StratoEnergetics introduces new Slaughterbot autonomous weapon

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/11/15/stratoenergetics-introduces-ne.html

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We now need fire-alarm like emergency EMP devices in all buildings.

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Well I am convinced.

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  1. I think there was a similar episode of Black Mirror, only with hacked bee drones.

  2. While I don’t think we need autonomous drones for policing, especially those with weapons, ultimately I do think we will have a robotic police force. Something like the Tetraval design from Chappie. Instead of paramilitary type police because we don’t live in South Africa, they would be like normal cops. Only these cops won’t have racial biases, will be forced to follow the laws with respect to search and seizure, won’t unfairly profile people, won’t get scared or jumpy at a threat, will only use lethal force if it would save other people, could record 360 video of every event both as evidence but also as oversight.

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Wasn’t that an episode of Black Mirror?

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I am reminded of The End of Violence, though I can’t recall whether that involved strictly autonomous, as opposed to human-aimed, killing machines.

The spoof website is really slick, and the videos are great, but if they want to terrify us with the future of autonomous weaponry they should have at least one “product” that isn’t defeated by a (Kevlar?) mosquito net.

IMG_3167

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I was participating in a project on autonomous plant pollinating UAV’s (I did mostly electronics and low level software). In my opinion machines like those presented in the video are entirely doable right now, with current off the shelf electronics. With current state of Monocular Simultaneous Location and Mapping(SLAM) algorithms, cell-phone System on Chip with single camera will be enough.

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This idea has been around since early Bush. No less scary. Tech marches on & we definitely should prohibit these things but what good will laws do against the next Reich? More deadly power held by a short chain of command means less chance for conscientious objection.

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“Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.”

Might want to get a more grown-up sounding name. That sort of thing is not going to help being taken seriously other than by people you move away from on the subway at three in the morning.

Sounding like a paranoid space case or a plot scenario in Futurama was not a wise idea.

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Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons warned us of this decades ago!

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I am loving this sci fi future, where the only people who can defend themselves are tennis players and trout fishermen.

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They’ll have the biases built into them by policing assumptions.

Nope - don’t want.

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Flesh and blood cops can’t be hacked by 4chan. You’d be amazed how good this feature is.

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A bit late for that, my friend.

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The scary part is this tech may actually already exist.

Self-forging projectile is not new. And there are talks about deploying them in battlefield drones, with anti-armor self-forging projectiles, popped from a cruise missile over an enemy armor formation, with each, sharing swam intelligence, pick their own targets. A couple of these and enemy formation of armor is toast. If you need serious interdiction of an area, imagine a stealth loitering drone dropping one of these targeting any car or larger vehicles in the area.

It’s not hard to imagine the same shrunk down to the self-forging projectile closer to a .22, on a drone size a hardback book (not counting the rotor arms)

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Just reading Gibson’s "peripheral"at the moment with personalised swarm weapons - nanobots that tear through you