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Comments (156)

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  delichon
  This was back in 2026, before they released the Dredd series for civilian applications with onboard due processing and agents for prosecution, defense, judge, jury and executioner with millisecond response times, drastically reducing price per perpetrator.
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  robotresearcher
  We've had loitering munitions that choose their own target autonomously for a long time, for example anti-tank weapons that climb up after being released from a plane or helicopter then sit on a parachute until spotting one or more tanks and firing warheads at them.The superficial new thing here is the exact quadcopter form factor, but the significance is the new price point. You bet the loitering anti-tank weapon costs a fortune. These drones are very cheap.Of course, mines can be even cheaper, but you unwittingly engage them rather than them engaging you.
• somat
  That is not true. By my calculation the first human killed by drones was probably September 24, 1958 when planes were shot down by fully autonomous rocket powered kamikaze drones released over the taiwan strait.My point being A. we have been killing people with fully autonomous drones for a long time now. and B. why the name change? just because it uses a propeller or is in vertical helicopter form does it is not a guided missile?
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  saltcured
  I think the ancestor drones are land and sea mines, or really any kind of trap that dislocates the timing and control of the "trigger" from the person who launched it into the environment.These newer drones have just gained locomotion instead of having to wait for victims to come to them.
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  pharos92
  The world is really at a threshold where it's become openly obvious that technology is not working for the majority of humanity, but a small cabal.
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  namuol
  > “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”This is a clear war crime. We don’t need to update any international laws, do we? This is by definition indiscriminate, like landmines or chemical weapons.
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  arjie
  Something like a proximity mine from a video game. I always did wonder why they didn't just sprinkle a bunch of these in an intermediary zone. Surely it provides incredibly effective area denial. Perhaps it does and you can't get in, perhaps it invites escalation. Definitely seems like widespread automated hunter-seekers will be some kind of terror operation in the next quarter century. Too easy to build, too easy to deploy, and you don't even have to be around when it activates. Controlling the explosives pipeline is surely the only way. I'm surprised it hasn't already happened.
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  inigyou
  Is this new? I'm sure I've heard about it in the Iran and Gaza wars.Or is this the first time a soldier was killed, all those other times being civilians?
• seydor
  not even the first time, i remember reports of such drone use in Libya: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/01/1002196245/a-u-n-report-sugge...We 'll just train some pigeons to eat the quadcopters, problem solved.
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  matheusmoreira
  The meta keeps evolving. I suppose the next step is to create drones designed to intercept each other. Then swarms of drones will battle it out in the sky fully autonomously.
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  guestbest
  Strange reading an article like this covered in ads
• thangalin
  How would this work for an identical twin civilian?
• anon
  undefined
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  CrzyLngPwd
  I wonder what that means for war crimes responsibility.Let's say a swarm of these things kills every civilian patient in a hospital or every child in a school. Who is responsible?I'm surprised Israel wasn't the first to field such weapons.
• maxdo
  OpenCV + nvidia jetson. A Killer combo
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  RetroTechie
  Is this any different from say, carpet-bombing an area? If so, how?
• bawolff
  > involving fully autonomous drones set to destroy anything in a given area, with confirmed casualtiesI mean, is that really different than a heat seeking misile at the end of the day? If its set to kill everything in the area, its not really using AI for making targeting decisions in the same sense a human would.
• 13415
  It's the future of warfare and it will sink the inhibition threshold for starting wars of aggression further.
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  YeGoblynQueenne
  A few thoughts.First, I advise a modicum of skepticism to be retained in the face of such news. Ukraine is, after all, in the middle of an existential crisis and must take every advantage it can, even if it's just scaring Russian invaders further (I bet both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers are already pretty scared of drones).Additionally: "“There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing…". So there's no way to know exactly what happened which adds a lot of uncertainty.Finally: the system was first used two years ago once, then never again. That doesn't sound like it's giving much of an advantage. Sorry, I don't believe that it's a matter of military ethics. If Ukraine could deploy actual Terminator robots to the front line it would do it in a heartbeat. Again: existential crisis. They're fighting for their country's existence. I would use every weapon in my disposal; and I'm a pacifist who hates violence. So I don't think that "test" really worked well at all.Now, taking the New Scientist's reportage at face value, the announcement seems to describe a system that is only marginally more capable than a self-guided missile. It seems that a quadcopter swarm of undisclosed strength flew to a predetermined location (nothing new to see here), then a target acquisition system was activated.Is the latter a new capability? Hard to say without more details that we're not likely to know. Maybe the drones simply locked on to whatever moved. Motion sensing is not new technology. Nor is it a great idea to put it on a flying grenade that you fire-and-forget.Maybe the drones had some on-board machine vision system that tries to identify useful targets like persons and vehicles. That's eminently possible with modern tech, I have a Raspberry Pi-powered quadruped from China that can detect my face, identify balls of different colours etc. All this is more than enough to automate target selection, with a bit of creative cobbling together of existing components and if you don't care too much who the target selected, is.Without more information it's very hard to guess exactly what happened. However, "Slaughterbots" these don't seem to have been.Later, a different, human-piloted drone was sent in to inspect the outcome. Why human-piloted? Well, because there's no way to ensure that an autonomous drone will be able to do the job, that's why.So in other words: we're not there yet. "There" being a nightmare where machines kill humans autonomously and we unlock a new level of horrors and war crimes. There is still time. We can still pull back from the brink. Resistance is not futile.
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  throwaway_19sz
  Can someone who got past the paywall tell me what the definition of “fully autonomous” is here? I’m guessing it means the software selected targets based on something the human operators decided when they launched the drone? Is the criteria geographic (any humans in a certain zone), or known individuals (facial recognition), or based on enemy uniforms/visual descriptions, or a specific behavioural rule (anyone emerging from this building), or what?
• tamimio
  That’s a war crime, but I have seen unhinged drone operators who prefer to fly these drones than doing anything else because “they like the killing”, exact words said by one.Technically speaking, it’s not impressive, you can train a simple local object recognition in the companion computer in the drone to fly at that specific object, so just train it on soldiers images and communicate over serial port and let the open source auto pilot do the navigation, again, nothing is that impressive, a weekend project, personally done before but not on humans and it was for good.
• josefritzishere
  Skynet is manifest.
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  kylehotchkiss
  What's gonna happen when the redneck militias start building these on their compounds? I'm terrified of domestic implications - police departments can't go buy old military gear to squash these yet.
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  ReptileMan
  Fully autonomous Ukrainian drones. We don't know if Russia hadn't used something before them.The two sides are quite evenly matched
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  FrustratedMonky
  Got to Kill Them AllPokémon Go Driven Drones Autonomously Killing.They develop consciousness and turn it around, and try to catch every human and Transfer them to the Professor for Candy.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48487029https://dronexl.co/2026/06/09/pokemon-go-scans-niantic-vanto...
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  davidfekke
  I hate to burst the New Scientist's bubble, but this is nothing new. We have had systems for decades that operated under "Fire and Forget". We have missles that either go to a pre-designated point or chase a heat or radar signature once they are fired.Human soldiers kill civilians and other soldiers on the same side. It is called "friendly fire". It is horrible, and should be avoided, but humans are more likely to make this kind of mistake more than a computer or AI model.
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  damnitbuilds
  If you drop a dumb bomb on an area, it kills everyone there.If you release an autonomous drone in an area, it will probably kill everyone there, but might use its AI to decide not to kill some people there.Why is the latter worse than the former ?
• Xotic007
  [dead]
• Hilliard_Ohiooo
  Let's go boys! The AI war is so fucking on!!!