I would love to find a fundamental flaw in this reasoning, but I can't. It was, I guess, naïve to not expect exponential technological progress not to reflect in the political structures. The world is changing, and changing very quickly.
The article doesn't get much into what can be the next step - fully autonomous drones that travel by night, charge by day, and find a target by themselves. A bit like landmines, with a shorter half-life, but highly mobile and intelligent enough.
consumer451 · 5h ago
Technology advancing faster than society has always seemed like the most likely "great filter" to me.
The recent advancements in the normalization of hate and suffering, while tech keeps advancing, makes me feel like I have Cassandra Syndrome, aka, I feel like I am taking crazy pills.
ddq · 4h ago
Yes, a lot of us feel the same way. It's clear to me the next step is for us to start coming together, grouping up and sharing our ideas. I read on the internet every single day people expressing these feelings and for some reason we remain impotent and helpless when we could be uniting and inventing. Where is the will? I can only hope it's simply happening outside the scope of my vision. But it really needs to be happening faster.
We are coming face to face with the concept of exponential growth itself. Humanity versus the feedback loop. And it will take coordinated genius to best such a naturally powerful foe.
consumer451 · 2h ago
> Where is the will?
The memory of what happens when hate takes control died, literally. The people who survived WWII are mostly gone. Now, without their knowledge, without their shame, we are swinging back to the other side.
My concern is that the swing happens to go the wrong way, at the same time that we happen to have an incredibly asymmetric ability to destroy each other.
We might be 1 or 5 swings away from that being a truly end-of-times situation. At this point, that seems to me like it would be when a pissed off kid, whose parents were killed as "collateral damage," could create a novel pathogen with only a $10k lab.
If tech and hate keeps advancing at the current rate, what is that, 100 years max? We really need to get our shit together.
snickerbockers · 10h ago
He failed to consider that small actors won't have a monopoly on drones. The best counter is for the defending authority to have even more drones on constant patrol looking out for any drones that don't satisfy whatever the criteria is for a "good drone". This brings its own host of problems because the people have to become accustomed to constantly being surveilled by a swarm of government drones with the ability to assassinate anybody at any moment and nobody to hold criminally accountable, but my point is that this technology is available to the defenders too.
ffsm8 · 10h ago
I am not sure if you realize how hopelessly impossible that is.
You're aware that the (to my knowledge, which is entirely based on documentaries) primary way drugs are shipped to the USA are drones nowadays? Some via air, some underwater etc
There is just to much area and drones are tiny. It's infeasible to track them without spending insane amounts of money (and creating a total surveillance state as a by-product)
snickerbockers · 9h ago
>I am not sure if you realize how hopelessly impossible that is.
It's not impossible if it's predominantly automated. You have swarms of "police drones" on patrol actively scanning for other drones and when they see one that they don't like (some sort of signed certificate that authenticates the owner and their license) they shoot it down. It works as long as the "police drones" are plentiful and well dispersed to the point of maintaining dominance.
>and creating a total surveillance state as a by-product
that's what i meant when i said this brings its own host of problems. My point's not that our way of life will continue unabated my point is that this particular force multiplier goes both ways, and the defense will be a sort of "drone police corps". The biggest problems will be whatever happens outside of the "margin of error" (ie accidentally shooting down the wrong drones, civilians caught in crossfire, people hurt by falling debris) and the general end of any notion of privacy (not that America isn't already going in that direction anyways).
trod1234 · 9h ago
This concept's conclusion is fully sketched out in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age.
snickerbockers · 9h ago
I guess I'll have to check that one out. I read Snow Crash a decade ago and it's one of my favorite books ever written but I never read anything else he wrote because (from what i understand looking at reviews and plot synopses) it's not all bizarre cyberpunk "not-quite-parody but also not-entirely-serious" like Snow Crash.
LargoLasskhyfv · 8h ago
Do so! It's great.
rightbyte · 9h ago
In theory I guess the anti-drone drones could be armed with non-lethal things like nets or balls or whatever.
trod1234 · 9h ago
Agreed. This is the most likely outcome of this, and it won't be regular drones it will be a race to toner wars from Neal Stephenson's "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer."
Floating clouds of molecular drones ever-present designed to destroy other unauthorized drones, and that technology will enable the long walk on a short pier for those that violate phyle rules. Cookie cutters.
Gigachad · 5h ago
Feel like there is something comforting that the state of things hasn’t been bigger bombs, more destruction, and more harm, but instead became highly targeted attacks that massively cripple a countries military infrastructure with almost no harm to anyone else.
spwa4 · 8h ago
Well, how about this: there is a lot of knowledge that if it were publicly available in a useful form, could do incredible amounts of damage. From viral DNA/RNA sequences to the exact procedure to get a fission cascade. The exact chemical formula to a lot of different nasty concoctions, or in some cases just the fact that particular things even exist (e.g. you don't need radioactive material to create radiation poisoning ... even mass radiation poisoning)
Advanced knowledge has only once been used in a terror attack, and not very effectively.
These types of drone would need to collect a lot of not-so-easy-to-get knowledge. You'd need weapons, mechanical design, electronic fuses ... but mostly an AI good enough to make decisions on their own. And frankly, with good AI you could do a lot more damage than this without ever killing anyone.
walrus01 · 11h ago
How would they charge? The watt hours needed to fly a medium sized VTOL uav of any type for any reasonable amount of time can't be collected by the size of pv panel that can be reasonably carried by the same craft. Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot.
ben_w · 10h ago
> The watt hours needed to fly a medium sized VTOL uav of any type for any reasonable amount of time can't be collected by the size of pv panel that can be reasonably carried by the same craft.
Drones aren't limited to quadcopters.
> Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot.
So do that?
Humans are persistance predators, or so I'm told. We didn't domesticate horses by running faster than them, but by because they had to rest, and when they stopped we'd catch up, and then they'd run again, a cycle that repeated until they couldn't run any more.
But these days, we humans are no longer nomadic: we live in predictable homes, and most of us who work do so at predictable locations.
A drone that takes a year to get to one of us? We could outrace it, or shoot it down… but only if we know it's there.
rbanffy · 9h ago
> A drone that takes a year to get to one of us? We could outrace it, or shoot it down… but only if we know it's there.
As someone in the IRA once told Margaret Thatcher, "We only need to be lucky once. You need to be lucky every time".
eszed · 11h ago
> sits still for a week
Why would that be an issue? Planners have to think further ahead, but the threat is only marginally decreased.
ldom22 · 11h ago
So called “vampire drones” have the capacity to identify electrical transmission lines and leech off them
rcruzeiro · 10h ago
This is still speculative tech, no?
rbanffy · 9h ago
I bet it won't by next month or so.
namrog84 · 11h ago
What about those drones that charge via power lines?
You can have other drones swap in fully charged batteries when needed.
hackernewds · 11h ago
they don't need to be constantly flying. as long as work is not done, there isn't much energy being burned. and most of the energy burned is not with the rotors
walrus01 · 11h ago
If you mean something that is put in place with a full charge and just uses PV to trickle charge keep itself awake and alive, sure. I was thinking a scenario where something is dropped off, flies 10-15 minutes and lands somewhere to await a target. It would need many days to charge before it could fly again for ten minutes.
snickerdoodle12 · 11h ago
Drop a charging pad on a roof somewhere
mcphage · 11h ago
> Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot.
Isn’t that the answer to your question, then?
walrus01 · 11h ago
Kind of, but it seems such things would be obvious and exposed to being easily located if just sitting around idle in sunlight collecting charge. Not exactly like a landmine.
snickerdoodle12 · 11h ago
A drone sitting on a roof where no one ever goes isn't exactly obvious
dotancohen · 10h ago
Will militaries or civilian operators soon operate fleets of drones that scan rooftops and other exposed sunny locations for charging drones?
ben_w · 10h ago
Even if they do, can still be camouflaged as e.g. a bunch of leaves, or other detritus.
dotancohen · 9h ago
Sounds like an arms race to me.
In any case, the solar cells should still be visible.
spwa4 · 8h ago
(solar cells can be non-reflective black, the reflectivity is just to double-dip the suns rays)
beefnugs · 10h ago
power lines are AC, same tech as wireless phone charging, you just need to coil wires properly
ben_w · 10h ago
Not usefully like wireless charging, but also there are easier ways such as touching the exposed wire.
rbanffy · 9h ago
Tram lines could be a target.
idiotsecant · 11h ago
Charging isn't needed or even very helpful. It's a million times easier, cheaper, and more efficient to just drop a few cheap drones in areas your target might go, then have someone monitoring remotely activate them at the appropriate time.
NewJazz · 11h ago
Dropping the drones is an opportunity for surveillance to catch you via license plate, gait, et cetera.
ben_w · 10h ago
The range of even an inefficient quadcopter drone being what it is, if your target is somewhere in San Diego then "in the area" of your target includes bits of Mexico.
(For competently designed fixed-wing drones, Canada is "in the area" of San Diego).
justsomehnguy · 10h ago
Drone dropping drone doesn't have a license plate nor gait.
idiotsecant · 7h ago
Ok, I guess I will drop it in some unimportant ditch 20 miles away at 1am on a nondescript stolen bicycle. That cost me about 1% of the cost of this hypothetical recharging hunter-killer terminator.
madaxe_again · 11h ago
The reasoning is sound, but incomplete.
The reality is that a majority of people are simply too lazy to do this stuff. We are talking about populations that call a guy to come change a lightbulb - rigging a drone with explosives, figuring out control at a distance - this is beyond the scope of capability for the majority of malcontents. Most would-be pipe bombers end up nabbed at the point where they try to purchase a charge for their devices. Same deal here. Yes, there’s scope for a small number of bad actors to wreak havoc, but the thing about small numbers is that they are readily dealt with through existing law enforcement frameworks.
On a state level, war is war, and arms races are never static. You send flotillas of drones? I manufacture flotillas of counter-drone drones.
Yes, there is an asymmetry currently, but just as air supremacy was once seen as “well, this makes war practically impossible”, and became just another battleground, the same will happen here.
glitchc · 11h ago
It only takes a few dedicated true believers to fundamentally change how society works. 9/11 only happened once.
rbanffy · 9h ago
I often have to point out they won. They wanted to change the US, and the country is, today, almost unrecognizable. Patriot Act, FISA courts, and now illegal deportations and an alliance with Russia at the top level.
madaxe_again · 8h ago
The US wanted to change. PNAC spelled out almost all of what happened after 9/11, before 9/11, and it was a gift to the security industrial complex hawks. They literally said in their report that a Pearl Harbor type event would likely be necessary:
“Further, the process of transformation… is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
FridayoLeary · 10h ago
You put that quite bluntly but i agree with you. Just look at all the dumb mistakes would be terrorists make. If drone warfare was so easy then hamas - a (once) decently competent militant organisation would be using it as a great equaliser against israeli troops. The truth is that besides for on october 7 when they were used extremely effectively they have been absent. Israeli troops on the other hand are all using them for surveillance. It looks like only states have the abilities to maintain drone tactics.
FerretFred · 11h ago
Maybe this is one reason why in the US and latterly in the UK, the authorities are scrambling to introduce remote ID for drones with 249gm flying weight upwards: this includes operator/pilot ID. No doubt there'll eventually be some sort of AI-assisted pattern recognition/prediction that'll enable pre-emptive prediction of attacks.
skavi · 11h ago
It’s fairly simple to build your own quadcopter.
snickerdoodle12 · 11h ago
Even simpler to buy a drone and replace the electronics
skavi · 6h ago
I would not expect that to be simpler. Working within that was designed as an integrated system sounds more annoying than putting together components that are intended to be used in DIY quadcopters.
FerretFred · 11h ago
It is, but if you're in a hurry and not bothered about the consequences just nip down to your local store and get one off the shelf.
therein · 11h ago
Yeah RemoteID is absolutely stupid. Legislators acting like only DJI makes drones.
FridayoLeary · 10h ago
The truth is most domestic terrorists don't stand out for their intellect. State aided terror cells or a large organisation might be able to pull that off, but i don't think some random jihadist would think of it. Off the shelf drones get geoblocked.
The possibilities of drone warfare is terrifying, but imo the author is overstating the danger that they pose in the hands of domestic terrorists.
theamk · 11h ago
.. and if it does not have remote ID, in the future it might be shot on sight by an automatic system.
ponector · 11h ago
Firearms all have unique ID, but it is relatively easy to get one on black market for illegal use.
nradov · 10h ago
It's also possible to craft build certain types of small arms in home workshops without serial numbers. People have been doing this for centuries but the necessary tools have become cheaper and easier to use in recent years.
directevolve · 10h ago
Counterpoints and questions:
- Non-wired drones can be jammed. It’s early days for building defenses against these attacks.
- Non-state actors have far less access to the sophisticated intelligence needed to strike hard targets or secure against counter strikes.
- Setting up hidden bombs for remote detonation on soft targets, like the freeway, has been possible, no need for drones. What other factors have been preventing these types of attacks? How do drones change those factors?
If America was hunting Osama bin Laden today, I bet we’d have used a drone to kill him rather than sending in special forces. Likewise, if I was a cartel in the jungle or rebel force in the mountains, I’d be damned scared of the military or police coming after me with an endless wave of drones.
spwa4 · 8h ago
> Non-wired drones can be jammed. It’s early days for building defenses against these attacks.
AI drones can't be jammed. And I wouldn't count on terrorists having qualms about how unethical this would be.
directevolve · 4h ago
True, but then terrorists need to have access to AI bombs, drones and AI targeting systems.
thomassmith65 · 11h ago
This scenario might play out, but if it does, it will be a temporary phase.
What will bring it to an end will be a panopticon: video surveillance everywhere, stronger anti-encryption laws, AI monitoring the whole lot.
I'm not an activist with an agenda here; it's just that there's an upper limit to how much drone terrorism a society will tolerate.
intended · 11h ago
This is addressed in the article - its a core point.
Everything you described is the friction which societies will endure to stop these threats.
This friction will slow down our global economy, and break the world we have known entirely.
Which is why the article ends on:
> The future will be more like the past.
> As the scale of effective communication, transportation, maintenance, and influence recedes, society will become more human and more personal, with weaker and multifarious institutions.
> The collapsing institutional monopoly on violence will yield a renewal of local and personal violence, and a very messy working-out of a hierarchy suited to the new conditions.
> Anyway, it’s a great time to make friends.
I will say, that over time we have found ways to beat even the most distributed of systems. Napster and piracy come to mind.
MichaelZuo · 10h ago
Why would it be distributed?
Increasingly effective surveillance propels increasingly effective centralization throughout the entirety of human history.
thrance · 6h ago
Doubt that would help much, what may happen though is a ban an all drones. Firearms are banned in most of Europe and you don't see them that often.
logicchains · 10h ago
>there's an upper limit to how much drone terrorism a society will tolerate.
There's an upper limit to how much authoritarianism a society can tolerate. Automated weaponry becoming cheaper and cheaper as technology progresses will eventually lead to a wave of decentralisation in society, because offense is much cheaper than defense, so wannabe tyrants will have a harder and harder time maintaining their own safety.
No comments yet
darquomiahw · 11h ago
>What would you restrict, if you wanted to prevent any other actor from building drones? Batteries? Rotors? 3D printers? $17 Raspberry Pis?
Explosives and fuzing mechanisms, which are already regulated in many countries.
arrowsmith · 10h ago
And yet terrorists and other bad actors have still been able to build bombs despite the regulations.
ckemere · 9h ago
Explosives have to be manufactured, and most require precursors that are hard to come by. More broadly, perhaps the historic argument that we should care about, eg Somalia, because failed states can enable chaos that crosses borders becomes more true???
(*edit - I mean by hosting factories for illicit materials!)
imaginationra · 11h ago
Re: crypto and this "The collapsing institutional monopoly on violence will yield a renewal of local and personal violence, and a very messy working-out of a hierarchy suited to the new conditions."
If prediction markets come to act as proof of life oracles- which they already have in a few cases- things get very dark very fast for everyone I reckon.
skrebbel · 11h ago
I feel like you condensed multiple paragraphs worth of thought into 2 sentences and I simply can't follow at all. Would you care to write it out in more detail?
mumbisChungo · 11h ago
I am guessing the idea is ubiquity of prediction markets -> there's a prediction market for the liveness of everyone/anyone -> financial incentive to kill anyone
combined with the idea of the proliferation of local/personal violence
imaginationra · 11h ago
Something like that- I'm an artist/creative and was working on a (Black mirrorish)story years back about this, thats were the thought comes from- a related ransom system would also be built into it- would create an offshoot of Defi known as DeathFi.
qiine · 10h ago
holysh*t this is grim
OgsyedIE · 11h ago
You aren't seriously suggesting that people will take out prediction market bets on people's death dates and then commit murder to rig the bet? How would a prediction market on anybody's death date get enough liquidity for this strategy to ever come close to breaking even?
imaginationra · 11h ago
They've already used prediction markets to bet on peoples death as in the case of Sinwar from Hamas. It seems like all the pieces are there and moving into place- I'm just an artist/creative imagining things though(shrug)
arrowsmith · 10h ago
It would be one way to hire a hitman. A "bet" on the prediction market would effectively function as a bounty on the target's head.
E.g. "I bet $1,000,000 of BTC that [politician] won't be assassinated before the end of 2025. Anyone want to prove me wrong?"
That was effectively the idea behind the "Assassination Market" site that popped up in the early days of Bitcoin [0]. Obviously that was just some stupid fantasy site made by some libertarian crypto weirdo that never led to anything real. (As far as I'm aware, no-one has yet assassinated Barack Obama.) But there's a first time for everything.
Things get very dark in few dozen years anyway - see established mainstream science about global warming. We know and ignore this because it's unpleasant and if we take it seriously it cuts the short term profits.
Instead we worry about things that are more sexy and less inevitable.
wellthisisgreat · 11h ago
> If prediction markets come to act as proof of life oracles- which they already have in a few cases- things get very dark very fast for everyone I reckon
so second coming of Jesus is on the books?
can't wait.
chrisweekly · 11h ago
The linked blog post is interesting, plausible / rational, and scary. Curious if HN'ers have insights about its pov and/or the "exitgroup" per se.
hooverd · 11h ago
Well, they seem concerned about "gay race communism" and want an "urban Reconquista" maybe just garden variety wignats?
thomassmith65 · 10h ago
Oh dear. I wonder if the author splurged on a fancy bunker, and now fantasizes of scenarios that would justify the expense.
mosura · 11h ago
One of the potential great filters is the absorption of all resources available to a civilization by a drone program intended to counter the drone program of a rival civilization.
Historically nuclear arms used to be thought of as creating a hostage type scenario, where you can think of major cities of nuclear powers held hostage by their opponents. This is ok as long as the rival nuclear powers remain large and few in number such that their desires for your compliance do not contradict those of another nuclear power. The drone problem is going to become a variant of the “everyone has nukes now” except drones are so much harder to detect in idle states.
Companies selling what they claim are solutions to this stand to print money, but it is not clear how it can really be done.
jonplackett · 11h ago
But there’s not the same mutually assured destruction to keep it in check. Culpability is very different. How do you know who launched a drone? It can also be scaled up or down in a way nukes can’t. And it could also be much more sudden and precise in a way nukes can’t.
c22 · 10h ago
By rolling back your continuous aerial surveillance tape.
dotancohen · 10h ago
Add in the fact that any small rogue actor could build and operate a drone or even a fleet, and the calculus changes quickly.
cakealert · 11h ago
Would you need to harden individual targets if you design and deploy a defensive drone swarm that is always patrolling?
It will successfully mitigate the cheap flying drone threat as long as they aren't launched close to the target. There will probably not be any more birds in human territory however since discriminating will be counter productive anyway, hostile drones will seek to impersonate birds otherwise.
jonplackett · 11h ago
It’s the same problem as air Defense now though isn’t it - asymmetry.
If you have 100 drones you can just launch them all at one critical thing.
If you want to defend one critical thing from 100 drones, you might need 200 drones protecting it.
And you also have to have 200 for every other critical thing.
And even if you do do that, they just need 150 drones.
cakealert · 11h ago
Current air defense approaches rely on non-reusable drones: missiles with rocket fuel.
With reusable drones you can deploy expensive defensive drone swarms at scale. For example: radar drones, ramming drones, gun drones, etc.
I don't see how long range single drones will be a meaningful threat in such a setup, even stealth drones will not be able to maintain stealth against multiple radar drones from different angles. The skies will belong to drone swarms.
intended · 10h ago
Current air defenses depend on being able to make weaker players give up on their ideas of even trying to attack bigger players.
The point being made here is that you can now have cheap attacks on boring targets, without having to risk any humans at all.
And by boring targets, they're talking about things like roads, or bridges and overpasses - ways to slow the global economy to a crawl, and to force nations into blowing their resources on defending everything.
> "What the Russians can’t do is harden every mile of highway, every bridge, every dam. Neither can the United States, and — critically — neither can the Chinese."
cakealert · 10h ago
The reason you would carry such an attack by drone is to escape attribution (and thus elimination/arrest), this becomes harder if you must launch the drone in close proximity to the target to evade a patrolling defensive drone swarm.
You will most likely require a ground drone with high explosives or launching an air attack drone, which will become an expensive complex operation. Mitigating the threat of cheap drones.
intended · 10h ago
I think that isn't the reason. The article says:
> But the threat of soft-target suicide terrorism never came to much, because a suicide bomber is a targeting system with an ego.
stating that many targets which would have truly been disastrous if hit, were ignored because the attackers wanted to satiate their egos or narrative, by hitting landmarks / high profile symbolic sites.
cakealert · 10h ago
A drone operator that is caught soon after an attack doesn't differ much from a suicide bomber that removes himself from the world during his attack.
jonplackett · 8h ago
Really? There's a pretty massive difference in that one definitely dies, and can only do one mission. The other could control 100s of drones and also believe they won't die.
arrowsmith · 9h ago
No, the reason you would carry such an attack by drone is because drones are cheap and accessible, in a way that simply didn't exist ten years ago.
jonplackett · 11h ago
You still have to protect everywhere though. That’s the asymmetry I mean. All the adversary needs to do is work out how to overwhelm whatever you’ve got.
Also, frankly the idea of having that many drones flying around the whole country is probably just as terrifying as an actual drone attack. Who is going to be in charge of those ‘defensive’ drones?
orbital-decay · 9h ago
Terrorbots look like a ton of other cyberpunk predictions which never really materialized. I think the most recent one was that crypto + anonymity would enable easy assassination bounties and cause a wave of contract killings. Yes, I know the article argues that drones could eliminate the human factor, but it's not convincing and still puts the cart before the horse, just like a lot of the commenters in this thread.
One rule about "infinite scaling" predictions is that the real world always messes them up. Warfare has changed, that's true. The rest of the life is not so easy to change, and (useful) drones are harder to build than it looks.
4ndrewl · 11h ago
Yes, drones, but how is this much different in terms of strategy than packing a van with explosives like the IRA were doing in Britain in 80s/90s?
Two differences. (1) You can do more targeted attacks. The furthest IRA got was usually to park a van in front of a building. With drones, you can target individuals, cars, planes, etc, even when they are physically separated from public spaces. (2) Since you can do targeted attacks, you don't need that much explosives. This makes you harder to identify and track. Breivik had to buy a farm to have access to the amount of fertilizer he wanted to use.
intended · 10h ago
Its covered in the article - they can target infrastructure nodes that were previously too boring to even consider.
The threat envelope has become everything.
jonplackett · 11h ago
There’s a reason Ukraine didn’t just drive a van right up to those bombers
ponector · 10h ago
But they did run semi truck with tons of explosive fertilizer on the Crimea bridge.
jonplackett · 8h ago
Which did not destroy the bridge.
bambax · 10h ago
> In a hyper-mobile, distributed global economy, you can destroy billions of dollars in value just by reducing the speed at which goods and people can securely travel.
Maybe, but the goal of terrorism isn't to destroy "value", whatever that is. It's to create fear and unrest and make life miserable for the people in the target country. "Economic disruption" doesn't do that. It doesn't actually do anything.
Also, drones are not needed for any of this, or suicide bombers. It's trivial to leave a suitcase on a train or in the subway and cause hundreds of deaths and extreme mayhem. (Not trivial to make a bomb to fit that suitcase, but not very hard.)
My theory of why it almost never happens is, there are actually very few terrorists.
It's telling that the examples in the post are not from individual terrorists but from states.
arrowsmith · 9h ago
> There are actually very few terrorists.
The UK security services reportedly have 43,000 terror suspects on their watchlist. [0] And they still haven't managed to prevent every terror attack in recent years.
A single long-distance drone can be easily defended by a tiny drone that only has to intercept it.
All things being equal, the advantage belongs to the defender, with a significant caveat: the defender must be aware of the risk and deploy defensive drones in advance.
jopsen · 10h ago
If the world reverses away from larges states that control violence at scale, the industrial base that makes computers, social media, crypto and drones possible will simply disappear.
Technology with globalization might be possible (I'm not entirely sure), technology we have today without organized states, not happening.
CamperBob2 · 7h ago
I wonder if that's true. Suppose Bejiing vanished tomorrow in a puff of smoke. Would anyone in Shenzhen care? Ditto, Washington DC and San Francisco.
In the parlance of our times, city-states may be all you need.
andruby · 10h ago
What's the state of "automated" drone defense systems that fire a laser at the drone?
intended · 10h ago
God, yet another grim future.
I won't call this a counter point, since what is argued is plausible, if not likely.
What I will make a comparison to piracy back in the MP3 era. It really seemed like it would be impossible to stop it, and then came the RIAA, MPAA. Eventually governments managed to figure out the internet and how to deal with the small and nimble upstarts.
But better still, (or less grim) is Netflix - when actual alternatives to piracy existed, people were more than happy to follow them.
(Of course that era didn't last for long, but we'll mark that as the utilty limit of the comparison)
CamperBob2 · 7h ago
It really seemed like it would be impossible to stop it, and then came the RIAA, MPAA.
No, then came Pandora and Spotify and YouTube. Nobody bothers pirating music these days because there's no point.
walrus01 · 11h ago
> Likewise, a drone factory is as vulnerable to drone attack as any other big, static, expensive piece of defense infrastructure.
It's really not, the Ukrainians have geographically distributed assembly and testing, QC of quadcopters in the ten to fifteen inch propeller size class in many random and hard to find locations. A shitload of them can be assembled by a team of ten people working in a 2000 sq ft workshop in an apartment building basement.
Large drone factories like something that can crank out shahed 136 size uav? Or like what the US mil calls a group 3 uav? Or group 4 sized? Sure, agreed, different thing.
I agree with a lot of the points the author makes in this article but I question if they've ever assembled a 12" prop size quadcopter (large enough to carry a good sized amount of munition on a 10-15 minute one way trip) from components. It's something easy to distribute as a cottage industry.
intended · 10h ago
I believe the author agrees with this, since a few sentences later they state:
> But drone technology is too cheap, too modular, and with too many useful civilian applications for the big players to control their manufacture.
>What would you restrict, if you wanted to prevent any other actor from building drones? Batteries? Rotors? 3D printers? $17 Raspberry Pis?
Theres definitely a recognition of how cheap and easy it is.
ponector · 10h ago
Even better, there is a program where everyone can buy components, assemble the FPV drone at home and send to the special QC unit. There it is tested and sent to the frontline.
qiine · 10h ago
wow, this is crazy
ajuc · 11h ago
Most of the work is in making electronics, batteries and engines. All requires typical long supply chains and big factories.
Assembly is a very small part of the job.
Currently there's no shortage of the components, but we could imagine a strict trade controls of the components, some cold war deglobalization scenario or even a WW3. Without CPUs there's no drones.
tonyhart7 · 11h ago
"a strict trade controls of the components"
how can you restrict such manufacturing tho??? I mean you literally cant block off an entire chinnese industry can you?
ajuc · 10h ago
You can drone-bomb the factory and ban ASML from sending the next set of matrices to rebuilt it.
That's just one scenario, there's others. The supply chains are REALLY long and touch basically every important country on Earth and quite a few unimportant ones.
tonyhart7 · 8h ago
Yeah that mean they can't, you act like Western did not do that to russia already
walrus01 · 11h ago
Finding and bombing the factory that turns out stm32h7 microcontrollers for hobby grade uav running betaflight seems like it would have a lot of unintended consequences.
ajuc · 11h ago
Wars and wide-spread terrosism tend to have unintended consequences, yes.
Teever · 3h ago
Why would this article get flagged?
therein · 11h ago
Looks interesting. I have quite a lot of domain expertise but taking you to a 99$ membership fee payment page right after filling the form leaves a bad taste.
I hope ExitGroup.US doesn't think they are the first group to have this kind of collective.
hooverd · 11h ago
seems like wignat militia prepper shit but for people who sell b2b saas
johnea · 7h ago
So, drone strike bombings are totally on topic, but US wing nut assassins shooting politicians, DHS tackling senators and arresting mayors, and the marines deployed to US cities, is all flagged out of existence.
It's been made quite clear, that HN is fundamentally a right wing-nut controlled forum.
I think there are a lot of woke-nut people in the mix as well, maybe even an equal amount, but the wing-nut mode of the highly bimodal distribution just flags anything that demonstrates that we've elected a criminal to the office of US president. Whereas the woke-nut mode is tolerant of allowing discussion to carry on, even on topics they don't agree with.
I guess it was to be expected, given the vulture capital origins of the platform...
xnx · 11h ago
What does the "2A" crowd think of homing bullets (drones) that have a range of miles and can be delivered anonymously.
Is this what he founding fathers were thinking of when they wrote the Bill of Rights?
TimorousBestie · 11h ago
Did you mean the Second Amendment?
lenerdenator · 11h ago
If you mean second amendment, well, right now I'm just as afraid of the US government having these as I am some doomsday cult leader, so shrugs
The article doesn't get much into what can be the next step - fully autonomous drones that travel by night, charge by day, and find a target by themselves. A bit like landmines, with a shorter half-life, but highly mobile and intelligent enough.
The recent advancements in the normalization of hate and suffering, while tech keeps advancing, makes me feel like I have Cassandra Syndrome, aka, I feel like I am taking crazy pills.
We are coming face to face with the concept of exponential growth itself. Humanity versus the feedback loop. And it will take coordinated genius to best such a naturally powerful foe.
The memory of what happens when hate takes control died, literally. The people who survived WWII are mostly gone. Now, without their knowledge, without their shame, we are swinging back to the other side.
My concern is that the swing happens to go the wrong way, at the same time that we happen to have an incredibly asymmetric ability to destroy each other.
We might be 1 or 5 swings away from that being a truly end-of-times situation. At this point, that seems to me like it would be when a pissed off kid, whose parents were killed as "collateral damage," could create a novel pathogen with only a $10k lab.
If tech and hate keeps advancing at the current rate, what is that, 100 years max? We really need to get our shit together.
You're aware that the (to my knowledge, which is entirely based on documentaries) primary way drugs are shipped to the USA are drones nowadays? Some via air, some underwater etc
There is just to much area and drones are tiny. It's infeasible to track them without spending insane amounts of money (and creating a total surveillance state as a by-product)
It's not impossible if it's predominantly automated. You have swarms of "police drones" on patrol actively scanning for other drones and when they see one that they don't like (some sort of signed certificate that authenticates the owner and their license) they shoot it down. It works as long as the "police drones" are plentiful and well dispersed to the point of maintaining dominance.
>and creating a total surveillance state as a by-product
that's what i meant when i said this brings its own host of problems. My point's not that our way of life will continue unabated my point is that this particular force multiplier goes both ways, and the defense will be a sort of "drone police corps". The biggest problems will be whatever happens outside of the "margin of error" (ie accidentally shooting down the wrong drones, civilians caught in crossfire, people hurt by falling debris) and the general end of any notion of privacy (not that America isn't already going in that direction anyways).
Floating clouds of molecular drones ever-present designed to destroy other unauthorized drones, and that technology will enable the long walk on a short pier for those that violate phyle rules. Cookie cutters.
Advanced knowledge has only once been used in a terror attack, and not very effectively.
These types of drone would need to collect a lot of not-so-easy-to-get knowledge. You'd need weapons, mechanical design, electronic fuses ... but mostly an AI good enough to make decisions on their own. And frankly, with good AI you could do a lot more damage than this without ever killing anyone.
Drones aren't limited to quadcopters.
> Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot.
So do that?
Humans are persistance predators, or so I'm told. We didn't domesticate horses by running faster than them, but by because they had to rest, and when they stopped we'd catch up, and then they'd run again, a cycle that repeated until they couldn't run any more.
But these days, we humans are no longer nomadic: we live in predictable homes, and most of us who work do so at predictable locations.
A drone that takes a year to get to one of us? We could outrace it, or shoot it down… but only if we know it's there.
As someone in the IRA once told Margaret Thatcher, "We only need to be lucky once. You need to be lucky every time".
Why would that be an issue? Planners have to think further ahead, but the threat is only marginally decreased.
Isn’t that the answer to your question, then?
In any case, the solar cells should still be visible.
(For competently designed fixed-wing drones, Canada is "in the area" of San Diego).
The reality is that a majority of people are simply too lazy to do this stuff. We are talking about populations that call a guy to come change a lightbulb - rigging a drone with explosives, figuring out control at a distance - this is beyond the scope of capability for the majority of malcontents. Most would-be pipe bombers end up nabbed at the point where they try to purchase a charge for their devices. Same deal here. Yes, there’s scope for a small number of bad actors to wreak havoc, but the thing about small numbers is that they are readily dealt with through existing law enforcement frameworks.
On a state level, war is war, and arms races are never static. You send flotillas of drones? I manufacture flotillas of counter-drone drones.
Yes, there is an asymmetry currently, but just as air supremacy was once seen as “well, this makes war practically impossible”, and became just another battleground, the same will happen here.
“Further, the process of transformation… is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
The possibilities of drone warfare is terrifying, but imo the author is overstating the danger that they pose in the hands of domestic terrorists.
- Non-wired drones can be jammed. It’s early days for building defenses against these attacks.
- Non-state actors have far less access to the sophisticated intelligence needed to strike hard targets or secure against counter strikes.
- Setting up hidden bombs for remote detonation on soft targets, like the freeway, has been possible, no need for drones. What other factors have been preventing these types of attacks? How do drones change those factors?
If America was hunting Osama bin Laden today, I bet we’d have used a drone to kill him rather than sending in special forces. Likewise, if I was a cartel in the jungle or rebel force in the mountains, I’d be damned scared of the military or police coming after me with an endless wave of drones.
AI drones can't be jammed. And I wouldn't count on terrorists having qualms about how unethical this would be.
What will bring it to an end will be a panopticon: video surveillance everywhere, stronger anti-encryption laws, AI monitoring the whole lot.
I'm not an activist with an agenda here; it's just that there's an upper limit to how much drone terrorism a society will tolerate.
Everything you described is the friction which societies will endure to stop these threats.
This friction will slow down our global economy, and break the world we have known entirely.
Which is why the article ends on:
> The future will be more like the past.
> As the scale of effective communication, transportation, maintenance, and influence recedes, society will become more human and more personal, with weaker and multifarious institutions.
> The collapsing institutional monopoly on violence will yield a renewal of local and personal violence, and a very messy working-out of a hierarchy suited to the new conditions.
> Anyway, it’s a great time to make friends.
I will say, that over time we have found ways to beat even the most distributed of systems. Napster and piracy come to mind.
Increasingly effective surveillance propels increasingly effective centralization throughout the entirety of human history.
There's an upper limit to how much authoritarianism a society can tolerate. Automated weaponry becoming cheaper and cheaper as technology progresses will eventually lead to a wave of decentralisation in society, because offense is much cheaper than defense, so wannabe tyrants will have a harder and harder time maintaining their own safety.
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Explosives and fuzing mechanisms, which are already regulated in many countries.
(*edit - I mean by hosting factories for illicit materials!)
If prediction markets come to act as proof of life oracles- which they already have in a few cases- things get very dark very fast for everyone I reckon.
combined with the idea of the proliferation of local/personal violence
E.g. "I bet $1,000,000 of BTC that [politician] won't be assassinated before the end of 2025. Anyone want to prove me wrong?"
That was effectively the idea behind the "Assassination Market" site that popped up in the early days of Bitcoin [0]. Obviously that was just some stupid fantasy site made by some libertarian crypto weirdo that never led to anything real. (As far as I'm aware, no-one has yet assassinated Barack Obama.) But there's a first time for everything.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market#Assassina...
Instead we worry about things that are more sexy and less inevitable.
so second coming of Jesus is on the books?
can't wait.
Historically nuclear arms used to be thought of as creating a hostage type scenario, where you can think of major cities of nuclear powers held hostage by their opponents. This is ok as long as the rival nuclear powers remain large and few in number such that their desires for your compliance do not contradict those of another nuclear power. The drone problem is going to become a variant of the “everyone has nukes now” except drones are so much harder to detect in idle states.
Companies selling what they claim are solutions to this stand to print money, but it is not clear how it can really be done.
It will successfully mitigate the cheap flying drone threat as long as they aren't launched close to the target. There will probably not be any more birds in human territory however since discriminating will be counter productive anyway, hostile drones will seek to impersonate birds otherwise.
If you have 100 drones you can just launch them all at one critical thing.
If you want to defend one critical thing from 100 drones, you might need 200 drones protecting it.
And you also have to have 200 for every other critical thing.
And even if you do do that, they just need 150 drones.
With reusable drones you can deploy expensive defensive drone swarms at scale. For example: radar drones, ramming drones, gun drones, etc.
I don't see how long range single drones will be a meaningful threat in such a setup, even stealth drones will not be able to maintain stealth against multiple radar drones from different angles. The skies will belong to drone swarms.
The point being made here is that you can now have cheap attacks on boring targets, without having to risk any humans at all.
And by boring targets, they're talking about things like roads, or bridges and overpasses - ways to slow the global economy to a crawl, and to force nations into blowing their resources on defending everything.
> "What the Russians can’t do is harden every mile of highway, every bridge, every dam. Neither can the United States, and — critically — neither can the Chinese."
You will most likely require a ground drone with high explosives or launching an air attack drone, which will become an expensive complex operation. Mitigating the threat of cheap drones.
> But the threat of soft-target suicide terrorism never came to much, because a suicide bomber is a targeting system with an ego.
stating that many targets which would have truly been disastrous if hit, were ignored because the attackers wanted to satiate their egos or narrative, by hitting landmarks / high profile symbolic sites.
Also, frankly the idea of having that many drones flying around the whole country is probably just as terrifying as an actual drone attack. Who is going to be in charge of those ‘defensive’ drones?
One rule about "infinite scaling" predictions is that the real world always messes them up. Warfare has changed, that's true. The rest of the life is not so easy to change, and (useful) drones are harder to build than it looks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Staples_Corner_bombing
The threat envelope has become everything.
Maybe, but the goal of terrorism isn't to destroy "value", whatever that is. It's to create fear and unrest and make life miserable for the people in the target country. "Economic disruption" doesn't do that. It doesn't actually do anything.
Also, drones are not needed for any of this, or suicide bombers. It's trivial to leave a suitcase on a train or in the subway and cause hundreds of deaths and extreme mayhem. (Not trivial to make a bomb to fit that suitcase, but not very hard.)
My theory of why it almost never happens is, there are actually very few terrorists.
It's telling that the examples in the post are not from individual terrorists but from states.
The UK security services reportedly have 43,000 terror suspects on their watchlist. [0] And they still haven't managed to prevent every terror attack in recent years.
Evil exists.
[0]https://archive.is/C9uS2
All things being equal, the advantage belongs to the defender, with a significant caveat: the defender must be aware of the risk and deploy defensive drones in advance.
Technology with globalization might be possible (I'm not entirely sure), technology we have today without organized states, not happening.
In the parlance of our times, city-states may be all you need.
I won't call this a counter point, since what is argued is plausible, if not likely.
What I will make a comparison to piracy back in the MP3 era. It really seemed like it would be impossible to stop it, and then came the RIAA, MPAA. Eventually governments managed to figure out the internet and how to deal with the small and nimble upstarts.
But better still, (or less grim) is Netflix - when actual alternatives to piracy existed, people were more than happy to follow them.
(Of course that era didn't last for long, but we'll mark that as the utilty limit of the comparison)
No, then came Pandora and Spotify and YouTube. Nobody bothers pirating music these days because there's no point.
It's really not, the Ukrainians have geographically distributed assembly and testing, QC of quadcopters in the ten to fifteen inch propeller size class in many random and hard to find locations. A shitload of them can be assembled by a team of ten people working in a 2000 sq ft workshop in an apartment building basement.
Large drone factories like something that can crank out shahed 136 size uav? Or like what the US mil calls a group 3 uav? Or group 4 sized? Sure, agreed, different thing.
I agree with a lot of the points the author makes in this article but I question if they've ever assembled a 12" prop size quadcopter (large enough to carry a good sized amount of munition on a 10-15 minute one way trip) from components. It's something easy to distribute as a cottage industry.
> But drone technology is too cheap, too modular, and with too many useful civilian applications for the big players to control their manufacture. >What would you restrict, if you wanted to prevent any other actor from building drones? Batteries? Rotors? 3D printers? $17 Raspberry Pis?
Theres definitely a recognition of how cheap and easy it is.
Assembly is a very small part of the job.
Currently there's no shortage of the components, but we could imagine a strict trade controls of the components, some cold war deglobalization scenario or even a WW3. Without CPUs there's no drones.
how can you restrict such manufacturing tho??? I mean you literally cant block off an entire chinnese industry can you?
That's just one scenario, there's others. The supply chains are REALLY long and touch basically every important country on Earth and quite a few unimportant ones.
I hope ExitGroup.US doesn't think they are the first group to have this kind of collective.
It's been made quite clear, that HN is fundamentally a right wing-nut controlled forum.
I think there are a lot of woke-nut people in the mix as well, maybe even an equal amount, but the wing-nut mode of the highly bimodal distribution just flags anything that demonstrates that we've elected a criminal to the office of US president. Whereas the woke-nut mode is tolerant of allowing discussion to carry on, even on topics they don't agree with.
I guess it was to be expected, given the vulture capital origins of the platform...
Is this what he founding fathers were thinking of when they wrote the Bill of Rights?