> imagine the ease of a State aiming a single drone at an a singularly unpopular voice leading the the crowd. Holy shit--that person just dropped dead on the stage! What happened? Drone.
They didn't need a drone to kill a political opponent.
Plus you'd see this 1-foot wide conspicuous object hovering in front of them, since you can't project a toxic gas in a targeted way from afar.
You don't need swarms to release vaporized agents. Just one low flying crop duster. That's the whole point of gas, it spreads everywhere so that you don't need to target.
HN has gone off the deep end with defense articles. Can't wait for the next headline to just say IT'S HAPPENING.
Not all drones 'hover', or are quad-copters. Most drone-swarms have been demonstrated using drones that fly like airplanes. 20 years ago when I started building RC planes, the smallest RC planes were about 6 inches wide. Many people are working on drones today that are insect-sized.
A mosquito-sized drone carrying a neurotoxin certainly would be used to carry out assassinations, crowd control, etc... And certainly would be a scary prospect.
Again, if the government is willing to use a mosquito drone full of neurotoxin to assassinate someone, why wouldn't they be willing to just send a man round with a pistol? The problem (in this example) is a government willing to assassinate political opponents, not that they have access to some fancy cyberpunk way of carrying out the hit.
They didn't need a drone to kill a political opponent.