ISIS using makeshift weaponized drones in combat.
Nobody is surprised. But I wonder what US policy will be on "drone warfare is great" when battle-drones are flying everywhere. Nervewracking.
@cwebber@identi.ca that was one of v the arguments against developing killer robots, plenty of other groups will develop the technology over time
Challenge #32: Open Arms
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the early days of nanotechology is the prospect that it may be easier to design offensive nanotech weapons than to design the defenses against them — possibly producing a time gap in which only the offensive weapons exist, with no defenses available.
Although it has not been proved, this seems likely to be the case...without proactive work on our part.
This potential time gap is not due to a difficulty in manufacturing the defenses — it would result from the longer time needed to design the more complex defensive systems, especially since the assumption is that this work cannot be started until the offensive systems are already built and available to study.
Senior Associate Mark Miller has proposed a possible solution for this problem, termed "Open Arms." This would be an open source-style project to "design-ahead" both the offensive and defensive weapons in parallel, thereby eliminating the dangerous timegap between when the two can actually be built.The risky part of this proposal is that the offensive weapons designs would be public knowledge — at least among those within the project.
Do you find the Open Arms proposal a plausible one, either as is or with modifications you suggest? If so, should Foresight actively advocate it — even sponsor it? If not, can the group come up with another idea on how to close the postulated dangerous time gap between offensive and defensive nanotech weapons availability?
Mike Linksvayer at 2016-12-01T06:01:49Z
Christopher Allan Webber likes this.
@Mike Linksvayer It's an interesting idea. I'm not totally sure it works out. But certainly in this case I think that keeping defense drone ideas a secret doesn't help, and trying to share ideas as widely as possible could quite help, because spreading those ideas as much as possible probably will help given how trivial it seems (even just as a mental exercise) to think of violent drone ideas.
"A Plan For Drones", one of Paul Graham's better future essays #vaguejokes