> You can buy a drone today, completely anonymously, strap some explosives to it, remotely fly it into someone and detonate it, a few hundred yards away from you

You can even drop a grenade from it; Daesh did that a few hundred times in 2016 and 2017: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2017/05/24/types-islami... https://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2016/10/11/irak...

But that’s not face-recognition-driven, anonymous, long-range, or precision-guided; it might not even be cheap, considering that the alternative may be to lob the grenade by hand or shoot with a sniper rifle. If the radio signal is jammed, the drone falls out of the sky, or at least stays put, and the operator can no longer see out of its camera. As far as I know, the signal on these commercial drones is unencrypted, so there’s no way for the drone to distinguish commands from its buyer from commands from a jammer. Because the signal is emitted constantly, it can guide defenders directly to the place of concealment of the operator. And a quadcopter drone moves slowly compared to a thrown grenade or even a bottlerocket, so it’s relatively easy for the defenders to target.

> Does Slaughterbot-like product existence make it easier?

Yes.

> If some terrorist wants to kill a bunch of people, how is it easier than just detonating a truck full of C4?

Jeffrey Dahmer wanted to kill a bunch of people. Terrorists want to persuade a bunch of people; the killing is just a means to that end. Here are seven advantages to a terrorist of slaughterbots over a truck full of C4:

1. The driver dies when they set off the truck full of C4.

2. The 200 people killed by the truck full of C4 are kind of random. Some of them might be counterproductive to your cause — for example, most of the deaths in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA here in Buenos Aires were kindergarten-aged kids, which helps to undermine sympathy for the bombers. By contrast, with the slaughterbots, you can kill 200 specific people; for example, journalists who have published articles critical of you, policemen who refused to accept your bribes (or their family members), extortion targets who refused to pay your ransom, neo-Nazis you’ve identified through cluster analysis, drone pilots (or their family members), army officers (or their family members), or just people wearing clothes you don’t like, such as headscarfs (if you’re Narendra Modi) or police uniforms (if you’re an insurgent).

3. A truck full of C4 is like two tonnes of C4. The Slaughterbots video suggests using 3 grams of shaped explosive per target, at which level 600 grams would be needed to kill 200 people. This is on the order of 2000 times lower cost for the explosive, assuming there’s a free market in C4. However...

4. A truck full of C4 requires C4, which is hard to get and arouses suspicion in most places; by contrast, precision-guided munitions can reach these levels of lethality without such powerful explosives, or without any explosives at all, although I will refrain from speculating on details. Certainly both fiction and the industrial safety and health literature is full of examples of machines killing people without any explosives.

5. A truck full of C4 is large and physically straightforward to stop, although this may require heavy materials; after the AMIA truck bombing, all the Jewish community buildings here put up large concrete barricades to prevent a third bombing. So far this has been successful. (However, Nisman, the prosecutor assigned to the AMIA case, surprisingly committed suicide the day before he was due to present his case to the court.) A flock of autonomous drones is potentially very difficult to stop. They don’t have to fly; they can skitter like cockroaches, fall like Dragons’ Teeth, float like a balloon, or stick to the bottoms of the cars of authorized personnel.

6. You can prevent a truck bombing by killing the driver of the truck full of C4 before he arrives at his destination, for example if he tries to barrel through a military checkpoint. In all likelihood this will completely prevent the bombing; if he’s already activated a deadman switch, it will detonate the bomb at a place of your choosing rather than his, and probably kill nobody but him, or maybe a couple of unlucky bystanders. By contrast, an autonomously targeted weapon, or even a fire-and-forget weapon, can be designed to continue to its target once it is deployed, whether or not you kill the operator.

7. Trucks drive 100 km/hour, can only travel on roads, and they carry license plates, making them traceable. Laima, an early Aerosonde, flew the 3270 km from Newfoundland to the UK in 26 hours, powered by 5.7 ℓ of gasoline, in 1998 — while this is only 125 km/hour, it is of course possible to fly much faster at the expense of greater fuel consumption. Modern autonomous aircraft can be much smaller. This means that border checkpoints and walls may be an effective way to prevent trucks full of C4 from getting near their destination city, but they will not help against autonomous aircraft.

> How about governments? I don’t see it - if a government wants someone dead, they will be dead (either officially, e.g. Bin Laden, or unofficially, Epstein-style). If a government wants a bunch of people dead, the difficulty lies not in technology, but in PR.

This is far from true. The US government has a list of people they want dead who are not yet dead — several lists, actually, the notorious Disposition Matrix being only one — and even Ed Snowden and Julian Assange are not on them officially. Killing bin Laden alone cost them almost 10 years, two failed invasions, and the destruction of the world polio eradication effort; Ayman al-Zawahiri has so far survived 20 years on the list. Both of the Venezuelan governments want the other one dead. Hamas, the government of the Gaza Strip, wants the entire Israeli army dead, as does the government of Iran. The Israeli government wanted the Iranian nuclear scientists dead — and in that case it did kill them. The Yemeni government, as well as the Saudi government, wants all the Houthi rebels dead, or at least their commanders, and that has been the case for five years. The Turkish government wants Fethullah Gulen dead. Every government in the region wanted everyone in Daesh dead. In most of these cases no special PR effort would be needed.

Long-range autonomous anonymous drones will change all that.

> sending a bunch of agents to arrest and execute people is just as effective. ... As for precise military strikes - we’re already doing it with drones, so nothing new here.

Sending a bunch of agents is not anonymous or deniable, and it can be stopped by borders; I know people who probably only survived the last dictatorship by fleeing the country. It’s also very expensive; four police officers occupied for half the day is going to cost you the PPP equivalent of about US$1000. That’s two orders of magnitude cheaper than a Hellfire missile (US$117k) but three orders of magnitude more expensive than the rifle cartridge those agents will use to execute the person. The cost of a single-use long-range drone would probably be in the neighborhood of US$1000, but if the attacker can reuse the same drone against multiple targets, they might be able to get the cost down below US$100 per target, three orders of magnitude less than a Hellfire drone strike.

It’s very predictable that as the cost of an attack goes down, its frequency will go up, and it will become accessible to more groups.

(Continued in a sibling comment, presently displayed above.)