Being Assassinated in Your Home by a Killer Robot Sent by a Fascist State Is No Longer Science Fiction

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/killer-robots-science-fiction

321 points · 37 comments · view on lemmy.world

37 Comments

Serinus@lemmy.world · 62 pts · 104d (4 replies)

Which was revealed when Anthropic made their very simple demands and the administration threw a tantrum.

  1. No fully autonomous murder; a human must make the final decision.

  2. No domestic mass surveillance.

Pretty simple demands that should have been easy to agree to.

yogthos@lemmy.ml · 44 pts · 104d (3 replies)

I'm still convinced this was just pure theatre to present them as the good and independent company that's totally not working with the fascist state.

Serinus@lemmy.world · 23 pts · 104d (1 reply)

I wouldn't say "pure" theatre. I think the demands were serious while also being a common sense PR move that would also motivate (or not demotivate) their employees.

But they were supposed to just be easy to agree to. "Okay, yeah, we'll have an overseer on the murder bots, and we won't use it to spy on Americans." Even with an optional wink wink nudge nudge, it still mostly works for Anthropic's PR.

It was supposed to be a layup, and the administration airballed it.

yogthos@lemmy.ml · 16 pts · 104d

it seems like the whole drama didn't really impact usage of their models by government agencies though

Mountainaire@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 104d

That's exactly what I was thinking. Why would they want to turn down the ability to collect surveillance data on all their enemies?

umbrella@lemmy.ml · 29 pts · 104d (8 replies)

goes both ways. drones are 3d printable, and nazis can also explode.

they may not want to open this pandora's box.

quick_snail@feddit.nl · 4 pts · 103d (3 replies)

Link to BOM? I'm especially interested in underwater ones like Yemen was using.

umbrella@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 103d (2 replies)

there are plenty in places like thingiverse, from simple and cheap ones for playing with, to the more complicated ones that can carry loads, to tiny drones meant for racing.

i might be wrong but there may be ready made underwater drones out there to download.

quick_snail@feddit.nl · 2 pts · 103d (1 reply)

I think it needs to be large enough to carry a payload that can sink a container ship.

umbrella@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 103d

that could probably be arranged tbh, a lot of 3d printed rocketry out there. i've seen big guided rockets with cameras and shit, for whatever propeller drones can't do. enough of those might do the trick.

i haven't seen any reports of them being used for this purpose, maybe they are not practical in some way i'm overlooking.

WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today · -1 pts · 104d (3 replies)

They do, and they will win. I'm at least glad it is finally over, no one wanted to fight back, well the nazis can just kill us off already, and have their shit world.

queermunist@lemmy.ml · 14 pts · 104d (1 reply)

They aren't winning in Iran. Why is that?

WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 104d

Other fascists kicking their ass atm because of a blunder.

umbrella@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 103d

not with that attitude.

HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml · 19 pts · 104d (2 replies)

Fucking cowards using flying drones. Kill me with a full humanoid and then I'll be impressed.

Dymonika@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 104d (1 reply)

cowards

Haha, keep going. I'm sorry, but news flash, they don't care. To them, even a live dog is better than a dead lion.

I'm surprised I'm getting downvoted... I'm framing it from the view of what they probably believe, not me!

HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml · 7 pts · 104d

Gonna link to this thread the next time someone gives me shit for adding a /s to what they thought was "obvious" sarcasm.

einkorn@feddit.org · 15 pts · 104d (1 reply)

I recently read Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez from 2012. All in all it was an OK read, but I couldn't help feeling that the book had been overtaken by reality.

Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 11 pts · 104d

At the time that was the case as well - drone activity during the "war on terror" was widespread and largely indiscriminate in targeting.

quick_snail@feddit.nl · 15 pts · 103d

We’ve been here before, albeit on a much smaller scale and overseas. Between 1967 and 1972, the CIA ran a program in South Vietnam called Phoenix that generated intelligence-scored capture-or-kill lists of suspected Viet Cong and eventually killed somewhere between twenty-six- and forty-thousand people, many of them innocent Vietnamese civilians mistakenly flagged by informants and unreliable data

Jesus

quick_snail@feddit.nl · 14 pts · 103d

FAA quietly issued a nationwide notice in January creating 3,000-foot no-fly zones around every DHS and ICE vehicle, so that citizens and journalists can’t film federal immigration operations from the air.

Now that's something I haven't heard before

Ferrous@lemmy.ml · 13 pts · 103d (5 replies)

Anyone remember that short film from 2017 Slaughterbots?

https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU

yogthos@lemmy.ml · 6 pts · 103d (3 replies)

seems like where things are headed

eldavi@lemmy.ml · 6 pts · 103d (2 replies)

it makes you wonder how the media will spin this into a good thing. lol

that's assuming that they do more than gloss over it at all or call the victims terrorists.

Korkki@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 103d (1 reply)

More important question is how you'll fight it? Protest nicely? I seriously see no other option beside popular counter assassination campaign.

eldavi@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 103d

at that stage, i wonder if there's anything we could do about it.

eldavi@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 103d
[ removed ]
balsoft@lemmy.ml · 9 pts · 103d (1 reply)

As far as I can tell, it's been reality for like 20 years now. The drones became smaller and perhaps more precise, that is all

thethunderwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 103d

it's primarily about the autonomous weaponry not the use of drones

quick_snail@feddit.nl · 8 pts · 103d

To understand what’s coming unless Congress steps in to stop it now, you must first know about what’s already been built in Gaza that’s the template for the Trump regime. An Israeli intelligence whistleblower told the Israeli magazine +972 in April 2024 about an AI system called Lavender that ranked the entire population of Gaza by “probability of militant affiliation.”

ELITE pulls data from the IRS, the Social Security Administration, DMV records, Medicaid files, utility bills, license-plate readers, and commercial data brokers (which typically include social media posts and often even emails when they come from “free” email providers), then populates a map with dossiers and assigns a “confidence score” to each person’s current address. If you update your address to get medical care, for example, that updates your score. Or post something on social media.

I think it's important to note that one of the metadata points that increased your chances of being bombed in Gaza was if you slept somewhere different too often.

So, I wouldn't be surprised if "changing your address too frequently" makes you climb the kill list in the US program

quick_snail@feddit.nl · 8 pts · 103d (1 reply)

Umm..didn't Obama do this to the first US American living abroad?

We've had this reality for a looong time

eldavi@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 103d

-- but it's still a novel idea to many so it might as well be new.

quick_snail@feddit.nl · 6 pts · 103d (1 reply)

With Renee Good, the decision to kill her was made by a human being who was operating inside a system that had already decided her neighborhood, her opposition to ICE, and her observer status made her a legitimate target. What happens when that decision is made in twenty seconds by a machine down in Florida, and executed by a hovering armed drone as the FAA has cleared the civilian sky so nobody is watching?

Sounds like we need cheap open source defense drones that can defend our communities by knocking these murder drones out of the sky.

Does anyone have a link to a project to 3d print drones that can be used to disable other drones in the sky?

thethunderwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 103d

anti-drone drones are a good idea, yes

not got any links to designs but i'm sure that the internet has lots, and that it's not hard to adapt generic designs

FIVE HUNDRED COGFLIES

quick_snail@feddit.nl · 5 pts · 103d

Their responsibilities include counterterrorism, unconventional warfare...

I read that as "we will fight terrorism with terrorism"

...and that's especially concerning because the current administration defines "writing articles like this one" as terrorism, because it's antifascist

FriendBesto@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 103d (1 reply)

Don't want to be that guy, but this is far from new news.

"Less than two weeks ago, the United States conducted a drone strike over central Yemen, killing one al-Qaeda operative. The strike was the last under Obama (that we know of). The 542 drone strikes that Obama authorized killed an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians. As he reportedly told senior aides in 2011: “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”

This is from 2017. You can find even older stuff.

https://www.cfr.org/articles/obamas-final-drone-strike-data

tyler@programming.dev · 7 pts · 103d

None of those were autonomous strikes.

GirthBrooksPLO@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 103d

The abandoned this a few days ago because of a law suit that rightfully pointed out that because ICE refuses to make themselves easily identifiable, the rule is impossible to follow. A drone operator can't know where an Ice vehicle is before launching a drone.