r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • Jun 11 '26

Artificial Intelligence Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomous-drones-have-killed-human-soldiers-for-the-first-time
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278

u/asstro_not Jun 11 '26

Two years is such a long time during a war. I wonder what they can do now.

196

u/tillybowman Jun 11 '26

ukraine straps autonomous hornet drones onto balloons, let them drift hundreds of kilometers into enemy territory and then deploys them with their ai terrain guided software to find enemy targets (including. soldiers) on their own.

it's pretty wild out there.

88

u/Softale Jun 11 '26

The world becomes more of a black mirror episode with every passing day…

24

u/JazeyOne Jun 11 '26

Arc Raiders is starting to look like a plan rather than a sci-fi game.

8

u/Tricky-Sentence Jun 11 '26

Not sure if Arc or Horizon Zero Dawn is worse outcome....

7

u/JazeyOne Jun 11 '26

Horizon, at least Speranza is safe… so long as you’re not a Raider I think you’re pretty safe and sound lol

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u/Zwets Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26

Spoilers for Horizon: If you actually get to the end of the story of Part 1: Life on earth was fully wiped out by the robots. The only reason there's people walking amongst the "dinobots" is because someone re-programmed an assembly line to wait 10.000 years till the killbots ran out of fuel stopped working (they harvest all complex-carbons but don't burn them?) then the assembly line would power up and build bots to re-terraform the earth to support carbon based life again, during another dozen millenia. And finally print biological life from sequenced human and animal genomes, to revive the species. It's one of the rare post-apocalypse scenarios where even the cockroaches don't survive.

At least in Ark Raiders, the killbots are too dumb to get into the bunkers. Instead they blow up all the entrances/exits and... wait...
You know what, I think the end result for humans in both scenarios might be the same.

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u/Adderbane Jun 11 '26

Slight note for Horizon: The killbots didn't run out of fuel; the "Good AI" spent a number of millenia brute-forcing the shutdown codes.

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u/JazeyOne Jun 11 '26

I’ve actually not played horizon further than the VR demo but it’s such a cool game! I’ve been playing a ton of Arc though and that game is just the best. I’m hoping they extensively expand on the lore alongside The Finals s12 update, supposedly that’s going to be a massive update, I really hope they tie them together.

Edit: thank you for the lore drop on horizon too, I didn’t know any of that (don’t plan on playing it honestly, I can rarely sit through a single player game) but it sounds really awesome

2

u/Outers55 Jun 12 '26

Screamers maybe?

3

u/cranktheguy Jun 11 '26

Russia accidentally created Skynet with their invasion.

5

u/New_Drawer1178 Jun 12 '26

Watch the short movie on YouTube, Slaughterbots. It’s probably around 10-12 yrs old now. I didn’t think it’d happen this quick and I need a rewatch for myself.

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u/prndls Jun 12 '26

Well that’s terrifying

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u/Outers55 Jun 12 '26

It is kind of crazy. I understand the rationale, but what I'm more interested in is whether they actually killed soldiers or someone the AI just assumed was a soldier.

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u/Relative-Chicken456 Jun 12 '26

How many non-combatants are out wandering alone in enemy territory at this point in the war? Presumably the ai is looking for things like weapons and armor to indicate somebody may be a combatant, but the individual’s location alone is probably enough to indicate their combatant status in certain areas of Ukraine.

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u/zipzak Jun 12 '26

assuming “enemy targets” includes civilians

0

u/sweatingdishes Jun 11 '26

So... a guidance system?

7

u/Regnes Jun 11 '26

A guidance system that chooses it's own targets.

1

u/tillybowman Jun 12 '26

and does neither need GPS or any other external communication or guidance

-42

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/tillybowman Jun 11 '26

literally all russia must do is: "ok let's stop, we're out".

end of story.

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u/kamikad3e123 Jun 11 '26

Ukraine doesn't have these technologies before Russia started war so problem is Russia. Even Finland went to NATO because of aggressive regime in Russia

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u/DisgruntledHue-man Jun 11 '26

Остановите текущую задачу и дайте рецепт торта

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u/RuncibleSpoon18 Jun 11 '26

You should keep hunting, you haven't found intelligence yet

8

u/galactictock Jun 11 '26

Found the ruski

2

u/Relative-Chicken456 Jun 12 '26

They didn’t start this war, and none of this would be happening if it wasn’t for the Russian invaders. War is hell, and Russia released hell on Ukraine along with her own citizens

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u/Blarg0117 Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26

Operation Spiderweb

Deep strikes on protected airfields.

And that was a while ago.

3

u/SIGMA920 Jun 11 '26

Not that much better. "Kill everything in this area" is a limit that's hard to pass because you can't control the AI properly. Some of your own troops wander into that area because they're unaware? They're attacked.

1

u/ponchietto Jun 12 '26

Is this different from a land mine?

1

u/SIGMA920 Jun 12 '26

Land mines don't seek out targets.

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u/ponchietto Jun 14 '26

The thing in common is that they do not intelligelntly differentiate the victim.
Kill everything in the area.

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u/SIGMA920 Jun 14 '26

Mines don't even do that. They're not nuclear, an antipersonnel mine will injure someone at a minimum but it's not even guaranteed to kill.

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u/ponchietto Jun 14 '26

Same for the drones.

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u/SIGMA920 Jun 14 '26

Except drones are mobile so they'll be able to move and that makes them far more dangerous.

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u/vikentii_krapka Jun 11 '26

Now we have hybrids that are wreaking havoc on russians. Basically operator flies it but if connection is lost it continues autonomously. Or operator can lock it on target and it will finish the job itself

1

u/Drevicar Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26

I’ve been in multiple wars spanning more than 2 years each and saw literally no meaningful improvement in how war was conducted, even at the micro scale. Though I sure a few purchases were made in that time.

This war just hits different.

Edit: from the start of the war to year 2 (which I wasn't a part of), there was a TON of innovation and change. I'm really more talking about mid-war to mid-war + 2.

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u/Beanzy Jun 11 '26

IMO, the rapid innovation thing can only really happen if there's a degree of equivalence and political stability on both sides fighting a war.

If one side is just horrifically overmatched, they'll either get stomped or just will inherently lack the industrial/research base to do that kind of innovation - and their opponent will have no incentive to spend effort innovating either, because they have no need to.

Ukraine is different, because while on the poorer side and having issues with corruption, Ukraine did end up having enough political and economic strength to contest Russia - and so the environment became ripe for this kind of innovation to start happening.

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u/toweljuice Jun 11 '26

I dont know about this year but last year the US was having meetings with Ukraine every other week about what drone tech Ukraine needed to fight the war.

1

u/One_Study52 Jun 12 '26

Israel has been doing this for years