Perhaps it’s his measured British accent, or the box of PG Tips visible in his Berkley office as we talk via Zoom, but he doesn’t come across as a common or garden doom monger. Stuart Russell is professor of computer science at the University of California, and was a sponsor of the 2017 film, which has now been viewed more than 75 million times. Slaughterbots, of course, is not a documentary. Pretty terrifying: a small, inexpensive drone using facial recognition to select and kill a target, free from any direct human control.Ī still from the short film, showing a human target in the crosshairs of the fictional microdroneĬredit: Slaughterbots/The Future of Life Institute “That little bang,” we are told, “is enough to penetrate the skull and destroy the contents.” He throws it into the air, whereupon it swiftly recovers its orientation and charges like a bolt of lightning at a nearby mannequin, blowing a small hole in its forehead. He then reveals that inside the tiny four-rotored drone, which has by now landed gently in his hand, is three grams of “shaped” explosive. He goes on: “Just like any mobile device these days, it has cameras and sensors, and just like your phones and social media apps, it does facial recognition.” “Its processor can react 100 times faster than a human.” In other words, it controls itself. The best part? “It’s all AI,” the presenter says smugly, in the film. Even when he didn’t try, it seemed to dance in the air, apparently displaying its “stochastic motion” anti-sniper function. The audience laughed and clapped as the machine playfully dodged the presenter’s attempts to grab it. Slaughterbots – an award-winning short film from the Future of Life Institute – portrayed a fictionalised slick, Steve Jobs-style tech presentation introducing a microdrone small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. In 2017 a short film was premiered at a United Nations diplomatic conference in Geneva which, to put it mildly, ruffled some feathers. In short, it cannot think for itself and it cannot kill. Why? Because it ignores the fact that the Hornet still requires a soldier to put him or herself in danger by getting close enough to the enemy (less than 2km) to pilot it into position, and that once there the drone can only act passively, as a reconnaissance tool. But even a lowly computer science graduate student would roll their eyes at that. To illustrate the point, it is worth understanding what systems like Black Hornet cannot do.Īnnouncing the UK’s aid package, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace described them as “cutting-edge”. And if the machines can help technologically advanced nations like the West and its allies win battles while sparing their troops, what’s not to like? In short, drones are having a very good war. The invaders feel hunted, spending as much time looking up as forward. Intelligence suggests this has been somewhat bad for morale. It is now commonplace to go onto Twitter and see footage of an adapted drone, which last year might have filmed your wedding, dropping a grenade onto a bivouac of sleeping Russian infantry, or through the hatch of a tank. The first major war to be played out in real-time on social media, the conflict has sparked a small revolution in drone innovation, with commercial and domestic models – many of them donated by the West – hacked and modified to deliver lethal force. Ukraine in particular offers a very public demonstration of their versatility – and a glimpse of the future. Just as in civilian life we will shortly be using small drones to deliver our packages, militaries are now finding uses for them that a few short decades ago would have been written off as science fiction. “That might have been selecting the best helicopter drop-off points for soldiers assaulting a position, or talking other assets on to potential threats.” “The drones I worked with allowed us to make decisions based on the best available real-time information,” he says. Ukrainian soldiers launch a drone in northern KhersonĬredit: HANNIBAL HANSCHKE/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
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