Slaughterbots

Death by drone WARNING - SOME DRIVE-BY TRUMP CONTENT

Continuing the Goat’s regular series of thoroughly depressing articles

Elon Musk says that there is “only a 20% chance” AI will destroy humanity, and it could happen in the next 5-10 years. There was a time when he intended that as a warning. Now, as he has become obsessed with the great replacement theory and sees white people as a “dying minority”, it seems entirely possible that somewhere in the Nevada desert one of his companies is secretly developing a fleet of killer drones programmed to kill everyone with a darker than beige skin colour. Depending on how he’s feeling about Trump at the time, Musk keeps tweaking the algorithm to include or exclude bright orange from the kill list.

On the bright side, says Musk, he’s a glass-80%-full kind of guy and there’s an 80% chance of prosperity for all - goods and services will cost almost nothing and you won’t have to work because AI can do everything better than you, including writing miserable Substack articles about the end of humanity. And reading them too - your bot will read my article for you and summarise it far more eloquently and entertainingly than any human. The question will then be one of fulfilment, says Musk - will your life have meaning? You can tell the world’s richest man is already wrestling with this one. I recommend that he conquers his sense of ennui by becoming captain of man’s first mission to colonise Mars and that he stops there permanently - the only downside for the rest of us is that he will still be able to tweet.

Will a life of total leisure and futility have meaning? I can testify that it does. But I’m going to save that interesting philosophical question for another day. The topic today is a little more down-to-earth. Are you going to wind up being killed by a drone?

You will be at least vaguely aware of the rapid advances in drone technology over the past few years. In Operation Hedgehog, a NATO simulation exercise in 2025, a small Ukrainian drone unit effectively defeated two British/NATO battalions. That’s 10 Ukrainian nerds, keeping a weather eye on their drones while swapping between World of Tanks and Pornhub, beating 16,000 troops in the field. Ukraine can manufacture kamikaze drones for $300 each and manufactures up to 350,000 drones of all types each month. The UK has 8,000 in total.

You will also have seen that Donald Trump masterminded a great victory against Iran. For the very reasonable cost of 4,000 lives and $113 billion, Trump has made Iran repeat their promise not to buy or make a nuclear weapon. Obviously he needed to give a little in exchange - a $300 billion reconstruction fund to repair the $270 billion damage he caused, unfreezing $24 billion of frozen Iranian assets, removing sanctions on Iranian oil sales and the occasional closing of the Strait Of Hormuz at Iran’s discretion, which was open all the time before he started the war. The most powerful military in the world cannot keep the strait open when faced with cheap drones.

This is a terrifying montage of Ukrainian drones hunting down and killing Russian soldiers. Viewer discretion advised. It’s almost impossible to survive a drone attack on the front line. I also highly recommend Noah Smith’s article last month on drone warfare, challengingly titled “all non-drone militaries are obsolete”.

So there’s our defence problem sorted - scrap any existing plans and spend all our money on drones, a handful of operators and plenty of anti-drone technology - jammers, interceptors and net launchers. We might also want a nuclear deterrent backstop, preferably one which is not technically dependent on a rogue superpower. During Trump’s second term, America has attacked seven countries (Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Somalia), murdering one head of state and capturing and imprisoning another, and threatened five countries (Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Greenland and Oman).

Ukraine are now world leaders in drone expertise and America has been lagging far behind - many in the American administration are keen to partner with them to help America catch up. But for some strange reason President Trump is dragging his heels on signing the deal. We may never find out why Trump is so pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine - whether the Russians have kompromat on him, whether it’s his Putin dictator-crush, Hunter Biden’s Ukraine links or an aversion to its small, Jewish leader who is too honourable and dignified to kiss his fat, flabby ass like everyone else.

Most Ukrainian drones are FPV (first-person view) drones piloted by humans wearing virtual reality headsets. But often targets are pre-programmed and the drone flies the last mile autonomously, to get round jamming which inhibits remote control. Some drones (e.g. long range drones targeting infrastructure) have the target loaded at launch and then fly autonomously. The US already uses autonomous defence systems to intercept incoming drones and missiles, autonomously identifying and striking targets.

As yet Ukraine says it does not use fully autonomous drones which select and strike their own targets, although it has tested the technology. There is obviously a risk of an autonomous drone selecting a civilian or even a friendly fire target, as well as broader ethical considerations. Do we want to empower an autonomous drone army and can we be sure it will stay on our side? We need humans to stay in control. It might start threatening to invade Greenland or something.

Drones can be equipped with facial recognition technology to target an individual. It’s very easy to do, as this article shows, where an amateur enthusiast modified a drone to chase people around “as a game”. Apparently Israel used “Killer AI” to identify and kill Iran’s top leaders in February, and Putin has been hiding his family in a bunker ever since he found that out.

It’s not difficult to imagine what happens next. Building one of these drones is relatively simple. You could send one of these drones off to the golf course at Mar-a-Lago at the weekend, programmed to recognise a very famous face that’s likely to be there. It would self-destruct on impact after launching its custard pie into the famous face. No-one could trace it back to you. You could load it up with a banana milkshake to target Farage, except where would he be? All you could be sure of is it would not be Clacton. He and his girlfriend have so many houses funded by well-wishers that he owes absolutely no obligation to.

Terrorists might arm their drones with something worse than custard pies and milkshakes. And governments may not be averse to eliminating a few of their bothersome subjects with a discreetly delivered drone strike. Russian businessmen might start spontaneously combusting in the street instead of falling out of windows and getting novichok in their underpants. It will become commonplace to see stocky middle-aged Russian emigres suddenly vaporise in Berkeley Square and Cadogan Place. Trump would be most jealous of Vlad’s powers, dreaming of blowing up Jimmy Kimmel live on air like he was a Venezuelan fisherman.

I recommend this excellent and terrifying short film (just 7 minutes) called Slaughterbots. The technology is now here. A long time ago, Elon Musk was spearheading calls for the outlawing of lethal autonomous weapons. He’s a bit quieter about it now, for reasons that are not disclosed. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for a ban last year, calling lethal autonomous weapons “politically unacceptable and morally repugnant”. 120 countries supported him, but 12 countries were opposed, including, depressingly and predictably, USA, UK, Israel and Russia.

Slaughterbots are here. It looks like they are coming our way soon.

I predict governments will soon deploy drones for civilian use falling short of murdering its own people. They can hover over crowds, taking pictures and gathering information for law enforcement purposes. Perhaps governments will soon go further - authorising deployment of drones that can emit teargas or sound cannons (ear-piercing or deafening noise) to disperse crowds, or use other non-lethal force. They will join a host of other delivery drones that will soon be darkening our skyline.

So how likely are you to be killed by a drone? I’m talking about being targeted by one rather than inadvertently walking across someone’s delivery bay just as a drone is dropping off their new wardrobe. I’d say your chances of survival are pretty good, but will be worsened if you attract the ire of an authoritarian government or an extremist individual or organisation. Or if ou look extraordinarily like a Russian businessman or an anti-Trump chat show host. Your chances are also going to drop dramatically if your government ends up in a war, because swarms of millions of slaughterbots could be headed your way. If you’re British your government currently has no defence against them, and you may need to plan a fall-out room and an inner refuge, as advised by this nuclear survival pamphlet from 1980. In the current weather, and after watching the news or England play, you may feel like doing that straightaway.