I remember the first time I learned about drone swarms was this YouTube video called Slaughterbots: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA

Of course at this point, my country had been using drones to kill people since I was a small child, which I think is ironic.

In the Slaughterbots scenario, each specific drone has sensors and AI good enough it can pilot itself and doesn’t need an external connection that can be detected or disrupted and is good enough to target individual people with facial recognition. I believe (this is not an area of expertise for me) that the drones depicted in that video are still far more advanced than what currently exists currently (but I think it could probably get there within the next 10-20 years), whereas the video linked shows a more realistic drone swarm attack where it’s targeting infrastructure and the blast radius is larger than being able to target an individual's head, but still smaller than traditional UAVs.

It’s an upsetting watch, but the part of me that enjoys speculative science fiction (I love evaluating how realistic the apocalypse is in zombie movies) always found the attempted countermeasures employed to be silly and unrealistic. Covering windows and leaving only tiny circles so no drone can get through etc…

But at the same time, the video struck a chord because as soon as I saw it, I knew some form of this was coming and likely within the next decade. But mitigations and countermeasures are being developed in tandem. I think that's the major thing the Slaughterbots video got wrong.

And there's many different potential countermeasures, they don't all have to be 100% effective, but together they form a kind of "net" that will make these attacks a lot harder to pull off.

For example, they now have a portable machine that can disrupt a drone swarm's sensors, which will at the very least require additional shielding (and increase cost per unit) which removes some of the benefits. It's possible the technology will prove even more fruitful after additional development and make drone swarms mostly untenable for warfare except in rare situations.

This is a very direct countermeasure, but I could also imagine other indirect measures like regulating consumer drone manufacturers and forcing them to add/remove features that make it more difficult to turn them into a weapon. The same way printers can't just print currency and GPS won't work if it's moving too fast.

Ultimately, for war it just makes it another type of weapon/tactic and there's already infrastructure for controlling how those things move between countries and intelligence groups that work to keep them away from terrorists etc...

Which leaves the possibility of a sole actor or small group without state backing turning consumer drones into these swarms. Which could happen, it could be a new vector of terrorist attack. But they'd still have to source explosives which is already monitored, etc... In the Slaughterbots video, these swarm attacks are extremely efficient and effective, killing 5000+ people at a time. I think a similar attempt from a homegrown terror cell would not be more effective than a mass shooting or traditional bombing in terms of casualties (< 50.) I think for it to become more effective, it would have to be done many times and iterated on by the same group, building up institutional knowledge. It's just too complex.

Like the idea of a "dirty bomb", I think it’s one of those things that is theoretically extremely dangerous but due to a mix of factors is unlikely to result in a situation like the one depicted in that video. A matrix of countermeasures will just make the juice not worth the squeeze.

I think about it like guns. There is a lot of gun violence in the United States, but it stems more from ideological gridlock than the government not being able to stop it if they had the will to.

The one thing that does worry me is the possibility of targeting individuals. So if you have a tiny drone that can explode and isn’t part of a larger swarm, then you could potentially murder someone in a way that is very hard to investigate. Much harder than a homicide involving a gun where someone had to pull the trigger. It could be the next evolution of SWATing someone.