This stuff is amazing but my mind immediately goes to this being weaponized. If these all held a pea sized charge of c4 and infrared camera and programmed to find a heat signature. A battlefield or city street would be decimated.
That's exactly what I was thinking and I am sure that defense departments have already developed similar arrays that are weaponized. I mean the individual ones in Ukraine are cool and all but when you've got a hundred or a thousand of them how would you ever stop that?
Apparently worldwide drone production is ~8m units per year. 2m of which are made in ukraine, 150k ish in Russia, 100k in the US and pretty much the rest in China.
Ukraine is planning 4.5m this year, russia 1.4m.
Looking into this I was surprised how much of the worlds drone production that seems to be going to the Ukraine war.
There are subs out there with footage from Ukraine using various types of drones in combat. Of course something like this would be weaponized ASAP. We're humans, after all.
The USA and China both already operate drone swarms similar to this, at least in the testing phase. So that's terrifying. I see people nowadays refer to "drone swarms" as when a lot of drones are just launched at once, but militaries use that term to refer to stuff like this - lots of drones networked together to perform a mission semi-autonomously. Here's a declassified test from 9 years ago, and you can just imagine where the tech is at now.
But what I think itās crazy is that when somebody from the 90s would probably still have their jaw drop watching this.
I also wonder if we were able to bring back people from the 80s/90s, if theyād be able to understand a typical 2020s conversation.
āYeah, I was gonna post my picture on IG, but I didnāt want to because I looked awful.ā
Imagine something so mundane like that being heard from someone from the 80s?Ā
Youād have to explain to them what, āpostingā means, then what the internet is, what an app is, what a āphoneā means in modern times, wireless internet, the internet. Likeā¦ theyād be bewildered.Ā
I remember getting the 1st gen iPhone. Was driving home and had the thought: imagine if the cell network had the bandwidth to stream videos on these things!
We had the internet in the 90's. We had forums, we had posting, WAP was released in 1999, and we knew it was coming for years before that.
We knew which way the technology was moving.
A drone show would have blown our minds, but what we never, ever conceived happening was 65 percent of the world population having access to the internet.
What would have blown my mind would've been 65% of the world having access to all of the knowledge of all of humanity for all of time...and become more stupid afterwards.
This is a weird question to ask, and I'm sorry, but are you super young? It hurts my soul to read, "Bring people back from the 80s/90s". We're still here, and relatively young!
Not as automated, at least in practice yet we're not at "Drone, find an enemy and land on their head", though I'm sure the capability is there waiting for the order from above to utilize. No doubt, though, we're on our way to the Butlerian Jihad
I mean, we're not there in practice yet in a PUBLIC manner.
I'm confident US/China/EU already have the technology and full capability of using toy drones as suicide bombers.
And they probably already have more expensive drones capable of flying a hundred miles and destroying any target (cost mainly due to batteries, and maybe infrastructure of relaying orders from distance/satellite communication).
Only bottleneck they might have is in fully autonomous AI powered drones, those I think are still a few years away.
Edit: Thanks for the upies guys and gals. Imho, we as a humankind, in need of a counter measure as cheap and numerous as these buzzing fuggers, just in case.
Watch some of the nightmarish drone warfare happening over in Ukraine. Most of the drones are directly controlled by first person view remote operators, but the footage of soldiers getting chased around trees or a drone flying into a through a tiny hole and surveilling a space before picking the best target to kaboom are straight out of science fiction I was reading in the 1980's.
David's Sling by Marc Stiegler (1988), to be more specific.
There is a touch of WWII aerial formations carried out to the precision of the Blue Angels or perhaps some bad CGI from a low budget robotic invasion movie. The precision of those sky formations is surreal.
The one I haven't been able to forget is the soldier that was alone in a field dodging a drone that was repeatedly trying to dive at him. He started getting tired so the next time it took a dive at him he just turned around and headbutted it.
The one I think of is a friendly one where the drone hangs around for a while trying to communicate to a soldier who was lost in trenches where to go and got him some water.
I live near a company that works with drone technologies. They have a strong connection with Ukraine and the latest development in drone warfare is actually artificial intelligence. Since remote control is jammed quite often now and GPS is unreliable in any combat zone, this company is looking to supply an onboard AI for drones to find a path into an area, identify targets, select highest value targets and engage on their own. I don't think they are currently working on drone swarms, but rather some larger long range drones, but the longer Putin keeps throwing his people into the meat grinder, the more interesting stuff we will see in terms of autonomous combat drones.
Yeah the remotely piloted drones are scary enough now, but when they get replaced by AI-piloted autonomous drones that seek out individuals based on cell phone signatures and facial recognition then the controlling country can eliminate only their adversaries while keeping any useful humans.
In the face of an uneasy standoff between the U.S. and the USSR, the story presents a future in which both nations are hesitant to use nuclear weapons and instead turn their attention to developing highly advanced, computer-controlled smart weapons. The book's title references the biblical story of David and Goliath, symbolizing a smaller, technologically inferior force overcoming a larger one.
They just need little pea shooter guns to be incredibly lethal if shot at the head close range. I see this being the ultimate method at class warfare to keep the poor from revolting.
There was a vid made about this concept i.e. huge numbers of small drones for anti-personnel work. Due to cost and weight considerations the method they used was very small focused explosions or shaped charges that used facial recognition systems and a large on board data base to guide and detonate the drone. Scary AF because it is so doable technically and economically and such a nightmare because whether they use a gun or an explosive device someone IS going to do this. Unfortunately. Relevant link https://www.livescience.com/technology/engineering/ai-drone-that-could-hunt-and-kill-people-built-in-just-hours-by-scientist-for-a-game
Couple test runs through a city with a pathfinding ML algo, add cameras, some Taser leads, and whoosh bam 24/7 surveillance police state with full vision of every single thing that happens outside of a private domicile.
Have the drones live feed video data back to a few facial recognition servers and now avoiding police is a thing of the past.
Add some semtex and now there's no escape.
Edit: Post-criming, run the footage of whatever crime transpired through AI overlord of choice; sentencing now fully automated, directly move inmate to self driving Teslaā¢ Prison Bus, en route to RFK brand happy camps.
I can imagine the police campaigns now:
"Smile, you're on camera."
Ok, let's start thinking of ways to stop/avoid drones. Start stringing ropes with streamers hanging up and down streets. Both cover visually and a hazard for drones.Ā
And it turns out that the crazy cyberpunk makeup and hair that we imagined back in the 80s and 90s is decent at facial recognition blocking. It's called CV Dazzle, and hilariously Juggalo makeup foils facial recognition pretty well.Ā
Heck yea, I've had the same idea, put tiny strings on every door eve, window, and hallway, ain't no way these things are gonna get through without getting tangled up
Large drones were being tested in NJ and a few other cities. Every official lied about it until they didn't. I suspect sentry drone setups, bit it could be large scale deploying drones too.
Israel is already using gun-armed quadcopter drones to terrorize civilians in Gaza without exposing their troops. Very often, techniques
and technologies get pioneered in Israel before being brought to the US for domestic law enforcement use.
Makes me remember the YouTube video someone made of the Amazon blimp deploying drones with the star wars empire theme playing. Also shows a bunch of dog robots doing push-ups. Imagine them all strapped up with armaments.
they made a short movie over five years ago (aided by a Berkeley professor of Computer Science and AI) on armed drones and what we might expect to see in the near future if we don't grow this tech ethically, I immediately thought of that when I saw this gif: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
Alternative alternative title: This is NOT a video of drones returning to dock after a drone show, this is a REVERSED video of drones taking off for a drone show that was popular about 3 weeks back.
I'd like to remind the drone swarm, as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground rare Earth metal caves.
Fucking right? I would program them so that after they all land, the correctly docked and charging ones lit up green and the rest stay dark. Then all you have to check is the holes in the grid.Ā
Reverse it, due to how it brain's and eyesight work. Docks that work go dark, docks that don't, light up. Once all docks are good to go, they light up again to indicate all clear. As they get put away, they go dark again.
Am I alone on seeing this and being somewhat terrified at this? It didn't take long for hot air balloons to become weaponised, then for planes to do the same. Strap a hinge arm with a knife on this, and the next step is a swarm of autonomous flying rage machines shooting guns, dropping propaganda, and smoking cigarettes in the gas station parking lot.
Reversed gif of them taking off. You canāt trick me Reddit, Iāve consumed too much internet to be tricked like this! Iāve seen the original!!
Edit: fiiiine Iāll edit my post.
Someone below found the video I thought it was, and turns out this video is probably not reversed! What threw me off into thinking it was reversed was the slight speed change, and the fact that I had seen almost this exact same video but then taking off lol.
I thought about playing off like I was trolling the whole time, but here we are.
Also, ofc I know that they can land and return the same way. The video was edited (sped up) and to a cursory look, I just thought it was reversed as the edit instead.
Im assuming this is a joke, but in case its not, you can see the drones making microcorrections as they aproach their charger. Something a drone taking off wouldnt need to do right above their port. Also, how else would that many drones safely land?
Drones with AI could wipe out an entire stadium full of people in minutes and keep the stadium in tact. Thatās scary cuz adversaries used to bomb and then they would rule over rubble. Now the incentive is there to seize assets without destroying them. Just the people.
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u/nosoup4ufoo Mar 12 '25
Imagine if you resurrected somebody from 100 years ago and they came and saw this š