Form of your robotic destructor will not be Mini slaughterbot drones but a Waymo self driving car

UC Berkeley professor Stuart Russell and the Future of Life Institute have created video titled “Slaughterbots” that depicts a future in which humans develop small, hand-sized drones that are programmed to identify and eliminate designated targets.

The Berkeley professor fears this particular scenario but it is not that big a deal. He and his people need to do more analysis of weapons, military and terrorist tactics.

They are called unstoppable but are stoppable

They call them unstoppable miniature drones.

They are stoppable. There are EMP weapons both for large scale and handheld. There are computer controlled machine gun systems for anti-drone and anti air systems.

We already have big drones with big missiles. They have been used to kill thousands in the middle east for a couple of decades.

There are all kinds of drones with all kinds of guns and shotguns.

Automatic weapons that work without human intervention after activation are missiles and bombs.

Also, if someone (terrorist or country) tries to attack you with missiles or bombs or drones, then you attack that country and beat them down until they are unable to launch offensive attacks or you hunt down the terrorists with CIA, big drones and big weapons or your own smaller weapons.

As with all weapons the $200-300 billion per year US military procurement budgets means that the US will have far more drones than any other nation.

US Police forces have heavy weapons and surplus military gear. The New York police department will have a larger drone budget than many nations.

Delivering a container full of drones or dropping a plane full of drones is not any easier than delivering a load of bombs or missiles.

There have been many suicide bombers and those who use trucks to drive into crowds

Despite what people say it is actually difficult to recruit suicide bombers and tough to motivate people sufficiently to grab a truck to run them into crowds.

As self driving cars and trucks become common then it will be easy to repurpose or make a simplified self driving vehicle to perform the task of bombing without the suicide portion or using the truck as a weapon.

It is also possible that the terrorists will take Amazon delivery drones or making drones that look like the Amazon delivery drone (in case the digital security of an Amazon drone cannot be cracked) and packing them with the explosives and ball bearings.

The terrorist attacks when they come will be in the form of self driving trucks, self driving cars and Amazon drones.

1. They will be everywhere just like regular trucks are now
2. People will see them and expect them, so they could move into a crowd without arousing response
3. It could be fast to repurpose them, just as it is easy to take over a truck now
4. There are robotic devices now that can operate the steering wheel and controls of a car or plane. They are drop in automation

However, just like the truck attacks that occasionally happen now, we will not stop using trucks or cars or drones when they happen.

The security of self-driving trucks, self driving cars and delivery drones is where we need to put our efforts and not on weaponized AI drones.

Also, the questions that we should consider will be whether it will be good or bad for police departments to have fleets of counter drones. If they should then how should they be managed.

12 thoughts on “Form of your robotic destructor will not be Mini slaughterbot drones but a Waymo self driving car”

  1. Are u alll crazy? 🙂

    The SDC Utopians of NBF were constantly trolling the rest of us how SDCs would be infallible in ALL CASES.

    Yes, they said that. Repeatedly. Entire thread wars were sustained because they would not give a single byte in this ‘issues’. I of course repeatedly counter-said they would all be proven to be fools like the Peak Oiltards were and the Global Warming fraudsters will be.

    They started disappearing ride around when the first SDC accidents occurred, btw.

    • Infallible? They didn’t say that SDVs would be infallible.
      They said that SDVs would be OMNIPOTENT. Not just able to never make a mistake, but able to avoid crashes in all cases even when someone else suddenly drove to the wrong side of the road, or if a pedestrian deliberately jumped in front of them, or if a bridge collapsed.
      Merely infallible? Ha!

  2. Maybe product liability laws will force the makers of such driverless vehicles to continually improve safeguards, to prevent terrorist acts through their vehicles.

  3. More likely you will die due to:

    1. Self driving vehicle born IED.
    2. 20 years from now one morning 30 million self driving vehicles are driving when a high orbit nuclear device detonates. The EMP bricks the control AI of all self driving cars which then continue mindlessly in to oncoming traffic, off the road at high speed. Millions die.

    • Random bricking of computers is not limited to EMPs. A few self-drivers will brick every year just because they had any combination of hardware-failure/software-failure/attempted-hacking/crash-damage/?

      And this is a GOOD thing (in this circumstances) because it means that self driving vehicles will have already been forced to adopt a fail-safe design. When it locks up or gets totally confused or outright bricks it wacks on all the hazard lights and comes to an immediate stop broadcasting a panic signal.

      The earliest models might not manage this, but by the time sdvs are common they will have had enough random bricking that the bugs will be worked out.

      After all, even human drivers brick occasionally.

  4. And in response to the first assassinations via delivery van the “Firearms Manufacturers Association” launches a multibillion dollar campaign legalize open carry rocket launchers.

  5. “if someone (terrorist or country) tries to attack you with missiles or bombs or drones, then you attack that country and beat them down”

    A country, probably so. Terrorists? Which country do you beat down to kill IS / Daesh? Nuke ’em all to glass? It’d still create more terrorists than you killed. The inability to fight terrorists as one targets a nation-state is precisely WHY terrorist organizations came to be. A flaw of ISIS is that it has ambitions of becoming a territorial power – so either it fails for years to do so and starts losing ability to draw converts, or it goes for territory and becomes a target.

    • Well IS made it easy to answer that question by taking territory and acting like a country. Made it easy to bomb them.

  6. I’m reminded of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.

    The drones get smaller and more autonomous until they are having huge battles in the air of the city, drone against drone, bot against bot, but they are microscopic in size and the average inhabitant doesn’t even notice that there is a war on around them, except if
    1. The other side wins and suddenly the attacking bots have seized control
    or
    2. Everything is just dirty, with black dust everywhere: the shattered remnants of all the (largely carbonoid) dead bots falling out of the air. Everything has black dust on it? Oh there must be a war on.

    • Flying microscopic drones are especially dangerous. They could be weaponized, so they just fly into your lungs and shred them.

      You can’t fight what you can’t see, and you can’t be using EMP guns indiscriminately, not when we depend on our cell phones and cars with electronic controls and IoT-based door locks.

      • Creating shielded cars is trivial, and largely done anyway especially when dealing with the very high frequencies you would use to attack microscopic drones.

        Creating shielded phones is obviously more of a challenge. But I think you could manage, especially with the above mentioned frequency thing. Otherwise you would need “energy shields” in a form that really did work, ie. zones of intense radiation producing a 3D barrier all around the borders of your house/city/nation.

        Iot door locks? You deserve to die.

        • LOL on door locks. I think I’d survive better than most, but the point is, our society is definitely dependent on electronics, so EMP guns or barriers definitely carry risks.

          One way to prevent the drone attack I mentioned would be wearing masks like the Japanese. But nanobots is still a scary thing, especially if it self-replicates and feeds on or destroys hydrocarbons, then how do we avoid the grey-goo future scenario? Having an off-site backup (space colony) still seems like a really good idea. It might explain Fermi’s paradox.

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