If you have a drivers’ license or a passport, you’re in it.
> WW2 weapons were already enough to wipe out entire cities
Indiscriminately. Which gives you a big PR issue. Being able to kill only, say, every military-aged male in a city without touching anyone else is a bit different.
But seriously though, there's a lot of heuristics that can be used for "is a target and not a dummy". Will they be perfect? No. But they don't need to be.
You couple the fast drones with slower surveillance ones at higher altitude to identify possible targets. Or pair them with local security cameras, or the victim’s cell phone pings.
search: >'bird of prey trained to take-down drones'< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='bird of prey trained to...>
But, here's the thing. Current tech-level drones are already extremely lethal to civilians. Given the state of modern AI, including the poor abilities for facial recognition in real-world situations, sending "autonomous" weapons to take out targets in civilian areas will only increase the number of civilian victims.
Not to mention, assassinations, in the first place.
Edit: I get the gist of your comment- that it's already possible to kill (civilians or not) in horrible ways. Yes, but why do we need yet another way to do that, then? The more ways there are to commit wanton murder and destruction, the worse, surely?
I am honestly more scared of chemical weapons and barrel bombs. You know, things that have actually been confirmed to have devastating impact in Syria.
Somehow the typical hacker news commenter is worried about very precise robotic hit men operating in large groups to be used for indiscriminate killing when WW2 weapons were already enough to wipe out entire cities. You're more likely to have died from the atomic bombs deployed in Nagasaki or Hiroshima than from some tiny plastic drone with a 5 minute flight time.
I mean think about a hypothetical nuclear weapon that kills everyone recognized via facial recognition in a 10 kilometer radius. Most bystanders aren't important enough to have their face on that database.