I would love to find a fundamental flaw in this reasoning, but I can't. It was, I guess, naïve to not expect exponential technological progress not to reflect in the political structures. The world is changing, and changing very quickly.
The article doesn't get much into what can be the next step - fully autonomous drones that travel by night, charge by day, and find a target by themselves. A bit like landmines, with a shorter half-life, but highly mobile and intelligent enough.
He failed to consider that small actors won't have a monopoly on drones. The best counter is for the defending authority to have even more drones on constant patrol looking out for any drones that don't satisfy whatever the criteria is for a "good drone". This brings its own host of problems because the people have to become accustomed to constantly being surveilled by a swarm of government drones with the ability to assassinate anybody at any moment and nobody to hold criminally accountable, but my point is that this technology is available to the defenders too.
I am not sure if you realize how hopelessly impossible that is.
You're aware that the (to my knowledge, which is entirely based on documentaries) primary way drugs are shipped to the USA are drones nowadays? Some via air, some underwater etc
There is just to much area and drones are tiny. It's infeasible to track them without spending insane amounts of money (and creating a total surveillance state as a by-product)
Agreed. This is the most likely outcome of this, and it won't be regular drones it will be a race to toner wars from Neal Stephenson's "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer."
Floating clouds of molecular drones ever-present designed to destroy other unauthorized drones, and that technology will enable the long walk on a short pier for those that violate phyle rules. Cookie cutters.
It isn't about whether or not they'll have a monopoly on drones, it's about the power balance shifting to be not so one sided on defense.
For decades we've lived in a society where defending against these kinds of violent acts was far easier than committing them. That's changing, and it only has to change a little bit to have radical effects on society.
The reality is that a majority of people are simply too lazy to do this stuff. We are talking about populations that call a guy to come change a lightbulb - rigging a drone with explosives, figuring out control at a distance - this is beyond the scope of capability for the majority of malcontents. Most would-be pipe bombers end up nabbed at the point where they try to purchase a charge for their devices. Same deal here. Yes, there’s scope for a small number of bad actors to wreak havoc, but the thing about small numbers is that they are readily dealt with through existing law enforcement frameworks.
On a state level, war is war, and arms races are never static. You send flotillas of drones? I manufacture flotillas of counter-drone drones.
Yes, there is an asymmetry currently, but just as air supremacy was once seen as “well, this makes war practically impossible”, and became just another battleground, the same will happen here.
You put that quite bluntly but i agree with you. Just look at all the dumb mistakes would be terrorists make. If drone warfare was so easy then hamas - a (once) decently competent militant organisation would be using it as a great equaliser against israeli troops. The truth is that besides for on october 7 when they were used extremely effectively they have been absent. Israeli troops on the other hand are all using them for surveillance. It looks like only states have the abilities to maintain drone tactics.
Domestically this seems to be the wisdom, but not in occupied countries and/or countries where you killed a lot of peoples’ family members. These will 100% be a good tactic for various guerrilla fighters.
Technology advancing faster than society has always seemed like the most likely "great filter" to me.
The recent advancements in the normalization of hate and suffering, while tech keeps advancing, makes me feel like I have Cassandra Syndrome, aka, I feel like I am taking crazy pills.
Yes, a lot of us feel the same way. It's clear to me the next step is for us to start coming together, grouping up and sharing our ideas. I read on the internet every single day people expressing these feelings and for some reason we remain impotent and helpless when we could be uniting and inventing. Where is the will? I can only hope it's simply happening outside the scope of my vision. But it really needs to be happening faster.
We are coming face to face with the concept of exponential growth itself. Humanity versus the feedback loop. And it will take coordinated genius to best such a naturally powerful foe.
How would they charge? The watt hours needed to fly a medium sized VTOL uav of any type for any reasonable amount of time can't be collected by the size of pv panel that can be reasonably carried by the same craft. Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot.
> The watt hours needed to fly a medium sized VTOL uav of any type for any reasonable amount of time can't be collected by the size of pv panel that can be reasonably carried by the same craft.
Drones aren't limited to quadcopters.
> Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot.
So do that?
Humans are persistance predators, or so I'm told. We didn't domesticate horses by running faster than them, but by because they had to rest, and when they stopped we'd catch up, and then they'd run again, a cycle that repeated until they couldn't run any more.
But these days, we humans are no longer nomadic: we live in predictable homes, and most of us who work do so at predictable locations.
A drone that takes a year to get to one of us? We could outrace it, or shoot it down… but only if we know it's there.
they don't need to be constantly flying. as long as work is not done, there isn't much energy being burned. and most of the energy burned is not with the rotors
Feel like there is something comforting that the state of things hasn’t been bigger bombs, more destruction, and more harm, but instead became highly targeted attacks that massively cripple a countries military infrastructure with almost no harm to anyone else.
Charging isn't needed or even very helpful. It's a million times easier, cheaper, and more efficient to just drop a few cheap drones in areas your target might go, then have someone monitoring remotely activate them at the appropriate time.
Well, how about this: there is a lot of knowledge that if it were publicly available in a useful form, could do incredible amounts of damage. From viral DNA/RNA sequences to the exact procedure to get a fission cascade. The exact chemical formula to a lot of different nasty concoctions, or in some cases just the fact that particular things even exist (e.g. you don't need radioactive material to create radiation poisoning ... even mass radiation poisoning)
Advanced knowledge has only once been used in a terror attack, and not very effectively.
These types of drone would need to collect a lot of not-so-easy-to-get knowledge. You'd need weapons, mechanical design, electronic fuses ... but mostly an AI good enough to make decisions on their own. And frankly, with good AI you could do a lot more damage than this without ever killing anyone.
- Non-wired drones can be jammed. It’s early days for building defenses against these attacks.
- Non-state actors have far less access to the sophisticated intelligence needed to strike hard targets or secure against counter strikes.
- Setting up hidden bombs for remote detonation on soft targets, like the freeway, has been possible, no need for drones. What other factors have been preventing these types of attacks? How do drones change those factors?
If America was hunting Osama bin Laden today, I bet we’d have used a drone to kill him rather than sending in special forces. Likewise, if I was a cartel in the jungle or rebel force in the mountains, I’d be damned scared of the military or police coming after me with an endless wave of drones.
Maybe this is one reason why in the US and latterly in the UK, the authorities are scrambling to introduce remote ID for drones with 249gm flying weight upwards: this includes operator/pilot ID. No doubt there'll eventually be some sort of AI-assisted pattern recognition/prediction that'll enable pre-emptive prediction of attacks.
The truth is most domestic terrorists don't stand out for their intellect. State aided terror cells or a large organisation might be able to pull that off, but i don't think some random jihadist would think of it. Off the shelf drones get geoblocked.
The possibilities of drone warfare is terrifying, but imo the author is overstating the danger that they pose in the hands of domestic terrorists.
It's also possible to craft build certain types of small arms in home workshops without serial numbers. People have been doing this for centuries but the necessary tools have become cheaper and easier to use in recent years.
> Likewise, a drone factory is as vulnerable to drone attack as any other big, static, expensive piece of defense infrastructure.
It's really not, the Ukrainians have geographically distributed assembly and testing, QC of quadcopters in the ten to fifteen inch propeller size class in many random and hard to find locations. A shitload of them can be assembled by a team of ten people working in a 2000 sq ft workshop in an apartment building basement.
Large drone factories like something that can crank out shahed 136 size uav? Or like what the US mil calls a group 3 uav? Or group 4 sized? Sure, agreed, different thing.
I agree with a lot of the points the author makes in this article but I question if they've ever assembled a 12" prop size quadcopter (large enough to carry a good sized amount of munition on a 10-15 minute one way trip) from components. It's something easy to distribute as a cottage industry.
Most of the work is in making electronics, batteries and engines. All requires typical long supply chains and big factories.
Assembly is a very small part of the job.
Currently there's no shortage of the components, but we could imagine a strict trade controls of the components, some cold war deglobalization scenario or even a WW3. Without CPUs there's no drones.
Finding and bombing the factory that turns out stm32h7 microcontrollers for hobby grade uav running betaflight seems like it would have a lot of unintended consequences.
Even better, there is a program where everyone can buy components, assemble the FPV drone at home and send to the special QC unit. There it is tested and sent to the frontline.
I believe the author agrees with this, since a few sentences later they state:
> But drone technology is too cheap, too modular, and with too many useful civilian applications for the big players to control their manufacture.
>What would you restrict, if you wanted to prevent any other actor from building drones? Batteries? Rotors? 3D printers? $17 Raspberry Pis?
Theres definitely a recognition of how cheap and easy it is.
This is addressed in the article - its a core point.
Everything you described is the friction which societies will endure to stop these threats.
This friction will slow down our global economy, and break the world we have known entirely.
Which is why the article ends on:
> The future will be more like the past.
> As the scale of effective communication, transportation, maintenance, and influence recedes, society will become more human and more personal, with weaker and multifarious institutions.
> The collapsing institutional monopoly on violence will yield a renewal of local and personal violence, and a very messy working-out of a hierarchy suited to the new conditions.
> Anyway, it’s a great time to make friends.
I will say, that over time we have found ways to beat even the most distributed of systems. Napster and piracy come to mind.
>there's an upper limit to how much drone terrorism a society will tolerate.
There's an upper limit to how much authoritarianism a society can tolerate. Automated weaponry becoming cheaper and cheaper as technology progresses will eventually lead to a wave of decentralisation in society, because offense is much cheaper than defense, so wannabe tyrants will have a harder and harder time maintaining their own safety.
Explosives have to be manufactured, and most require precursors that are hard to come by. More broadly, perhaps the historic argument that we should care about, eg Somalia, because failed states can enable chaos that crosses borders becomes more true???
(*edit - I mean by hosting factories for illicit materials!)
Re: crypto and this "The collapsing institutional monopoly on violence will yield a renewal of local and personal violence, and a very messy working-out of a hierarchy suited to the new conditions."
If prediction markets come to act as proof of life oracles- which they already have in a few cases- things get very dark very fast for everyone I reckon.
I feel like you condensed multiple paragraphs worth of thought into 2 sentences and I simply can't follow at all. Would you care to write it out in more detail?
I am guessing the idea is ubiquity of prediction markets -> there's a prediction market for the liveness of everyone/anyone -> financial incentive to kill anyone
combined with the idea of the proliferation of local/personal violence
You aren't seriously suggesting that people will take out prediction market bets on people's death dates and then commit murder to rig the bet? How would a prediction market on anybody's death date get enough liquidity for this strategy to ever come close to breaking even?
They've already used prediction markets to bet on peoples death as in the case of Sinwar from Hamas. It seems like all the pieces are there and moving into place- I'm just an artist/creative imagining things though(shrug)
It would be one way to hire a hitman. A "bet" on the prediction market would effectively function as a bounty on the target's head.
E.g. "I bet $1,000,000 of BTC that [politician] won't be assassinated before the end of 2025. Anyone want to prove me wrong?"
That was effectively the idea behind the "Assassination Market" site that popped up in the early days of Bitcoin [0]. Obviously that was just some stupid fantasy site made by some libertarian crypto weirdo that never led to anything real. (As far as I'm aware, no-one has yet assassinated Barack Obama.) But there's a first time for everything.
Things get very dark in few dozen years anyway - see established mainstream science about global warming. We know and ignore this because it's unpleasant and if we take it seriously it cuts the short term profits.
Instead we worry about things that are more sexy and less inevitable.
> If prediction markets come to act as proof of life oracles- which they already have in a few cases- things get very dark very fast for everyone I reckon
Readit News
The article doesn't get much into what can be the next step - fully autonomous drones that travel by night, charge by day, and find a target by themselves. A bit like landmines, with a shorter half-life, but highly mobile and intelligent enough.
You're aware that the (to my knowledge, which is entirely based on documentaries) primary way drugs are shipped to the USA are drones nowadays? Some via air, some underwater etc
There is just to much area and drones are tiny. It's infeasible to track them without spending insane amounts of money (and creating a total surveillance state as a by-product)
Floating clouds of molecular drones ever-present designed to destroy other unauthorized drones, and that technology will enable the long walk on a short pier for those that violate phyle rules. Cookie cutters.
For decades we've lived in a society where defending against these kinds of violent acts was far easier than committing them. That's changing, and it only has to change a little bit to have radical effects on society.
The reality is that a majority of people are simply too lazy to do this stuff. We are talking about populations that call a guy to come change a lightbulb - rigging a drone with explosives, figuring out control at a distance - this is beyond the scope of capability for the majority of malcontents. Most would-be pipe bombers end up nabbed at the point where they try to purchase a charge for their devices. Same deal here. Yes, there’s scope for a small number of bad actors to wreak havoc, but the thing about small numbers is that they are readily dealt with through existing law enforcement frameworks.
On a state level, war is war, and arms races are never static. You send flotillas of drones? I manufacture flotillas of counter-drone drones.
Yes, there is an asymmetry currently, but just as air supremacy was once seen as “well, this makes war practically impossible”, and became just another battleground, the same will happen here.
Dead Comment
The recent advancements in the normalization of hate and suffering, while tech keeps advancing, makes me feel like I have Cassandra Syndrome, aka, I feel like I am taking crazy pills.
We are coming face to face with the concept of exponential growth itself. Humanity versus the feedback loop. And it will take coordinated genius to best such a naturally powerful foe.
Drones aren't limited to quadcopters.
> Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot.
So do that?
Humans are persistance predators, or so I'm told. We didn't domesticate horses by running faster than them, but by because they had to rest, and when they stopped we'd catch up, and then they'd run again, a cycle that repeated until they couldn't run any more.
But these days, we humans are no longer nomadic: we live in predictable homes, and most of us who work do so at predictable locations.
A drone that takes a year to get to one of us? We could outrace it, or shoot it down… but only if we know it's there.
Why would that be an issue? Planners have to think further ahead, but the threat is only marginally decreased.
Isn’t that the answer to your question, then?
Deleted Comment
Advanced knowledge has only once been used in a terror attack, and not very effectively.
These types of drone would need to collect a lot of not-so-easy-to-get knowledge. You'd need weapons, mechanical design, electronic fuses ... but mostly an AI good enough to make decisions on their own. And frankly, with good AI you could do a lot more damage than this without ever killing anyone.
Dead Comment
- Non-wired drones can be jammed. It’s early days for building defenses against these attacks.
- Non-state actors have far less access to the sophisticated intelligence needed to strike hard targets or secure against counter strikes.
- Setting up hidden bombs for remote detonation on soft targets, like the freeway, has been possible, no need for drones. What other factors have been preventing these types of attacks? How do drones change those factors?
If America was hunting Osama bin Laden today, I bet we’d have used a drone to kill him rather than sending in special forces. Likewise, if I was a cartel in the jungle or rebel force in the mountains, I’d be damned scared of the military or police coming after me with an endless wave of drones.
AI drones can't be jammed. And I wouldn't count on terrorists having qualms about how unethical this would be.
The possibilities of drone warfare is terrifying, but imo the author is overstating the danger that they pose in the hands of domestic terrorists.
It's really not, the Ukrainians have geographically distributed assembly and testing, QC of quadcopters in the ten to fifteen inch propeller size class in many random and hard to find locations. A shitload of them can be assembled by a team of ten people working in a 2000 sq ft workshop in an apartment building basement.
Large drone factories like something that can crank out shahed 136 size uav? Or like what the US mil calls a group 3 uav? Or group 4 sized? Sure, agreed, different thing.
I agree with a lot of the points the author makes in this article but I question if they've ever assembled a 12" prop size quadcopter (large enough to carry a good sized amount of munition on a 10-15 minute one way trip) from components. It's something easy to distribute as a cottage industry.
Assembly is a very small part of the job.
Currently there's no shortage of the components, but we could imagine a strict trade controls of the components, some cold war deglobalization scenario or even a WW3. Without CPUs there's no drones.
how can you restrict such manufacturing tho??? I mean you literally cant block off an entire chinnese industry can you?
> But drone technology is too cheap, too modular, and with too many useful civilian applications for the big players to control their manufacture. >What would you restrict, if you wanted to prevent any other actor from building drones? Batteries? Rotors? 3D printers? $17 Raspberry Pis?
Theres definitely a recognition of how cheap and easy it is.
What will bring it to an end will be a panopticon: video surveillance everywhere, stronger anti-encryption laws, AI monitoring the whole lot.
I'm not an activist with an agenda here; it's just that there's an upper limit to how much drone terrorism a society will tolerate.
Everything you described is the friction which societies will endure to stop these threats.
This friction will slow down our global economy, and break the world we have known entirely.
Which is why the article ends on:
> The future will be more like the past.
> As the scale of effective communication, transportation, maintenance, and influence recedes, society will become more human and more personal, with weaker and multifarious institutions.
> The collapsing institutional monopoly on violence will yield a renewal of local and personal violence, and a very messy working-out of a hierarchy suited to the new conditions.
> Anyway, it’s a great time to make friends.
I will say, that over time we have found ways to beat even the most distributed of systems. Napster and piracy come to mind.
Increasingly effective surveillance propels increasingly effective centralization throughout the entirety of human history.
There's an upper limit to how much authoritarianism a society can tolerate. Automated weaponry becoming cheaper and cheaper as technology progresses will eventually lead to a wave of decentralisation in society, because offense is much cheaper than defense, so wannabe tyrants will have a harder and harder time maintaining their own safety.
Deleted Comment
Explosives and fuzing mechanisms, which are already regulated in many countries.
(*edit - I mean by hosting factories for illicit materials!)
If prediction markets come to act as proof of life oracles- which they already have in a few cases- things get very dark very fast for everyone I reckon.
combined with the idea of the proliferation of local/personal violence
E.g. "I bet $1,000,000 of BTC that [politician] won't be assassinated before the end of 2025. Anyone want to prove me wrong?"
That was effectively the idea behind the "Assassination Market" site that popped up in the early days of Bitcoin [0]. Obviously that was just some stupid fantasy site made by some libertarian crypto weirdo that never led to anything real. (As far as I'm aware, no-one has yet assassinated Barack Obama.) But there's a first time for everything.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market#Assassina...
Instead we worry about things that are more sexy and less inevitable.
so second coming of Jesus is on the books?
can't wait.