It seems to me that the chief, and most concerning, use case for drone (mis)use is suppression of domestic populations, not against state actors or their proxies. The proliferation of surveillance state technologies and philosophies, and the rise of activist opposition, has paved the way for this.
Current surveillance technology is vulnerable to activism due to its static position and inability to deter attack. Their effectiveness is also diminished by crowdsourced information sources that allow for planning around them. All of those limitations are mediated by drones.
Sequestration of specific groups of people without the need for walls and gates becomes easy and inexpensive. Likewise for area denial: “Those People can’t be here”. There is no need to break up protests, a drone can be assigned to each protestor and follow them home. Person hanging subversive flyers? Follow them around until there’s nobody looking and bring them in for intensive tutoring. Mobile phone service disruption can be highly targeted; solving the nosey journalist problem.
After a social transition period you don’t even have to bother with surveillance. Fast acting sedatives or a taser can solve domestic problems just as effectively as a neurotoxin or explosive. The directed energy car demobilization devices being tested by police can be used by a drone to stop a car and other drones in the flock(?) can ensure the targets stay in their vehicle until the good guys in black and face masks show up to disappear them.
Every advantage ascribed to drones as WMDs provide the same advantages against domestic populations. It also satisfies the need of authoritarian supporters to use tax funds to finance the persecution of the undesirables amongst them. There are no international laws to worry about. No concerns of bleeding heart sympathizers sailing in a disrupting pogroms. The only thing protecting the public are the courts and lawmakers who adhere to principles and moral values.
A key issue missing in this excellent article is the acknowledgment of the willingness of people to live under nets and otherwise degraded environments for extended periods if it protects them from an enemy. People will accept sleeping in a Morrison shelter or being under tulip nets forever if that’s what it takes. The point is, stopping enemy drones is a matter of (in)convenience. It can be done without exorbitant financial cost. But all the tulip netting in the world won’t help if the people who weaponized the drones against you are also under the netting with you.
AI coordination is hostile to financial gain, which is what AI is all about. Maybe a handful of people had high minded ideals about what AI can do for humanity, but those people have little control over AI now. The‘ve had to sell that control to command the investment required to make all this happen.
So much money had been borrowed for AI scaling that is has dried up capital markets globally. That kind of spend requires a corresponding risk management strategy and that means banks run the AI companies, regardless of how AI executives act.
The financiers will not permit meaningful coordination or throttling of frontier AI development. At least until something awful happens. Until then, everyone has their own investments to protect and the exposure is preposterously high. Accidentally giving someone an advantage is an unthinkable proposition.
Coordination will not be voluntary. It will require regulation which, again, demands some kind of spectacular disaster to have occurred. The best bet at this time is to put effort into defining what the post disaster regulatory environment will look like. A group needs to be already in place and waiting to fill that role when the time comes.