In a small skirmish in which the side with the AI has a lot of resources, sure.
In a large scale war, I’m not so sure. A fire-and-forget weapon with a 40km range is expensive and might be a scarce resource. Bullets are much cheaper, and if the AI can fly itself close enough to shoot you, it can do so inexpensively.
And this is not to mention that a 40km range weapon requires targeting that works at 40km.
Highly maneuverable reusable aircraft (even drones) are expensive, and a scarcer resource than missiles.
In modern great power military conflict, if you get to the point where you can fly F-16s or a hypermaneuverable AI dogfighting drone into visual range against an opponent [with inferior planes] who's out of missiles, haven't you already won?
If the opponent isn't inferior in dogfights, then instead of using ~$1mil munitions as expendables, you're using planes (and possibly pilots) as expendables. That's not a good or economical trade-off when missiles are as good as they are today.
Do you believe a jet fighter drone with a gun can be manufactured with sensing, computing, landing, takeoff, and AI for a million, or even a million per kill vs fighter craft? I do not.
Maybe you'll want AI for loitering munitions, for air to air a fighter drone is going to look more like a first stage for a multi-missile launch platform. It'll fly a while, loiter, volley against aircraft or missiles, then return for rearm and recover.
Bullets are cheap, but an AI airplane with a gun is far more expensive than almost any fire and forget missile since it is effectively a larger, more complex, more expensive fire and forget missile.
The software is freely replicable, the hardware is not. And the hardware for just the “running the AI” part of the reusable AI fighter is going to be more expensive than the electronics of a single use fire-and-forget air-to-air missile, and so will most of the parts of the fighter compared to the missile.
You don’t need a 1.8T parameter LLM to control an AI guided missile. In all likelihood, the model to control these can be run on an iPhone-level computer, which is max $1000. The bottleneck is still the missile.
Depends greatly on the AA capabilities of your adversary. Slower moving, larger drones with guns are easier to detect and shoot down than missiles, and probably more expensive than the average missile as well.
The only way a gun might be more efficient is in a situation with total air supremacy like Iraq or Afghanistan, and the targets would ideally be in the open.
Couldn't the aeronautical capabilities of an unpiloted aircraft have a significantly higher ceiling if the design doesn't need to accommodate for limiting g-forces on a human?
Not by much. Building airframes that can handle higher G forces than a human comes at a huge weight penalty which impacts cost, range, and payload. Plus, it becomes really tough to avoid compressor stall when the flight envelope gets into high AoA plus high speed. The engineers end up having to do funky things with the inlet that increase drag and radar signature.
Those weapons are sophisticated today because they were developed by the western military industrial complex under heavy oversight by politicians, neither of which had a need for a cheap, effective, high explosive drone.
Fundamentally, those cost a few thousand dollars in components at most. The reason the end products are expensive is that they are not optimized for mass production. Which, for better or worse, is starting to change. My 2c.
That's kind of a political question. Politicians set the rules of engagement, which dictate the level of confirmation required before employing weapons. It's a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum a certain area can be designated as a free-fire zone in which any airborne contact is assumed to be hostile. In the middle of the spectrum it may be required to use data links and IFF to avoid firing on friendly or neutral aircraft. And at the other end of the spectrum, visual confirmation may be required.
Wow. So much wow. Lavender and The Gospel “AI” used to identify individuals and buildings to bomb with the goal being to drop buildings on a hamas suspected person even if 10-100s of civilians are present with “dumb” bombs
So much to dissect here but will say this, I’ve been waiting for this story for a while.
I think it’s debatable whether it’s wise to have any kind of online presence what with the NSA taking over everything from your router to your watch to your doctor’s office and smart toilet.
I don’t work in the tech field but what would these systems look like? Basically they ingest intelligence like phone calls and logs and whatever else they get and it spits out a list of people with associated last known addresses and estimated civilian casualties and then lists supporting evidence?
Is this just ML that’s been worked on for years or is this some GPT based advancements? Can their system analyze voice, photos etc and it just predicts like a GPT?
Ps I’m not pro or anti anybody. I have no dog in this fight and I’m not versed enough to make a judgement. My heart goes to everyone affected. What a disaster and a tragedy war is.
Look at drone tactics deployed in Ukraine. It's shocking. Not in the future but right now, modern warfare is a swarm of <$100 jerry rigged recycled devices flying around delivering a few ounces of explosive whatever head or body can be accessed.
I think more likely a AI kill bot drone will be the way we die. You can build ten for the cost of one fire and forget missile, and it will be a lot more precise only killing the humans and leaving the infrastructure intact.
While a compelling short film, those tiny quadcopters are handicapped missiles. They fly slowly enough that modern anti-drone systems could engage them; their use of visual sensors leaves them vulnerable to laser blinding. Self-destructing drones are missiles trading manoeuvrability for speed.
Tiny missiles which are practically cost-free compared to conventional weapons, difficult to track by your enemies, and not just difficult to take out of the air, but oftentimes several orders of magnitude more expensive than the drone itself. Part of their effectiveness lies in the economic asymmetry involved.
Yes in the recent Iran attack on Israel the interceptors cost about $3mm each and the drones range from $20k to $2k. That asymmetry leads to a calculus of attack through overwhelming mass that’s so vast it’s impractical if not impossible to resist it.
In fact the US DoD is already proposing a “hellscape” capability this is precisely built around this idea as the primary method of countering China in the future.
Same thing happening in Ukraine. I actually think this is one of the huge stories that almost nobody is talking about right now. Sudden paradigm shift means big changes can happen quickly.
> stories that almost nobody is talking about right now
It is being talked about non-stop in military and international relations news. The point isn’t that drones are being ignored. It is that self-destructing drones are best thought of as a new niche of missile, one that is cheaper and more manoeuvrable than a conventional missile at the expense of speed. (As opposed to drones' traditional framing as tiny planes.)
They aren't free. Autonomy is computationally and sensor hungry, and consumes a lot of power. The moment a platform approaches the capabilities you are thinking of, it stops being cheap and stops being small. All while those drones are stopped by doors, curtains, strong wind, any kind of mist or darkness (unless you use thermal vision, which is $$$), or rain.
Thermal vision isn’t particularly expensive (I can get a high resolution compact IR camera for less than $20 on AliExpress now) and turkey is already fielding AI loitering munitions that are fully autonomous. Drones with weapons aren’t stopped by curtains or doors, and modern drones aren’t stopped by winds. I can fly my consumer DJI on a day with strong winds just fine.
I think you’re underestimating the rate of change in the technology and cost space along every one of these dimensions. Your assessment was true 5 years ago, isn’t true now, and will seem anachronistic in another 5.
The context of my reply is that "slaughterbot" short video, not 100kg+ drones.
It goes both ways. Just half a century years ago plenty of people were convinced we'd be having flying cars by now, projecting the speed of progress in one particular area forward. It doesn't work like that, progress in any given area is S-shaped, not exponential.
It's even worse when processes are adversarial. Where are the TB2s in Ukraine? Are you aware that FPV drones seem to have less than 10% success ratio nowadays?
My DJI weighs about 1kg and I could put explosives and enough compute on it for less than 100g to be self guided and lethal today, as well as cover every other dimension you mentioned.
The problem with flying cars is the physics at that time wasn’t conceivable (but is now it’s just I’m practically useless). The technology exists to do everything discussed by a DIY effort. It’s not about some quantum leap in ability. It’s about scale, cost reduction, and improvement of existing tooling and tying it all together. Which militaries world wide are -already- doing.
A 10% success ratio when the munition costs an order or two magnitude less is a winning proposition. The key isn’t each drone being successful it’s about launching 100,000 drones at once and being unstoppable en masse
Your DJI can't cope with doors. 100g of explosives don't do much, see Ukraine where this was attempted multiple times with very limited effect. And most importantly, your DJI enjoys massive subsidy because it is mass produced for entertainment, any custom weapon system would be at least an order of magnitude more expensive. This is already the case in Ukraine btw, with FPVs being comparable in total cost to entry point Mavics, despite being MUCH cruder.
It's not a winning proposition when you take into account that those FPV launches require teams of dozens of people to support, and that good old artillery is both cheaper, scarier (=more suppressive), and more effective.
Launch 100,000 drones against what target? How do you find the target? How do you get to it without getting detected and destroyed? Where do you launch from, what's your launch platform, and is it survivable (if you just plan to bring trucks to the front line, they'll just get blown up pre launch)? How do you deal with high power directed microwave, lasers, or just basic AA shells filling the air with shrapnel for peanuts? How do you coordinate the attack, especially under EW, without saturating all bandwidth available way before you reach 100,000?
You're severely underestimating the challenges and how much it costs to solve them. There are multiple reasons why torpedo boats never worked against competent navies, despite being theoretically much cheaper than battleships or modern destroyers; many of those reasons still apply to those ideas about cheap drones.
In the end it might very much be cheaper and more effective to use a good old JASSM-ER.
This is already theoretically possible with multiple teams using current technology. Intel has been doing these drone light shows for a while now, and here's a video from 2 years ago with only 1000 drones.
I wonder if the person cuing the launch at the beginning of the video understands what "drop[ping] the hammer" is a reference to. Maybe this is a case of unintentional Chekhov's gun?
Oh yeah, they also have another video, where they break their own record for their Guinness world record show with 2018 drones. That's the number of drones and the year they did it in. That's already 5 years+ ago. They let slip that their drone coordination software was literally designed to control "limitless amount of drones" and it's only using a single PC for coordination.
I agree with everything you've said, in case it wasn't clear.
US Export control frameworks managed to keep missile technologies from reimplemented by bored teenagers while actual guided munition technology were left stalling for decades(for better or worse - Ukraine is running out of SAMs daily), resulting in media narrative disconnect between those.
I can drop a cluster bomb filled with drones into a city, army base, factory and they kill everyone with precision and are collectively almost unstoppable.
Yes flying a large drone a few hundred miles over enemy fortifications is quite stoppable compared to a hypersonic missile. So, don’t do that.
> I can drop a cluster bomb filled with drones into a city, army base, factory and they kill everyone with precision and are collectively almost unstoppable.
I personally see this as a potential of drones being used to shoot down other drones or missiles, and the inevitable drones trying to shoot down those drones.
