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Palmer Lucky exemplifies this terrifying phenomenon for me. Completely incapable of foreseeing the profound negative outcomes for all of us, just fixated on the tech and the challenges involved and the excitement of being on the cutting edge and being “patriotic”. It’s not even sociopathy, it’s like a complete blindness to the lives of others and the knock-on effects of their actions. The most pure, unadulterated naïvety it’s possible to achieve with a human genome, exploited and monetised by people who probably really are evil cunts. I’m sure Palmer’s lovely to talk to, not remorseless or sadistic, able to feel sadness on behalf of others, etc. Just physically incapable of taking his eyes off his job for long enough to notice anything else. I think this is why “evil tech guy” accusations don’t really land, because they know they’re not evil and so dismiss our concerns and just keep on truckin’ towards Armageddon. People like Musk and that twisted little moonfruit Peter Thiel are the ones I could comfortably execute in a ditch for the good of humanity, but Palmer Lucky would be too interested in the backhoe we used to dig his grave to realise he was about to die. It’d be like shooting a dog or something, no point, just rehome him and retrain him.
Who’s ready for… … … manhacks?!
You get a manhack, you get a manhack, everbody gets a manhack!!!
Ever watch that show Man tracker? It’ll be like that but with flying shaped charges
What about:
(+) “They fly now!”
???
Would you look at that. One more reason to fight to the death against anyone oppressing you.
The ICE situation in American befuddles me. They going to kill you anyway, FIGHT. Meh. Maybe that’s easy for me to say after hitting middle-age having lived an interesting life. 🤷🏼♂️
As a mechanical engineer it was horrifically saddening when I got a chance to talk with the smartest, highest achieving engineer in our cohort, ask him where he wanted to go when he graduated and he shrugged and said “I dunno, Raytheon or Boeing? Whatever pays the most haha.”
If this is you:
You are a bad person, you are evil. I sincerely hope there is a hell and you go there once you die. Murderer!I like to think I have a strong sense of moral justice, but let’s be real, if licking boot had a significant chance of paying off my debts, I’d do it and not lose much sleep about it.
Well those wedding parties aren’t going to drone bomb themselves!
Purdue helping the bad guys. I gotta be honest. I didn’t see this coming so soon.
hmmmmmmmmmm what’s that green box in the corner say? squints
Oh look another one…
Armed is not what you think it means. Its referring to the motors. Typically when you go to take off you have to arm the drone before you can use the motors. You press a button on your radio and then can lift off.
Target locked is 100% what it means though.
Have they considered using different terminology, like ‘activated’ or something instead…?
Jesus fucking christ, I had to go look cause I thought you were just being funny. Nope, clipped straight from the image itself wtf
Screamers is a great movie about autonomous killbots
I hate modern tech. When I was naiver I would see this project as incredibly cool and fascinating; I still think is very cool from a technical perspective. But knowing where and how it’ll be used, is just sad.
This is why we should be teaching the humanities to engineers from the beginning. We should be questioning what value these things can bring and how said tech can be used to do the opposite. Don’t just focus on the technical achievement, a flex of ego driven technique.
I’m not saying, don’t do something because it might have blow back but you have to weigh up the cost-benefit ratio.
Recently there was a demo of a drone that spins in place so that it looks like a faint smudge rather than, well a drone. Their justification was that it could be used to do wildlife watching without interference with the animals… almost everyone else saw this as a near invisible bomb.
Every day I see something new that makes me realize that there are too many in that field that do not think about these issues until it is too late. That they do not realize or do not care that their work will be leveraged into the next hell on earth until it is too late.
Alas this is nothing new, Wernher von Braun by Tom Lehrer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio
I don’t know how they were trying to observe the drone, but there are image processing techniques in the visible spectrum and signal processing techniques in the radar domain to detect rotating objects. Do you just mean a smudge to the naked eye?
Also it makes no sense how a rotating drone would be good for wildlife watching. Wouldn’t your sensor on the drone be rotating the whole time? That’s another step of processing to continuously correct for a rotating reference frame.
You can see it in action and yes the excuse was pretty weak. That said, this is at the stage that quad drones were in about 15-20 years ago. It might not be useful now but you can see the direction that are looking at.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7d42fAhAXs
Also having a rotational image corrected on a modern SOC is fairly trivial on the GPU, I could see having a specific ASIC on board would be able to do it even easier. The most difficult thing would be having to compensate for a rolling shutter or doing away with that all together.
I said it in a response further up, the technology of making the drone doesn’t have to be perfect it just needs to add enough burden to the opposition that it becomes another vector to correct for. And those that don’t do that will potentially end up being hit.
So, they hired some naive children to develop this SAD thing? Because otherwise, they might have a conscience to stop this shit.
Yep. Humans are REALLY good at making sci come to fruition
Seems they like the worst parts.
Isn’t this from Terminator: sarah Connor chronicles?
Eagle Eye (film) has an added level.
This will be used in terror attacks.
Ooh, movie idea: a take on The Most Dangerous Game where some rich dude uses an AI system to hunt humans for sport but the AI, being programmed to hunt something dangerous, determines that the rich dude is now the target because he’s the one setting the whole thing up. Tables are turned. Maybe the rich dude now finds himself in the trenches with the poor folks he’d captured?
Oh now that is a good film idea!
Your comment illustrates the difference between sci-fi and fantasy.
JurrasicThe Most Dangerous Park
In a timeline where the US war machine, among others, continues to function exactly like an infinite money glitch; we get to experience the privilege of watching an ever accelerating boom of brilliant innovations, all with the shared purpose of continuing to drive humanity backwards.
As it has ever been. Radar. GPS. Digital imagery. Friggin microwave ovens. All military-first inventions.
Digital imagery actually goes to NIST and I would consider it not military-first - https://www.nist.gov/mathematics-statistics/first-digital-image
I would say that NASA/space also brought about a lot of inventions, but space and military have tended to go hand in hand.
Yeah, people say that a lot. Then again, nobody knows the “what if” to compare it to. Like, how many brillant inventors were slaughtered in the trenches? What could’ve universities researched were they not bombed or shut down? I feel like we would’ve had crazy more cool inventions already ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
War is generally terrible for the advancement of theoretical science (because researchers get drafted & murdered, “pure” research budgets are diverted to the military) but great for the development of pre-existing theoretical science into new technology
The internet
I read an interesting article that said our current scifi dystopia trajectory is more along the lines of Philip K. Dick than Asimov or Huxley. If you haven’t seen screamers you might want to check it out. Basically there’s a war between a megacorporation and a union of scientists, so the scientists invent autonomous drones that kill everything with a heart beat and of course the drones become sentient.
So the resistance will have to move underground, literally.
I wonder how these things work when the target is still and camouflaged. I’m sure adding infrared would be trivial but infrared can be foiled by a tarp, I’m sure we could figure that out, a tarp with camouflage on one side seems pretty easy
I guess it is like most things. There is always a work around but what is the cost of said work around. Even if you can camouflage yourself from things like this, you still take on additional burden of having to address this.
They’re light weight optic models. You’re right that infrared and other wavelengths are trivial to train on but the compute becomes expensive and the combined battery + chips become very heavy for these drones that also need to carry an explosive payload AND remain nimble to function. Flying through a forest means rapidly adjusting course constantly for branches and whatnot.
We’ve had the technology to do this for over a decade. The reason we haven’t seen these in war yet is because they don’t work especially well and there are cheaper + better options.
I suspect that as SOC performance continues to improve, the power demands and AI complexity will eventually over come this. Yes, your phone can play subway surfers at 8K but that same chip could also end up on the receiving end of a drone.
I mean a Snapdragon X2 can give a lot of image processing performance for about 20watts of power draw. That same work load would have been 200-1000 watts a decade back, and power draw is still being reduced with larger ASIC designs.
