Quote:
Originally Posted by Skybird
Militarily, autonomy is the logical next step in drones to avoid them getting hacked and hijacked. But from then on, the inhibitions to wage undeclared and unidentified wars everybody against everybody will dramatically drop.
Combine that with artificial swarm intelligence, and maybe scientists like Hawkings, warning against hightech and AI being the reason for mankind going extinct, one day may be shown to have gotten it right.
And this does not even consider autonomous swarm drones using biological and nuclear weapons.
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I wonder if nuclear weapons are going to go out of fashion at some point, I mean at the moment they're the most explosive weapon that we have, but also one of the most messy, especially if it's something horrific like a cobalt enhanced bomb. Same goes for biological weaponry, it's something that can cause a problem for the user as well as the enemy. Although there is a difference with biological which I'll come back to in a moment.
The weaponry that is wanted is clean and consise weaponry, pinpoint accurate long range stuff, like a tiny seeker bullet which kills only one person in a crowd. Stuff that avoids collateral damage which in a multi-media environment leads to civilian backlash.
Unfortunately that will lead to the exact opposite to what you say in the opening paragraph because such assassination weaponry will make it much much easier to wage undeclared wars.
Of course, it would be slightly harder to automate an assassination drone, it would require a clear facial recognition and body identification program which can be tricked by surgery. So you'd probably have to keep that one manned.
One that could be automated is when it comes down to genetically precise biological warfare, which I fear is literally around the corner, where a virus can be unleashed on a populace that only kills people of a particular ethnic group who have that marker in their DNA. Now that is pretty disturbing stuff, and I really hope that never happens but it's a genie in a bottle and someone will let it out someday.
