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For those watching truth and justice fall apart in the United States, who are frightened that the war crimes being suggested this year will fully happen and go unpunished, here is an idea that might bring you some reassurance. Like a famous book says, the ruling class is, and always was, horrible. A select few has always exploited their position to take a disproportionate share -- and then, even more if only to decrease the relative power of their subjects... which never hits a stopping point. All records confirm that story. Average people have always been in a miserable struggle against this fact. And now this century, besides the two battling forces, an entirely new player in the game has arrived -- modern technology -- that threatens to disrupt things from business as usual... but no one knows quite how. Will it serve to centralize power or decentralize it? Will it make us all slaves in a fascism of Trump-like billionaires who are, through access to superior technology, globalization, and control of disinformation, increasingly able to hoard all the world's wealth out of our reach and to coerce us into anything they want? Or will technology do the opposite, distributing power, freeing us all to live independent and intellectually fulfilling lives? As much of a pessimist as I am about the human condition, it's actually the second one that I'm about to make a case for, albeit knowing that many of us may not live to see it achieved. Let's think about it. The US military has spoken a lot lately through its choices of which research to fund, and for the last few decades it has taken up a disturbing focus on developing crowd control technologies, such as the Active Denial Systems and Long Range Acoustic Devices that are in production at Raytheon right now -- efforts that look a lot like funding of preparations against a popular uprising. Without strong and willing external enemies to deter, and with more funding to spend than ever, Generals these days have turned the military-industrial sights inward on domestic enemies -- which, probably intentionally, enhances the security of current regimes against their own people, upsettingly opening the door for repression. Meanwhile, technology has ruined other things. Older tools that were meant to bring the balance of power back to the people, such as America's proliferation of guns and the second amendment right to use them, conspicuously cannot do anything to any present-day military force equipped with bombers and drones. Guns have been reduced to a joke, mere hunters' toys by comparison that macho southern militias stereo-typically still put their faith in are no longer worth the downsides to our health to everyone else. Without that option we feel ourselves resigning to helplessness against our own rulers -- and importantly, against their ability to get superior technology. Before you personally resign to that, consider that we are actually worse than ever at predicting what technology will do next, including who it will benefit. We try to look ahead and extrapolate, and as is natural we do it by projecting all the trends that we see linearly, and we don't see them going well at all. But scientists who propose a coming technological singularity would call this a fallacy. Technology as they see it is moving things at a non-linear pace, demonstrable by graphing just about any measure of high-tech power and noticing its tell-late curve of exponential growth, where one generation of new tools helps us to build the next generation that much sooner. The exact numerical value of that exponential growth term has historically been like a constant in that it represents the power of the human brain, the creative and inventive pace of humans, but even that constant term in the function is unstable as humans begin altering and augmenting our own brains -- and will be fully blown away once we start hooking up our brain parts to computers without biological needs that can digitally duplicate, backup, and share their learned information to anyone else. Since the shape of the whole function that technological growth follows is beginning to wildly change, a Singularitarian sees the things approaching us as entirely unpredictable -- with a rate of change speeding up out of control, passing up our wildest and weirdest expectations. But for everyone else, linearly projecting trends has worked for us all throughout history, so why stop now. We try to linearly extrapolate current life and envision a world where having the most tanks and planes and soldiers and cash continues to be the deciding factor of who gets to rule the world. And we worry, because our rulers' ability to get superior technology implies that now is the easiest time to buck this trend with violent revolution, and then from here on out it only gets more difficult. Justice and fairness will only be more unattainable, the wealth gap and the overall disparity of power will only get wider and worse. It implies the best course of action is immediate overthrow by everyone, which still probably ends in extermination. All this is soon to be over. Because of one very specific technology, you can safely put most revolutionary plans on hold --the future that we are afraid of, the coming centuries where our rulers are above all punishment, or even the coming decades where Trump's lifetime appointees roll back twenty years of human-rights progress for each additional year that they serve while nobody stops them, is not going to be like that. Instead, I see a swift justice coming our way. I'm telling you that you can relax in the assurance that the most sociopathic men in the ruling class will all die violently, and soon. Why? Because fame is dangerous. Especially today, people get destroyed by fame. But consider tomorrow. The dangers of becoming famous will multiply -- all dangers will, really -- when technology makes killing easier. When we realize we're at an age where anyone can just open-source download and then cheaply 3D-print a simple rocket and guidance circuitry, things change. Weapons are going to get cheaper and designs more open. There will be too many downloads, too many suspects, for the authorities to care. Once designs for cheap trap-laying drones exist they'll be on the internet forever, and even a police state can't kill a concept like the internet, or even shut it off... it's distributed and de-centralized already. Dangerous robots, and whatever materials or deadly chemicals they are made of, will get cheap. And then really cheap. I'm sure you all can see deadly killer robots coming too, but the cheap and easy part is in some ways already true. Imagine amateurs ordering them up or manufacturing them without any skill-set because of automation -- some would. After just one more decade or so of robotics research, of improved tools and declining cost, everyone will have some incredibly smart projectiles, and anyone could use them to assassinate on a whim. Made untraceable by means of indirect machine helpers, or many layers of them each propelling the next into position (algorithms can sort out the details better than we could), vengeful people can and will anonymously cause high-profile individuals to drop like flies. Like would already happen now if each and every crazy commenter on YouTube actually possessed the means and the tools -- you know this. Everyone who is powerful and/or a celebrity will be in constant fear of being next. Someday soon anyone can 3D-print that guided rocket. When doing this by the thousands is affordable for an individual, security guards cannot save public figures from the masses -- who just need to park a device anywhere nearby to send them away in a rush of smoke. Nor can they hide the powerful from it. Tiny camera boards are ten cents now and they're only getting cheaper to litter everywhere and to network together, including cheap computer vision to track people's flow from the range of one to the next. Geo-tagged videos of everything are everywhere, and overall we can all see that every ounce of privacy is evaporating from both our normal lives and from our rulers' extraordinary lives. The sadistic among them can try to maintain existing private hoards of wealth and live underground off the grid, and then continue to traffick and repress vulnerable people, but as soon as people notice missing family members they will send the dogs in -- their cheap, private supply of sensing robots will flood all the blind spots on earth -- and the people involved will all eventually get found and die. Technologies of repression, the technological tools that modern dictators and plutocrats used last century to wage war on the people are, about a lifetime later, about to be in widespread and cheap availability to everyone. So much so that repressing anyone will cease to be a good idea. Even being high-profile at all will cease to be a good idea, for that matter. Humanity is entering a phase of decentralization. One of keeping your head down. Everybody will bring attention to their ideas, but not to themselves. In my opinion I can't really see things going differently. If this really happens, how long will it stay that way? You can safely bet that our society is a lot closer to cheap 3D printing and manufacturing than we are to producing whole-brain uploading. So, decades at least. Once the powerful can have virtual immortality by transplanting brains, or transplanting heads or bodies, or replicating the data on their brains to digitally represent everything they think and know and think that they feel, preserving many copies, cheap assassinations will become a cheap trick. Murder will become a band-aid to getting rid of somebody -- instead, something to do casually and for the hell of it. Maybe more of an exclamatory tool of rhetoric, or a practical joke. Defeating and mocking death is great, but it takes the power out of the hands of the people once again, because any source of authoritarian hate capable of deceiving a voting populace becomes un-killable again. So then we'll have to come up with some other way to stop the virus of bad ideas from spreading and sending us towards the next nearest dystopia.
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Feb 6, 2017 00:02
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This could be a really good thread and I like your OP but its a little rambling and sorta buries the lede so let me sum up the money shot for the TL;DR crowd. quote:Instead, I see a swift justice coming our way. I'm telling you that you can relax in the assurance that the most sociopathic men in the ruling class will all die violently, and soon.
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Feb 6, 2017 00:06
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i agree w/ the OP, CNC mills make dictatorships impossible
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Feb 6, 2017 00:18
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quote:Instead, I see a swift justice coming our way. I'm telling you that you can relax in the assurance that the most sociopathic men in the ruling class will all die violently, and soon.
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Feb 6, 2017 00:20
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This is pretty out there and probably goes to far, but at the same time I wouldn't bet against it. poo poo is getting very weird and hard to anticipate. "Senator Smith Assassinated by Untraceable 3D Printed Rifle" does not seem out of the realm of possibility. If anyone would like to dig into some cyberpunk fiction heavily involving the idea of brain downloads/copies I would highly recommend the Altered Carbon books.
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Feb 6, 2017 00:21
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The Butcher posted:poo poo is getting very weird and hard to anticipate. "Senator Smith Assassinated by Untraceable 3D Printed Rifle" does not seem out of the realm of possibility. Seems like a lot of effort when you could just use some old mosin.
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Feb 6, 2017 01:10
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OwlFancier posted:Seems like a lot of effort when you could just use some old mosin. Hm, true. Also narrows down the pool of suspects when you can ask "which of these dudes has a giant fuckoff 3D printer in his garage?"
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Feb 6, 2017 01:23
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Also 3d printed weapons are bad, there's a reason H&K don't make guns entirely out of hardened silly string.
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Feb 6, 2017 01:30
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Are printable guided missiles even a thing? I think that the wealthy/powerful will always be ahead of anything that might threaten them. It also helps that they encourage a culture where wealth is associated with various virtues (like hard work or prudence).
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Feb 6, 2017 01:52
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For what it's worth, I kind of had a realization like this last night when I was watching a Frontline episode about the fighting in Mosul between ISIS and Iraqi military forces. At one point in the episode, the group of Iraqi soldiers that the episode's journalist was following around was the target of an attempted grenade bombing by an ISIS drone. So these soldiers use their rifles to shoot it down (which probably isn't the best way to do it), and then they had to get running because they saw more drones coming for them. The initial attack seemed scary enough, but the implications of being chased by drone swarms piloted by people trying to kill you struck me as being especially terrifying to consider.Ytlaya posted:Are printable guided missiles even a thing? Right now, the wealthy and powerful are protected by many human limitations that drones kind of do away with. Humans are recognizable. They aren't discreet or compact. They're restricted from accessing many places by security guards, locks, and so on. Would be assassins are hampered by all of that, and maybe (if they're the conscientious type, oxymoronic as that sounds) the risk of collateral damage from a high-intensity assault dissuades them. But if one can sneak a drone across from a target in a building, or hide it until the target appears, or whatever...that changes all of that. There's no human face to readily trace down. There is no real restriction on where a drone can go. It can be discreet. When the prospect of being able to take one's time and assure their target is correct and pinned down is available, you might see less reluctance to press the button that pulls a trigger or releases a catch. Every reduction in risk and increase in capability in turns increases the number of attack vectors that can be utilized. Which isn't to say that any of this is ideal or good, but the OP isn't entirely off-base, and there's only so much that the wealthy and well-off can really do to counteract a determined attack by decentralized attackers using remote devices.
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Feb 6, 2017 02:18
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Kthulhu5000 posted:Which isn't to say that any of this is ideal or good, but the OP isn't entirely off-base, and there's only so much that the wealthy and well-off can really do to counteract a determined attack by decentralized attackers using remote devices. Or a determined attack by decentralized attackers using bombs and rifles... This isn't a new thing. The reason wealthy people aren't regularly gunned down in the street is because people don't really want to do that, not because they lack the means.
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Feb 6, 2017 02:27
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OwlFancier posted:Also 3d printed weapons are bad, there's a reason H&K don't make guns entirely out of hardened silly string. They function and they fire, they mostly fail at being reusable many times. what else do they need to do?
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Feb 6, 2017 02:34
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Why would this hypothetical future where everyone is super easy to assassinate still have the rich and powerful playing up the celebrity angle? Why would they not do everything in their power to remain anonymous while amassing their wealth? Why would this anonymous, instant, unstoppable weapon making technology be allowed to spread to the poor? Why wouldn't this technology make things significantly worse for the average human being as the government just starts "counter"-droning anyone seen with someone related to someone who maybe had this technology?
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Feb 6, 2017 02:34
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Dont forget, they're getting rid of the internet.
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Feb 6, 2017 02:46
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The Butcher posted:This is pretty out there and probably goes to far, but at the same time I wouldn't bet against it. I think "Market Forces" better describes our future. But maybe the real message we can learn is that graphically sucking elven cocks will let us make the world a better place.
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Feb 6, 2017 02:50
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OwlFancier posted:Or a determined attack by decentralized attackers using bombs and rifles... That kind of misses the point I was making, though? Rifles aren't necessarily discreet to unload, setup, and use (if you're being a sniper). Even with a suppressor, they can still make a report. They can still leave evidence, be it shell casings or the rifle itself or witnesses reporting a panicked looking guy running out of a building with a big bundle. Long range shooting isn't simple, and trying to shoot a specific target introduces complicating factors of elevation, angles, and all of that. The same applies with an explosive; you have to get it near the target, you run the risk of being discovered, and unless you're willing to blow yourself and other people up, it's not very direct. These are very real hindrances, both the psychological barriers involved and the physical ones. But when you can pilot a small drone from a hideout, when you can zoom it right in to the target and detonate it or fire off a few rounds of ammunition, when you have a sort of psychological rush from playing God (if one is miswired that way), a whole lot of barriers will melt away. Throw in ideological justification, and you will have a population of people indulging their rage and worst impulses with minimal risk to themselves.
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Feb 6, 2017 03:00
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I think before drone assassins save us from capitalists it'll be something else, like a massive stock market or offshore account hack, that will do more to erase their power. There's a doohickey I've seen video of that forces drones to land just by pointing the thing at one which could probably be researched into something that would work at longer ranges and direct itself, not to mention the ways to deal with snipers that already exist (bullet-proof limos, bullet-proof glass, bodyguards, meeting in facilities without windows or sunroofs, etc.). 3D printed missiles would be something else but gated communities would invest in defenses and just have people come to them if they had to do face-to-face, and that dag-nab punk down the street playing his music at 3 am would probably get shot first and take the whole neighborhood with him. Not sure that's the kind of change you're looking for!
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Feb 6, 2017 03:04
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After a quiet and controlled blast, a cannonball flies a mile into the air, roughly in the direction of its target, and it drags a long metal cable the whole way with it. As the cannonball drops down on its arc, using some sensors inside and open source guidance software it starts to jettison off pieces of itself in just the right way to stay on target, until all that's left are some fins that slow it down to a near-stop, coasting along until the loose end of the wire softly lands exactly where you wanted it within an inch. Near the end of that cable it has a loop that lassos around the neck of your assassination target. A mile away where it came from, a machine has reeled in all slack in the cable during its travels, keeping the wire to the cannonball nearly straight the whole time; it makes some final adjustments before the lasso finally drops. That machine is attached to a $100 pickup truck, which now peels off taking the head with it. The driver promptly cuts off the wire and then drives out of town. Who did it and how do you investigate the crime? Would this require guidance that's a little too perfect for a little flying machine to handle? I'm not so sure these days. Here's where we were six years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVQIglBZo6s
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Feb 6, 2017 04:43
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I'd personally be satisfied if scientists could perfect remote-controlled insect-sized robots capable of carrying a lethal dose of poison, so that the Secret Service would have to permanently put Trump in a Faraday cage and occasionally let out an EMP to kill all nearby electronics, depriving him forever of TV and his twitter phone.
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Feb 6, 2017 11:41
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Inferior Third Season posted:I'd personally be satisfied if scientists could perfect remote-controlled insect-sized robots capable of carrying a lethal dose of poison, so that the Secret Service would have to permanently put Trump in a Faraday cage and occasionally let out an EMP to kill all nearby electronics, depriving him forever of TV and his twitter phone. That would kill him as surely as the poison bots. Make sure Pence and other horrible Republicans are out of succession first please. Also that cannonball thing reminds me of Dahir Insaat. Maybe it's the quadcopter video at the end that seals the deal. In any case giant ropes/wires aren't exactly hard to trace unless they break up well before their ends (and you want it to last otherwise your assassination plot will snap in half before the noose even lands on whoever) so if there's a single thing that goes wrong with placing the truck (nosy neighbor who noticed out of town plates, security camera that saw a pealing truck in the area, etc.) there will be leads to follow. Rough leads to be sure and a lot of ways for them to hit dead ends, but nobody will just be sitting and scratching their heads when they see it beyond how cartoonish the whole thing feels.
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Feb 6, 2017 14:42
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Windfall posted:After a quiet and controlled blast, a cannonball flies a mile into the air, roughly in the direction of its target, and it drags a long metal cable the whole way with it. As the cannonball drops down on its arc, using some sensors inside and open source guidance software it starts to jettison off pieces of itself in just the right way to stay on target, until all that's left are some fins that slow it down to a near-stop, coasting along until the loose end of the wire softly lands exactly where you wanted it within an inch. Near the end of that cable it has a loop that lassos around the neck of your assassination target. A mile away where it came from, a machine has reeled in all slack in the cable during its travels, keeping the wire to the cannonball nearly straight the whole time; it makes some final adjustments before the lasso finally drops. That machine is attached to a $100 pickup truck, which now peels off taking the head with it. The driver promptly cuts off the wire and then drives out of town. Who did it and how do you investigate the crime? We already have a much easier version of that, it's called a mortar.
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Feb 6, 2017 14:44
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Ytlaya posted:Are printable guided missiles even a thing? No, printable guided missiles aren't a thing. Consumer 3D printers only really handle plastic, or at best, plastic with powdered metal added. 3D printing real metal at home isn't practical, and 3D printing circuit boards is just marketing-speak for "printing a wafer of silicon that you can then manually add circuits to yourself". The virtues of 3D printing for practical applications (rather than quick, shoddy prototypes) tend to be heavily exaggerated. Most notably (and obviously, if you sit back and really think about it for a second), you can't 3D print explosives or rocket engines, which kind of puts a huge damper on the idea. All you can really accomplish with a 3D printer is creating the body of the rocket, which is already the easiest thing to procure because all you really need is a metal tube and a few pieces of wood or plastic.. You still need to get your hands on proper explosives to put in the rocket, you still need real electronics knowledge and skills and equipment if you're going to make it remote controllable or build yourself a little drone brain, and so on. You can't just download a design from the internet and print out a ready-to-go rocket, and you can't 3D print any of the actually difficult-to-obtain-or-build parts of the rocket. The same goes for 3D printing drones - you can certainly 3D print a drone body, but you can't 3D-print the electronic brain that goes in that body, and you certainly can't 3D print any explosives for it to place. So you have to make or buy your own bombs anyway, you have to solder everything together yourself, and at that point why even bother with 3D printing the shell to put all those things in when you can just spend twenty bucks on a RC car and mount a cellphone camera on it? 3D printing is not nearly as powerful - or as useful - as many devotees like to imagine. The other big flaw in OP's idea is that people have been talking about the growth of technology for assassination purposes since the 1500s - wheellock pistols were subject to some of the first gun control laws because their size and relative stealthiness to use quickly earned them noteriety as an ideal 14th-century assassination tool. All the OP has really figured out is that it's really easy to murder people. Windfall posted:After a quiet and controlled blast, a cannonball flies a mile into the air, roughly in the direction of its target, and it drags a long metal cable the whole way with it. As the cannonball drops down on its arc, using some sensors inside and open source guidance software it starts to jettison off pieces of itself in just the right way to stay on target, until all that's left are some fins that slow it down to a near-stop, coasting along until the loose end of the wire softly lands exactly where you wanted it within an inch. Near the end of that cable it has a loop that lassos around the neck of your assassination target. A mile away where it came from, a machine has reeled in all slack in the cable during its travels, keeping the wire to the cannonball nearly straight the whole time; it makes some final adjustments before the lasso finally drops. That machine is attached to a $100 pickup truck, which now peels off taking the head with it. The driver promptly cuts off the wire and then drives out of town. Who did it and how do you investigate the crime? Are you joking? I think the two-mile-long cable stretching right through a populated area and leading back to a weirdo in a pickup truck with a generator and a bunch of machinery in the back isn't exactly stealthy - or practical, for that matter. I shouldn't have to explain why, because it's clear I've already spent more time thinking about it than you have.
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Feb 6, 2017 15:43
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3d print a 3d printer drone that flies off to a distant location before 3d printing an attack drone which murders the victim and then destroys the 1st drone and itself. Perfect crime?
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Feb 6, 2017 19:16
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Windfall posted:After a quiet and controlled blast, a cannonball flies a mile into the air, roughly in the direction of its target, and it drags a long metal cable the whole way with it. As the cannonball drops down on its arc, using some sensors inside and open source guidance software it starts to jettison off pieces of itself in just the right way to stay on target, until all that's left are some fins that slow it down to a near-stop, coasting along until the loose end of the wire softly lands exactly where you wanted it within an inch. Near the end of that cable it has a loop that lassos around the neck of your assassination target. A mile away where it came from, a machine has reeled in all slack in the cable during its travels, keeping the wire to the cannonball nearly straight the whole time; it makes some final adjustments before the lasso finally drops. That machine is attached to a $100 pickup truck, which now peels off taking the head with it. The driver promptly cuts off the wire and then drives out of town. Who did it and how do you investigate the crime? Yeah that's cool now gotry that with commercially available poo poo
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Feb 6, 2017 19:43
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Main Paineframe posted:All the OP has really figured out is that it's really easy to murder people. What I'm saying is buy a mosin because carcanos are expensive now.
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Feb 6, 2017 19:45
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Or again, a mortar. It's this magical method of throwing bombs really long distance and there's all these calculations you can do to figure out where the bomb is going to go. Seriously the idea that it's ability that stops political leaders getting murdered is grossly misunderstanding that most people simply do not want to do it.
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Feb 6, 2017 19:45
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OwlFancier posted:Or again, a mortar. Anymore, you're also somewhat signing your own death warrant. Nice predictable arcs of fire lead you to getting a round dropped back on you unless you move after firing, which is not always obvious to the insurgent.
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Feb 6, 2017 19:49
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rkajdi posted:Anymore, you're also somewhat signing your own death warrant. Nice predictable arcs of fire lead you to getting a round dropped back on you unless you move after firing, which is not always obvious to the insurgent. I somehow doubt that most western nations are equipped for or inclined towards employing counter-battery fire in their cities.
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Feb 6, 2017 19:50
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Anyone who thinks 3D printed guns are scary doesn't understand 3D printing or guns.
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Feb 6, 2017 19:53
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I for one am terrified of being assasinated by someone nerdy enough to own and operate a 3d printer with a gun that is worse than the sten. What will we do when technology makes possible for thousands of dollars what some plumbing supplies and half an hour made possible decades ago. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Feb 6, 2017 |
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Feb 6, 2017 19:54
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Why have the truck at all. In place of the pickup truck just shoot a big boat anchor out of a second cannon tied to the wire, as that will generate more sudden snapping force on the cable than a truck anyway and more importantly, could be set up anywhere you can dig a hole un-monitored. Or don't even bury it at all, just drop it off -- the point of that is it's a lot easier to find a wooded lot somewhere you're sure no one will see you or get suspicious at you digging a hole months before the event when you have a radius of a mile or two to do it in, as opposed to currently, where you have to be within eyesight of your target and shoot them while security is set up, or somehow predict exactly where they will walk to bury a remote bomb close enough to there.Main Paineframe posted:Are you joking? Yeah of course, that's a thought experiment more cartoonish than what an efficient or reliable plan would look like. It doesn't have to be Rube-Goldberg, I'm talking about anything in robotics that could obsolete what security teams of humans do. There's a whole lot of possibilities that could fall under that category, not all of them as ridiculous, provided that someday there are dense enough groups of cheap personal robots swarming the air following their owners everywhere. If we at least have that, so many aspects of my drone-and-anchored-cable scenario could be replaced or eliminated. Change the cable to a razor sharp net and have a tiny drone gradually bury it all underneath where people will walk all the time, so that your cannon could scoop anyone up in the net and launch them through a tiny window in a split second. Use modular robotics to automatically disconnect parts of the net from each other before it fires so that only the person being tracked in the area gets dragged off. Command your drone to slowly set this up pretty much everywhere over years. Now whoever set it up has left behind a lot more evidence, but the assassination victim is no less dead, the other bystanders in the room aren't, and there's no form of protection that a high-profile person could buy themselves against attacks like that. These automated attacks don't need to be precisely aimed by a person or even necessarily initially set up with them in mind. If consumer robots become cheap enough and all these elaborate logistical details become automated enough through software, then one nobody angry YouTube commenter just needs to be crazy enough to issue the command to their little robot, and then wait a couple of years for it to all happen without any more thought on their part. Someone could always go through with an assassination without insisting on it being anonymous and un-traceable, by the way. Plenty of people take credit for crimes, or commit violent crimes right out in the open -- it's just that normally high-ranking public figures are invulnerable to this due to armed guards and perimeters being set up and snipers on rooftops. Most people do not think they could get anything harmful past a top security team even if it meant sacrificing themselves. Whereas here in the future scenario everyone who has a smart projectile (which I'm saying is eventually everyone) would know they have some way to pull it off, with a single command even if they have no skill-set given that the guided device is smart enough. The anonymity can just come from indirection and obscuring who commanded which robots to set up what chain reaction that day. The main invention here is not 3d-printing of plastics and metals as I poorly named and brought emphasis to, or do-it-yourself kits for robotics at all, but rather the control software. Imagine if everyone had access to open software for optimizing physical control problems that is of a quality high enough to maneuver any 3D body at least as well as a bird or an animal could, by varying simple mechanical degrees of freedom. Software for controlling soft robots of any squishy shape via learning already exists. I mean, holy poo poo, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhomcCEAXCg. Imagine when the type of software behind that quadcopter video is 30 years more advanced and you can download it from an app store into anything robotic, or that has soft synthetic muscles. Someday by simple proliferation of free software we will all be able to get our hands on projectiles that are at least as smart as an animal and that's far more useful than a gun that just shoots straight. There's nothing you could buy to stay safe from that short of a bulletproof cage 24/7. Happy Thread fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Feb 6, 2017 |
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Feb 6, 2017 20:02
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Main Paineframe posted:you can certainly 3D print a drone body, but you can't 3D-print the electronic brain that goes in that body, Step one: buy a mendel 3d printer or similar Step two: print the body Step three: pull the arduino that controls the printer out of the the 3d printer and shove it in the body. Step four: call it an "electronic brain" to make a computer sound scary and fantastical.
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Feb 6, 2017 20:05
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OwlFancier posted:Or again, a mortar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknKUoqY5Qs But I don't know of any successful terror attacks that have used mortars. Not at least for precision assassination of one person. Too imprecise, too loud, too traceable back to where it fired from, requires being set up in-person and out in the open, requires still being set up the day of when rooftops are all being watched by security. I think that's the reason you don't hear about it; it's not easy. People do want to murder. Look at any time in history other than now. Murder was equally easy to get away with in early human history as I'm portraying for the future, and that's why males in some foraging societies had an 80% death rate from murder by other males (link). Bad politicians and other celebrities would be dead many times over today if it were that easy to anonymously get away with. \/\/\/ That'll teach me for hitting post before I'm done Happy Thread fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Feb 6, 2017 |
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Feb 6, 2017 20:16
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Windfall posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknKUoqY5Qs Mortars on pickups were used often in Iraq to bombard coalition troops. Drive up, fire it, drive away. The IRA also famously managed mortar Downing Street in 1991 and to RPG MI6 HQ in London in 2000. Many things are possible if people are actually motivated to do them. The primary obstruction, again, is that people don't want to.
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Feb 6, 2017 20:25
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Step one: buy a mendel 3d printer or similar At that point, why even bother with the 3D printer? Why not just buy the Arduino directly? The only thing the 3D printer does at that point is save you a trip to the store - and even that isn't worth much since you still have to go out to buy the motors and batteries and the many other parts that can't be 3D-printed. It's like saying you 3D-printed a bomb when all you really did was 3D-print a case and then buy explosives and wires and circuitry to put into that casing. Windfall posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknKUoqY5Qs Your link talks about death rates by warfare, not murder. Hunter-gather societies didn't exactly have a whole lot of assassination going on. The reason there aren't a ton* of assassinations going on is largely because there just aren't that many people willing to take the plunge and actually assassinate someone. *"A ton" is relative. It might seem to us in the US like assassinations don't happen, but they're not that uncommon, especially in countries where the government has less popular legitimacy.
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Feb 6, 2017 20:40
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Main Paineframe posted:At that point, why even bother with the 3D printer? Why not just buy the Arduino directly? The only thing the 3D printer does at that point is save you a trip to the store - and even that isn't worth much since you still have to go out to buy the motors and batteries and the many other parts that can't be 3D-printed. It's like saying you 3D-printed a bomb when all you really did was 3D-print a case and then buy explosives and wires and circuitry to put into that casing. Again let's focus on the control software and implications of widespread cheap access to really precise robot actions. This isn't actually supposed to be about 3D glue guns or CNC mills.
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Feb 6, 2017 20:56
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Windfall posted:Again let's focus on the control software and implications of widespread cheap access to really precise robot actions. This isn't actually supposed to be about 3D glue guns or CNC mills. If you have the technology to make off-the-shelf guided missiles you have the technology to make computer-targetted laser anti-missile systems and put them on every rooftop.
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Feb 6, 2017 21:13
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Main Paineframe posted:At that point, why even bother with the 3D printer? Why not just buy the Arduino directly? Why not buy one? Arduinos are in the same category as 3D printers where they don't really strictly allow anyone to make anything they couldn't have made before but brings the complexity down to a consumer hobbyist level.
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Feb 6, 2017 21:14
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Windfall posted:Again let's focus on the control software and implications of widespread cheap access to really precise robot actions. This isn't actually supposed to be about 3D glue guns or CNC mills. Okay, I was a bit confused because the OP talked almost exclusively about 3D printing murder machines using downloaded designs. Just a heads-up, because I can guarantee that's going to throw other people off too! Using robots to do things isn't all that new either, though. It's a gigantic leap from "really precise robot actions" to "carrying out an assassination". Having a missile that can change targets in mid-air isn't all that hard - the technology's been around for decades. The hard part is teaching the missile to identify one particular human being without human intervention of some sort and hit that person rather than any of the other people around them - even top-of-the-line military hardware can't do that, and you certainly can't just download that off the internet. Of course, you could always remote-control the thing using a camera sight, show up at the assassination site in person and use some method to indicate the target to the missile, or just know precisely where the target will be at a specific time...but none of those three things require any particularly new or developing technology.
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Feb 6, 2017 21:32
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For a pentest thing I did for work once, a coworker and i taped a raspberry pi with 2 wifi nics and a data-sim (GSM) nic to a quadcopter, landed it on the roof of a hospital, intercepted a few handshakes from a wireless drug pump, cracked the psk in a few minutes using a relatively low-spec cluster, and were able to tell the drug pump to administer alternate dosages, then flew the quadcopter back. The conclusion is you can definitely murder people that way, and that the wireless drug pump system wasnt fit for use at the company I was working for. The drug pump system in question is widely used in the US and Canada. I'm really surprised nobody has been directly, intentionally murdered as a result of a hack against a medical device yet. edit: I should say, the total cost of all equipment involved was maybe 2000 USD.
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Feb 6, 2017 21:44
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