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We Need To Build Anti-Drone Systems For Civilian Spaces
It might be entirely too easy to create drones that could chase people around - as this DIY effort to create an AI-steered homing/killer drone demonstrates.
We built an AI-steered homing/killer drone in just a few hours
— Luis Wenus (@luiswenus) March 2, 2024
I thought it would be fun to build a drone that chases you around as a game. It just uses an AI object detection model to find people in the frame, and then the drone is programmed to fly towards this at full speed… pic.twitter.com/p5ijBiHPxz
As @luiswenus points out, this danger should be countered by some sort of anti-drone system right away.
Science fiction author Neal Stephenson foresaw the need for this about thirty years ago in his 1995 novel The Diamond Age:
the real border was defended by something called the dog pod grid - a swarm of quasi-independent aerostats...These pods were programmed to hang in space in a hexagonal grid pattern about ten centimeters apart near the ground (close enough to stop a dog but not a cat, hence "dog pods") and spaced wider as they got higher.
(Read more about dog pod grid aerostats)
I'd add that Philip K. Dick described swarms of computer-controlled hunter-killer drones in Vulcan's Hammer (1960); see robot tracking device.
Frank Herbert described a tiny drone that was guided by a human hand in his 1965 novel Dune:
From behind the headboard slipped a tiny hunter-seeker no more than five centimeters long. Paul recognized it at once - a common assassination weapon that every child of royal blood learned about at an early age. It was a ravening sliver of metal guided by some near-by hand and eye.
(Hunter Seeker from 'Dune' by Frank Herbert)
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