I’m honestly surprised that these don’t exist already. I know the IDF was working on facial recognition for combat drones back in 2009, and I’m surprised this hasn’t been seen in the wild yet.

We definitely don't have good enough face recognition for use in combat. We have face recognition that mostly works if you've got a small pool of faces and a clear photo. Not really sure why you would want to put face recognition on military robots though.

Our ROE are fluid enough that detection will suffice, orders like "kill all the faces in this geofenced region" wouldn't seem out of the ordinary.

It will certainly be quite surrealist to see a bunch of people standing around, just covering their faces with their hands, waiting for the drone to pass.

I don't think we civilians would necessarily know about them if they did exist. Self-piloting drones exist, good facial recognition exists, just need to put them together.

> good facial recognition exists

Does it? I would guess if you're going to blow someone's head off with an autonomous drone you'd want to be pretty darn sure it's them. Though, on second thought, governements don't really care about civilian casualties anyway... Perhaps this is a pragmatic solution to lowering those counts....

>Does it? I would guess if you're going to blow someone's head off with an autonomous drone you'd want to be pretty darn sure it's them.

Why you'd say that? Major countries (not some rogue states or teams) bomb groups of civilians all the time, often missing their actual target, or killing 10-40 people in the process (even at weddings). It's not like anybody cares outside of the country of those killed.

And of course the "assymetric threat" (read: islamic terrorists) don't just not care about this, they're actually boasting about it online and in videos that they don't care about that. Even in cases where they accidentally hit their own.

So I'd add that it depends on ideology, and very few actors seem to be "above" collateral damage, and no-one cares. Or at least, not enough.

There are also intermediate steps before outright attacks: simply having drones which can track people in a crowd, guide ground forces, etc. has a lot of applications which wouldn’t be publicized (“officer smith recognized the resistance officer in the crowd and followed them home”). Plant some DL fakes on their phone and occupation could be very different.

I imagine pulling the human element out of the loop is valuable to the military.

Of course these things exist already. If it's possible, someone in the defense industry will build it. They try building things that aren't currently possible, let alone something like this that a skilled hobbyist could put together.

A friend of mine quit an EE lab in grad school because they were working for the government on drones that did exactly this, but for missiles, in 1996.

Maybe you've seen it failing in the wild

https://theintercept.com/2018/08/11/israel-palestine-drone-s...

Whats to stop Facebook from taking a contract like this? Scary.

what about maduro recent speech ?

fun but what about having net technology ?