Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Wednesday, July 7, 2021

Drone Swarms

I don’t celebrate all advances in technology.  More precisely, I don’t appreciate certain uses of new technology.  Following are the first two lines of an article I read in The Sun:

“ISRAEL used the first ever drone swarm deployed in battle to hunt down Hamas terrorists, it was reported.

The drones have no human input but instead link together using artificial intelligence to seek out their targets.”

In plain English, Israel dispatched robots to fly out on their own for the purpose of hunting and killing people.

Deeper in the article, I read this:

“The basic idea of a drone swarm is that its machines are able to make decisions among themselves.”

I think this is a line we should never have crossed.

Did I expect to see this line crossed?

Yes.

If you are Country X and your drones are on the hunt, I suppose this might sound wonderful.  But Country X is not alone in seeking to use drone swarms.  At present, Israel, the UK, Russia, the United States and China are tinkering with this technology.

This not a good operating space for some of the aforementioned countries.  For now, I am mostly afraid of the humans behind the killing robots.  But the more autonomous and efficient the killing machines become, the more we should fear the machines themselves.

Mitchell Hegman

Source: https://www.the-sun.com/news/3222879/israel-first-ever-drone-swarm-hamas/

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