One of the most lethal tactics is drone mining: let a drone lie in wait somewhere in the bushes until a human or vehicle passes by.
Fucking campers, man.
‘at Western military expos everybody is talking AI-controlled drones. This is nonsense of course’ Apparently the limitation is that it’s currently too expensive to run AI locally on a drone but this is rapidly changing with new nVidea chips. He expects chips to become small and cheap soon enough that AI drones will appear soon.
Honestly not surprising, you’d need a mix of powerful but cheap chips and still quite light AI to make it work on device. And the problem would also be, if the AI is too simple, there’s higher risk of friendly fire. Am reminded of that classic Philip K. Dick story, “Second Variety”, where the basic autonomous drone model is essentially just a small ball full of blades that kills anyone who comes close enough, unless they carry some special radioactive plaque that deters them. That sort of IFF system might in fact be cheaper and simpler to work with than an AI fully capable of doing it on its own reliably.
Obviously I consider this sort of thing generally a bad idea. But it’s clearly the direction this is going. I wonder how long before full drone-on-drone warfare.
A quick Google states that Ukraine produces about 4000 FPV drones a day. Alarmingly, the same Google search revealed that the total procurement of FPV drones at this moment by the British army is 450 FPV drones! Western militaries are completely asleep at the wheel.
The cynical amateur geopolitical analyst in me says also that this is why it’s so dumb of the West to let Ukraine fail. You got a perfect laboratory to experiment and develop this new type of warfare and then eventually you can cannibalize Ukrainian know-how for yourself and make leaps and bounds without losing a single soldier yourself. Even someone who was evil but cunning would see the benefits here. But of course the US right now are being run by a moron so it’s not surprising he misses this detail.
Fucking campers, man.
Honestly not surprising, you’d need a mix of powerful but cheap chips and still quite light AI to make it work on device. And the problem would also be, if the AI is too simple, there’s higher risk of friendly fire. Am reminded of that classic Philip K. Dick story, “Second Variety”, where the basic autonomous drone model is essentially just a small ball full of blades that kills anyone who comes close enough, unless they carry some special radioactive plaque that deters them. That sort of IFF system might in fact be cheaper and simpler to work with than an AI fully capable of doing it on its own reliably.
Obviously I consider this sort of thing generally a bad idea. But it’s clearly the direction this is going. I wonder how long before full drone-on-drone warfare.
The cynical amateur geopolitical analyst in me says also that this is why it’s so dumb of the West to let Ukraine fail. You got a perfect laboratory to experiment and develop this new type of warfare and then eventually you can cannibalize Ukrainian know-how for yourself and make leaps and bounds without losing a single soldier yourself. Even someone who was evil but cunning would see the benefits here. But of course the US right now are being run by a moron so it’s not surprising he misses this detail.