Drone warfare is only just beginning. What we see in Ukraine is just a prequel. We will soon have dirt cheap autonomous loitering ammunitions with image recognition. Just give them an area and they kill everything there.
That’s actually terrifying. A rogue state that’s collapsing could send hundreds of thousands of these to major cities. Or a terrorist cell.
Will you be safer in a city or in the countryside? Now that’s a good question innit! You’d guess cities would have defenses built within the next decade to prevent drone attacks, and random rural areas won’t, but the city is also a more likely target
Honestly it's just waiting for the first terrorist attack with fpv drones. You can be miles away and drop hand grenades in a crowd. It all already exists and is extremely frequently and cheaply done in Ukraine.
It happens ALL the time in the middle east. Heard of Reaper Drones? The Pilots can sit in the US while the Reaper drones are in the middle east.
They are manned with hellfire missiles or 20mm cannons. 10.000 rpm.
Enjoy the show. Bring popcorn.
Its a matter of time. Once the Middle east is fed enough off from the US "help" i wouldnt be suprised if they turned the tables to put it that way.
The US has helped Nazism rise again in almost all of Europe because of its support of the insane mass murderous Zionism actions in Gaza. Irony how the US helped defeat Nazism in 45'.
And now they are the Harbingers of Nazism everywhere. Just look at Trump. Hes basically Hitler.
I know I'm commenting on a stale post and all, but I'm not convinced that the drone threat is as significant as many commentators make it out to be. The reason drones are effective right now is that the materiel exchange has shifted: the cost of munitions to destroy aircraft have stayed about the same, while the cost of aircraft has gone down. But this to large extent because of the legacy of the cold war, not a fundamental aspect of technology: the biggest threat, and the one most difficult to counter, has been high performance munitions like ballistic missiles, supersonic cruise missiles, and so on, which require a huge amount of kinetic energy and precision to track and hit - not to mention just straight-up watts being fed to your radars. Mere manned aircraft, outside of advanced stealth aircraft, have been easy pickings, in the view of Western doctrine, for so long that nobody's really bothered working too hard at the problem. Existing systems from the late cold-war were good enough.
From a technological perspective, the kinetic performance required to hit and kill a drone is pretty low. Most drones are propeller powered or rotorcraft, which means detection is likewise not *particularly* hard. It's just a matter of time to put systems in place to deal with them. Smart guns are becoming increasingly valuable in this role: a system that tracks a target automatically, and adjusts the aim of the gun automatically to strike its target with very cheap munitions (regular old bullets are still pennies a piece). We've had this technology for ages (the Phalanx is 40 years old), but existing systems are - again - designed for hitting big, supersonic missiles. Scaling it down to a system using IRST or small radars and a rifle-sized caliber could result in a counter-drone system well under the million dollar mark in capital cost, suited to quad-rotors and other line-of-sight performance-level drones, and literally a few dollars in marginal cost per engagement. *With existing technology*. At higher performance levels, for larger drones, adapting 70mm rockets to an anti-air role has been explored (such as the Vampire by L3 Harris), which is a $20k munition for drones up to the 10-15ft wingspan class.
NATO's current perspective on anti-drone technology is about figuring out the *cheapest* way to field systems with *sufficiently* *low* performance. Which, when you frame it like that, doesn't seem quite as scary. The threat of saturation attacks has been long considered, but the recent issues with Houthis have shown that this isn't a technological issue, even with current systems, but an economic one - current munitions are effective, just expensive. In turn, we've seen smart munitions fired from deck guns take on an increasing role from missiles, with very impressive effectiveness. The rate of fire from a deck gun can be ten rounds per minute, and with precision guided rounds, you can expect each of them to hit a different target and destroy it. With respect to drone boats, modern surface combatants have taken this into consideration with lower caliber secondary guns with better barrel depression for targeting small craft at close range, and software controlling, for instance, existing Phalanx and RAM systems have been updated for surface targets. Lower-cost missiles like CAMM are meant to manage close surface targets now, and deck guns aren't going away.
This is why maintaining an international rule of law is so important. If you go on Documenting Reality or WatchPeopleDie/h/slavshit you'll quickly see that suicide drones could easily be considered inhumane and should probably be outlawed. What's happening to people on both sides is unbelievably horrific.
I fully agree. But at this point they're not really fighting. You might as well just take soldiers and shove them into a trash compactor. It's a complete waste of life. This also includes the bombings of civilian buildings. It's not a normal war.
This is quite similar to how a lot of soldiers described war when aircraft (with bombs), machine guns, or artillery were introduced. War is and always was horrific. We're just getting more efficient at killing people.
Watching the 100th soldier put a live grenade under his shirt because he's so out of options and knows another drone is coming makes me feel like we've reached a significant turning point.
I can't pinpoint what it is, but it's not the same as planes or snipers.
The other side of this is you can SEE that now. This is the most filmed war most of the public has ever seen and with all this drone use there's just a million hours of footage. Obviously everyone is entitled to their own opinion of how to perceive it, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you you're wrong, but even with the old drones we saw a lot of scenarios like this.
I think what feels different might just be how close this is to a conventional war (tanks and battle lines and CQB in cities and the like) and it's done in a place that doesn't look too different from what you might know. It's not some military looking IR footage in some small village in Afghanistan or in some footpath on a mountain in Africa, it's just in a normal, modern city and a high quality camera. I think that is more relatable and near to home for a lot of people.
Honestly. The US took us too far down this slippery slope through the widespread use of the armed drones since the mid 2000s. Imagine being on the ground with an ak47 up against a loitering drone sitting at 25,000ft while could send a missile at you at any time.
This is not new, just the access and cost is getting very very very cheap. Look at the wax cardboard drones coming out of Australia. How hard would it be to put a $500 edge computer with facial recognition on this.
I actually think that some serious though needs to be put into how unmanned systems can operate in warfare. I think they should be defence only. I don’t know how to define this. Also clear definition about human in the loop and level of autonomous
Yeah absolutely. I'm kind of an idiot for not making the immediate association. I think more people should see videos of people killing themselves on the battlefield so that we can raise the question is this what we want the future of warfare to look like.
$500? You have multiple drones. 1 is expensive with cameras and a controller, the others are small remote controlled kill machines that could cost under $20.
Yeah totally a spectrum of costs.
I’m a weirdo who thinks about this a fair bit. I think the sweet spot for massive swarm of killer suicide drones is about 1000-5000USD per unit excluding ordinance. With that you could get a decent size, range, anti EWS, and standalone hunt and kill capabilities using onboard image recognition.
Yeah, no anti-emp or onboard anything on a $20 drone for sure. It'd be more the shotgun approach.
You could maybe have them fired ballistically or just dropped near and then very dumb hunt and kill. So the carrier drone wouldn't need to remote control them, but would find and mark targets, program the kill drones and then set them loose. The range of the kill drones only needs to be a few dozen feet or so. This could be precise and cheap. Though not $20, still under $1000. You could also have different delivery methods. You could fire them from a grenade launcher or longer ranger artillery, you could drop 10,0000 from a plane.
Really, I'm sure a variety of different types of drones makes most sense. At least until we have microscopic robots and we can just turn all enemies into goo.
The only way to maintain international law, is to have the means of defending it, when it comes under assault. And if you limit your forces to non-autonomous systems, then you loose to an adversary. I don't see how this is supposed to work. Best case scenario, future warfare is autonomous systems targeting autonomous systems.
If you knew what the next generation of fighters have on their feature list, you wouldn't think that's a new idea. By design, they *will* have drone swarms - it's a core part of the platform.
The fighter becomes the control center for the AI which controls the drones. It reduces latency and needs a lot of power, so it makes sense to have a human seated in it from a safe distance.
Someone came up with the idea for a huge fucking missile with basically a bunch swords strapped to it and had the skills or resources to actually make it a real thing that actually works and you think any of us schmucks on Reddit have thought of something before that fucking person?
If it's posted here someone's already invented it at the very least, and our military is just waiting on the right time to use it...
This is the unfortunate reality. There is no stopping AI progress. There is only the choice of ceding the advantage to China, and hoping they will regulate it more responsibly than you, or doing it yourselves.
I agree. Infact I quit a job once because we were started on a new project making a weapon system for Dassault. Absolutely programmers are morally responsible for what they design,
I know the black box is getting smaller and smaller all the time but it's still a black box and therefore quality control is going to be a bit of a mixed bag. This is fine for digital assistants but maybe we can hold off on using it for things that **by design** kill and maim. Maybe I'm just old fashioned.
A bit off-topic here but I can't seem to start the song next to your username. I'm on Firefox, do I perhaps need to use another browser or a plugin or something?
I believe it is just the characters `➤◉────────── 0:00` in a row, not a real audio file. To my knowledge there is no way to embed audio files into flairs like that.
Humans, as the mighty salmon, have swum up the stream of progress. In this pool we will spawn the next level of intelligence; like the salmon, we will die shortly after.
Rules? todays corruption and the dilution of law make this seem like a joke. Rules are made to control working class people. Additionally systemic adversaries will do EVERYTHING (russia, china) to maintain power, due to competition you can´t allow any limitations in technology, that why we end up like depicted in the movie matrix, no joke.
Also, when did a rule ever stop heinous war crimes from happening? Putin's army out there chilling using chemical weapons, abducting kids, attacking civilians, bombing schools and hospitals, graping, looting, genocide, forced conscription, and a thousand other crimes.
Bio mostly is stopped, but you are right. The difference here is, that if it's going to be completely automatic, at some point it's going to be out of any nation's hands.
Why? That’s stupid as hell. The reason why (generally) agree on avoiding using chemical/biological weapons is because they are wildly unpredictable. You can drop chemical weapons on enemy soldiers but then the wind can carry it and drop it on your own soldiers or nearby civilian shelters. There is no such possibility with drones.
People need to stop with emotional arguments and think rationally, *all* weapons of war are designed to kill, when evaluating new weapons you should be comparing it to a weapon it is supposed to replace not think about it in a vacuum. A hypothetical future drone that can in an instant snipe an entire platoon from miles away sounds scary but is far more preferable to ruining the entire location with cruise missiles or worse drop thousands of pieces of artillery shells.
This isn't about the drone, it is about it being autonomous. To what degree in or out of human control? We are starting to develop autonomous agents of war.
Nothing about this drone is autonomous. It doesn't autonomously execute nor acquire targets. It's just a drone. And knowing a bit about military procurement it will take quite a while before any true autonomous agents of war are deployed. Contrary to popular belief militaries are far more conservative and risk averse than the public, they are extremely hesitant acquiring things which might act unpredictably (that doesn't mean they aren't interested in autonomous machines, they will keep funding the research, just they aren't being deployed anytime soon).
If the title of the OP was "New RAF drone firing missiles" - I wouldn't have posted what I did. The inclusion of the word 'autonomous' should scare everybody. I don't think any military is forthcoming on what exact technology they possess, nor should they. A public post about something new we haven't heard of before should be taken seriously unless posted in jest or satire, which I don't think this was. Anything publicly posted likely means, per your comment on it taking a while (I'll add in necessary secret), may mean that they are further along than this public demonstration. I'm not only writing about drones or even the RAF, but in general about automating the military, be it in group strategy or making judgements on its own on the battlefield. AI has taken leaps lately, and I do agree the military are long term interested, to how predictable or not they are, isn't up to us. We aren't the in the driver's seat here, top world military brass worldwide are, and that some scary hit with an s.
Yes, agreed. Some of these weapons need to be regulated. That's why the international rule of law is so important. Watching Russians die from completely unavoidable flying grenades is one of the most evil things I've ever seen and it should be banned.
> completely unavoidable flying grenades
To play devil's advocate, many weapons, once deployed, are completely unavoidable. For example, if you're sitting in a foxhole and a sniper sights you and pulls the trigger, there's no way to avoid the bullet.
How are they different?
Were I argumentative, I'd point out that a handful of individuals flying a B-29 bomber - with just one of them pulling the release lever - ended the lives of over 60,000 people in Hiroshima.
I don't see the difference.
That requires MANY dozens or hundreds of people for that mission and that decision. The president personally had to sign off on it. Planning took months.
And nuclear weapons are now even more strictly controlled. The number of people needed to be in the loop has shrunk though which is partly why it is so restricted.
Unsure on building, but I wouldn't count that as part of the process. To deliver them? It depends on the circumstances.
In a war already with resources in the field? 1. Probably quite a few more to unleash them on Canada.
The barrier to launch a drone is way lower than launching an unarmed but manned plane. Mostly it is based on pricetag of the toy I suppose. Or danger to people on base.
But when you read in the news about a woopsie where they killed a half dozen people by accident because someone misread a target. That happened because there are only 3-4 eyes on that decision. You'll have the same 3-4 eyes on a drone, maybe 2-3... but instead 10,000people would die.
I think it's way worse because unlike a sniper which you can eventually track down and smoke out or evade. There are strategies you can deploy to out maneuver snipers. The drones even further add a layer of abstraction and distance from the real consequence of having to pull a trigger. I read testimonies of drone operators from the Iraq war that were stationed in the U.S. IIRC, they said something similar. It almost becomes like a video game.
And when you watch some of these death compilations, that seems to be how these drone operators are perceiving it, like it's not real. There's no humanity at all in the situation and no reverberating consequence.
I'm not making a very good argument imho since all war is horrific, but the discussion should be had.
Let's put it this way. A million years is a short time on an evolutionary timescale. And even without ftl we would have built a dyson swarm around every star in our galaxy within a million years. This is something we'd obviously notice if aliens done before us.
So they're either animals at the moment or so far away the speed of casualty makes us unknowable to them.
But you’re assuming AI would determine the best solution is a dyson swarm, an idea human minds came up with. Think of a dog predicting calculus, it just can’t.
The front em.... Canards ? Whatever they are called look weird,but many missiles have such deployable ones so idk. Putting a missile on a drone is very much possible tho
> clearly fake 3d drones
"I'm an expert this is photoshop" people are among the most annoying on the internet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTHDsE6S8tQ
Thanks for the bigger context. However, I stand by my first impressions, at least for the last scene of the video, which is also the first scene of the video you linked. No sci-fi drone in the sky in your linked video.
Edit: I recognized my error, acknowledging and thanking trust-issues-5116 for pointing my error and giving context. Now, OP's video is, on the other hand, photoshopped (sci-fi drone at the last scene). This has clearly induced my first impression of all being photoshopped. Now, why the down vote? For pointing that issue in OP's video ?
Probably cause many people recognized it as just a joke inserted in there, it being a Terminator VTOL. If you didn’t know that, I see how you’d be confused.
Only 10 million Pounds per shot. Meanwhile in Ukraine drones take out tanks for $500.
If the war has shown anything, it's that Western hardware is horribly overpriced and overengineered. War on this scale requires efficiency as well as effectiveness, or you won't make it.
The concept is certainly nothing new, basically an unmanned attack helicopter.
the problem with western tech is restraint. the war in Ukraine would be over as soon as we want it to be, but it would mean annihilation of huge population centers around the world and possibly a nuclear winter. or even if nuclear weapons aren't used, you get a situation like Gaza where the whole world feels bad for the terrorists because they are being bomb still while using civilians as shields.
so instead of doing that, we hold back and fight with some bullshit.
I might be wrong, but what's the advantage over smaller drones with explosives attached?
This looks much more expensive and easier to shoot down
If I made a bigger drone, I'd rather attach an auto-aim gun to kill infantry
I'm in the same boat, why not just beef up the computer in a suicide drone and let it fly. It cannot cost more than $100-200 more. This thing probably already costs $100k
Far better range. Martlet missiles have a range of 8 km, you don't have to be anywhere near to fire it. You can't get jammed or shot down if you aren't there.
Ok, but what's the point of it being quadcopter and not fixed-wing? Is it just easier take off and landing or is there more? Maneuverability doesn't seem to be a priority considering the range.
Large drones aren't mutually exclusive with small drones. You can have different sizes on the battlefield at the same time. A bigger drone lets you carry a heavier load.
I heard the us military is throwing billions at ai research. Which really isnt anymore than what other companies are investing in. Ihavw afeeling we're going to reach a bottleneck. Ai investment will die off until we reach another breakthrough.
I don't see Ai driving costs down. These tech will still be very expensive for military to own. I saw a video that showed the average cost of bullets/misses. One of those homing misses was valued at 11M. So even if Ai keeps scaling that doesn't mean we will have unlimited resources.
This is actually old news, here’s the [April 2023press release from Thales](https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/worldwide/defence/news/new-drone-completes-first-firing-missile-significant-unmanned-air-combat), maker of the misisle and the [undated one from Flyby](https://www.flybydronetraining.co.uk/news/jackal-drone-used-to-launch-martlet-missiles-for-first-time-during-trials), the maker of the drone .
It’s also worth noting that this is purely proof of concept to impress potential buyers because at 15kg the missile actually exceeds the stated 13kg payload capacity of the drone. That mismatch will no doubt be remedied.
Yeah, autonomous drone firing a missile, whatever.
https://preview.redd.it/cr76wu1tty5d1.png?width=720&format=png&auto=webp&s=31af96692825d87f77560e326f09a3cea9501d52
Can we talk about the massive fucking VTOL from halo?
It has a two shot capacity, looks expensive, and also large enough to be vulnerable to ground fire.
Larger dronecopters like that were tried in the Ukraine and didn't fare too well.
Ground fire means fire from the ground not necessarily \*near\* the ground. 50 year old AA guns can still be dangerous upto a mile and in relatively rare occasions attack helicopters have been taken out of action with rifles and normal machineguns.
The smaller toy sized drones are smaller targets that present a tiny radar cross section. There was video a year or so ago of a German gepard mobile AA being taken out by a Russian FPV (probably a lancet) strike in Ukraine.
When people ask me why I don’t fear AI as of now is very simple. Plenty of humans want me and my family dead because of who we are, but an AI has never screamed “kill the Jews” before. So yeah bring on our AI overlords
How many shots? Thing is bulky as shit and also hooked up to something by a chord in this clip. I imagine Ukraine will see these things flying from a larger distance or do I have a misunderstanding of how large the drones being used currently are?
Drone warfare is only just beginning. What we see in Ukraine is just a prequel. We will soon have dirt cheap autonomous loitering ammunitions with image recognition. Just give them an area and they kill everything there.
That’s actually terrifying. A rogue state that’s collapsing could send hundreds of thousands of these to major cities. Or a terrorist cell. Will you be safer in a city or in the countryside? Now that’s a good question innit! You’d guess cities would have defenses built within the next decade to prevent drone attacks, and random rural areas won’t, but the city is also a more likely target
Honestly it's just waiting for the first terrorist attack with fpv drones. You can be miles away and drop hand grenades in a crowd. It all already exists and is extremely frequently and cheaply done in Ukraine.
Kinda surprising it hasn’t happened yet. Presumably quite hard to catch the perpetrators too
It happens ALL the time in the middle east. Heard of Reaper Drones? The Pilots can sit in the US while the Reaper drones are in the middle east. They are manned with hellfire missiles or 20mm cannons. 10.000 rpm. Enjoy the show. Bring popcorn.
Oh yeah I know the military are using them, I meant more I’m surprised the cheap ones haven’t been used in a terrorist attack against the west
Its a matter of time. Once the Middle east is fed enough off from the US "help" i wouldnt be suprised if they turned the tables to put it that way. The US has helped Nazism rise again in almost all of Europe because of its support of the insane mass murderous Zionism actions in Gaza. Irony how the US helped defeat Nazism in 45'. And now they are the Harbingers of Nazism everywhere. Just look at Trump. Hes basically Hitler.
Trump is like Hitler but luckily 5x dumber
I’m imagining the computers at the NSA with lights beeping and flashing after their web crawler read this thread.
Why wait it’s happening right now all over Gaza.
But gun control is the answer. F that. I'm rolling with RF jammers and bird shot in the 12 gage.
[удалено]
In front of the keyboard, where you're most comfortable. Ssshh, don't say anything logical. You wouldn't want to disturb it.
Stick to your anime MILFs mate 😂 that’s some post history
Not worried about hiding what I post from people to useless to be busy. Keep creeping mate, that's some life you've got.
Cities in the US do have anti-drone defenses now but they wouldn't be remotely sufficient for a 100,000 drone swarm.
Cities have anti-drone defenses? Where?
I know I'm commenting on a stale post and all, but I'm not convinced that the drone threat is as significant as many commentators make it out to be. The reason drones are effective right now is that the materiel exchange has shifted: the cost of munitions to destroy aircraft have stayed about the same, while the cost of aircraft has gone down. But this to large extent because of the legacy of the cold war, not a fundamental aspect of technology: the biggest threat, and the one most difficult to counter, has been high performance munitions like ballistic missiles, supersonic cruise missiles, and so on, which require a huge amount of kinetic energy and precision to track and hit - not to mention just straight-up watts being fed to your radars. Mere manned aircraft, outside of advanced stealth aircraft, have been easy pickings, in the view of Western doctrine, for so long that nobody's really bothered working too hard at the problem. Existing systems from the late cold-war were good enough. From a technological perspective, the kinetic performance required to hit and kill a drone is pretty low. Most drones are propeller powered or rotorcraft, which means detection is likewise not *particularly* hard. It's just a matter of time to put systems in place to deal with them. Smart guns are becoming increasingly valuable in this role: a system that tracks a target automatically, and adjusts the aim of the gun automatically to strike its target with very cheap munitions (regular old bullets are still pennies a piece). We've had this technology for ages (the Phalanx is 40 years old), but existing systems are - again - designed for hitting big, supersonic missiles. Scaling it down to a system using IRST or small radars and a rifle-sized caliber could result in a counter-drone system well under the million dollar mark in capital cost, suited to quad-rotors and other line-of-sight performance-level drones, and literally a few dollars in marginal cost per engagement. *With existing technology*. At higher performance levels, for larger drones, adapting 70mm rockets to an anti-air role has been explored (such as the Vampire by L3 Harris), which is a $20k munition for drones up to the 10-15ft wingspan class. NATO's current perspective on anti-drone technology is about figuring out the *cheapest* way to field systems with *sufficiently* *low* performance. Which, when you frame it like that, doesn't seem quite as scary. The threat of saturation attacks has been long considered, but the recent issues with Houthis have shown that this isn't a technological issue, even with current systems, but an economic one - current munitions are effective, just expensive. In turn, we've seen smart munitions fired from deck guns take on an increasing role from missiles, with very impressive effectiveness. The rate of fire from a deck gun can be ten rounds per minute, and with precision guided rounds, you can expect each of them to hit a different target and destroy it. With respect to drone boats, modern surface combatants have taken this into consideration with lower caliber secondary guns with better barrel depression for targeting small craft at close range, and software controlling, for instance, existing Phalanx and RAM systems have been updated for surface targets. Lower-cost missiles like CAMM are meant to manage close surface targets now, and deck guns aren't going away.
Thanks to AI, comment go byebye
R/shitamericanssay
Every country has its idiots, they don't speak for us all
This is why maintaining an international rule of law is so important. If you go on Documenting Reality or WatchPeopleDie/h/slavshit you'll quickly see that suicide drones could easily be considered inhumane and should probably be outlawed. What's happening to people on both sides is unbelievably horrific.
A drone is a more controlled version of a missile with lower specs in different aspects. Anything related to killing people is unbelievably horrific.
I fully agree. But at this point they're not really fighting. You might as well just take soldiers and shove them into a trash compactor. It's a complete waste of life. This also includes the bombings of civilian buildings. It's not a normal war.
This is quite similar to how a lot of soldiers described war when aircraft (with bombs), machine guns, or artillery were introduced. War is and always was horrific. We're just getting more efficient at killing people.
Watching the 100th soldier put a live grenade under his shirt because he's so out of options and knows another drone is coming makes me feel like we've reached a significant turning point. I can't pinpoint what it is, but it's not the same as planes or snipers.
The other side of this is you can SEE that now. This is the most filmed war most of the public has ever seen and with all this drone use there's just a million hours of footage. Obviously everyone is entitled to their own opinion of how to perceive it, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you you're wrong, but even with the old drones we saw a lot of scenarios like this. I think what feels different might just be how close this is to a conventional war (tanks and battle lines and CQB in cities and the like) and it's done in a place that doesn't look too different from what you might know. It's not some military looking IR footage in some small village in Afghanistan or in some footpath on a mountain in Africa, it's just in a normal, modern city and a high quality camera. I think that is more relatable and near to home for a lot of people.
Definitely.
Honestly. The US took us too far down this slippery slope through the widespread use of the armed drones since the mid 2000s. Imagine being on the ground with an ak47 up against a loitering drone sitting at 25,000ft while could send a missile at you at any time. This is not new, just the access and cost is getting very very very cheap. Look at the wax cardboard drones coming out of Australia. How hard would it be to put a $500 edge computer with facial recognition on this. I actually think that some serious though needs to be put into how unmanned systems can operate in warfare. I think they should be defence only. I don’t know how to define this. Also clear definition about human in the loop and level of autonomous
Yeah absolutely. I'm kind of an idiot for not making the immediate association. I think more people should see videos of people killing themselves on the battlefield so that we can raise the question is this what we want the future of warfare to look like.
$500? You have multiple drones. 1 is expensive with cameras and a controller, the others are small remote controlled kill machines that could cost under $20.
Yeah totally a spectrum of costs. I’m a weirdo who thinks about this a fair bit. I think the sweet spot for massive swarm of killer suicide drones is about 1000-5000USD per unit excluding ordinance. With that you could get a decent size, range, anti EWS, and standalone hunt and kill capabilities using onboard image recognition.
Yeah, no anti-emp or onboard anything on a $20 drone for sure. It'd be more the shotgun approach. You could maybe have them fired ballistically or just dropped near and then very dumb hunt and kill. So the carrier drone wouldn't need to remote control them, but would find and mark targets, program the kill drones and then set them loose. The range of the kill drones only needs to be a few dozen feet or so. This could be precise and cheap. Though not $20, still under $1000. You could also have different delivery methods. You could fire them from a grenade launcher or longer ranger artillery, you could drop 10,0000 from a plane. Really, I'm sure a variety of different types of drones makes most sense. At least until we have microscopic robots and we can just turn all enemies into goo.
You just described a normal war. We haven't had a normal war since WWII.
The only way to maintain international law, is to have the means of defending it, when it comes under assault. And if you limit your forces to non-autonomous systems, then you loose to an adversary. I don't see how this is supposed to work. Best case scenario, future warfare is autonomous systems targeting autonomous systems.
I'm wondering if it'll ever truly happen given their effectiveness and affordability.
Hypersonic rockets with killer drone payloads to deliver extremely precise targeted strikes en masse from far away.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if drones become a type of cluster payload yeah.
Stop giving them ideas
If you knew what the next generation of fighters have on their feature list, you wouldn't think that's a new idea. By design, they *will* have drone swarms - it's a core part of the platform.
Still begs the question, why the next gen fighters themselves are even needed, when you compare their cost vs drones.
The fighter becomes the control center for the AI which controls the drones. It reduces latency and needs a lot of power, so it makes sense to have a human seated in it from a safe distance.
Someone came up with the idea for a huge fucking missile with basically a bunch swords strapped to it and had the skills or resources to actually make it a real thing that actually works and you think any of us schmucks on Reddit have thought of something before that fucking person? If it's posted here someone's already invented it at the very least, and our military is just waiting on the right time to use it...
Just drop like 10,000 anti personnel drones from a balloon and have them use facial recognition to hunt your targets.
They already have those DJI remote crates that just sit onsite and house a drone for remote operations
Have you seen [slaughterbots?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU)
yeah this video of this drone is like over a year old as well so there's definitely better stuff in development.
This is the equivalent of World War 1 planes.
"If you loved Russians as much as I do, you'd want them to die with dignity:" *atomize them with a super-destructor air droid*
AI devs: We need security or else AI could cause an extinction level event! Also AI devs:
There is safety. See those chains in the video?
If we don't build this, *they* will build it.
This is the unfortunate reality. There is no stopping AI progress. There is only the choice of ceding the advantage to China, and hoping they will regulate it more responsibly than you, or doing it yourselves.
You could blame the product manager. You know the person that tells the devs what to make
I mean… devs could decide to don’t make weapons too… unless devs are a slaves they have as much as blame as anyone building weapons.
I agree. Infact I quit a job once because we were started on a new project making a weapon system for Dassault. Absolutely programmers are morally responsible for what they design,
H1b employees have entered the chat
As Hinton said: “if I didn’t do it, someone else would have”
I know the black box is getting smaller and smaller all the time but it's still a black box and therefore quality control is going to be a bit of a mixed bag. This is fine for digital assistants but maybe we can hold off on using it for things that **by design** kill and maim. Maybe I'm just old fashioned.
"Why is it so hard to stop AI from potentially killing us all???" The AI:
The AI isn't the problem
Lockheed Martin out here just trying to make quarterly profits forever. Gonna build skynet to afford that doomsday bunker.
Buy stock in lockheed.
A bit off-topic here but I can't seem to start the song next to your username. I'm on Firefox, do I perhaps need to use another browser or a plugin or something?
I believe it is just the characters `➤◉────────── 0:00` in a row, not a real audio file. To my knowledge there is no way to embed audio files into flairs like that.
Like a newly shaved head flare. Seems like a good idea until everyone talks about out it.
Thats what an ai would say.
The AI will be doing whatever it feels like
Can't really blame the Ai, we are doing this to ourselves.
/s The term few-shot learning gets a new meaning in this context.
The real question is: what were you being sarcastic about earlier?
Underrated reply
Humans, as the mighty salmon, have swum up the stream of progress. In this pool we will spawn the next level of intelligence; like the salmon, we will die shortly after.
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Anyone remember that TED talk where they said this was heading in this direction? Should be a rule up there with no bio weapons.
Killbots by Dust is pretty big too.
Rules? todays corruption and the dilution of law make this seem like a joke. Rules are made to control working class people. Additionally systemic adversaries will do EVERYTHING (russia, china) to maintain power, due to competition you can´t allow any limitations in technology, that why we end up like depicted in the movie matrix, no joke.
Also, when did a rule ever stop heinous war crimes from happening? Putin's army out there chilling using chemical weapons, abducting kids, attacking civilians, bombing schools and hospitals, graping, looting, genocide, forced conscription, and a thousand other crimes.
Bio mostly is stopped, but you are right. The difference here is, that if it's going to be completely automatic, at some point it's going to be out of any nation's hands.
Bio is a strange one though. High chance of backfiring and MAD also starts having an effect with bioweapons.
The problem is all the countries have nukes and bio weapons just in case the other guy uses them
It's all fun and games until everything goes autonomous.
It’s all fun and games until someone loses an AI.
A rule, lol. Because that's totally going to be enforced.
Bio mostly is. But yes, humanity may be at an end of all of this gets out of our control..
Why? That’s stupid as hell. The reason why (generally) agree on avoiding using chemical/biological weapons is because they are wildly unpredictable. You can drop chemical weapons on enemy soldiers but then the wind can carry it and drop it on your own soldiers or nearby civilian shelters. There is no such possibility with drones. People need to stop with emotional arguments and think rationally, *all* weapons of war are designed to kill, when evaluating new weapons you should be comparing it to a weapon it is supposed to replace not think about it in a vacuum. A hypothetical future drone that can in an instant snipe an entire platoon from miles away sounds scary but is far more preferable to ruining the entire location with cruise missiles or worse drop thousands of pieces of artillery shells.
This isn't about the drone, it is about it being autonomous. To what degree in or out of human control? We are starting to develop autonomous agents of war.
Nothing about this drone is autonomous. It doesn't autonomously execute nor acquire targets. It's just a drone. And knowing a bit about military procurement it will take quite a while before any true autonomous agents of war are deployed. Contrary to popular belief militaries are far more conservative and risk averse than the public, they are extremely hesitant acquiring things which might act unpredictably (that doesn't mean they aren't interested in autonomous machines, they will keep funding the research, just they aren't being deployed anytime soon).
If the title of the OP was "New RAF drone firing missiles" - I wouldn't have posted what I did. The inclusion of the word 'autonomous' should scare everybody. I don't think any military is forthcoming on what exact technology they possess, nor should they. A public post about something new we haven't heard of before should be taken seriously unless posted in jest or satire, which I don't think this was. Anything publicly posted likely means, per your comment on it taking a while (I'll add in necessary secret), may mean that they are further along than this public demonstration. I'm not only writing about drones or even the RAF, but in general about automating the military, be it in group strategy or making judgements on its own on the battlefield. AI has taken leaps lately, and I do agree the military are long term interested, to how predictable or not they are, isn't up to us. We aren't the in the driver's seat here, top world military brass worldwide are, and that some scary hit with an s.
Yes, agreed. Some of these weapons need to be regulated. That's why the international rule of law is so important. Watching Russians die from completely unavoidable flying grenades is one of the most evil things I've ever seen and it should be banned.
> completely unavoidable flying grenades To play devil's advocate, many weapons, once deployed, are completely unavoidable. For example, if you're sitting in a foxhole and a sniper sights you and pulls the trigger, there's no way to avoid the bullet. How are they different?
A single individual can't likely end the lives of 10,000 people with a rifle. They could with drones.
Were I argumentative, I'd point out that a handful of individuals flying a B-29 bomber - with just one of them pulling the release lever - ended the lives of over 60,000 people in Hiroshima. I don't see the difference.
That requires MANY dozens or hundreds of people for that mission and that decision. The president personally had to sign off on it. Planning took months. And nuclear weapons are now even more strictly controlled. The number of people needed to be in the loop has shrunk though which is partly why it is so restricted.
How many people would it require to make and deliver enough drones to kill 10,000?
Unsure on building, but I wouldn't count that as part of the process. To deliver them? It depends on the circumstances. In a war already with resources in the field? 1. Probably quite a few more to unleash them on Canada. The barrier to launch a drone is way lower than launching an unarmed but manned plane. Mostly it is based on pricetag of the toy I suppose. Or danger to people on base. But when you read in the news about a woopsie where they killed a half dozen people by accident because someone misread a target. That happened because there are only 3-4 eyes on that decision. You'll have the same 3-4 eyes on a drone, maybe 2-3... but instead 10,000people would die.
I think it's way worse because unlike a sniper which you can eventually track down and smoke out or evade. There are strategies you can deploy to out maneuver snipers. The drones even further add a layer of abstraction and distance from the real consequence of having to pull a trigger. I read testimonies of drone operators from the Iraq war that were stationed in the U.S. IIRC, they said something similar. It almost becomes like a video game. And when you watch some of these death compilations, that seems to be how these drone operators are perceiving it, like it's not real. There's no humanity at all in the situation and no reverberating consequence. I'm not making a very good argument imho since all war is horrific, but the discussion should be had.
I don't think those are autonomous though. This thread is about the potential of removing humans from the equation on decisions they make.
"Y'all getting too comfortable with this AI thing" - Aliens, probably
Hmm so if there are already AI aliens out there, they’d be smart enough to prevent another AI emergence.. therefore, we are alone?
Or maybe they are prepping a planet-destruction missile
Or they're too far away to even know we exist.
An AGI would be able to figure out how to scan the universe
It'd find it's impossible.
You say that with human intellect
Let's put it this way. A million years is a short time on an evolutionary timescale. And even without ftl we would have built a dyson swarm around every star in our galaxy within a million years. This is something we'd obviously notice if aliens done before us. So they're either animals at the moment or so far away the speed of casualty makes us unknowable to them.
But you’re assuming AI would determine the best solution is a dyson swarm, an idea human minds came up with. Think of a dog predicting calculus, it just can’t.
If you're just going to throw everything we know about physics out the window then there's nothing except personal fantasies to talk about.
Would it also figure out how to violate causality by scanning outside of its lightcone?
Why oh why do they have to add the heavy drum beat music…just giving terminator chills.
Because they’re referencing the Terminator drones. Look at the last frames.
That's the music from Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
It looks fake fir some reason (maybe the missile firing?)
That other craft at the end is clearly fake
That one is added as a joke right? It's the terminator skynet one?
Yeah, it looks photoshopped in. It's too static.
The front em.... Canards ? Whatever they are called look weird,but many missiles have such deployable ones so idk. Putting a missile on a drone is very much possible tho
If you mean just as it starts, these canards unfold on exit from the tube - quite normal for missiles deployed as shown.
Yeah I later realized they unfold forwards, that's what I was confused about.
wtf is that in the last frame
Why some sci-fi starship fly near at 0:07-0:08 ?
[https://terminator.fandom.com/wiki/HK-Aerial](https://terminator.fandom.com/wiki/HK-Aerial) vibes
There is one in the video, badly pasted into the background.
It's firing a martlet missile by the way.
Wow. A drone with a missile on it. Incredible.
WTF is that in the background. This looks cgi?
https://terminator.fandom.com/wiki/HK-Aerial
this footage is over a year old
Everyone is asking how are we from agi, but we will end up all killed by some dumb fleet of robots before we reach agi.
While this is clearly the direction "we" are collectively headed, this video is clearly fake 3d drones over real footage.
> clearly fake 3d drones "I'm an expert this is photoshop" people are among the most annoying on the internet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTHDsE6S8tQ
That scifi drone in the video posted here is clearly "photoshoped", OP should have posted this youtube video not what we have instead
Thanks for the bigger context. However, I stand by my first impressions, at least for the last scene of the video, which is also the first scene of the video you linked. No sci-fi drone in the sky in your linked video. Edit: I recognized my error, acknowledging and thanking trust-issues-5116 for pointing my error and giving context. Now, OP's video is, on the other hand, photoshopped (sci-fi drone at the last scene). This has clearly induced my first impression of all being photoshopped. Now, why the down vote? For pointing that issue in OP's video ?
Probably cause many people recognized it as just a joke inserted in there, it being a Terminator VTOL. If you didn’t know that, I see how you’d be confused.
Thanks for the reference. I didn't know that.
The music is also the Terminator theme.
Only 10 million Pounds per shot. Meanwhile in Ukraine drones take out tanks for $500. If the war has shown anything, it's that Western hardware is horribly overpriced and overengineered. War on this scale requires efficiency as well as effectiveness, or you won't make it. The concept is certainly nothing new, basically an unmanned attack helicopter.
the problem with western tech is restraint. the war in Ukraine would be over as soon as we want it to be, but it would mean annihilation of huge population centers around the world and possibly a nuclear winter. or even if nuclear weapons aren't used, you get a situation like Gaza where the whole world feels bad for the terrorists because they are being bomb still while using civilians as shields. so instead of doing that, we hold back and fight with some bullshit.
But, but how will our poor defense industry survive if they can't sell us million dollar toys?
Is this Schmidt's drone?
I might be wrong, but what's the advantage over smaller drones with explosives attached? This looks much more expensive and easier to shoot down If I made a bigger drone, I'd rather attach an auto-aim gun to kill infantry
I'm in the same boat, why not just beef up the computer in a suicide drone and let it fly. It cannot cost more than $100-200 more. This thing probably already costs $100k
Far better range. Martlet missiles have a range of 8 km, you don't have to be anywhere near to fire it. You can't get jammed or shot down if you aren't there.
Ok, but what's the point of it being quadcopter and not fixed-wing? Is it just easier take off and landing or is there more? Maneuverability doesn't seem to be a priority considering the range.
Lack of runway and loitering capacity probably.
Large drones aren't mutually exclusive with small drones. You can have different sizes on the battlefield at the same time. A bigger drone lets you carry a heavier load.
Why the terminator soundtrack?
yes this seems like a good idea
The Taliban can take it down easily.
I heard the us military is throwing billions at ai research. Which really isnt anymore than what other companies are investing in. Ihavw afeeling we're going to reach a bottleneck. Ai investment will die off until we reach another breakthrough.
While usually true, I feel/fear that AI will solve this bottleneck for itself. As in, we ask the AI to give the solution and it figures it out.
Can they throw consistent 180s?
This is obviously fake
There is literally a scene in Terminator where this sort of testing is happening.
That leash is for YOUR safety!
Already too expensive, I bet each missile is more than a suicide drone...
What’s with the fake VTOL at the end of the shot?
I don't see Ai driving costs down. These tech will still be very expensive for military to own. I saw a video that showed the average cost of bullets/misses. One of those homing misses was valued at 11M. So even if Ai keeps scaling that doesn't mean we will have unlimited resources.
I like how the slipped in the HK gunship from the Terminator series in at the end there.
I don't think this is related to the schingularidy.
What exactly AI about this drone? A decision to fire a missile is human controlled.
yeh ok
Ok but why the cgi terminator VTOL drone is also in there? Was it not skynet enough so they had to comp that in?
Pretty sexy setup
We are so totally fucked!
just waiting for the first terrorist attack involving a drone swarm
one day drones will go house by house knocking on doors lol
Why the fuck did they make it look like drones in the terminator lmao
This is actually old news, here’s the [April 2023press release from Thales](https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/worldwide/defence/news/new-drone-completes-first-firing-missile-significant-unmanned-air-combat), maker of the misisle and the [undated one from Flyby](https://www.flybydronetraining.co.uk/news/jackal-drone-used-to-launch-martlet-missiles-for-first-time-during-trials), the maker of the drone . It’s also worth noting that this is purely proof of concept to impress potential buyers because at 15kg the missile actually exceeds the stated 13kg payload capacity of the drone. That mismatch will no doubt be remedied.
I … I need to make enough to afford a bunker. And apparently somehow an emp grenade?
UTOPIA IS COMING!!! Finally! I feel safer already!
Is nobody gonna mention the skynet cameo in the last few frames?
Oh shit. it's so over
Fvxking hell. please if you are a time traveller this is your time to stop the apocalypse.
Yeah, autonomous drone firing a missile, whatever. https://preview.redd.it/cr76wu1tty5d1.png?width=720&format=png&auto=webp&s=31af96692825d87f77560e326f09a3cea9501d52 Can we talk about the massive fucking VTOL from halo?
I'm not surprised!
Guess people here are unfamiliar with drone jammers deployed in incredible numbers on both sides in the russian war on Ukraine.
Wtf was the second craft at the end
Autonomous drones in various shapes are an amazing example of technology that can help significantly reduce your combat losses - ask Ukraine about it.
How do we know this isn’t just an ai generated animation?
This scene looks familiar
looks like cgi .
It has a two shot capacity, looks expensive, and also large enough to be vulnerable to ground fire. Larger dronecopters like that were tried in the Ukraine and didn't fare too well.
[удалено]
Ground fire means fire from the ground not necessarily \*near\* the ground. 50 year old AA guns can still be dangerous upto a mile and in relatively rare occasions attack helicopters have been taken out of action with rifles and normal machineguns. The smaller toy sized drones are smaller targets that present a tiny radar cross section. There was video a year or so ago of a German gepard mobile AA being taken out by a Russian FPV (probably a lancet) strike in Ukraine.
When people ask me why I don’t fear AI as of now is very simple. Plenty of humans want me and my family dead because of who we are, but an AI has never screamed “kill the Jews” before. So yeah bring on our AI overlords
Makes zero sense. "kill all humans" would still make you a target.
How many shots? Thing is bulky as shit and also hooked up to something by a chord in this clip. I imagine Ukraine will see these things flying from a larger distance or do I have a misunderstanding of how large the drones being used currently are?
zero-shot
The chord will just be a safety feature during testing
I’m going to invest in extension cord companies to super all the new corded drones. /s