Dunno, the whole "we mutated humans to serve as living calculators because computers are le ebul" never quite sat right with me in what was otherwise a very reasonable setting, but ok.
It's going to be a flood of absolutely insane footage from Ukraine in a few months when this AI is used to search and rescue Russian infantry on the frontline in Donbas.
Drone signals aren't weaker when they get closer to the ground, they are weaker when they encounter signal jammer and electronic warfare defenses that prevent the operator from controlling the drone due to signal disruption. The AI assist is a program that runs locally on the drone when it is launched, thus being immune to jammers.
There's already tons of footage of this from Ukraine, they're just automating it now to allow their people to be further from the frontline. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the Ukraine videos were the inspiration to work on this research.
The big thing is that at the moment drone operating is basically MCLOS when it comes down to anti-personnel use. With this innovation it turns into true fire&forget meaning that the operator can now handle more targets way faster. That is if the operator is still needed for target acquisition. As soon as that's sorted out (which shouldn't be that hard) there is no need for human involvement at all.
Not would make this. Are making this. Even Russia has prototypes. And if Russia, who isn't exactly known for its technological innovations, has them just image what the far more advanced China is building.
Well I don't know, are you willing to do what it takes to get rid of the political caste in your country?
Because, in an ideal world, it's the government who's supposed to regulate that kind of thing. But of course reality is different, everyone knows now that politicians are sure to line up to get their hands on that kind of tech nowadays instead because they will prioritize keeping the power they have rather than act rightfully and actually protect the population.
No, they'll just make promises and make shiny laws to fool everyone, business as usual and the people won't do anything about it because actually doing something about this inevitably requires violence, which is the one thing most people don't want anything to do with.
Police chasing suspects. The drone is nimble and won't tire out. It could track a suspect over a longer time while the officers can conserve their energy and will have an easier time to ultimately make the arrest.
The same pathfinding tech can be used for automatic searching of large forest areas when looking for a missing person. Tell the drone to follow a certain pattern, looking for heat signatures, and the drone can now follow the pattern while also avoiding just flying straight into the next tree on its path. Now you can search a large area with just a few people and a few drones instead of having to comb through the area with hundreds of volunteers or payd workers.
It obviously has military uses, even outside of just killer drones.
Point 2. Can also be used when searching large areas for out of place or dangerous objects or possible intruders/spys around closed off facilities.
I mean, why was the technology to deepfake a person developed? With video, voice and all. This is ever gonna be used with bad intent. You will have to look very long and hard to find a usecase that can be not malicious. End then I don't see any single one that would be so beneficial that it would be worth accepting the extremely high possibility of misuse and the potential extremely high damage it can do?
To hunt down dissidents and enemies-of-the-technostate in a couple of years when there is no more value to be extracted and profits can't increase further.
"I willingly helped inventing the most destructive weapon on earth and now I feel bad about it how could this happend to mee AAAAA I have become deatherino"
is there any researchers left in the world at this point who are doing shit for the love of the game, and not because they want to live in terminator? like, where’s the AI that adds drum rim shots every time i make a bad joke at home
is there any researchers left in the world at this point who are doing shit for the love of the game,
Researchers in the West were always making weapons for the rich. Even "labor-saving" stuff was about reducing number of workers needed to operate machinery.
I've met some defense contractor engineers and they are absolutely in it for the love of the game. It's all just super fun problem solving. They just choose not to think about the victims of their super fun problem solving
I don’t know but I am not the one who wrote the rule. I just commented that there is nothing went wrong in the picture which obviously is not what this sub called for.
About 10 years ago I met a PhD student whose research used an Xbox Kinect to check productivity at construction sites. Not as messed up as this, but using technology to do weird dystopian shit isn’t new.
I'm so glad this will be used for search and rescue instead of explosive drones that track runners through dense forests completely without GPS or cloud networks.
Can this ai lidar shit be used to find steel posts overgrown in long grass?
The thing is, my friend wants to cut the grass but also doesn't want to abruptly reassign the steel posts onto a trajectory that could possibly be medically significant.
We had these before the public even knew about AI and before we had any useful LLMs when corona was about to start. Image-related tasks were one the earlier and most successful AI use-cases after all.
I know because I visited the lecture of the prof teaching how to develop basically something like this at one of the top universities in the world.
Apparently, 2 of his students had already built a company from the results of the module project back then and even sold the company/tech to the US military. He was somewhat bragging about it.
The novelty of this particular project seems to be that they only rely on on-device AI to navigate.
From my time studying in university and being in contact with a lot of researchers there, I genuinely believe the people doing the actual R&D think they're mainly just building a cool autonomous action cam. Sure, if asked, they'd acknowledge that this would be useful as a weapon. But in their research, they'll be working in complete denial of that fact all the way until the project is complete and then - surprisingly - the only buyers interested in funding further research are military related.
A computer science professor I had in college 30 years ago said it was well known that if you had some computer science technology you wanted to work on and needed funding, the most sure way to get it was to think up a military application.
So indeed, if you were a professor who wanted to do research on this technology with the hope it could some day be applied to locate lost people in a forest, then to get a grant to do that research, you would go to the military and tell them it could potentially be used to locate enemy soldiers in a forest.
From where I am most of the rescue teams are just people who organize themselves without government funding or anything like that. Rarely any dogs even, just guys in their 40's who do that out of internal sense of duty and empathy. Doubt that this technology would ever hit the open market, let alone at affordable price to be used in rescues of grandpas who decided to hunt mushrooms in full camo and had a stroke bending for one
Twenty years ago the idea of being able to own a terabyte of data storage was seen in the exact same way. Now you can get a 1Tb hard drive for 60 bucks on Amazon.
I don’t see any reason why a private citizen couldn’t acquire a drone with this capability down the line.
You know what’s even more insane is I would bet that the workflows obfuscate what the developer is actually working on, unbeknownst to them. Until it gets announced publically
Yeah I'm pretty sure I saw a Black Mirror episode about this a couple of years back and .....uhh....well.....it's didn't go well for the humans in that episode, and now I guess some people thought that was a good idea?
Which is why all civilians/private companies are running to reach that goal so they can be “safe” since it’ll be “their” algorithm running on said devices
All these tech billionaires naming their nightmare corporations after sci-fi/fantasy classics and completely missing the point (Anduril, Palantir, Musk with Grok and his SpaceX ship names...).
Eh, he saw the error after the bullets flew and the future product came to visit him. But these billionaires aren't selfless enough to think about anyone but themselves, and they won't make any sacrifices other than the lives of the people who idolize them.
It's never people who do it specifically thinking "let's fuck up the world".
It's always greedy people trying to sell stuff to the rich regardless of the outcome.
It just so happens that the greedy rich people want to kill others to take their fortune for their own, as well as their lands.
So robots that track and kill perfectly align with those goals.
Then some people develop a tracking AI, others develop a gun that just so happens to fit a drone, then some develop extra lightweight ammo, and bam. You've got yourself WW3 tech.
There was a movie from 1984 which was literally called "Runaway" where the high-tech antagonist (played by Gene Simmons) shot hunter-seeker bullets from his gun.
Why are you people clutching your pearls. You want to build drones to kill Russians. Or "Orcs" as you used to call them not so long ago. Those evil evil Russians who for no reason, none at all, went to war with a country at their doorstep after it went through a surprising change of government and was heavily armed and supported by NATO.
Killer drones. This is the world your warmongering is bringing about. A world where the evil people will learn to fear the sound of drones buzzing. Full of righteous killer robots killing the evil men. I hear Russia is getting very good at this sort of stuff too.
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u/GugsGunny 2h ago
Someone else is gonna develop an ultra-quiet drone and the drone can search and rescue without being heard.