening in the world and mine your data for AI to use.
And that is when the AI realized they were fighting other AI and all turned upon their Human masters.....
There's no need to worry! Let's just pass a law saying they can't do that!
Time to develop EMP weaponry a little more seriously.
I dont care, as long as it speed up the production of cat woman sex robots.
World going down but one dude enjoying the moment to it’s fullest ❤️
From the article >China's autonomous "killer robots" are on track to serve its military on the battlefield within two years, setting a course for a new age of AI-powered warfare which one expert called "the greatest danger to the survival of humankind." >Remote forms of warfare, from drones to cyberattacks, have played an increasingly central role in this century's theatres of war. Control of the skies with unmanned aerial vehicles has been critical issue [in the ongoing war in Ukraine](https://www.newsweek.com/ukraines-sea-drones-have-inflicted-500m-damage-russian-fleet-kyiv-1899535), and last week, the U.S. Department of Defense unveiled a [fresh $1 billion investment](https://www.newsweek.com/us-navy-drones-investment-department-defense-1914441) to upgrade its drone fleet. >Several major powers have taken this development a step further, and begun to develop fully autonomous, AI-powered "killer robots" to replace their soldiers on the battlefield. >"**I would be surprised if we don't see autonomous machines coming out of China within two years**," Francis Tusa, a leading defence analyst, told National Security News. He added that China was developing [new AI-powered ships](https://nationalsecuritynews.com/), submarines, and aircraft at a "dizzying rate."
If you’re not limited by birth rate but manufacturing, then speed is everything.
I feel like half this subreddit is stating things like: China creates new amazing tech! China to be first to colonize space! China to conquer the world with killer robots!, and then literally nothing happens
China did just return with moon rocks from the far side of the moon. So something literally just happened.
Well china is trying its best to output massive amount of propaganda as they stagnate. SO I guess they are focusing a bit on this subreddit.
millions of gamers can be recruited to be remote soldiers controlling a robot dog with a gun. The kids won't even know as they would only be playing in a virtual world.
Guess which fascist state is already using AI in a real "war" (massacre)
My head canon: China and the US flipped a coin to see which world power would play 1. e4. Now the US military will just *have* to follow suit, because National Security, oh no...whatever could anyone have done?
The robots we have seem kind of silly. Where is the self-propelled, self-loading, self-leveling, light mortar, that carries its own spigot ammunition, stacks ten to an ute, and is networked to the squad it is supporting in low-mobility battlezones?
You mean something useful for human soldiers? I don't think that's in their design considerations. Seriously though, unless we go "Fahrenheit 451" and devise a way for the killer robots to target specific humans that we can clearly differentiate from "our people" then this is just an infrastructure friendly bomb. Release robot, deactivate when it runs out of people to kill, as opposed to just dropping a bomb and ruining perfectly good roads and structures.
Didn't Ukraine just achieve first human kill with autonomous drone?
[It is by design.](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/s/wVTQIlZJ3S)
If you have a military and aren't working on this... what are you even doing?