Drones taught to spot violent behavior in crowds using AI - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/6/17433482/ai-automated-surveillance-drones-spot-violent-behavior-crowds We gettin closer everyday to Deus Ex

I'm glad that the lead researcher is atleast acknowledging and pointing out the ethical/etc problems with it: Speaking to The Verge, Singh defended his work. He said despite these criticisms, it could have a positive effect on the word: stopping crime and terrorism. He suggested that new regulations might be needed so such technology isn’t misused, but he admitted there was “no good answer” to the worrying scenarios experts like Whittaker and Stanley are predicting. “Anything can be used for good. Anything can be used for bad,” said Singh. This still has a ways to go and still so many variables including bad video stream integrity, false positives, etc.

Amusement aside, this is some Orwellian shit. I mean yeah, at best, this will only target people who are actually problematic, but more likely, this'll target everyone, and will probably be used to keep an eye on everyone. In another time where democracy isn't slowly being eroded in the Western world, I might not be so sceptical about this.

Drones are still pretty shit to use for sustained surveillance considering their loudness and low battery times. Generally they will only stay up there for 30 minutes at a time.

The sci-fi fan aspect of me is going, "That's fucking cool!" and the aspect of me that is aware of society and ethics is going, "Aww fuck."

anyone invented a viable, non-nuclear way to create an EMP yet?

An EMP is just a device that sends out a pulse of EM energy. What makes a Nuke potent in that regards is just that it sends out a massive pulse of EM energy. If you want a massive pulse of EM energy, all you need do is provide a sufficient source of power to reach both the magnitude you want and the effective range you want.

There are drone jammers, but owning any form of jamming device is an automatic felony.

people sure like to throw around the word AI a lot. I don't think AI will mean anything more than it does to the combine soldiers in half life unless it is being conducted on a three dimensional synaptic processor that was literally made for the fucking AI, but hey being sentient and being able to preform more than one task isn't a prequisite for this buzzword.

Which is sort of funny if you think about it because Microwaves are technically such a 'jamming device'.

The drone is specifically being used to detect and alert to violent behaviours, saying "it will likely target everyone" is kind of nonsensical in this context? I mean if you want to monitor everyone you actually only need the hovering drone without the AI meant to spot people being violent. Not that drones would be the best system for this, they're expensive with low flight times and are easily broken. The actual "Orwellian" shit is the social credit system with cameras all over the country that China is doing, this seems pretty harmless.

soon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrXfh4hENKs

The U.S. military worked on something called the marauder that shot toroids of plasma and emitted a decent sized emp on around it while destroying anything it touched. I suppose you could scale down the capacitor banks used to charge the weapon and mount it on a vehicle and get about a kilometers worth of range.