I think you could argue that Star Wars is more fantasy than sci-fi. It has concepts like destiny, an unexplainable magical force, etc. Not to mention ridiculously slow "laser" weapons. It's unconcerned with scientific plausibility, and more with storytelling. I mean, jedis look like they would fare poorly again WWII-era weapons such as machineguns, RPGs, fragmentation grenades, chemical weapons (corrosive gas that burns skin and lungs) and napalm.
As far as infantry soldiers never missing, maybe. It's also likely that soon there won't be much human infantry. We might still be far useful autonomous robots, but I don't think we're that far from remote controlled humanoid robots with guns on them.
IMO sci-fi has to ask philosophical questions that arise with sufficiently advanced technology. Star wars mostly doesn't do that. There are a few things in the lore, like how androids have to be reset regularly or they gain sentience. But it's not really explored. Star wars is fantasy.
* Adventure Fiction/Space Opera - The technology and science are secondary to the plot, which is often very grandiose, much like operas and horse operas that were popular at the time (the root of the latter name).
* Gadget Fiction - The technology/science and the struggle of the inventor to create/discover/explain it are the source of the conflict in the story.
* Social Science Fiction - The effect of the technology/science on society is the source of the conflict in the story.
Star Wars is a 1 and 3 type of story, though you could hone in a bit more and say, for example, that Episode IV is also gadget fiction given the focus on the Death Star.
Even "realistic" WWII movies got near everything wrong.
War wouldn't look glamorous if 4 out of 5 soldiers die a "glorious" death from artillery fire from 20 kilometres away.
Analogously, WWIII will likely be about thousands of soldiers being vaporised by atomic weapons, and blown to pieces by drones flown by men sitting in comfy bunkers on the other side of the globe
Or maybe for WWIII weapons will be so destructive that we instead will fight it through propaganda, surveillance and trade. Maybe a country will build some militarized, new island, but nobody would date to touch those because weapons are already to scary.
Even if one country managed to install a puppet president in another, no military action would ever result because escalation to nuclear weapons is too frightening of a possible consequence.
I think this outcome is a reasonable prediction, but it requires three key assumptions -- that those people making the decisions actually understand how terrible these weapons are, that mutual destruction is actually assured, and that those people actually care about losing.
> Analogously, WWIII will likely be about hundreds of millions of civilians being vaporized by atomic weapons.
There are about 14,000 nuclear weapons in existence. If we assume all of them are 300kt weapons (overly approximate), then each one has a maximum fireball area (i.e., region where people would be vaporized) of about 1.12 km². Allowing for a population density of 20,000 people per km², which is enough to make you one of the top 50 densest cities if held city-wide, this allows for about 300 million people to be possibly vaporized as an upper limit.
Trying to track down the actual count of nuclear weapons by their various sizes has proven to be nontrivial, but given that the size class I used accounts for only ½ the US's active nuclear weapons, the other ½ being on the 100kt scale (which produces ⅓ the blast area, apparently), and given that the US makes up about half the world's nuclear weapons, the area that can be targeted by ranges is definitely a wild overestimate.
Factor in that densely-populated slums are not going to rank high on anyone's nuke list, and that coverage to maximize number vaporized, as opposed to number killed, is not likely, and I seriously doubt that it's possible to see 100 million people vaporized by atomic weapons in any war.
Existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons are adequate to destroy any industrial economy on Earth. Total war between industrialized nations lasted years in the 1940s because the vast majority of weapons failed to harm their targets, largely due to inadequate aiming. But since the 1970s people have had good precision guided weapons. Since the 1950s people have had weapons that can miss the target by miles and still destroy it.
If two great powers wage total war with today's most destructive weapons, there won't be enough surviving people and infrastructure left to develop a next generation of even more destructive weapons.
To quote Einstein (not exact, but something along these lines): "WW III will be fought with atomic weapons, WW IV will be fought with sticks and stones".
That's right. Almost every weapon, especially nuclear, works best against civilians rather than well trained and well hidden soldiers.
And as far as I remember, in previous war nuclear weapon was used against civilians. Targeting large cities with high population density would be the most effective usage.
Some scifi shows, e.g. stargate, occasionally do cover people sitting in bunkers and aiming killsats at other nations while being afraid of getting vaporized themselves.
Sure, most of the action is still close combat, but they don't totally neglect the remote killing.
The science fiction that more correctly envisions the effects of technological development on warfare is less popular. It's particularly uncommon in TV and films. Audiences prefer certain kinds of violence to be conventional, ennobling, and heroic. It's hard to evoke that feeling if the protagonist faces no more personal risk than an exterminator spraying for ants -- even in cases where the "bad guys" really do seem to merit lethal violence.
See also: movies where the final confrontation with a villain requires hand to hand combat because all the ranged weapons have been misplaced. Shooting enemy soldiers at long distance before they're even aware of the danger is great in actual warfare but audiences don't want actual warfare.
The science fiction that more correctly envisions the effects of technological development on warfare is less popular. It's particularly uncommon in TV and films
Here's the big difference between actual combat footage and movies/tv. In movies/tv you have to have the actors in well-framed shots, well-lit, recognizable, and distinguishable against the background. On actual battlefields in recent times, doing this sort of thing often gets you dead in about 3 seconds.
Contrast this with my impression of watching some actual outdoor combat helmet-cam footage: People start yelling they're taking fire, then take cover. The enemy is something like 150 yards away or more, and would only appear as a tiny figure or a speck on a TV screen, but only if you actually spotted them and you don't even get to poke your head up to look for too long, if at all. You might be able to distinguish smoke or flashes in the distance, though. A few minutes later, air support is called in, and there's an even bigger puff of smoke out there.
I have watched a ridiculous number of combat footage videos from recent conflicts. I agree with your take on the helmet-cam perspective.
There are times where you can clearly see everybody and they're well lit, not moving chaotically. That's when you watch a team operating anti-tank guided missiles against tanks or other targets. There's a lot of distance separating the attackers from their targets. You hear the missile launch and watch it close the distance to the target over a period of several seconds. The targets might start to scatter a couple of seconds before the missile arrives if they can hear it, or remain completely unawares until the explosion. It's very easy to see what is happening but it also looks very "unheroic."
I'm not the authority on this, but it does say a galaxy far far away. I feel like I have a vague memory of it being 5 thousand years ago too? Hopefully someone corrects me
I also love how space battles are portrayed as taking place up close. Space is large. You'd surely depend entirely on computers for targeting and would never see the enemy with the naked eye at those distances. Makes for a boring movie though.
Some computer games solve this problem by making your named characters mass-produced androids/clones. You can chat with them at the base and yet send them to die.
"Once upon a time, in the very earliest days of interplanetary exploration, an unarmed human vessel was set upon by a warship from the planet Kzin-home of the fiercest warriors in Known Space. This was a fatal mistake for the Kzinti, of course; they learned the hard way that the reason humanity had decided to study war no more was that humans were so very, very, good at it." -- from the jacket of the anthology 'Man-Kzin Wars'.
The same technology that makes for beautiful eye-detection autofocus in portraits can also make for efficient slaughter of those designated to die.
We must each choose the world in which we wish to live.
funny you mention cameras - I was thinking about "subject tracking autofocus" as I was skimming that article. A large-scale non-nuclear war (is that even possible) in modern times would be pretty nasty
> A large-scale non-nuclear war (is that even possible) in modern times would be pretty nasty
I’m not clear where the boundary is between “war” and other events involving large numbers of deliberate fatalities where the goals involve changing governance or borders.
That said, considering recent tech developments and looking at the cost of each part separately, I won’t be surprised if the next decade gives us a genocidal conspiracy where a hundred people kill a million with self-made remote controlled or autonomous weapons.
China has pledged no first use of nukes. Suppose they go for Taiwan with amphibious assault.
US Navy robot torpedo mines lurking offshore sink their navy for a while, but their ballistic anti ship missile swarms keep the USN carrier fleet way out of range.
This sets the scene for conventional war and mass military deaths as the commies would spare the cities of Taiwan they want to occupy.
Trump or his successor would be tempted to nuke mainland ports but mutual assured destruction would prevent it.
Likely there is a growing motivation for Taiwan to get their own nukes as the Mainland Chinese fleet grows in size. Israel is the precedent.
I'm not sure it changes anything. If you've seen the horrible footage of modern aerial platforms turning unsuspecting enemy infantry into red mist, you might be surprised to learn that they haven't, in response, abandoned their AKs and RPGs in terror.
I'm not sure there's a killing technology so exacting and guaranteed as to change the fundamental behaviour of these enemies.
Though maybe I'm wrong and there is some magic bullet out there that will change modern warfighing.
It has been a long while since the world has seen first-class militaries battling one another for survival. Current conflicts frequently have restrictive rules-of-engagement behind which inferior opponents can shelter. Furthermore, the 'insurgents' of today may feel that they have no other choice than the course of actions that they have selected, even if death loiters above.
The next major conflict will have episodes that emulate some of the battles of World War One, where machine guns and chemical weapons utterly massacred those who were unprepared to face them. Imagine a 1990s-era armored column beset by a few thousand drones with small shaped charges -- it would be an attack without countermeasure; utterly confusing and over in minutes.
Imagine a nuclear war between US and USSR, which were on the brink of it several times.
For simplicity, let's consider that 100% of populations of both countries, and half of Western Europe's, get killed in the war. This makes, roughly, 150M + 300M + 150M = 600M. With world population being around 6000M at the time of the demise of the USSR, that would make 10% of world population. Hardly a complete devastation.
Much harder consequences would be the climate impact ("nuclear winter"; its original prognosis was reviewed since 1980s, it should be less severe), and radiation pollution (which, as we know from e.g. Chernobyl, is nasty but not immediately deadly after some time).
Of course, the world has enough nukes to kill the entire population, but likely only if carefully planned for it, unlike any even remotely realistic conflict scenario.
I think you underestimate how efficient and fragile the civilization is. If you take a modern city and stop transportation of products into the city, in a few days there'd be nothing to eat there.
Yes. But we also underestimate how many people in Africa and even east Asia live not in efficient cities, but off the land, in poverty but also in relative independence.
There was a civilization collapse before, around 500 C.E. Cities abandoned, books burned, technology forgotten. It took 1000 years to get back to the level of that civilization. People living off the land only have so much time in the day. Some of the causes of collapse included military spending, constant wars, erosion of traditional polytheistic values by intolerant religion, government corruption and political instability, lead pollution, soil erosion and deforestation.
West Africa is unlikely to be targeted. It contains 0.37 billion people. Aggregated, Africa has 1.2 billion people, many of whom would survive. South America, too, is unlikely to see substantial targeting -- 0.42 billion people. Indonesia alone is 0.26 billion people.
A nuclear exchange would be really bad, but a lot, in absolute terms, of people will survive the initial exchanges.
How likely is an 'apocalyptic' nuclear winter as a result of nuclear war anyway? Most modern cities don't burn very well and even the largest volcanic explosions we've recorded have only dropped temperatures by an estimated few degrees. That would absolutely kill a lot of people, but humanity will survive.
The start of Gulf II involved quite a few army-army engagements that were over in minutes. 1980s armor and no air cover doesn't work out so great against modern armor and air support.
That technology has been for sale since 2013.[1] The original version cost $22,000 and was quite bulky. This looks smaller, but still on the bulky side. It will probably be made smaller and cheaper in the future. There's less electronics than in a cell phone in there.
That's pretty awesome. I wonder if it would be feasible with modern tech to build a neural net powered autotracker on a raspi (or some other cheap, compact, low power microcontroller). Mark a target with a button on the side of the rifle, have the controller lock the trigger until target it aligned. Could build in range compensation and might not even need a neural net to track simple targets. But you need a way to segment target pixels and track them as they move.
I refuse to work on anything that compromises my morality so that includes your case, gambling sites, user tracking (and advertising platforms) and particularly weapons systems etc.
Note: I have no issue with people who do, it's not on me to judge them.
You can even train a net which will show you where all the targets are. Not even faces, _any_ part of a human. Butt sticks out from a shallow trench? Butt gets shot off. And it won't be limited to visible spectrum either, so it could largely "ignore" camo. And it could be augmented by similar AI-based person detection from a drone. This is not doable on a Raspberry Pi, but something like a recent Snapdragon SoC should be able to do it without breaking a sweat.
It's all coming, the question is who gets it first and how accurate it is.
If you think about it rationally, this is actually not a bad thing. As MAD shows, if there is a potential for armed conflict, it's better from the casualty standpoint if one or both of the sides have overwhelming firepower. Then either the weaker side, or both sides will choose not to engage because the "victory", even if achievable, would come at too high a cost.
The only real problem I see with this is if this tech makes its way to the "bad" folks, like ISIS. When any idiot can somewhat reliably hit targets a mile out, things get problematic.
Another interesting thing about this is that with today's science and technology I could cobble a pretty good version of what I described together in less than a year, hardware and all, for under a million dollars (assuming I already have multispectral dataset, if not, add another million). Which tells me that pretty much every even somewhat developed nation state already has their own version.
>Which tells me that pretty much every even somewhat developed nation state already has their own version.
That, or they don't because target identification and having authorization to fire are not problems that will be so easily solved.
We generally try to avoid friendly fire. The device you described sounds like an indiscriminate killing machine. There's a reason we gave up area-denial weapons like mines. They kill indiscriminately and create huge political problems that mean you can win a battle and lose the war.
Soldiers in the field do not receive "authorization" for every shot they fire. When developed to its logical final form, this could be a part of _every_ rifle, turning every soldier into an all-seeing super-marksman.
And in this case there's no "indiscriminate killing machine", because soldier pulls the trigger - the weapon does not fire on its own. And that's the way it ought to be.
>And in this case there's no "indiscriminate killing machine", because soldier pulls the trigger - the weapon does not fire on its own. And that's the way it ought to be.
>Not even faces, _any_ part of a human. Butt sticks out from a shallow trench? Butt gets shot off. And it won't be limited to visible spectrum either, so it could largely "ignore" camo. And it could be augmented by similar AI-based person detection from a drone.
These two statements don't seem to reconcile. The second one has major things wrong with every single statement there.
>Soldiers in the field do not receive "authorization" for every shot they fire.
You might be surprised. For one, on just how detailed the rules of engagement for a particular operation can be. For two, outside of imminent threats, there's also quite a bit of direct authorization going on. Especially for sniper teams.
I don't see why you'd think that. Just because the scope highlights everything you can shoot doesn't mean that it will fire the weapon. We are not (yet) at the levels of accuracy where such decisions could be made by a machine, except for area denial.
Well... We (the US) haven't given up on mines, and the biggest issue with them isn't their indiscriminate nature as much as the inability to turn them off once a conflict ends. Automated, engage-everything-in-area, gun-based defences would neatly eliminate the cleanup issue while not needing IFF.
Automated in the sense of "don't need a person standing in a tower", not in the sense of "needs no maintenance". I suppose minefields might be the latter, but even then I'd argue that minefields are less "needs no" and more "can receive no, since they'd kill the maintenance personnel".
(And if you're running out of ammo, you'd need to add more mines too)
> The device you described sounds like an indiscriminate killing machine.
A gun is already an indiscriminate killing machine. Having an 'only pewpew when on target' setting doesn't change this.
Now, using this tech to set up an automated sentry turret is another matter (and something I'm still flabbergasted isn't commonplace, given the number of people in any developed nation with the skills and resources to build one in their shed.)
A gun is not a "killing machine" at all. The vast majority of guns currently in rotation haven't killed anybody, indiscriminately or otherwise. Gun is a tool to increase the lethality of its owner, but you could drive nails with it and it wouldn't kill anyone on its own.
This is pure sophistry. We're not talking about some blunderbuss on a plaque over the mantlepiece. We're discussing a loaded rifle, ready to fire and aimed by a soldier at a human target. It's a machine being used to kill a human.
Not really no. It's an inanimate object. It does not have agency. If you, the soldier, do not aim it and don't pull the trigger, it will sit there and rust into dust without killing anyone. You can't call it an "indiscriminate killing machine" any more than you can call e.g. a hammer or a kitchen knife the same.
As I stated above, if scaled down to the size of a pistol, this could be a solution to the trigger pull and shooter-flinch problems. This could make lightly trained handgun users an order of magnitude more effective.
A pistol is a side arm. In no world will even a scaled-down version of this probably ever be worth humping around the extra bulk and weight and introducing complicated maintenance and reliability issues.
Maybe for competition shooters or something, but they'd be banned in competition. It just doesn't make sense.
A not-that-effective one, even sometimes when the users are highly trained. It seems to be a form-factor problem, and the mechanism has to do with trigger pull and flinch. (And more generally, people acting funny in the heat of combat.)
In no world will even a scaled-down version of this probably ever be worth humping around the extra bulk and weight and introducing complicated maintenance and reliability issues.
That's tautological. If it's too heavy and not reliable enough, then it's tech not worth putting on the battlefield. The question is if it can be made light and reliable enough.
The same question once faced autoloaders, sidearm pistols, revolvers, holo/red dot sights, magnified optics, and even firearms themselves. The answer is universally, when it's ready, it can be useful in certain contexts.
If it's a pound, sure - that would be too much to add to a pistol. If it's an ounce, and has no maintenance/reliability issues? Who knows, but I wouldn't bet against it.
Marksmanship isn’t a problem. I don’t understand what problem this solves except for snipers. Most infantry engagements happen within 150yds. Anything further (like across a mountain valley in Afghanistan) your target is the muzzle flashes of the enemy. Is this thing going to be an aimbot for muzzle flashes? This is where crew served weapons come in handy, and snipers. This device would not have helped me getting ambushed within 100yards or being the first guy in the door on a raid.
Suppressing fire is used to keep the enemy’s head down and to reduce their volume of fire even from defilade so that you can move shoot and communicate. Obviously it is preferable to kill your enemy but you can’t always see them.
This doesn't solve the problem of "I know the enemy is in that general direction, but I cant see them" which is more or less why you might use suppressing fire.
Like a weapon sight that only releases the hammer when the target is more than 90% likely to be hit. This should be a selector switch to disable if desired for free gunning.
It solves not enough money in the pockets of the vendor problem. Might ultimately allow a stepdown in training and be good for SWAT.
I'm pretty sure you could put a weight at the end of the barrel with some actuators in it to drive the barrel the MOA changes necessary to center on a spot.
Of course, but sometimes they break out the bolt actions with big glass. This might provide a little more assurance of a hit, esp if training budgets don't allow for folks to stay razor sharp.
I doubt it's integrated at this time but it would also allow for a workflow to authorize shots (and of course record the whole thing).
You're not thinking big enough. What new tactics would become viable if a soldier of average ability could reliably hit a target at 1000 yards? You can't just take new technology and limit your imagination to how it works with existing tactics. You have to imagine the new tactics. If you don't, you're as useful as a battleship in WWII (not very).
What new tactics would become viable if a soldier of average ability could reliably hit a target at 1000 yards?
Basically this has been the pipe dream of all armies, once bolt action rifles matured, and all the way up through WWII.
If you don't, you're as useful as a battleship in WWII (not very).
Capital ships like Carriers can't be everywhere at once, and there were a lot of WWII engagements involving cruisers, destroyers, and smaller craft. So, what is the difference between a cruiser and a battleship? Basically scale.
This "guaranteed hit" tech basically tries to solve the trigger pull and flinch problems. It might be quite useful if it could be scaled down to handgun size in a red-dot like form factor.
And you're not understanding that this is probably the wrong problem to solve. It is a solution in search of a problem. We already can provide accurate fire further than we can see. What we need to improve is proper target identification, coordination and tracking of friendlies, improved intelligence, better knowledge of culture/language, and grand strategy against insurgencies, to name a few.
To put this another way: training a sniper is really hard and expensive. However, it's not the marksmanship that's the hard part. It's the camouflage, field-craft, spotting, intelligence gathering, and tactics to integrate into the rest of the unit that are the difficult things to teach.
I'm not sure why you listed those complaints because that is exactly what a smart weapon with a screen could be used for.
>What we need to improve is proper target identification,
Assuming the rifles are networked with each other then it only takes one source of target information and the whole squad will be aware of potential targets. (e.g. someone marks a target, a drone spots a target -> the targets are shown on all rifles)
>coordination and tracking of friendlies
The rifle should be capable of detecting other soldiers that are in the rifle network.
That would be a totally different technology from that presented here. But one that would potentially solve some issues. It's not dissimilar to the land warrior program. That was abandoned because nobody wanted to hump around the batteries and crap.
The reality is, we evolved to be pretty efficient social predators. Attempts to augment our natural ways of acting in crisis need to be really well matched to innate ways of thinking to be useful.
Think about it this way. When driving around with your GPS, music, and passengers and you encounter something distressing like being lost or seeing a complicated traffic situation up ahead that induces a moment of panic, the natural response is to cut away all the crap and limit the flow of information through you to the absolutely most essential. It's quite possible that it may be nearly impossible to do that with augmented reality systems like you are describing.
I don’t understand what problem this solves except for snipers
Mount this system on a relatively small, silent drone. (There's two more problems to solve, right there, however.) That would be relevant to outdoor recon.
This device would not have helped me getting ambushed within 100yards or being the first guy in the door on a raid.
An Army study found that in Afghanistan, >50% of all engagements happen at a distance of greater than 500m. This is the reason for all the current work to extend the range of the average infantryman. A case could be made that some of that work is overspecializing for conditions that might not reoccur in future wars. For example, Pentagon is currently pushing hard for replacing the 5.56 with a 6.8 cartridge that is more powerful than the 7.62 NATO. That would make for a nice sniping round, but maybe not the best when kicking in doors and suppressing people close by?
This doesn't really seem like technology that is "needed". When you can actually see the enemy a holo sight in the hands of a trained soldier is probably more than sufficient. Whether it takes one round or 3 to stop the enemy it doesn't matter. Watching this tech it seems super slow to use. Perhaps it might be useful for hitting a target at 1000 yards. But that's such a rare use case.
I hope someday humans can evolve past war. The cold unfortunate truth is there are people in the world right now that seek to gain power through whatever means they can. To that end, it would be incredibly naive to not develop these weapons systems, and police ourselves to use them for purely defensive purposes. The alternative is to face annihilation when they are developed and used against you. I'm will forever be anti-war, but in order to be peaceful, one must first be dangerous.
"And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms."
I basically agree with this, and would even go further and say that I'm a nationalist and explicitly for one country. With that being said, there's an added dimension that you left out- that this aiming technology then gets adopted by the other superpower, then by other major militaries, and eventually filters its way down to minor combatants. And the balance of power between the two superpowers, one of whom I'm a member of, stays basically as it was before- just that now the whole world is that much more lethal.
Like, the term 'arms race' got popularized to describe this exact situation. I'm not even arguing against the technology described here, but just more cynical about the ultimate effects
Isn't there a nuclear arsenal already? Isn't it dangerous enough? Hydrogen bombs, ballistic missiles? Maybe it is time to spend 99% of the defense budget on what actually needs defense? Ecological services that are going down fast?
World's military spendings are $1.8T/year. NATO is $1T/year. The U.S. is $0.6T/year. As per U.N. estimates, $0.3T per year is sufficient to stabilize CO2 levels.
But no, instead of defending what really needs to be defended, the choice is to spend on the useless technology, like illustrated in this article.
Didn't tracking point have a security flaw because it worked on local wifi or something? Don't recall for sure. Looks like they just put everything on the weapon now. Interesting what modern miniaturization can do. Same tech that advances smartphones makes guntech better.
Suddenly adversarial AI becomes more than a cool tech talk and paper.
It seems reasonable to imagine spies and hackers trying to acquire the models from sights so that, on the day of actual battle, their soldiers can be given carefully prepared masks that defeat the sights of the enemy etc.
Details are lacking, but this seems ok-ish. It sounds like this is focused on "found my target and now I'm in the figure 8 where my sight is bouncing around because of my heartbeat or other outside physical influence". Assuming it's focused on that sort of bias, it seems fine. If it reaches beyond that it clearly needs more research.
The main problem for the military with those kind of electronics assisted weapons are the fucking batteries. Infantry already has a heavy load to move around. Adding battery packs does not help. Best case scenario you're tethered to some vehicle. Worst case your heavier rifle has no special system anymore because your 10lb of batteries are depleted.
For militarized police which do fast action like SWAT the battery problem is not a thing anymore.
Why do they need so much power? A phone can run all day off a 200g battery and has enough processing power to do autofocusing and image processing. If it's on standby it should consume next to nothing.
Night vision goggles, radios, flashlights. That adds up fast. Combine that weight with armor inserts, weapons, ammo, headgear, and 70lbs isn't uncommon.
But on the other hand, you're already wearing body armour, so what's a little explosion? Little explosions come out the back of your rifle every minute. (LiPo batteries really don't deflagrate violently, even when shot. They just burn.)
I remember reading somewhere that there is money to fight climate change. It is just that it is being spend on weapons, like this one. Efforts would be much better spent, trying to reduce the rate of destruction of ecological services. There are between 200 and 2,000 species extinctions occur every year. Could one be saved for a price of one rifle like this?
Nature has devised molecular machinery specific to our time on this earth. Want to freeze yourself for a deep space trip? There is a creature that can do that. Want to regrow limbs? Survive like a tardigrade? Not get cancer? Everything we need is out there. Some of it will be key to the future. In some cases it took many millions of years to evolve. Vancomycin came from soil, what else lies in wait for bio-prospectors and molecule hunters?
Nothing if its all dead. There should be a prime directive and it should be for life on this planet
It's truly criminal that we're potentially losing out on gamechanging biotech in order to facilitate archaic profit generating schemes like chopping down trees for lumber or digging up coal to burn.
Our future is getting mortgaged in more ways than one.
I suppose you could equip a team with these and bluetooth an AND function. Every team member could pick a different target, all weapons would fire simultaneously when every weapon met 'guaranteed hit' criteria, not before. Should make for a highly effective one-shot tactic against multiple targets.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadAs far as infantry soldiers never missing, maybe. It's also likely that soon there won't be much human infantry. We might still be far useful autonomous robots, but I don't think we're that far from remote controlled humanoid robots with guns on them.
* Adventure Fiction/Space Opera - The technology and science are secondary to the plot, which is often very grandiose, much like operas and horse operas that were popular at the time (the root of the latter name).
* Gadget Fiction - The technology/science and the struggle of the inventor to create/discover/explain it are the source of the conflict in the story.
* Social Science Fiction - The effect of the technology/science on society is the source of the conflict in the story.
Star Wars is a 1 and 3 type of story, though you could hone in a bit more and say, for example, that Episode IV is also gadget fiction given the focus on the Death Star.
War wouldn't look glamorous if 4 out of 5 soldiers die a "glorious" death from artillery fire from 20 kilometres away.
Analogously, WWIII will likely be about thousands of soldiers being vaporised by atomic weapons, and blown to pieces by drones flown by men sitting in comfy bunkers on the other side of the globe
Analogously, WWIII will likely be about hundreds of millions of civilians being vaporized by atomic weapons.
There are about 14,000 nuclear weapons in existence. If we assume all of them are 300kt weapons (overly approximate), then each one has a maximum fireball area (i.e., region where people would be vaporized) of about 1.12 km². Allowing for a population density of 20,000 people per km², which is enough to make you one of the top 50 densest cities if held city-wide, this allows for about 300 million people to be possibly vaporized as an upper limit.
Trying to track down the actual count of nuclear weapons by their various sizes has proven to be nontrivial, but given that the size class I used accounts for only ½ the US's active nuclear weapons, the other ½ being on the 100kt scale (which produces ⅓ the blast area, apparently), and given that the US makes up about half the world's nuclear weapons, the area that can be targeted by ranges is definitely a wild overestimate.
Factor in that densely-populated slums are not going to rank high on anyone's nuke list, and that coverage to maximize number vaporized, as opposed to number killed, is not likely, and I seriously doubt that it's possible to see 100 million people vaporized by atomic weapons in any war.
If two great powers wage total war with today's most destructive weapons, there won't be enough surviving people and infrastructure left to develop a next generation of even more destructive weapons.
And as far as I remember, in previous war nuclear weapon was used against civilians. Targeting large cities with high population density would be the most effective usage.
Sure, most of the action is still close combat, but they don't totally neglect the remote killing.
See also: movies where the final confrontation with a villain requires hand to hand combat because all the ranged weapons have been misplaced. Shooting enemy soldiers at long distance before they're even aware of the danger is great in actual warfare but audiences don't want actual warfare.
Here's the big difference between actual combat footage and movies/tv. In movies/tv you have to have the actors in well-framed shots, well-lit, recognizable, and distinguishable against the background. On actual battlefields in recent times, doing this sort of thing often gets you dead in about 3 seconds.
Contrast this with my impression of watching some actual outdoor combat helmet-cam footage: People start yelling they're taking fire, then take cover. The enemy is something like 150 yards away or more, and would only appear as a tiny figure or a speck on a TV screen, but only if you actually spotted them and you don't even get to poke your head up to look for too long, if at all. You might be able to distinguish smoke or flashes in the distance, though. A few minutes later, air support is called in, and there's an even bigger puff of smoke out there.
There are times where you can clearly see everybody and they're well lit, not moving chaotically. That's when you watch a team operating anti-tank guided missiles against tanks or other targets. There's a lot of distance separating the attackers from their targets. You hear the missile launch and watch it close the distance to the target over a period of several seconds. The targets might start to scatter a couple of seconds before the missile arrives if they can hear it, or remain completely unawares until the explosion. It's very easy to see what is happening but it also looks very "unheroic."
And of course SG never really explained why they weren't using Landies and Humvees
The same technology that makes for beautiful eye-detection autofocus in portraits can also make for efficient slaughter of those designated to die.
We must each choose the world in which we wish to live.
funny you mention cameras - I was thinking about "subject tracking autofocus" as I was skimming that article. A large-scale non-nuclear war (is that even possible) in modern times would be pretty nasty
I’m not clear where the boundary is between “war” and other events involving large numbers of deliberate fatalities where the goals involve changing governance or borders.
That said, considering recent tech developments and looking at the cost of each part separately, I won’t be surprised if the next decade gives us a genocidal conspiracy where a hundred people kill a million with self-made remote controlled or autonomous weapons.
US Navy robot torpedo mines lurking offshore sink their navy for a while, but their ballistic anti ship missile swarms keep the USN carrier fleet way out of range.
This sets the scene for conventional war and mass military deaths as the commies would spare the cities of Taiwan they want to occupy.
Trump or his successor would be tempted to nuke mainland ports but mutual assured destruction would prevent it.
Likely there is a growing motivation for Taiwan to get their own nukes as the Mainland Chinese fleet grows in size. Israel is the precedent.
I'm not sure there's a killing technology so exacting and guaranteed as to change the fundamental behaviour of these enemies.
Though maybe I'm wrong and there is some magic bullet out there that will change modern warfighing.
The next major conflict will have episodes that emulate some of the battles of World War One, where machine guns and chemical weapons utterly massacred those who were unprepared to face them. Imagine a 1990s-era armored column beset by a few thousand drones with small shaped charges -- it would be an attack without countermeasure; utterly confusing and over in minutes.
A true major conflict would be annihilation and utter devastation across the globe.
Imagine a nuclear war between US and USSR, which were on the brink of it several times.
For simplicity, let's consider that 100% of populations of both countries, and half of Western Europe's, get killed in the war. This makes, roughly, 150M + 300M + 150M = 600M. With world population being around 6000M at the time of the demise of the USSR, that would make 10% of world population. Hardly a complete devastation.
Much harder consequences would be the climate impact ("nuclear winter"; its original prognosis was reviewed since 1980s, it should be less severe), and radiation pollution (which, as we know from e.g. Chernobyl, is nasty but not immediately deadly after some time).
Of course, the world has enough nukes to kill the entire population, but likely only if carefully planned for it, unlike any even remotely realistic conflict scenario.
if it came to this, the other countries would be forcibly dragged into the conflict - it's a "with us, or against us" sort of deal.
You'd expect only a handful of countries can remain neutral (most of which are in a strategically irrelevant location, like new zealand).
A nuclear exchange would be really bad, but a lot, in absolute terms, of people will survive the initial exchanges.
[1] http://www.tracking-point.com/
Modern general usage aside, it's always meant 'overwhelmingly impressive' rather than 'good'.
I refuse to work on anything that compromises my morality so that includes your case, gambling sites, user tracking (and advertising platforms) and particularly weapons systems etc.
Note: I have no issue with people who do, it's not on me to judge them.
It's all coming, the question is who gets it first and how accurate it is.
If you think about it rationally, this is actually not a bad thing. As MAD shows, if there is a potential for armed conflict, it's better from the casualty standpoint if one or both of the sides have overwhelming firepower. Then either the weaker side, or both sides will choose not to engage because the "victory", even if achievable, would come at too high a cost.
The only real problem I see with this is if this tech makes its way to the "bad" folks, like ISIS. When any idiot can somewhat reliably hit targets a mile out, things get problematic.
Another interesting thing about this is that with today's science and technology I could cobble a pretty good version of what I described together in less than a year, hardware and all, for under a million dollars (assuming I already have multispectral dataset, if not, add another million). Which tells me that pretty much every even somewhat developed nation state already has their own version.
That, or they don't because target identification and having authorization to fire are not problems that will be so easily solved.
We generally try to avoid friendly fire. The device you described sounds like an indiscriminate killing machine. There's a reason we gave up area-denial weapons like mines. They kill indiscriminately and create huge political problems that mean you can win a battle and lose the war.
And in this case there's no "indiscriminate killing machine", because soldier pulls the trigger - the weapon does not fire on its own. And that's the way it ought to be.
>Not even faces, _any_ part of a human. Butt sticks out from a shallow trench? Butt gets shot off. And it won't be limited to visible spectrum either, so it could largely "ignore" camo. And it could be augmented by similar AI-based person detection from a drone.
These two statements don't seem to reconcile. The second one has major things wrong with every single statement there.
>Soldiers in the field do not receive "authorization" for every shot they fire.
You might be surprised. For one, on just how detailed the rules of engagement for a particular operation can be. For two, outside of imminent threats, there's also quite a bit of direct authorization going on. Especially for sniper teams.
I don't see why you'd think that. Just because the scope highlights everything you can shoot doesn't mean that it will fire the weapon. We are not (yet) at the levels of accuracy where such decisions could be made by a machine, except for area denial.
(And if you're running out of ammo, you'd need to add more mines too)
A gun is already an indiscriminate killing machine. Having an 'only pewpew when on target' setting doesn't change this.
Now, using this tech to set up an automated sentry turret is another matter (and something I'm still flabbergasted isn't commonplace, given the number of people in any developed nation with the skills and resources to build one in their shed.)
Maybe for competition shooters or something, but they'd be banned in competition. It just doesn't make sense.
A not-that-effective one, even sometimes when the users are highly trained. It seems to be a form-factor problem, and the mechanism has to do with trigger pull and flinch. (And more generally, people acting funny in the heat of combat.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout
In no world will even a scaled-down version of this probably ever be worth humping around the extra bulk and weight and introducing complicated maintenance and reliability issues.
That's tautological. If it's too heavy and not reliable enough, then it's tech not worth putting on the battlefield. The question is if it can be made light and reliable enough.
The same question once faced autoloaders, sidearm pistols, revolvers, holo/red dot sights, magnified optics, and even firearms themselves. The answer is universally, when it's ready, it can be useful in certain contexts.
This "capability" sounds somewhat contrary to the purpose of suppressing fire.
I'm pretty sure you could put a weight at the end of the barrel with some actuators in it to drive the barrel the MOA changes necessary to center on a spot.
Combat and swat raids have little in common with video games.
I doubt it's integrated at this time but it would also allow for a workflow to authorize shots (and of course record the whole thing).
Basically this has been the pipe dream of all armies, once bolt action rifles matured, and all the way up through WWII.
If you don't, you're as useful as a battleship in WWII (not very).
Capital ships like Carriers can't be everywhere at once, and there were a lot of WWII engagements involving cruisers, destroyers, and smaller craft. So, what is the difference between a cruiser and a battleship? Basically scale.
This "guaranteed hit" tech basically tries to solve the trigger pull and flinch problems. It might be quite useful if it could be scaled down to handgun size in a red-dot like form factor.
To put this another way: training a sniper is really hard and expensive. However, it's not the marksmanship that's the hard part. It's the camouflage, field-craft, spotting, intelligence gathering, and tactics to integrate into the rest of the unit that are the difficult things to teach.
>What we need to improve is proper target identification,
Assuming the rifles are networked with each other then it only takes one source of target information and the whole squad will be aware of potential targets. (e.g. someone marks a target, a drone spots a target -> the targets are shown on all rifles)
>coordination and tracking of friendlies
The rifle should be capable of detecting other soldiers that are in the rifle network.
The reality is, we evolved to be pretty efficient social predators. Attempts to augment our natural ways of acting in crisis need to be really well matched to innate ways of thinking to be useful.
Think about it this way. When driving around with your GPS, music, and passengers and you encounter something distressing like being lost or seeing a complicated traffic situation up ahead that induces a moment of panic, the natural response is to cut away all the crap and limit the flow of information through you to the absolutely most essential. It's quite possible that it may be nearly impossible to do that with augmented reality systems like you are describing.
Mount this system on a relatively small, silent drone. (There's two more problems to solve, right there, however.) That would be relevant to outdoor recon.
This device would not have helped me getting ambushed within 100yards or being the first guy in the door on a raid.
Not what "this device" is meant to address.
An Army study found that in Afghanistan, >50% of all engagements happen at a distance of greater than 500m. This is the reason for all the current work to extend the range of the average infantryman. A case could be made that some of that work is overspecializing for conditions that might not reoccur in future wars. For example, Pentagon is currently pushing hard for replacing the 5.56 with a 6.8 cartridge that is more powerful than the 7.62 NATO. That would make for a nice sniping round, but maybe not the best when kicking in doors and suppressing people close by?
What happens when the person in charge is insane? Or, worse, unethical? Or, even worse, Dunning–Kruger? How would we police ourselves then‽
Unfortunately that big stick also induces a desire to use it.
Like, the term 'arms race' got popularized to describe this exact situation. I'm not even arguing against the technology described here, but just more cynical about the ultimate effects
World's military spendings are $1.8T/year. NATO is $1T/year. The U.S. is $0.6T/year. As per U.N. estimates, $0.3T per year is sufficient to stabilize CO2 levels.
But no, instead of defending what really needs to be defended, the choice is to spend on the useless technology, like illustrated in this article.
What a waste.
Only soon enough everyone has it.
Every dollar towards tech like that is effectively R&D for every regime on Earth.
It seems reasonable to imagine spies and hackers trying to acquire the models from sights so that, on the day of actual battle, their soldiers can be given carefully prepared masks that defeat the sights of the enemy etc.
Much easier to simply obscure or mask whatever features the model detects.
A lot more of who survived just spent the whole war walking and doing maneuvers.
For militarized police which do fast action like SWAT the battery problem is not a thing anymore.
Gundam is the only answer.
Our future is getting mortgaged in more ways than one.