If I had to guess I’d imagine that it has to do with our good, so-old-fashioned-it’s-probably-genetic, fear of predators(the toothy kind, not the MQ-1).
Getting blown up is not a good thing, and in practice it can be abundantly horrific if it fails to kill you quickly(trapped under rubble and slowly dying of injuries or dehydration, suffocation following lung damage from thermobaric munitions, getting filled with shrapnel, having a limb or two torn off, etc.); but what happens inside a big explosion happens ‘off camera’ in a sense.
You see the explosion itself; but you don’t see inside it. Abstractly, it’s not hard to infer that anyone inside or nearby didn’t do so well; but you don’t see that. A robot swarm, by contrast, is immediately evocative of a pack of something predatory, searching, hunting, and (at least after the rev. A surveillance-only models are superseded), exterminating.
It’s perfectly conceivable that hunter-seeker deathbots will actually be less indiscriminate than explosives, and much better at killing just the guy with who is a biometric match, rather than leveling the building; but that won’t really diminish the ‘we are filling the area with gleaming metallic predators’ vibe.
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Actually, Achilles had two heels but only one was vulnerable.
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Yep. Shooting at the drones gives away your position, too. So unless you can develop an electronic countermeasure that can be carried by a person, your choices are lie low and hope they don’t see you, run away, or fire at them and wait for the Reaper or A-10 to show up.
Well, sure, but that’s still the ruling classes’ decision. It’s unclear to me whether your average peasant was terrified or thrilled at the prospect of a level military playing field. Or to what extent they were aware at all until someone conscripted them.
The 90s called, they want their music back.
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I believe we’ve reached the point in the existence of the US where the worst thing the most pessimistic among us can think of happening with military technology in the hands of civilians is probably not the absolute worst thing that will happen with military technology in the hands of civilians.
I don’t give a fuck what police believe about themselves, they are civilians. Public employees, at that.
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Incompetence coupled with extreme prejudice. Always a winning combination.
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Let’s make it 435 and start right now–never mind the existence of such swarms, we need to act before it’s too late!
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Depends. If you were 18 and the future looked like a lifetime of staring at an ox’s ass, the possibility of adventure didn’t necessarily seem too bad. We can still get teenagers to sign up to risk their lives for the elites, without even the promise of rape and plunder.
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Philip K. Dick predicted it a long time ago:
“The claws were bad enough in the first place—nasty, crawling little death-robots. But when they began to imitate their creators, it was time for the human race to make peace—if it could!”
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Yes
Absolutely terrifying in 1415
Like as hell itself in 672 AD.
And I won’t even get started on the effect of the scythed chariot .
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You release your own drones? Or dogs? Or the dogs who when they bark shoot drones from their mouths?
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