Former CEO of Google has been quietly working on a military startup for “suicide” attack drones.::The former Google CEO has been quietly working on a military startup called White Stork with plans to design “kamikaze” attack drones.
Remember, Eric Schmidt took Google public with the famous “Don’t be Evil” manifesto.
Now he makes murder bots.
There are company lines/slogans and then there are company action.
First one comes from PR and second is dictated by cold hard cash. Guess which one bends if there is a conflict?
Making weapons is not evil. Unfortunately, we live in a world where nations start wars. You need to be able to protect yourself and your allies
I disagree - it’s evil. I’m not saying we don’t need military and weapons but I’d say that if from all possibile ways of approaching this is making suicide drones is kinda evil.
Imagine having all this status, money and arguably some real skill you choose to make weapons instead of any other alternative. That’s incredibly sad.
Defending yourself is not evil. What’s happening in Ukraine is evil, because the US did not supply enough arms
Small minded point of view. Imagine if those billions were spend productively to unite people rather than defence. I’m not saying no defence is necessary I’m just saying the other side is infinitely more efficient. We attribute diplomacy to one of the greatest human inventions not because it’s more ethical (it is) but because it literally allowed us to prosper to the point where we can sustain 7 billion people with objectively great lives for the most part.
That didn’t get 155mm arty rounds to Ukraine.
No amount of money can bring back people dying to Russian bombs.
It’s a weapon like any other. Maybe you’re iffy on the name, but suicide drones are just another way to attack specific targets, like missiles but far more precise. What is evil about having a remotely controlled aircraft hit an enemy position as opposed to artillery, bombs or gunfire hitting enemy position?
I disagree with this. There is one glaring issue with AI-powered weapons, in comparison to other traditional ones - the skill ceiling required to make massive damages at scale.
Sure, you can probably level a whole town if you get your hands on some kind of advanced artillery. But it’s still vastly more complex machine, that probably requires extensive training just to operate. You need an army for that, and army is made of people who will hopefully tell you “No, we’re not doing that”, if your request is not reasonable. And if you somehow try to do it yourself, good luck getting more than a few shots out before someone notices and tries to stop you.
If you have an army of hundreds or thousands of AI powered suicide drones, where you just slap an explosive on them, set a target and the whole fleet will start running, you only need one person with a computer. And once you send the fleet, it’s vastly more difficult to stop it. Hell, you probably don’t event need to physically get to the drones, if you can hack into the system that controls them.
And that’s the biggest issue with any AI-powered weapon, and a reason why they shouldn’t exist.
Imagine having an obscene amount of money for the rest of your life, and the thing you decide to do is to invent more devices and methods to kill people.
Because they’re not good people.
I think we try to analyze stuff and always give benefit of doubt because life’s weird but some people are just bad - Occam’s razor and everything.
I recently watched a great video on how drug dealers who deal Tranq justify selling dangerous drugs (by Channel 5 on yt) and the host had a great monolog on how many of these people create these fake realities to justify that “their just a cog in the machine” and have no choice and obviously this is a spectrum of sorts. But this mega rich cunt has all of the choices. Literally. So, it’s evil. No excuse.
Imagine a world where US already had this tech and gave it to Ukraine to protect itself.
A world where Us has ultimately superior weapons is ultimately doomed no matter what the idea was.
…you mean a missile?
Yes, but ones that his company makes and he gets to profit from. It is the classic “tech bro” play. Come to market with some overly complex solution to a problem that has been solved to most peoples satisfaction for decades, claim you are disrupting a stale market that is not meeting the needs of the consumer, ignore any and all existing rules and regulations so you can undercut the existing competition, then bitch when those rules and regulations catch up after you have driven out the existing competition and made obscene profits.
Tech bros are simply middlemen in search of profitable problems that don’t exist.
Don’t these already exist? Ukraine has been using suicide drones to destroy tanks and other equipment for a couple years now.
Edit: I remember an anecdote as well that ISIS was hand building suicide drones as well whenever the hell that was.
The headline is kinda burying the lede. You’re absolutely right that “kamikaze drones” already exist. Others have rather glibly pointed out that cruise missiles that have existed for decades are essentially this, and more recently there have been a great many “loitering munitions” drones which are what this startup is talking about.
The thing that seems to be novel here is that they are intending to make them fully automated, with AI-driven target acquisition, and capable of operating in a zero-comms environment. Currently drones generally still need a human at the controls.
The idea of what amounts to the equivalent of Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” tech being in charge of deciding who lives and dies and what should be reduced to a smouldering crater is, it has to be said, faintly unnerving.
