Aspen
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2019
- Messages
- 3,585
- Reaction score
- 1
- Country
- Location
Slaughterbots is a 2017 arms-control advocacy video presenting a dramatized near-future scenario where swarms of inexpensive microdrones use artificial intelligence and facial recognition to assassinate political opponents based on preprogrammed criteria. The video was released onto YouTube by the Future of Life Institute and Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at Berkeley, on 12 November 2017.[1] The video quickly went viral, gaining over two million views.[2][3] The video was also screened to the November 2017 United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons meeting in Geneva.[4]
The dramatization, seven minutes in length, is set in a Black Mirror-style near future.[5][6] Small, palm-sized autonomous drones using facial recognition and shaped explosives can be programmed to seek out and eliminate known individuals or classes of individuals (such as individuals wearing an enemy military uniform). A tech executive pitches that nuclear weapons are now "obsolete": a $25 million order of "unstoppable" drones can kill half a city. As the video unfolds, the technology get re-purposed by unknown parties to assassinate political opponents, from sitting congressmen to student activists identified via their Facebook profiles. In one scene, the swarming drones coordinate with each other to gain entrance to a building: a larger drone blasts a hole in a wall to give access to smaller ones.[1][7][8]
The dramatization, seven minutes in length, is set in a Black Mirror-style near future.[5][6] Small, palm-sized autonomous drones using facial recognition and shaped explosives can be programmed to seek out and eliminate known individuals or classes of individuals (such as individuals wearing an enemy military uniform). A tech executive pitches that nuclear weapons are now "obsolete": a $25 million order of "unstoppable" drones can kill half a city. As the video unfolds, the technology get re-purposed by unknown parties to assassinate political opponents, from sitting congressmen to student activists identified via their Facebook profiles. In one scene, the swarming drones coordinate with each other to gain entrance to a building: a larger drone blasts a hole in a wall to give access to smaller ones.[1][7][8]
