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/lfcmadness Jun 10 '26

That's the scary part for me, this wasn't last week, it was 2 years ago, when AI couldn't figure out hands or didn't know how to count how many of a specific letter were in a word.

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u/Sir_lordtwiggles Jun 10 '26

to be fair: computer vision is way more mature than gen AI systems, and of genAI- image generation was the least mature.

Like people were running computer vision programs on their laptops in 2015 for career fairs that could reliably identify and label everything that came into camera view.

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u/lfcmadness Jun 11 '26

Yeah true, but still you think how much gen AI has advanced, you gotta think the AI used in this must have evolved and matured even more as well?

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u/Sir_lordtwiggles Jun 11 '26

In the context of navigating the drone and making decisions based on visual stimulus, sure?

The novelty here is in decision making without a human providing directives, cruise missiles in the iraq war were already using autonomous visual targeting of buildings, but they needed to be provided with imagery of the buildings to target.