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It's Not The Terminator. It's worse.
I carry a concealed handgun, legally. I’ve thought pretty carefully about what I’m willing to do with it and under what circumstances. Last week I realized it would be completely useless against a new threat I’m really worried about.<br>Let me back up.<br>I used to think the idea of a robot apocalypse was stupid. Not because AI isn’t potentially dangerous, but because the specific fantasy (Skynet wakes up, builds an army of chrome humanoids, declares war on humanity) skips about forty steps and gets basically everything wrong. Humanoid robots are hard to build, expensive to operate, and worse than humans at most of the things you’d actually want a weapon to do. The form factor is a liability.<br>I used to stop there. Dismiss the robot apocalypse, move on. I don’t anymore.<br>I’ve been playing a lot of ARC Raiders lately, which is a game where you are part of the last dregs of humanity slugging it out against (among other terrible things) autonomous flying drones. The developers had to nerf the drones to make the game playable. Give the AI realistic tactical behavior and semi-realistic physical capability and the honest answer is “this would be unwinnable.” So they tuned it down. Made the drones a little dumber, a little slower, a little less coordinated than they plausibly could be. And even nerfed, the drones are scary enough that they spontaneously caused human players to cooperate with each other. If you’ve spent any time in online multiplayer shooters, you know how remarkable that is. These games are not known for bringing out the best in people.<br>Real-world drone developers are working in the opposite direction.<br>I recognize how strange it is to be using a video game as a jumping-off point for threat analysis. But the thing is, I’m not actually speculating. Cheap autonomous drones are actively killing people in Ukraine right now. That conflict has become the world’s involuntary laboratory for exactly this technology, and the lessons are being absorbed by every military and non-state actor paying attention. The video game is fiction. Ukraine is not.<br>Here’s what a weaponized drone actually is: a flying landmine that goes looking for targets. It doesn’t need to navigate stairs or open doors or carry a rifle. It moves in three dimensions without caring about terrain. It can approach from any angle, including directly above whatever cover you’re hiding behind. It sees in infrared. It follows you into buildings. It doesn’t need to shoot you. It just needs to get close enough and detonate. The physical form factor isn’t a liability. It’s optimized for exactly this.<br>And here’s what one costs: not much. A decent FPV drone with a small explosive payload runs maybe $500-1000 fully built. A $200,000 home equity loan (the kind a moderately successful engineer could get on a Tuesday) buys you 200 to 400 of them. That’s not a thought experiment. That’s a shopping list.<br>But the cost isn’t even the scary part. The scary part is what happens when you have a lot of them at once. You’ve probably seen drone light shows at stadium events or big outdoor concerts. Hundreds of drones moving in precise coordinated patterns, forming shapes in the sky, no human pilot for each one. Just software telling the swarm where to go. That’s the technology. Now replace the lights with explosives and replace “form a shape” with “find a heat signature.” A single drone operated by a single person is scary. A coordinated autonomous swarm doesn’t need a pilot at all. It needs a target description and a launch command. After that it handles the rest. Traditional air defense systems are designed to stop a small number of fast expensive threats. Not 400 slow cheap ones arriving simultaneously from every direction.<br>I could build one in my garage. All the components are legal. I won’t, because I’m not a monster, but the reason I won’t is entirely ethics and not at all logistics. That is a very thin layer of protection to be relying on.<br>And you don’t even need rogue AI for this to go badly. You don’t need Skynet. You need one disgruntled engineer with a home equity loan and a Timothy McVeigh moment. The AI angle is almost beside the point. The tools are already here. The only thing standing between right now and a catastrophic autonomous drone attack on a civilian target is the moral character of everyone who knows how to build one. That’s it. That’s the...