Tactical butterfly net?

Nuclear weapons obsolete. Ok.


So what's to stop someone from programming their own drones to intercept? Nothing.

Just like full suits of armor, the crossbow, the longbow, gunpowder, the Gatling and TNT that was to make everything else obsolete..this is just the newest thing. Countermeasures are already in the works if not already existent.

meh, problem solved...

quote:

Originally posted by thunderson:
Nuclear weapons obsolete. Ok.

So what's to stop someone from programming their own drones to intercept? Nothing.

Just like full suits of armor, the crossbow, the longbow, gunpowder, the Gatling and TNT that was to make everything else obsolete..this is just the newest thing. Countermeasures are already in the works if not already existent.

I don't entirely disagree. Part of this is like anything else we've encountered this far.

But tiny and agile targets make for a serious, serious adversary for humans, like trying to swat or shoot a robotic wasp, and I'd wager almost no one here could reliably shoot one while flying, many regular folks couldn't even swat one reliably, except maybe with a shotgun or fat boat paddle, and who's going to the mall/ a restaurant carrying that around?

The size alone, once perfected and capable of deadly munitions, will be a game changer - perhaps like no other, and as long as we like wireless phones and broadband (not going away anytime soon, if ever), we're in deep, deep shit when and if these are readily available to those will ill intentions.

When 30/50/etc can fit in a single backpack, each with a pre-programmed target, or against several targets with multiple backups each, it's going to present significant challenges with no known remedy on the horizon. Taking on one would suck, but eight+? Shiiiiiiiiit.

Way before Skynet, this sort of technology will still be a danger like few things can be.

localized Biological/Chemical attacks, explosives, surveillance, it's going to be a problem.

we'd better be spending equal effort on defensive measures as the things themselves.

^ I think the biggest threat would be small attacks on civilian populations but that's always the case.

You're correct, we do need to put a lot into countering this threat but I believe, though I have no proof, that we are doing so already.

I realize Berkeley is on the cutting edge, but I personally thought about this scenario when I first saw the small RC helicopters for sale. I'd bet the farm the defense department has as well.

The same technology that enables them (plus others) could be used to disable them. Launch your own swarm of aerial hunter-killer drones that take out the attackers. Anything airborne in a given sector that can't quickly respond correctly to an IFF code gets attacked. Maybe come up with directional, short range EM pulse weapons to fry their electronics. Use broadband jamming to block their communications (using inverse spread spectrum techniques to allow our own coms to work through the jamming.)

quote:

Originally posted by arabiancowboy:

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
What we need to be doing is developing both the offensive and defensive technology simultaneously. We ARE going to be hit with this stuff. We need to have the technology in place to stop it. Radar and optical/IR directed lasers might also be an interesting weapon. Just some stuff off the top of my head.

It's going to take some imagination. Guys shooting at them with rifles isn't gonna work.

We're trying. Defensive is very difficult to do without fragging out your own spectrum. ISIS conducted 400 COTS UAV missions in a single month during the end of the Mosul offensive. Mostly real-time ISR, but over 100 of those missions were kinetic drops of modified hand grenades. A LOT of effort was spent trying to stop that, but its really hard. If that's the capability of a non-state group who was logistically isolated and losing..... imagine the capability of a fully resourced state with years of planning and their own universities churning out students to innovate this stuff. All while our pussy education system wrings its hands at the potential.

The comment that caused me to cringe was when the dear prof noted that these little buggers could descend on a city and only take out the 'bad' people. So as with any weapon, the danger is always 'who' gets to decide who is good and bad.

After watching the video, this is not the sort of weapon I'd be a huge proponent of.

Elon Musk says the 2nd biggest danger to mankind behind climate change is AI.

quote:

Originally posted by Black92LX:
Elon Musk says the 2nd biggest danger to mankind behind climate change is AI.

The third is Elon Musk, but he's trying harder.

Years ago I wrote simple code to synchronize threads with data driven variance per thread. Logically, not a small step to make the algorithm more complex and and tie into RF data coms.

This is not rocket science and no doubt multiple “right” solutions. This is here, and on the cheap. Targeting th pe communication of swarms and the location logic are probably best most immediate options.

Brave new world and we better get aggressive or the equivalent of the guy who grew up with a trash - 80 (me) will hand us our lunch.

quote:

Originally posted by FlyingScot:
Years ago I wrote simple code to synchronize threads with data driven variance per thread. Logically, not a small step to make the algorithm more complex and and tie into RF data coms.

This is not rocket science and no doubt multiple “right” solutions. This is here, and on the cheap. Targeting th pe communication of swarms and the location logic are probably best most immediate options.

Brave new world and we better get aggressive or the equivalent of the guy who grew up with a trash - 80 (me) will hand us our lunch.

I worked a counter-IED program where the big thing was "define the threat."

After months of multi-agency meetings, listening to the big brains on the subject I realized this:

"The threat is people improvising explosive devices. The only limits are the materials available and the builder's ingenuity."

I was reassigned shortly thereafter.

Jamming techniques, counter swarms, etc, won't mean a thing in a NYC subway tunnel, or at a crowded National Championship football game, or a rally in DC, or your local mall on Black Friday, with people everywhere, in tight quarters, where even one explosion or bits of flying debris can be deadly to one or many folks. Ant Man is an amusing film. Ant sized weapons, so to speak, are best left in SciFi, but they're not, they're nearly here and coming.

These things are insidiously nasty conceptions, and will be horrific realities one day, and I bet we'll wish they'd never been created one day, like sarin gas, or (shudder) tiny nukes.

quote:

Originally posted by Sig2340:

quote:

Originally posted by FlyingScot:
Years ago I wrote simple code to synchronize threads with data driven variance per thread. Logically, not a small step to make the algorithm more complex and and tie into RF data coms.

This is not rocket science and no doubt multiple “right” solutions. This is here, and on the cheap. Targeting th pe communication of swarms and the location logic are probably best most immediate options.

Brave new world and we better get aggressive or the equivalent of the guy who grew up with a trash - 80 (me) will hand us our lunch.

I worked a counter-IED program where the big thing was "define the threat."

After months of multi-agency meetings, listening to the big brains on the subject I realized this:
"The threat is people improvising explosive devices. The only limits are the materials available and the builder's ingenuity."

I was reassigned shortly thereafter.

Man you got that right. C-IED has proven an endless black hole money pit, with some but not enough to show for our expenditures.

I’ve grown weary of listening to PHDs opine and over analyze. It really is as simple as you say. First beer on me if we ever meet.

Looks like we've come a long way from the "Glock-under-the-drone" days!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH3jCJkAvF4

GGF

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
Do you doubt that, if not technically possible already, it will be so within a fairly short period (say 5 years)?

quote:

Originally posted by maladat:
Berkeley has one of the top 3 or 4 computer science programs in the world, but it's also probably in the top 3 or 4 most left-leaning universities in the world.

Sometimes that results in some really stupid shit coming out of the people there.

I think we'll probably get there eventually, but right now we don't have anywhere close to the technology to deploy swarms of hundreds of thousands of small autonomous drones that can work cooperatively to explore an unknown variable environment while searching for specific targets to destroy.

There are at least 5 different things in that scenario that, given the current state-of-the-art, are difficult-to-infeasible to do for even a single drone with a sophisticated, heavy, expensive sensor suite backed by a sizable computing cluster.

A bunch of modified R/C aircraft (which is, after all, what most small drones essentially are) that go to predefined locations and then fly into anything that moves and blow up? Sure, that's doable. It has been for a while. Hell, 15 or 20 years ago you could have built a bunch of machine gun or rocket platforms that you could dump out of a plane with parachutes and have them hit the ground and shoot at anything that moves. A bunch of them would land flipped over or in useless locations, but some of them wouldn't. But that's not what the article is talking about.

As for where my opinions come from - I'm partway through a PhD in computer science, and while my research doesn't have much to do with this scenario, I'm around people every day that do work on that kind of stuff (pathfinding/motion planning, image recognition, cooperation between autonomous systems, exploration and mapping of unknown environments, stuff like that).

quote:

Originally posted by ubelongoutside:
meh, problem solved...

That could be made of AR500 steel 1/2 in thick and it wouldn't help against a properly designed shaped charge with 3 g of net explosive weight.

Deny drone GPS and communications and position active anti-drone countermeasures - i.e. opposition drones, sensor countermeasures, energy weapons, etc.

Not saying it wouldn't be a threat, but there are always counters.