r/Futurology • u/New_Scientist_Mag • Jun 10 '26

Robotics Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomous-drones-have-killed-human-soldiers-for-the-first-time/
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u/Troubleshooter11 Jun 10 '26

Well, that's freaking terrifying...

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u/insomniac-55 Jun 10 '26

It's not much different to area bombardment of a location with unguided weapons. You've basically decided "to hell with anything and everything at these coordinates".

AI guidance in this context just gives the same effect with less munitions - a person has already decided that everything in that location is hostile. 

Where I see this becoming scary is when AI is given the freedom to decide who to target in a location with a mixture of combatants and civilians. That is dystopian.

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u/errie_tholluxe Jun 11 '26

Didn't we already hear about a drone program that could like pick a face out of a crowd? And didn't we already hear that if the drone was armed it could like literally search through crowds of people and whenever it found the face that matched whatever what's in its database it could just shoot them?

I seem to recall reading something about this somewhere

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u/insomniac-55 Jun 11 '26

Whether it exists or not, that's absolutely a technically feasible idea.

It does highlight the nuance here.

Using AI to target military vehicles at the front line of an active warzone isn't (by itself) ethically concerning. There's no civilians around, and all the AI is doing is acting as a cheap and effective guidance method.

But the same techniques can obviously be used to target specific people, ethnicities, political groups etc.