I’ve enjoyed Mark Rober’s videos for a while now. They are fun, touch on accessible topics, and have decent production value. But this recent video isn’t sitting right with me
The video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrGENEXocJU
In it, he talks about a few techniques for how to take down “bad guy drones”, the problems with each, and then shows off the drone tech by Anduril as a solution.
Anduril aims to sell the U.S. Department of Defense technology, including artificial intelligence and robotics. Anduril’s major products include unmanned aerial systems (UAS), counter-UAS (CUAS), semi-portable autonomous surveillance systems, and networked command and control software.
In the video, the Anduril product is a heavy drone that uses kinetic energy to destroy other drones (by flying into them). Quoting the person in the video:
imagine a children’s bowling ball thrown at twice as fast as a major league baseball fastball, that’s what it’s like getting hit by Anvil
This technology is scary for obvious reasons, especially in the wrong hands. What I also don’t like is how Mark Rober’s content is aimed at children, and this video includes a large segment advertising the children’s products he is selling. Despite that, it is showing off military technology with serious ethical implications.
There’s even a section in the video where they show off the Roadrunner, compare it against the patriot missiles, and loosely tie it in to defending against drones.
Roadrunner-M is a high-explosive interceptor variant of Roadrunner built for ground-based air defense that can rapidly launch, identify, intercept, and destroy a wide variety of aerial threats — or be safely recovered and relaunched at near-zero cost.
I understand the criticism of the tone of the video, but what I totally don’t understand is that some comments say that this technology was “scary”.
How? You are aware that we are loving in a world where missiles can carry nuclear bombs and where thousands of those are kept in working condition so they could be launched at any moment? A world where terrorists have successfully destroyed a building in another country with a plane? Where school shootings are a thing? Where there is a war in the Ukraine where much cheaper drones are used to kill much more efficiently with explosives?
I guarantee you that no one will ever acquire one of these drones to attack an individual because there are so many ways that are cheaper and easier and have been around for decades.
Yeah it’s very odd, it’s probably one of the least scary things around at the moment - makes no sense everyone worked up about a clearly defensive measure that’s far less likely to hurt anyone accidentally compaired to alternatives like spraying bullets or airburst missiles.
I really don’t get what makes it scary, it’s like being in a house fire when you live above a gunpowder factory but you’re worried you’ll drown because one of the taps is dripping
I think fear is fairly subjective, and to me these are scarier than bombs and guns. Bombs have a blast radius and bullets don’t stop after they hit their target, which means collateral damage has to be considered before using these. If you don’t have to worry about that because you’re going to just drop an anvil on someone’s head it would make it that much easier to order someone’s death.
Like yeah you’re probably not going to see any mass killings with these drones, but it certainly makes individual targeted killings easier.
Oh, great! What are the terms of your guarantee?
“or else”