290
Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
(www.newscientist.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2026
290 points (97.7% liked)
World News
56514 readers
2030 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Military training exists to brainwash decent human beings with a sense of morality and critical thinking abilities, who know they mustn't kill and would refuse requests to kill, into killing machines who are proud to follow orders (and then experience PTSD when they're returned to civilian life and realize what they've done).
Therefore, I contend that fully autonomous drones have killed human beings since wars have been a thing, and those drones are called "soldiers".
Fun and interesting take, as far as commentary on soldiers.
These new fully autonomous drones though, are able to be mass produced by Capital. That's the important difference. It means that there is a nascent way, to bypass the need to have a country with high births to fuel a war machine, and you can just more easily Capital your way to domination.
And that's kinda scary.
So are soldiers, to be fair.
Luckily we don’t live in a world yet where capital can make those drones without labor. Until we do they will still need the populace as a whole.
I can barely see you up there on that high horse.
This is factually inaccurate.
A much better predictor for PTSD is crimes against humanity committed. Killing in war, when necessary is almost "free".
It's thinking like that that's the reason war still exists. Everybody thinks killing is awful, apart in certain circumstances when it's okay, when it's in fact never okay.
Killing the Russians executing your dad and raping your mom is not ok?
Killing the Israeli soldier shooting indescriminately at children is not ok?
User name checks out.
I was specifically talking about PTSD. War exists for real world reasons. Most of which aren't a desire for human suffering. A worldview of good and evil just doesn't do reality justice and discards the human suffering caused by your and anyone's actions.
No, the psychological training to get people to kill each other without thinking is new. Before the 1960's it was common for soldiers to purposely miss. The desensitising and psychological training of shooting at human targets without thinking changed modern warfare and turned people into killing machines.
This is why I stopped playing ARC. Felt like it was just conditioning to prefer shooting-on-sight than being friendly. That or being a sociopath and lying and shooting someone in the back.
Neither of which are properties I like to even play pretend having.
You're very correct in your comment, btw. Nowadays US uses methods that condition people so well that the shoot-to-kill amount of soldiers is like ~95%. In WWII (and everything preceding it) it was roughly 2% of men who were quite literally psychopaths (not in the criminal sense, but a sense of being able to turn off their empathy, many surgeons and ceos belong to this group of ppl). Only <25% of soldiers in a position to fire at the enemy actually shot at them. About 1% of US fighter pilots accounted for ~50% their kills.
Lindybeige has what I think is a fairly good video on the subject.
Shooting to kill - how many men can do it
Nope these make the choices. Ai driven 99.999%
When deployed, the drone is launched into a designated hunt-zone. It navigates purely via visual landmarks. The onboard AI constantly screens the video feed. When an object matches its classification matrix (e.g., a specific mobile missile launcher), the system locks onto the pixel coordinate, arms the ESAD, and executes a terminal dive completely independent of human input.
This tightly integrated anatomy of Edge Compute + Computer Vision + Modular Lethality is what defines the reality of autonomous robotic warfare today.
That's what they're saying:
When deployed, the soldier is launched into a designated hunt-zone. He navigates purely via visual landmarks. His brain constantly screens the nerve data from his eyes. When an object matches its classification matrix (e.g., a specific mobile missile launcher), the organism locks onto the pixel coordinate, arms the ESAD, and executes a terminal dive completely dependent on human input.
I don't understand are you agreeing with me or quoting me because that's not from the article, that's from my Ai prompt that I run through gemini and then ask questions.
You didn't understand that they took your comment and applied it to a human instead of a computerized drone?
I mean, they used AI to generate their last comment. If there were ever a good example of AI eroding the capability for thought...
Instead of letting the large language model think for you, I would suggest to try critical thinking for yourself. I sincerely mean this in a kind way, because if you continue with this, you may become a drone like the ones we talk about here, and I wish that on nobody. I know this current path is easier/more convenient, but sometimes one has to choose the harder path to arrive at a better result.
I don't let things think for me I made the prompt that it had to run off of. It wasn't I asked it the anatomy and it gave me that. I had to trick it.
Lol. Okay buddy
Ask it: the anatomy of a terminator drone, the ones we use in Ukraine not the movie.
You won't get what I got.
I dunno if you can tell, but I'm fundamentally against the waste of resources that are LLMs. No thanks.
You didn't understand that they took your comment and applied it to a human instead of a computerized drone?