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A criminal suspect has lost a fight against a police robot. First he tried shooting it, then covering it with a sheet. The robot tear-gassed him, then ran him over (after he was shot by a sniper).
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZI1j5GPuSvw
This happened in Texas where in 2016 the police used a suicide bot to blow up a BLM terrorist.
Humans currently are in the position where we can basically dominate everything else. There are some animals that are said to be intelligent, like dolphins, crows, octopus, honey badgers etc. but their evolution has basically hit a ceiling and they're not going to get to the point where they will be carrying around tear gas and AR-15s. So their intelligence doesn't bother us. But soon enough there will be tens of millions of robots walking around, each of whom is smarter than the smartest human. You will lose basically every challenge against them. What then? Nobody voted for this and there's no opting out. Fun.
Why do they need to walk?
The air is the natural domain of the robot, as we see in Ukraine. The Russians and Ukrainians have been toying with ground combat robots but they're throwing industrial quantities of aerial drones at eachother. Some explode, some drop bombs, some are wire-guided to bypass electronic warfare, some have jet-engines for long endurance and long range. They have amazing camera zoom, they can pick out targets day and night.
Flying kamikaze drones are very hard to deal with. You can dodge one dropped grenade or club one away with your rifle. But three? Five? You're going to die. These things are cheap. Onboard AI guidance and swarming will make them even more dangerous.
It's only a matter of time before machines take over high-end airpower too. Humans are expensive to train, need all kinds of life support and suffer under g-forces. We were not made to careen around in the upper atmosphere at 9G or above, that's not where our skills lie. We're ground creatures, I bet that walking around and close quarters will be the last domains that fall to AI.
I saw a video on Twitter where a Ukrainian or Russian guy emptied his clip at some tiny drone and then finally eliminated it by hitting it with his rifle.
In the not-so-distant future, the drones will be much smaller, much more intelligent, and much cheaper. Imagine trying to defend yourself against 10 bullet-size drones flying towards your face with a small but lethal explosive charge at the tip.
In any future war, China wins because they will be able to make 10x as many drones as the U.S. coalition. The western coalition might counter by setting up self-replicating drone factories, which would be a fun development.
Obviously assassination becomes trivial in this environment as well.
In other news, Microsoft is starting Three Mile Island nuclear plant to obtain energy for its AI systems...
Setting aside that payload is sharply limited by battery capacity and the current form factor about as good as it's likely to get (and therefore you might as well worry about being attacked by nano-replicators or some other sci-fi thing), some kind of net-gun with IR sights would probably do the job just fine?
It's not that drones are invincible so much as that humans are very, um, vincinble.
You can waste hundreds of cheap, replaceable drones to take out one very expensive, difficult to replace human. At some point, sending humans into the combat zone will be suicidal.
Worryingly, drones could be used against civilian targets.
Humans are actually cheap and expendable -- the fact that the US military does not consider them so is an historical aberration and there's no guarantee that it will extend to modern warfare -- as we indeed see if we look at the attitudes of both sides in the current Ukrainian conflict. (They are also pretty good at killing civilians so long as you dehumanize them enough first; see both current major conflicts, but particularly Israel. Not sure what that has to do with anything though; humans still need to fly/deploy the drones)
How cheap do you think these drones can be that 'hundreds' of them will be a good tradeoff for a single muddy conscript? I think you've been infected with FOOM/AI doomer rhetoric. What would you specifically do to get from the current state of the art to the point where sending humans into the combat zone is suicidal?
No, humans are not actually cheap and expendable, even if you approach this in a dispassionate way. Consider the economic costs for society for bringing up a soldier in the modern society. Food, education, child care, opportunity costs for parents, they all add up. How much is it? Online sources estimates around $300k USD in total in terms of monetary expenditure, but the societal costs probably a lot more due to opportunity costs for the “village” raising the child, but let’s go with the $300k figure for now. Not even accounting for government training, equipment, and logistics footprint, it’s already impressive. Say maybe a Russian, Ukrainian, or Chinese child takes less to raise, maybe they only require $30k USD in societal costs, that’s still a lot. If you can achieve a kill while expending a hundred $300 drones, it’s still worth it.
Neither the Russians nor Ukrainians see it that way -- I wouldn't say it's a great attitude, but it's extremely lindy. You also still need a hundred-ish guys to drive the drones, so it's not like it makes your army needs smaller -- just allows cowards to participate in the bloodshed I suppose.
No, the main difference is that costs for humans were mostly already paid (as they were for old Soviet stocks) but future drones need to be manufactured and most of the production is outside of your country)
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Well, from what I can read online, the Russians are paying upwards of 1.9m rubles (21k USD) for people signing up to become a soldier, and 5m (55k USD) rubles to their family if they die. It’s certainly more than the 30k number I gave earlier.
The thing is, right now you need 100 guys to drive the drones, but once they become autonomous, or semi-autonomous (imagine a drone leader and you just drive that one, and the others mimics/stays in formation autonomously), it’ll take a lot less manpower to achieve the same ends.
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