Future of Life Institute
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 12 months, 2018–2025
7:48 · 1.2M views · Nov 13, 2017
An 8-minute fictional short film, made by campaigners for a ban on autonomous weapons, depicting swarms of cheap AI-guided micro-drones used to kill targeted people. It ends with a call to action against autonomous weapons.
HN cites it whenever drone swarms or autonomous weapons come up, as a dramatized warning that now feels increasingly plausible.
12 comments from Hacker News
I'm surprised there's no mention of the short film "Slaughterbots" on this exact topic: this video It's very well done and has an HN vibe to it (with a dark twist, of course).
There is another slaughterbots video that's worth watching, this video There's also a real video by anduril industries about this not anymore fictional scenario [LINK]
I think it depends, right? If you have a small number of high cost, high impact UAVs, you will target infra and supply columns. If you happen to have a cargo plane full of cheap, mass produced head-popper slaughterbots which you can dump over a town, they will remove all the humans and leave you with intact buildings, vehicles, and infra. this video
Why require RF at all? An attacker could give the drone a location they know their target will be at and let the drone autonomously guide itself to the target. [This dramatization][^1] focuses on full autonomy, but I'd argue it applies just as much to the steps leading up to it. All the more reason to take this threat seriously now. [1]: this video
I know it is rather sensationalized, but how far off is this kind of technology? this video "Slaughterbots" posted in 2017. If I had to guess, I'd say that the tiny drones in this video still aren't capable of carrying the computational horsepower necessary for a lot of the activities portrayed. But...isn't it really a matter of time?