The Dawn of the AI Drone(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
The Dawn of the AI Drone
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/magazine/ukraine-ai-drones-war-russia.html
10 comments
basicly flying mines, with fairly short range, and mission duration, but with very little ability to distinguish friend from foe, and likely easy to trick into attacking decoys.
devestating against unarmed villagers, but that is nothing new either.
The rich and powerful need a way to enforce and maintain their power without any risk of dissent or revolution. So they’re racing to build drones to keep us all in line. I’m sure the neolibs at the times are practically foaming at the mouth for this future.
gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/magazine/ukraine-ai-drone...
Not at all surprising, and a mostly arbitrary milestone for NYT to declare. But still key to mark the progression, and note where we are at right now.
this part seems painfully ironic: >often run on off-the-shelf microcomputers like Raspberry Pi
Not at all surprising, and a mostly arbitrary milestone for NYT to declare. But still key to mark the progression, and note where we are at right now.
this part seems painfully ironic: >often run on off-the-shelf microcomputers like Raspberry Pi
This exact tech doesn't actually seem that new. Missiles (aka drones with rockets not propellers) have used onboard guidance (not remote control) for decades now [1].
But we all know where this is headed. It's probably not too long until someone develops a system to uses surveillance drones to monitor and area and detect targets with AI, then dispatches automated attack drones to kill anything that moves.
[1] The only remote-controlled missile I'm even aware of is this one, from the 40s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_X.
But we all know where this is headed. It's probably not too long until someone develops a system to uses surveillance drones to monitor and area and detect targets with AI, then dispatches automated attack drones to kill anything that moves.
[1] The only remote-controlled missile I'm even aware of is this one, from the 40s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_X.
Both TOWs and M47 Dragons are "remote controlled".
2000: "Don't be evil"
2025: Eric Schmidt: I'm “a licensed arms dealer.”
> He has framed his movement into the A.I. arms sector as implicitly humanitarian. “Now you sit there and you go, Why would a good liberal like me do that?” he said at Stanford. “The answer is that the whole theory of armies is tanks, artilleries and mortars, and we can eliminate all of them and we can make the penalty for invading a country, at least by land, essentially be impossible.” A.I.-powered weapons, he suggested, could end this kind of warfare.
O RLY?
>This is a prediction with precedent from when machines guns were poised to upend ground combat as people knew it. In 1877, Richard Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun, a prominent forerunner of automatic fire, proposed that as an efficient multiplier of lethal violence his weapon might spare people the horrors of war. “It occurred to me,” he wrote, that “if I could invent a machine — a gun — which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies.”
>Maybe the future will prove Eric Schmidt’s vision right. Whatever is coming will reveal itself in time. History shows Gatling was spectacularly wrong.
2025: Eric Schmidt: I'm “a licensed arms dealer.”
> He has framed his movement into the A.I. arms sector as implicitly humanitarian. “Now you sit there and you go, Why would a good liberal like me do that?” he said at Stanford. “The answer is that the whole theory of armies is tanks, artilleries and mortars, and we can eliminate all of them and we can make the penalty for invading a country, at least by land, essentially be impossible.” A.I.-powered weapons, he suggested, could end this kind of warfare.
O RLY?
>This is a prediction with precedent from when machines guns were poised to upend ground combat as people knew it. In 1877, Richard Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun, a prominent forerunner of automatic fire, proposed that as an efficient multiplier of lethal violence his weapon might spare people the horrors of war. “It occurred to me,” he wrote, that “if I could invent a machine — a gun — which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies.”
>Maybe the future will prove Eric Schmidt’s vision right. Whatever is coming will reveal itself in time. History shows Gatling was spectacularly wrong.
Alfred Nobel and various atomic bomb builders have both said the same, but have similarly failed to "end all wars".
If you want a more malicious framing, it's "now that all your tanks and mortars are ineffective, when you want to have a war you'll need to buy lots of my drones"
If you want a more malicious framing, it's "now that all your tanks and mortars are ineffective, when you want to have a war you'll need to buy lots of my drones"
[deleted]
How do you imagine the free world stopped Hitler and the Nazi Germany?
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.” ― George Orwell
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.” ― George Orwell
ai warriors are only going to be outnumbered by ai slaves, i'm not sure if domestic or sex will be the more numerous variety.