From pharos at gmail.com  Tue Jul  1 09:30:49 2025
From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK)
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2025 10:30:49 +0100
Subject: [ExI] Autonomous killer drones will soon be here
Message-ID: <CAL_armjY8o_t6grroQHpqLGtRACnp+PD1UmA2sK2WASTiF6Zrg@mail.gmail.com>

On Sun, 29 Jun 2025 at 21:20, spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> Now of course AI is going to be used for defense.  I will make the case, later today perhaps but more likely in the next few days, that we can imagine a case where AI will guide weapons to destroy other weapons.
>
> spike
> _______________________________________________


The Ukraine and Russian techies are developing drone warfare at a
fantastic pace.
Every enhancement becomes obsolete within three months.
They want drones to have the intelligence to select and destroy their
targets autonomously..
It won't take long for this to be achieved.

<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/25/ukraine-russia-autonomous-drones-ai>
Quotes:
Killing machines: how Russia and Ukraine?s race to perfect deadly
pilotless drones could harm us all.
Cheap, scaleable and highly autonomous, these weapons are developing
quickly ? and experts say they should prompt a global rethink about
security.
Daniel Boffey in Kyiv     Wed 25 Jun 2025

The targets are not merely tanks, planes, railway hubs and critical
infrastructure. The top priority is to kill people.

?There will be cheaper autonomous systems which can target infantry at
a smaller scale because this is a key target, because the doctrine of
war has changed, heavy equipment is used less and less,? Fedorov says.
---------------------

(And I guess that civilian forces and terrorists will also love these cheap
selective kill devices).
BillK


From spike at rainier66.com  Tue Jul  1 14:58:21 2025
From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com)
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2025 07:58:21 -0700
Subject: [ExI] Autonomous killer drones will soon be here
In-Reply-To: <CAL_armjY8o_t6grroQHpqLGtRACnp+PD1UmA2sK2WASTiF6Zrg@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAL_armjY8o_t6grroQHpqLGtRACnp+PD1UmA2sK2WASTiF6Zrg@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <005501dbea98$96e9e0c0$c4bda240$@rainier66.com>



-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of BillK via extropy-chat
Subject: [ExI] Autonomous killer drones will soon be here

On Sun, 29 Jun 2025 at 21:20, spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>... Now of course AI is going to be used for defense.  I will make the case, later today perhaps but more likely in the next few days, that we can imagine a case where AI will guide weapons to destroy other weapons.
>
> spike
> _______________________________________________


>...The Ukraine and Russian techies are developing drone warfare at a fantastic pace.
Every enhancement becomes obsolete within three months.
They want drones to have the intelligence to select and destroy their targets autonomously..
It won't take long for this to be achieved.
...
---------------------

>...(And I guess that civilian forces and terrorists will also love these cheap selective kill devices).
BillK

_______________________________________________



That technology already exists BillK.  Flying robot competitions include such subcompetitions as identifying categories of people: injured hiker, escaped convict, nude sunbather, fitness runner.  The game is to drop a first aid kit and water to the injured hiker, identify the position and direction of the escaped convict, ignore the jogger, pixelate the image of the nude sunbather.  Fortunately, they didn't actually specify the requisite size of the pixels on that sunbather, so if our drone creates an image of such resolution that we can count her eyebrow hairs, that image is still made up of pixels, and therefore meets the strict definition of "pixelate" by my reasoning.

I can easily imagine drones being used as targeting vehicles, which identify and laser-paint the target, as missiles with end-game guidance come in seeking that specific frequency of the targeting laser.  Consequence: we may soon see or perhaps have already seen our last major outdoor political rally.

spike



From atymes at gmail.com  Tue Jul  1 15:45:21 2025
From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes)
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2025 11:45:21 -0400
Subject: [ExI] Autonomous killer drones will soon be here
In-Reply-To: <005501dbea98$96e9e0c0$c4bda240$@rainier66.com>
References: <CAL_armjY8o_t6grroQHpqLGtRACnp+PD1UmA2sK2WASTiF6Zrg@mail.gmail.com>
 <005501dbea98$96e9e0c0$c4bda240$@rainier66.com>
Message-ID: <CALAdGNT1Cb+L7VAAMcWwU4tjaM=6-qZD6VEiRMhMXHupEwCXWw@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, Jul 1, 2025 at 11:00?AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I can easily imagine drones being used as targeting vehicles, which
> identify and laser-paint the target, as missiles with end-game guidance
> come in seeking that specific frequency of the targeting laser.
> Consequence: we may soon see or perhaps have already seen our last major
> outdoor political rally.
>

Let us imagine that this happens.  Some major - at least 1,000 people -
outdoor political rally happens.  Drone-launched munitions injure (at
minimum, possibly kill) a majority of the attendees.  The operators either
are government employees, or are not (being partisans, stooges, deniable
assets, or whatever) but are under the direction/control/enabling of
government employees (if nothing else: this is how they got the drones).
Despite this being a crowd, let us posit traditional kinetic weapons - at
most, fragmentation grenades - rather than gas clouds, sonic, or other riot
control measures, so as to demonstrate a clear intent to injure or kill
rather than merely deter.  (The demonstration, and its chilling effect on
further protests, may or may not be part of the purpose.)  The munitions
would likely be either artillery, or short range munitions that
functionally act like artillery.  (Guns can always be pointed up to act as
artillery.  Guided missiles in this quantity are expensive overkill - and
even mass murderers have finite budgets, especially government-funded ones.)

Local law enforcement would be all over this.  Politics aside, this is like
tossing raw meat to starving lions: investigation, arrest, and punishment
of those who would do this is clearly part of their purpose.  No federal
order to suspend investigation would have a chance of success, save maybe
for the FBI to assume jurisdiction - and if they try that only to clearly
drop the ball (due to ineptitude, slow walking, or merely not actually
conducting investigations and only being there to keep the local cops out),
the locals are going to do it anyway, jurisdiction be damned.  And if some
feds were responsible, they would be arrested and prosecuted under state
law, especially if there was a perception the feds would refuse to
prosecute.  Presidential pardons in this scenario would seem unlikely to
secure release of the perpetrators, and may backfire in other ways.

So, to get away with it, it would have to be done deniably, such that the
local police (ignoring any attempt to suppress them) would not be able to
prove who did it.  Given the assumption of a major political rally, this is
almost certainly happening in a large city - which means the local police
would be well-funded, with good access to and at least somewhat competent
training on technology.  The drones would have to be unregistered and
unlicensed.  Drones massing less than 250 grams don't have to register with
the FAA, so either make the targeting drones under that threshold or hope
that local airspace monitors don't flag larger drones not broadcasting ID.
Presumably the munition launchers would be ground-based; I don't know what
range mortars can get, and in an urban context, unblocked parabolic lines
of attack may be difficult unless they could launch from rooftops.  In any
case, they would either need to be able to escape detection quickly after
launch (launch would create enough noise and flash to risk the launch point
being immediately detected) or self-destruct so thoroughly that police
investigation of the remains could not trace back to their owners (which
seems unlikely, given the amount of resources that would be put into
investigation).  I am aware of means of doing this, but in practice,
implementations of that technology would be difficult - to understate
things - to acquire by the portion of the government that would execute
such a plan.  (There's a temptation to paint the government as one big
monolithic entity, such that anything that one department can get, is
automatically and instantly available to everyone in the government, and to
simply assert that this is an obvious fact.  In reality, that claim is
utterly false: the United States federal government is far from such unity.)

If it is credible enough that such an effort would be discovered, and that
the court of public opinion would tie responsibility back to the government
- almost certainly to the President - then that would likely be the best
deterrent to such a scenario actually happening.  (Unless someone were to
false-flag it, which seems unlikely given the organizations that would
false-flag it.)

Your thoughts?
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From spike at rainier66.com  Tue Jul  1 16:02:19 2025
From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com)
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2025 09:02:19 -0700
Subject: [ExI] Autonomous killer drones will soon be here
In-Reply-To: <CALAdGNT1Cb+L7VAAMcWwU4tjaM=6-qZD6VEiRMhMXHupEwCXWw@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAL_armjY8o_t6grroQHpqLGtRACnp+PD1UmA2sK2WASTiF6Zrg@mail.gmail.com>
 <005501dbea98$96e9e0c0$c4bda240$@rainier66.com>
 <CALAdGNT1Cb+L7VAAMcWwU4tjaM=6-qZD6VEiRMhMXHupEwCXWw@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <00a701dbeaa1$86ba6b80$942f4280$@rainier66.com>

 

 

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat

Cc: Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ExI] Autonomous killer drones will soon be here

 

On Tue, Jul 1, 2025 at 11:00?AM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

I can easily imagine drones being used as targeting vehicles, which identify and laser-paint the target, as missiles with end-game guidance come in seeking that specific frequency of the targeting laser.  Consequence: we may soon see or perhaps have already seen our last major outdoor political rally.

 

>?Let us imagine that this happens.  Some major - at least 1,000 people - outdoor political rally happens.  Drone-launched munitions injure (at minimum, possibly kill) a majority of the attendees?Your thoughts?

 

 

Adrian what I meant was a low-mass targeting drone of perhaps 10kg, which would have little or no radar signature, it would be hard to see, would make very little sound and would do nothing other than identify one particular person and paint him with a targeting laser from a distance of perhaps 1000 meters (some cameras are that good now), to guide incoming rocket propelled projectiles with end-game guidance aboard.  None of that requires huge amounts of funding or anything that couldn?t be smuggled into the country in a form unrecognizable as a weapon designed to take out one specific person.

 

I could see the students had created flying robots with sufficient on-board computing power to identify classes of people.  Some of these teams were very poorly funded, such as ours, where the pacifist students refuse any funding from military, government or any military contractor (which means pretty much every company interested in drones.)  They had a lot of engineering talent (I was very impressed with that) but operating on a starvation budget.

 

I hear Iran has issued a fatwa against that guy who is the current US president, I can?t think of his name at the moment, but he does outdoor rallies.  The Iranians have money and they have plenty of guys already in place.  Result: we may have already witnessed our last outdoor political rally.

 

spike

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From spike at rainier66.com  Tue Jul  1 16:22:10 2025
From: spike at rainier66.com (spike at rainier66.com)
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2025 09:22:10 -0700
Subject: [ExI] ten year ban on state ai regulations?
In-Reply-To: <00a701dbeaa1$86ba6b80$942f4280$@rainier66.com>
References: <CAL_armjY8o_t6grroQHpqLGtRACnp+PD1UmA2sK2WASTiF6Zrg@mail.gmail.com>
 <005501dbea98$96e9e0c0$c4bda240$@rainier66.com>
 <CALAdGNT1Cb+L7VAAMcWwU4tjaM=6-qZD6VEiRMhMXHupEwCXWw@mail.gmail.com>
 <00a701dbeaa1$86ba6b80$942f4280$@rainier66.com>
Message-ID: <00c601dbeaa4$554cbc30$ffe63490$@rainier66.com>

 

 

I am reading about the senate struggling to pass a budget.  They included in there a ten year ban on state-level AI regulation.  What I don?t understand is how states proposed to regulate AI.  The former VP and US presidential  candidate, whose name I cannot recall at the moment, explained to us what is AI in the famous ?first of all, it?s two letters? speech.  We are told it is a kind of a fancy thing, and it is artificial intelligence.  It?s about machine learning.  The machine is taught.  The issue is what information is going into the machine (etc.)  Note that this was the US government?s person in charge of AI, who had not the foggiest clue what it is.

 

So now, there were state-level regulations on AI?  What would those be?  To have regulations on something, we would need to clearly understand what qualifies as AI, ja?  Now the federal government is proposing a ban on state-level regulations on AI.  But the fed does not have the authority to prevent a state from regulating something, unless there is a specific reserved power in the constitution allowing the federal government to do that.

 

So now we are back to states having the theoretical authority to regulate something that I can?t even imagine how it would define.

 

Ideas?

 

spike

 

 

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From pharos at gmail.com  Tue Jul  1 16:55:44 2025
From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK)
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2025 17:55:44 +0100
Subject: [ExI] Autonomous killer drones will soon be here
In-Reply-To: <00a701dbeaa1$86ba6b80$942f4280$@rainier66.com>
References: <CAL_armjY8o_t6grroQHpqLGtRACnp+PD1UmA2sK2WASTiF6Zrg@mail.gmail.com>
 <005501dbea98$96e9e0c0$c4bda240$@rainier66.com>
 <CALAdGNT1Cb+L7VAAMcWwU4tjaM=6-qZD6VEiRMhMXHupEwCXWw@mail.gmail.com>
 <00a701dbeaa1$86ba6b80$942f4280$@rainier66.com>
Message-ID: <CAL_armi7q5ULvRF_JecOT0rCU9JEMVJerKEu7-=GLUXs+F1VmA@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, 1 Jul 2025 at 17:05, spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> Adrian what I meant was a low-mass targeting drone of perhaps 10kg, which would have little or no radar signature, it would be hard to see, would make very little sound and would do nothing other than identify one particular person and paint him with a targeting laser from a distance of perhaps 1000 meters (some cameras are that good now), to guide incoming rocket propelled projectiles with end-game guidance aboard.  None of that requires huge amounts of funding or anything that couldn?t be smuggled into the country in a form unrecognizable as a weapon designed to take out one specific person.
>
<snip>
>
> spike
> _______________________________________________


I think that in the very near future rocket projectiles will not be
required. A swarm of small drones with a specific objective could
either explode on impact or drop grenades. Any public appearances
would need to have a mobile drone defence system for company.
But a swarm of, say ten, small drones probably means that some
would still get through.
Such attacks could mean that public rallies would stop, as it would be
too dangerous for politicians to appear in public.

BillK