The average life expectancy for a Russian soldier in Ukraine is between 20-30 minutes, CIA director John Ratcliffe said. Speaking at a defense summit in Pennsylvania, he attributed the deadly conditions for Vladimir Putin’s forces to Ukraine’s combat drones equipped with AI. “What I would say is, our intelligence is consistent with some of the open-source reporting you may have seen in Ukraine,” Ratcliffe said. “So the average life expectancy of a Russian recruit, right now, arriving on the battlefield in Ukraine, is estimated to be between 20 and 30 minutes.” “And that’s because AI-powered drones have gotten to be such specialized, low-cost killing machines. And it’s why we’re now four and a half years into that conflict,” Ratcliffe added. Ukraine said this month that Russia has lost about 1.4 million soldiers since the beginning of its full-scale invasion, with over 1,000 of the Kremlin’s troops killed or wounded almost every day. In May, Ukraine’s defense ministry said it was killing roughly 200 Russian soldiers for every kilometer of territory that Moscow claimed.
Will that stop offline drones with its own sensing, though?
Yes, I know the definition for that is “missile,” but I think we’re getting close to the point where one could reprogram an off-the-shelf machine vision enabled drone to do this, and cover it in foil or something.
Low power herf won’t stop autonomous drones, but high powered one are microwave beams. The fines traces of semiconductors act as antennas and fry if enough amperage is drawn in.
I don’t know when off the shelf equipment will be able to do what you’re describing. Your best bet is when someone’s at a podium so there’s landmarks to reference. Face identification will still be difficult at range. At a certain point, vips will be giving their speeches in glass boxes, like the pipemobile.
I’m thinking of “action drones” that can follow around their users on skis or whatever. To film them from the air.
This is already a consumer product. Some have telephoto lenses (though face identification still wouldn’t be reliable, no).
Machine vision on a cheap ASIC is capable of doing this, too.
I’m not saying the whole package is there, but all the pieces are, so it’s not that far away. And I’m thinking one could cover a drone in metal foil to mitigate against microwave devices.
Maybe, but those are following a target. Not picking one out of a crowd. Indiscriminate weapons would be easy, but signalling one target out is a different story.