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.
Directional anti-tank mines are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARM_1_mine
These newer drones have just gained locomotion instead of having to wait for victims to come to them.
[1] “A Scientist Rebels,” 1947 http://lanl-the-back-story.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-scientist-...
Target selection is much more networked, automated, and adaptive than it used to be. Missiles can talk to each other.
I realize there is a full, multidimensional continuum here.
On one end are directly-aimed weapons that do their damage while still being aimed by the operator. Their risks include collateral damage limited to things like aiming errors, effect radius, or continuing down-range beyond the target.
Further out are messy things with more active guidance that can turn and seek the target and potentially go off course. But their time to target is still quite limited and more or less being observed by the one who fired it. The risk expands with its potential "cone of maneuvering" and travel range.
Then you get into these things with long dwell times and autonomy where the eventual targeting event happens without supervision and is greatly affected by things happening in the environment which the operator cannot have really predicted nor controlled for. The longer time in operation increases the risk not only from wandering/guidance but from how much the environment can change before it performs its final targeting event.
Another example in this category could be chemical and biological weapons. There is a lot more uncertainty in the targeting effects due to the way it disperses in the environment.
The missile, once fired, has the general vicinity (if not the exact position) of the target and is armed by the operator. Therefore, the operator is fully accountable for the targetting. Same goes for the landmines, once placed. Hitting civilians is reckless at best, and negligent at worst.
An autonomous weapon system (AWS) usually means that the system, once deployed, can do the targetting itself over any arbitrarily bounded location. An AWS can continue finding targets as long as its hardware allows it. For kamikaze drones, it's one time; for other drones, the ammunition & battery are the limits.
We currently rely on human targetting because we assume that A) humans are able to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate targets "well-enough", and if not, B) at least we can hold them accountable (e.g., punish them for war crimes).
An AWS provides a layer of plausible deniability: the operator can claim that the system wasn't developed well enough, while the developer can claim that it wasn't used as intended. Given the inscrutability of modern computational intelligence - i.e., visual-action neural networks - this could potentially lead to very worrying incidents.
From a technical POV, the difference between a manually operated drone and an AWS drone may not be massive. From a military POV, it's just another legal lethal tool in the arsenal.
But from a social/civilian POV, the use of AWS is still 'not normal' and opens a can of worms. Targetting while evading counterattacks and crimes successfully is a bottleneck for manual operation. That's no longer the case with AWS: build 20 thousand drones, for example, and you can trivially win by overwhelming any manual defense of frontlines or cities. And knowing the history of human warfare, winning can range from relatively bloodless regime changes to utter destruction of the loser's civilization.
So, the best outcome is similar to nuclear deterrence or MAD: as long as everyone has 20 thousand AWS drones, they're safe.
Landmines can be dropped from the air by the thousands and many land mines can survive for decades. Placing a landmine anywhere is essentially the same as firing a bullet blindly through time. And no individual soldier has ever been held accountable for a landmine that killed a civilian years down the road.
Which doesn’t make what you said about drones any less awful. Just that landmines are already uniquely awful.
Beautifully said and truly clarifies how evil of a weapon they are.
With that said, are these drones paradoxically more ethical because their loiter time is dramatically shorter and therefore won’t harm civilians after the conflict is over?
But I think there is an extreme ethical boundary we are traversing by putting targeting and trigger-pulling in the hands of a robot. The ways this will later be abused by authoritarian regimes is just staggering. We are reducing the necessary footprint of a loyal junta and automating dictatorships with this technology. It’s very disturbing.
An autonomous drone will select a target and pull the trigger. It fills in the position of a human pulling a trigger, which is a decision.
Maybe if robots began deciding where to lay mines, i could hand it to you.
We 'll just train some pigeons to eat the quadcopters, problem solved.
Or is this the first time a soldier was killed, all those other times being civilians?
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.
I'm not sure it's accurate to define yourself as a pacifist if you believe safeguarding the concept of a nation-state is more important than human life, ethics, or the downstream effects of using "every weapon at your disposal".
I don't think you realize the creativity and variety we humans have put to use when designing weapons. If you can imagine a biological, chemical, radiation, concussive, or other weapon, it's been worked on. There has been more than one project to build a "world-ending weapon" and go way beyond the MAD theory.
Wait till you hear that I'm also an anti-nationalist :P
But I'm also pragmatic. Nations aren't going away and they have armies and they like to invade each other. If my country were to be invaded (not a zero probability; I'm Greek and if NATO collapses...) I would put the good of my people above my personal beliefs before you could say "peacenick". C'est la vie.
>> I don't think you realize the creativity and variety we humans have put to use when designing weapons.
I think I do but why do you say this? I didn't understand how it connects to the rest of your comment, or to mine.
not the parent, but i have a guess.
they mention the variety of weapons because some weapons are abhorrent. designed to be maximally painful, for the maximum amount of time, purely to bring about maximum suffering.
"every weapon at your disposal" includes those weapons. and that is really difficult to square with "im a pacifist", even when considering conditional pacifism.
Completely false. They are beholden to their allies. Ukraine could also reach Moscow with missiles, why doesn't it? It could build a nuclear bomb in 6 months, if not 6 weeks, they have the capabilities, why doesn't it? It's not so simple.
So I agree that it's not so simple but I also don't believe for a minute that it has anything to do with ethics. Not in that war. And I have to be honest but I can't think of a war were ethics played an important role in determining belligerent's behaviour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPG-7#Ammunition
The newer drones may have dedicated warhead designs now, but the concept is similar. They carry high explosive warheads that aren't sold to civilians. It's the same reason the militias don't already have anti-tank weapons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpet_bombing
Autonomous weapons have hardly been deployed yet, maybe at the Inner Korean border or some lunatic's backyard. Therefore I don't think there is any legislation for it yet. But it seems a very cruel way of killing, also considering in this particular case they didn't even send footage back. What kind of experiment was this? Maybe they didn't like to see the brutality, perhaps people begging for mercy not to be killed, giving up and showing a white flag. Indeed this isn't possible with carpet-bombing.
Or, I can have a drone with an LPR slam a mortar round into your car as you drive.
The two sides are quite evenly matched
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.
> but humans are more likely to make this kind of mistake more than a computer or AI model
Based on?
Pokémon 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=48487029
https://dronexl.co/2026/06/09/pokemon-go-scans-niantic-vanto...
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 ?
It is much more dangerous when they start to be selective. Then people start trusting the selection capabilities and use them in cases where they wouldn't use a "kill everyone" weapon.
If a military can bomb you or drone you, it will bomb you and drone you.
I'm not sure about worse, but think one of the differences would be the size of the 'kill zone' and the cost/availability. 10 quadcopters "cover[ed] between 3 and 5 kilometres ". That would take a lot of bombs and a multiple aircraft sorties with to kill everything there. e.g. During the Vietnam war, a group of 6 B-52 bombers modified for carpet bombings could bomb an area around 1Km x 3Km. Only the US and Russia have heavy bombers that can do that. It could be done with smaller fighter aircraft, but that's more sorties.
That's vs. 10 quadcopter drones.
One way in which automated drones might be considered bad, is (if) they cannot accept surrender - but are used in scenarios where human operators could.
"No quarter" is a war crime.
Ai is like 8yr old with gun: unpredictable
It is similar to the problem with the neutron bomb. On the surface the idea of the neutron bomb (a bomb which kills humans via hard radiation but leaves infra intact) is not “worse” than a regular nuclear weapon. The dead die the same way and the living envy them. What CHANGES is the use calculus. I might not want to bomb an industrial valley if doing so destroys the thing I am trying to capture. However, if I have a bomb which kills the people living there and spares the factory, I might pull the trigger.
Similarly, it is cheap (relatively) to indiscriminately launch weapons at a distant place. It is extraordinarily expensive to send human troops in. They need food, water, and generally have families that expect some of them to come home. If putting a rifle on an autonomous vehicle works, then a ground invasion becomes cheaper.