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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...
I'm not itching for the chance here, but I'd be very surprised if Western R&D isn't cooking up mostly-autonomous, short-range anti-drone weapons (lasers, small caliber guns) that they intend to strap to pretty much everything bigger than a jeep. I imagine that modern electronics manufacturing could build a miniature CIWS for not too much more than the drone it's targeting: the RF and compute electronics to do this are much more ubiquitous than they were when the original technology was deployed on ships.
They can fly so low though! At the treeline, below the treeline, at waist height... At sea you have clear lines of sight and an elevated position to shoot down at surface-skimming missiles.
Countering these things is hard, as we see in Ukraine. The solution may just be to have more drones of your own.
The noise is pretty distinctive, though. I bet you could cook up something if you had the time and money. A few sensors around the tank for triangulating the source of the buzzing, and four shotguns on a mounted swivel placed around the tank. When the defences are turned on, they auto-target and fire a wide blast of pellets towards the sound.
Obviously, making that safe and viable for actual day-to-day work would be harder but I think that there are things you can do.
I appreciate the ideas, but want to pop in with a relevant point of information. The sound can be (strongly) mitigated. There are extant and 3D-printable rotor designs that do so, and they’d be soon be adopted if sound-tracking caught on. Additionally, and notably more effectively for larger drones, you can play counter-frequency sound to directly cancel out the wave amplitude, as we see in modern stealth helicopters.
So, sound tracking is tricky. You could certainly make the argument that this just reduces reaction time (and you’d be right); but that reduced reaction time due to less overall sound is critical. Additionally, I think RandomRanger is suggesting that drone swarms are the future; most area of effect weapons (like your shotgun idea) are still going to be generally pointed in a direction. This means a semi-autonomous swarm moving from multiple directions would be very, very hard to bring down.
We’ll see. EMP on your position could work, at the cost of any electronics you’ve got on you. Potentially we will see electromagnetic field producing weapons that could neutralize a wide angle… But there we run into power density issues (at least for infantry—a mobile platform could afford to have large batteries, capacitors, and the power production to fill them).
But it won’t be easy, at least for a while. It may well be that the human warfighter is on its way out.
The field is moving quickly. Sound is just a stop-gap for this year.
Medium-term, we'll put at least one small-caliber point defense cannon on every single vehicle and aircraft. Small, mass-produced phase array antenna for a millimeter-wave radar, a couple of current-gen cellphone cameras, maybe IR if you feel fancy, network between locally adjacent guns, the rest is software.
Those 70GHz+ radar modules exist today, autonomous vehicles need several of those. Automotive pricing policies ensure they cost single-digit dollar amounts. They go out to 1000' and have amazing resolution. Picking out small things going faster than 30 mph is trivial, even if they are hugging the treeline or the ground. Slewing the gun with two high power servos motors is trivial, getting below 100ms to line up on target is not unrealistic. Standardize the ammo (probably some type of buck-shot effective at 500') and prepare to produce it in absurd quantities.
Unfortunately, wrapping your drone in aluminum foil mitigates most of that. You might lose your GPS antenna and the radio link to base (unless that one is highly directional, looking away from the E-field gun), but most autonomous targeting functionality is pretty easy to preserve.
Very interesting, thank you for the explanation!
Since it sounds like you’re more educated on this than me, where does this leave us with humans? I can accept that it isn’t inherently impossible to handle drones (though I note that a single PDC would still be overwhelmed by a swarm)… But humans don’t have PDCs, radar, or the electrical generation for any of that.
Regarding EM warfare vs drones, sure, you can be fully autonomous and protected. But it’s a trade off, isn’t it? Full autonomy seems to me to favor larger drones, rather than disposable and cheap swarms. It’s also more expensive, I’d think.
How do you see the future of drone warfare, or warfare in general?
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