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Texas Schools Add Attack Drones To Protect Students (www.dallasobserver.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/34511710

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[–] 12 points 1 year ago (8 children)

The bigger question is when they'll have these patrolling the streets... At least they're human-operated, for now.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Before the end of next year? Like maybe they’ll use police drones prowling streets to distract voters and get them to vote for republicans.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Many departments already have drones with cameras, loudspeakers and thermal imaging. Currently mostly used for missing persons to scan large swaths of woodland quickly

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Yeah my hometown used them to find a guy that ran into the woods after being involved in a shooting.

    But I think RobotZap means a more dystopian use where drones essentially takeover the streets constantly patrolling to enact martial law by robots or something (getting terminator vibes).

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    The article doesn't actually specify that they're human operated. From the way it's described it could easily be just one human managing a swarm of 100 autonomous drones and taking control or issuing commands to individual drones as they see the need to

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    The high-tech drones, which are piloted by a team of former military men and nationally ranked professional drone racers, are not armed with bullets, but Campus Guardian Angel’s intention isn’t to kill or arrest; it’s to distract.

    If they were powered by AI, the media would be salivating over it.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    That is a good point. I'm not sure if the AI hype cycle is strong enough that bragging about your less-than-lethal weapons you sell to schools being AI piloted would outweigh the obvious danger of having AI controlling less-than-lethal weapons in a school environment.

    I'm just thinking from a cost perspective, they aren't going to want to pay enough people to pilot 30 drones individually even just for school hours, they're going to have one person piloting several of them at once when they deploy, and they'll be shifting focus between the various drones they control while the automation handles the ones not being manually controlled at that moment, much like the remote assistant drivers for some self-driving car companies.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I would be more willing to bet that there are between 4-8 people who will pilot the drones, and they are able to control them at any of the X amount of schools that have made the ransom payments for the system. They probably had the one 'professional drone racer' do the demonstration, flying the drones quickly through the school to wow the school board, and then will have bubba mcpilot sitting at a desk the majority of the time.

    So each of these 4-8 folks will control one drone, but it can be at any of all the schools.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    That's only 4-8 active drones at a time though. The article talked about deployments with dozens of drones in a given school. Sure you want to keep some in reserve but at some point from the perspective of the drone company it makes too much financial sense to have one person piloting more than one drone at a time since the technology exists.

    Miltech companies have been developing fully autonomous drones for combat scenarios since jammers can prevent manual control and are currently used in combat zones for that exact reason. Mithril Defense which is selling these drones also makes combat drones. I'd be very surprised if they actually maintain 1to1 drone operator to drone ratios for any amount of time

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