It's Not The Terminator. It's worse.

It's Not The Terminator. It's worse.

I used to think the idea of a robot apocalypse was stupid. (Stay with me, I promise this is going somewhere.) 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.

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. It’s a video game, though, so they had to make it playable, which means that the drones aren’t even as smart or tactically aware as they realistically could be. If they were, human players wouldn’t stand a chance. (Even nerfed, though, the drones are such a difficult enemy that human players started spontaneously working together instead of shooting at each other.)

Actual drone developers are working in the opposite direction. How unfair can they make it?

I recognize how strange it is to be using a video game as a jumping-off point for threat analysis, but cheap autonomous drones are actively killing people in Ukraine right now. That conflict has become the world’s involuntary laboratory for exactly this kind of technology.

A weaponized drone 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 follows you into buildings. It doesn’t need to shoot you, it just needs to get close enough and detonate.

For less than the cost of a single kitted out assault rifle, you could pick up a halfway decent FPS drone and strap an explosive device to it. You could build one in your garage. All the components are legal. A single, determined bad guy could build one in the morning and fly it into an elementary school in the afternoon. That’s horrifying, but that’s not remotely the worst part.

You’ve probably seen drone light shows at stadium events or big outdoor concerts. Hundreds of drones moving in precise coordinated patterns. It’s not like they have hundreds of pilots. They’re all autonomous, and they’re communicating with some central control system and each other to figure out exactly where they are. Now replace the lights with explosives and replace “form a shape” with “find something human shaped”. Replace the fireworks show setting with the elementary school, office park, hospital or church of your choosing. See how quickly this gets scary?

Skynet-esque AIs don’t even need to be involved. All you need is a small terrorist cell. Hell, one disgruntled engineer with a home equity loan and a Timothy McVeigh complex would be more than enough. The rogue AI thing 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…what? The morals of everyone that could potentially do something like this?

Oh, and did I mention that no meaningful civilian defense against any of this exists yet?

A handgun is worthless. The odds of hitting something vital on a drone while it’s still far enough away to make a difference are basically nil. A shotgun is marginally better, but not much. If you used birdshot, a wide choke, and it was broad daylight, and you saw it coming, maybe, maybe you’d stand a chance against a single drone. Against a coordinated swarm at night you’re bringing a gun to a drone fight.

There are some rudimentary civilian devices that do exist, technically, like net guns. They have a range of about 115 feet and can intercept a single medium-sized drone. But even if it works perfectly, you haven’t neutralized the threat. You’ve caught it. Now you have a live bomb on a string, twisted up in a net. It’s like building a rat trap out of a bucket of water. It’s effective, but now instead of just having a rat problem, you have an angry, wet rat problem.

The tools that might actually work, like RF jammers, directed energy weapons and purpose-built laser systems are extravagantly illegal. You definitely can’t own any of them, and even if you could, they’re generally not the sorts of things you’re going to carry around. Many require purpose built trucks.

So there’s no civilian defense that can be realistically or legally deployed. What about civilian governments? Police forces? I’d love to believe they could effectively address this, I really do. But these are the same institutions that can’t reliably prevent a school shooting, which is one person with one gun. The idea that they’re going to develop and deploy effective infrastructure against coordinated autonomous drone swarms is, to put it kindly, a stretch.

The honest answer to “what actually stops a hostile drone swarm” is, probably, “a defensive drone swarm”. What’s a defensive drone swarm? So glad you asked! It’s a thing my friend and I totally made up last week that does not currently exist, is barely even defined, and would require solving enormous engineering problems before it remotely could exist! I also just watched Benn Jordan’s series on the security vulnerabilities in municipally deployed Flock cameras and robot dogs. Surveillance technology with genuinely terrible security holes, deployed by city governments that didn’t understand what they were buying. Now scale that institutional failure up to autonomous weapons systems. The same procurement process, the same IT department, the same gap between the people specifying the technology and the people accountable for what it does.

So: Individual defense is legally impossible to prepare in advance. Municipal deployment at scale requires political will that doesn’t exist. Where does that leave us? I suspect it’s going to take something terrible happening to even make people aware of the problem. Then we’ll pass a bunch of performative laws that will make owning a drone a felony but will do absolutely nothing to stop a motivated criminal. It’s what we always do. It’s kind of our thing.

When I try to explain any of this to people, I can see the moment they file it next to alien invasions. It sounds like that. Drone swarms attacking civilian targets in America sounds as plausible as a weather control weapon or a mind control satellite.

But the logic isn’t actually complicated. The technology is mature. The components are legal and cheap. The defensive infrastructure doesn’t exist. The regulatory framework is twenty years behind.

I’m going to hate being right about this one.