> Image a swarm of 100 of these drones, 200, 500, all flying at 40km/h in a coordinated sweep, searching with multi-spectrum cameras and image recognition.
Now imagine those machines chasing down a thought criminal desperately trying to hide in the woods in order to avoid execution.
> Now imagine those machines chasing down a thought criminal desperately trying to hide in the woods in order to avoid execution.
If you're hiding in a forest and they know where you are within 30 minutes of flying time - you've already lost. If they don't have drones they can just use dogs.
The problems with this situation to solve, sorted by priority:
- don't have a totalitarian state
- don't let them know your thoughts
- escape to a different country while you can
- don't let them know in which forest you're hiding
- don't let them know where exactly
Drones only change the last point, and only marginally at that. Meanwhile we're collectively helping the internet overlords with the first 4 points by carrying smartphones everywhere and using google and facebook and whatsup etc.
Except that democracies can and do slip into totalitarian rule by autocrats who declare themselves the winner of elections and then obliterate their political opponents.
> - don't let them know your thoughts
Uh, whoops, they just know everything you ever searched for, watched, or bought online, who your friends and lovers are, where you live, what music you listen to, and what your genetic history is!
> - escape to a different country while you can
Except COVID and visas drying up, and anti-immigration sentiment rising everywhere.
> - don't let them know in which forest you're hiding
Better disable GPS on every device near me then! As well as disable every "CC" camera that's just for "security". Better also shoot down any surveillance drones or satellites!
The point is reasonable; but drones are quite different to dogs.
I imagine it is much cheaper maintain 100 drones, truck them to where they are needed and have them swarm with some level of facial or gait recognition than the equivalent operation would be with dogs.
Also this could be centrally coordinated with cameras a lot more cheaply over a wider area than at any point in the past, with fewer people and less requirement for locals to dob people in.
> ...don't have a totalitarian state...
After COVID, I'm not sure how feasible this step is. "People should be allowed to leave their homes without first having the required paperwork" does not even appear to be a consensus view. And speaking from Australia even that would be a step up from what we have had recently.
The same exact argument can be made against end-to-end encryption that is resilint against state actors … if you have to resort to sneaking around, your society has already lost politically. Fix your government.
The drones also solve the second to last point, if they make it viable to just sweep all forests within travel distance.
That's the important difference between dogs and drones: you can't substantially bring down the price of trained dogs with handlers. The costs of drones on the other hand are guaranteed to go down with scale, both in terms of capital costs and operating costs. So if your dystopian goal can't be achieved by a couple drones, just deploy more of them.
Reality is boring. The drones will be used for surveillance but the death will be delivered by regular firearms. The holocaust was "expensive" enough to justify shipping people into a central location where they are executed as efficiently as possible. What makes people think that a government would be willing to spend $5000 per killed civilian when it has to kill hundreds of millions?
I agree, with one correction: majority of Holocaust victims never seen a camp (neither concentration nor death camp). They were executed with regular firearms near the place they lived.
Camps were for undesirables that for whatever reason couldn't be killed immediately. Mostly because there were too many of them in one place.
And yet, Afghanistan exists today as an independent Taliban state. I think the English would still have trouble projecting power across the pond indefinitely.
Sometimes that's out of your hand. The people killed in Nazi Germany had no choice in being Jewish or disabled.
Governments can change for the worse pretty quickly, if you have one competent charismatic guy with the wrong ambitions. So we would better not give such people the tools to keep their power, if it ever comes to that.
But the problem to me with that vision is the existence of "thought crimes" and not the method by which such criminals are being chased.
The government isn't waiting to pass thought crime laws because they just don't quite yet have the ability to search a forest for people. That's not the big barrier here.
I’m imagining them in a snowy forest chasing a boy carrying a baby, while the boy uses memories of coldness to hide them from the heat-sensitive cameras on the drones.
The law enforcement is already equipped well enough to get you if you lead a normal life (addresses, phone etc.). The technology won't change that. It can be used for things they are not as good at though like finding people lost in the woods or chasing criminals. I mean, if they deem you a "a thought criminal" they can just knock on your door and take you to jail. They don't need a swarm of drones to achieve it.
According to my napkin math it would cost 1.5 trillion USD to kill every American with drones and I am already assuming very cheap and capable ones, that you deploy them near the target and that the target is incapable of defending itself. The cost of deployment itself isn't even included. Nuclear weapons are very cheap in comparison.
Let's put that number in context. USD 1.5T is 2/3 (or 3/4) of the total cost US spent on their forever war in Afghanistan.[0,1]
Clearly doable for a dedicated nation, given that US lost the war, lost the 20 years, and with their botched withdrawal handed the country back to the very same political power they wanted to drive out in the first place.
In comparison, spending less than the cost of a lost war and having a guaranteed result of being able to walk into an empty territory sounds like a bargain.
Humanity has repeatedly proven that it is capable of extreme, systematic cruelty without high-tech gadgets (take the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, for example). Why do you think that autonomous drones would make this worse?
"Now imagine an angry mob chasing down a thought criminal desperately trying to hide in the woods in order to avoid execution."
The Holocaust is a pretty bad example for "cruelty without high-tech".
Nazis had census data on millions of people reaching back decades, to sort trough that data, and search it for "undesirables", they employed computation tech that was cutting edge for its time [0], just like the methods of killing millions of people saw quite some industrialized innovation.
As such it's a rather blatant example for the whole new levels of cruelty technology can enable humans to do.
The progress also didn't just stop there, what the Gestapo and Stasi did, is child's play compared to the amount and details of data that can nowadays be trivially collected on whole population scales [1]
Majority of Jews during WW2 died outside of death/concentration camps [1]. Army, police or SS rounded up Jews in some majority-Jewish town or village, took them to a nearby forest, forced them to dig their graves and then shot everybody. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes non-Jews helped, or even did it without Germans. Sometimes they helped Jews and were killed with them. Sometimes Germans just killed everybody. Sometimes they had list of people to kill for political reason (for example university professors, priests, politicians, army officers, teachers etc. were targeted no matter their ethnicity).
Vast majority of Jews before WW2 lived in small mostly-Jewish towns and villages in eastern Poland and western USSR. It would be inefficient to move them to death camps, also you could steal from them when you murdered them. Win-win.
There was no need for technology, nazis weren't checking the papers or bothering with recording anything. There are thousands of mass graves near formerly-Jewish towns. Non-Jewish population was mostly helping to point the Jews because they were competing for food and resources during harsh occupation conditions, and besides Germans were mass-murdering non-Jews too, just as a lower priority. And if you protested you were Jewish too, right?
According to Timothy Snyder the main difference between countries where high or low percentage of Jews survived nazi occupation wasn't antisemitism but how much pre-war institutions were preserved. In countries where the nazi occupation was negotiated and the rule of law was preserved - it took months to confirm these people were Jews, move them to camps, sort them, etc.
In places like eastern Europe - where Germans just destroyed everything and law was practically non-existant - why would you bother with all of that? It was basically 4 years of the Purge. 1/6th of the population disappeared in Poland between 1939 and 1945. Jews were about 10% of pre-war population.
The involvement of IBM was shameful, but it wasn't necessary. The only technology nazis needed was firearms. And they could probably do it with knives and sticks if they really wanted - like in Rwanda. Or like in USSR or Communist China for that matter.
>>There was no need for technology, nazis weren't checking the papers or bothering with recording anything.
Most of what you said is true, except for this part. Nazis did make actual recordings(as in - videos) of exterminations conducted in eastern Poland, especially in the area that is now Ukraine, conducted both by themselves as well as the local population(threatened with death otherwise of course), all to show back in Third Reich as proof fo barbarism in the countries they were conquering. I really recommend reading Stanislaw Lem's biography on that topic, since he lived in pre and in-war Lwów.
>>The involvement of IBM was shameful, but it wasn't necessary.
I mean, that's a bit of a weird argument to make. Yes, places like Auschwitz could have exterminated as many people as they did even without IBM's help, but the whole point is that Nazis liked efficiency and the tech allowed them to keep track of what they were doing(in the concentration camps, like you said outside of them Nazis didn't bother to track much of anything)
> There was no need for technology, nazis weren't checking the papers or bothering with recording anything.
The Nazis did census data to sort out all kinds of undesirables, one of the more infamous examples being the Pink List; Since the German Kaiserreich police made lists of homosexuals and those suspected of being homosexuals.
These lists made it trough the Weimarer Republic, and once the Nazis took over the Gestapo already had most of their work done for them, because these pink lists were only one of many lists Germans liked to keep about the population.
It's one of the reasons why Germany to this day tries to be somewhat careful about large collections of personal data because after the Nazis, there then was the GDR with the Stasi, who once again took it to a whole new level.
These are relevant and well known historical examples for data collections being abused, making the Nazis out as mere "Dudes with guns" is vastly underplaying the levels of sophistication and effort that were put into "sorting trough people" on population size scales.
You are talking about 3rd Reich only part of Holocaust. It was bad, but it was a drop in the sea compared to what Germans did in occupied territories during WW2. A few orders of magnitude more victims.
I'm not talking about "3rd Reich only part of Holocaust", I'm talking about how the Gestapo was responsible for collecting and siphoning trough census data even in occupied non-German territories [0]
In that context, whatever point you are trying to make about numbers of victims in territories is kinda besides the point.
The point being that even in occupied Poland everybody had to register for the census, Polish people that were found without their registration form were shot on the spot.
In addition to that the Nazis also got Polish population data from the Deutscher Volksverband in Poland.
And it wasn't just Poland where that happened, it happened in pretty much every territory occupied by the Nazis because that's what the Gestapo was created for.
On the IBM front - IBM helped Nazi Germany run concentration camps, the number tatooed on every prisoner was an IBM-managed inventory number, they had offices and workshops near concentration camps to help run, operate and maintain the machines used by the Nazis, as much as IBM would like to forget that part of history now. So yes, Nazis were definitely using cutting edge tech for its time to help with their extermination efforts.
Holocaust was so striking to contemporaries, despite genocide being fairly common in history, at least in part because of its technological efficiency.
Technology also allows for more leverage. Hitler need an entire modern nation state with millions of people, semi-autonomous robots may give this power to a group of thousands.
Not really, Genghis and the other khans killed more than Hitler using a fairly simple technique: divide the captives by the number of your soldiers and each soldier is tasked with killing the captives assigned to them.
They usually had around 100k soldiers, armed with bows and knives, and killed tens of millions.
My point is, you don't need technology to achieve bad things and it is the wrong thing we are focusing on when trying to prevent these things. Nukes can already annihilate billions yet here we are, not being annihilated by nukes.
You could program a ethereum smart-contract virus, which hires people to scam money, produce slaughterbots, ship them to a city and strategically hit the soft underbelly aka airports, roads and railways and communication.
If you stack the attack into waves and have the slaughterbot parcels piled into flats by gig workers, you can have a ideology free terror attack that kills millions.
Such ATTAC-CELLs without members, are part of my games lore.
Here is a picture of a standardized factory, made from standardized components, making "slaughterbots" made from standardized components.
PS: The main building block is a sort of hangrenadesized fuel-container, with a fuelcell useable fuel that can be chemically primed to be a explosive. A standardized battery that could be exploded would do too..
The difference is in speed and profile . A decision can be made for automated systems to depopulate a region using low profile weapons vs say, nukes. Within 24 hours the job is complete and not a single non-victim actor had to witness the events. Compared to conventional methods which may take years, and risk the losing support, drone swarm ethnic cleansing would be cheap, quick, and decisive. Impersonal and rapid like nukes but without the implications.
Now imagine those machines chasing down a thought criminal desperately trying to hide in the woods in order to avoid execution.