[ExI] Autonomous killer drones will soon be here

[Adrian Tymes]

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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