100 Million Flying Handguns, an Open Letter to the IDF and Palmer Lucky

Seriously, this would be a really good thing if done correctly

Imagine you’re a soldier. You get sent to basic training the same as all other soldiers before you. You do the whole waking up early thing the same as all other soldiers before you. You do the whole running thing the same as all other soldiers before you. It’s exactly the same as the experience of every other modern soldier before you except for one key difference. During weapons training, every gun you are issued has two positional sensors at either end of the barrel. You don’t really know why this is, but your entire command structure has let you know that it’s your ass if you attempt to screw with these sensors in any manner. If you look closely there seem to be more sensors everywhere around the training camp. Microphones strung up seemingly at random. Wind sensors. High speed cameras at all angles down the entire gun range.

The next paragraph might seen like a non-sequitur, but I promise it is not. I try to keep an intuitive sense of what it is like to be an AI. Then I work backwards and ask myself what information I would need in order to perform a certain task. So, from this exercise I asked myself: “What information would I need to become the best possible AI marksman?”

I’d need to know the angle of a gun barrel and its position in space relative to a target. I’d need to know the prevailing weather conditions to make adjustments to my aim. I’d need to know other information about the sounds of the shot for immediate feedback on air density, wind, etc, and of course I’d need to know how successfully a bullet struck a target. For other reasons, I’d want to be able to see a bullet moving through space very, very quickly.

From here, it is a matter of collecting enough data and running the training set through some machine learning algorithm until you have distilled what I think of as a “crystal of marksmanship.” If it’s theoretically possible for a shot to be made, this system knows how to make it.

Imagine you are the same soldier mentioned in the first paragraph. It’s early in the development phase of what I call “Project Countershot.” Every hayseed kid from the Midwest with high ASVAB scores has been brought in to work at a place called “Gun Lab.” The only product that Gun Lab has so far produced is a little spinning wheel with a laser pointer that has one point of articulation to point up and down. It sits on top of the vehicle you’re walking next to. It also puffs out a tiny bit of gas when activated.

One day, you’re walking through some hostile environment. You’re green with no combat experience. Someone fires at you. More experienced soldiers can tell all kinds of things right away simply from the sound. Long barrel or short? Was the shot coming toward you or was it pointed away from you? In the chaos of battle, you can’t really tell and now you don’t have to think about it too long. The little laser on top of the vehicle spins and points directly at the location of the enemy fire. You know exactly where the enemy is firing from.

How? Because the AI model behind this technology had the experience of millions of fired rounds, an understanding of how weather impacts sound waves, and a deeply intuitive understanding of what type of gun must have fired what type of bullet and from where in order to for it to have received such and such an acoustic signal at a certain location. It even puffed out a little gas so you could follow the laser better. Your entire unit coordinates on the path of the laser light and returns fire, neutralizing the enemy with almost no confusion.

You know where this is going next, right? The product roadmap is self-explanatory. The next iteration of this product has a camera and a gun. Now, if someone fires on you the entire apparatus swivels, the camera acquires a target, and the gun fires once and neutralizes the enemy. You’d think this would kill all sorts of people but it doesn’t. It kills a few people and then suddenly vehicles equipped with this device stop becoming targets of random enemy fire. The enemy has to adjust tactics because firing on a group of soldiers with equipment like this is exactly the same as deciding to put a gun to your own head and pulling the trigger.

And if you want to hear something really crazy —and I apologize to all gun nuts for whom this is going to feel like I’m trying to break the laws of physics— future versions of this product with amazing compute power that have been optimized for speed over dozens of product releases, make you essentially bulletproof.

You can’t see a bullet traveling through space. You can’t do anything about a bullet once it is fired. Your eyes and hands are too slow. That doesn’t need to be true of a machine, however. Now, at the speed of light, when an enemy fires on you, the turret on top of your vehicle will see the bullet traveling through the air before the sound even arrives, rapidly adjust to point at a location where the bullet is going to be and literally shoot the bullet off its current trajectory with another bullet. You are now bullet-proof, to a certain extent, not from some magical force field but because a shield of ballistic projectiles that can be decisioned at lightning speed can hit anything out of the air before it hits you.

If that seems impossible, explain why? It’s literally just kinematics and dynamics. You don’t need relativity or quantum mechanics to do this. You just need to be very, very fast.

You could pay all kinds of money to make high-quality drones using this same basic concept. I’d recommend not doing that beyond a certain level, however. Quantity has its own kind of quality. Build cheap. Camera, microphone, gun, positional sensors, and rotors. Only a few different build versions. One day, you’ll produce these at less than a thousand dollars per unit. Cheap, fast, assembled by other machines, and with a host of regulations around when and how they can be used, and a bunch of software cryptography that was your biggest one time expense to make those regulations enforceable on the United States Countershot Drone Swarm. What people will one day simply refer to as “the Army.”

It’s the first army in history that cannot be deployed without a directly democratic vote from the American people. The meaning of a war authorization has changed. No one puts boots on the ground. That’s archaic. Worse, that’s dumb. For military actions needing a quick response, human commanders have access to no more than a few hundred of these at any given time. But if a populace is moved to defend itself, watch out. There is no safe place to be an enemy on foreign soil.

Replay the war in Gaza with this technology in existence. If you are traditionally liberal I can already sense your revulsion, your deeply held disgust that a war pig has proposed a weapon of tyranny, but I promise you this: If you are revolted it is simply because your imagination is not big enough. Your grievances are too petty, your soul too withered, to imagine the beauty of what is now possible.

Let us snap our fingers and replay the atrocities of October the seventh. It is no longer possible for such atrocities to occur in the world of these systems, or at least not to the same extent, but still let us suppose for the sake of arguments.

Does Israel bombard the Gaza Strip? Do children die?

No. Absolutely not. Why would Israel do such a thing? Bombs are a blunt instrument. Bombs are expensive. You use them once and they are gone forever. It’s like setting money on fire with no guaranteed enemy dead to serve as a return on investment. And it would only make bad press for Israel to take such an action when something infinitely better is now available. Israel now has a scalpel and it has at least three drones for every citizen in Gaza. Israel will have its own name for them, something patriotic, but they will simply fly a few miles from Israel proper into Gaza.

It is still frightening if you are on the ground in Gaza but the drones have speakers as well as microphones. They explain in approved language that the drones will not kill anyone unless that person is actively trying to kill another person and there is no other solution. They encourage the population to go peacefully about their day as long as it is safe to do so. There is no such thing as a psychopathic soldier whose actions have to explained away as aberrant because no soldiers with psychopathy are allowed to walk the field of battle. There is no one panicking and shooting up a school or some other civilian target that can cause an international incident. If a missile is fired from a residential building a few drones simply go to that location and explore. The drone demands immediate surrender. It takes pictures of those involved. It shares this information to other drones. The drone destroys their equipment.

Here, at last, is the ultimate humiliation. The one you could not have imagined. The best possible future you may still struggle to imagine as being truly possible. The drone doesn’t really kill anyone. Or at least, mostly not. Why would it? If some evil Hamas terrorist holds up a child as a human shield and fires on the drone then the drone allows itself to be destroyed. It’s not a person. It’s only a thousand dollars or so to replace and there are others. Many others. It’s easy enough to replace and better to save the child, everyone agrees. Easy enough to train a child recognition model. Your drones won’t ever kill a child.

Your own people love it and it destroys the spirit of your enemy to see one of their soldiers degraded to such tactics. If the terrorist becomes a threat to the child, yes the drone will kill him, but it will also have video of this. If your enemy uses child soldiers, and some will, then the drone will shoot the gun out of the child’s hands. That’s a stupid utopian thing to say to a human soldier, but there is no reason that a drone can’t be trained to fire on inanimate objects the same way that it could be trained to fire on people. Again, don’t let your imagination fail you. The drone will disarm the child by shooting that child’s weapons and let’s be honest, if you can shoot a bullet out of the sky it is easy enough to dodge a bullet. That child can shoot at your drone all he wants and all you have to do is change the rate of rotation on a few rotors to be basically impossible to hit. There will be other drones displaying this evidence on video screens throughout the territory.

Yes, we killed this man who tried to kill one of your children. It was one life or the other and we made the choice to save the innocent. Would you have had us do otherwise? Here is proof. If you think we are terrible ask yourself who else we have killed? Who? Show me. I have evidence, where is yours? We saved one of your own children. We did. Not you. Us. It is propaganda, yes, but it is true and that is an important distinction and also the best kind of propaganda. More important, it is more just and there is no such thing as collateral damage or “blowback.” No non-combatants holding the dead bodies of their children pulled out of rubble.

Wars have single digit casualty rates. A giant war in this future kills a few dozen people. People who, despite my wishes that all men’s hearts could be moved by reason, are more or less forcing you to use lethal force. There will be some, yes. But almost none compared to today. There’s a difference between dying for a glorious but hopeless cause and being ritually humiliated by an enemy so much stronger than you that you have no chance and that in the act of subduing you lays out exactly the conditions it demands to return to peace. It’s like a toddler fighting with an adult who uses the child’s own hands as a weapon and says “stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself.” Some of the drones from the United States even use this exact messaging.

If your enemy digs into tunnels? Or bunkers up? Okay. I don’t care. Why would I care? I can wait. I’ll park my drone on a few rooftops until we see a tunnel entrance. Then I’ll park somewhere directly over that tunnel entrance. I’ll park so many drones they’ll look like a bunch of seagulls waiting for French fries. And I won’t let anyone go in or out. It’ll be kind of funny to watch videos of them trying to find ways to sneak things in and I’ll use all kinds of tactics to make it impossible to move supplies that are also non-lethal. All I need to do is drop one tear gas grenade into a hole to neutralize your entire fighting force. We will show these videos as well.

We don’t even have POW camps in this future except for a few of the hardest cases. Only for people who have blood on their hands, which in the far future you can’t even really do. Everyone else is sentenced to community service. You tried to destroy your civilization so I will force you to build it up. If you don’t, a drone that follows you around will force you to do it. Put on a tool belt. Or grab a broom. Bend over and pick up some garbage. We’ll do this long enough for you to learn the lesson.

If you think this is impossible, explain why. If you think this should not occur, explain why in a way that cannot be cared for as a requirement in the construction of the system. We have to change the way we think about the purpose of government and what kind of future we want. We have to stop defaulting to the worst possible future. Our laws and our principles need to be enforced in our algorithms. What’s more, we need to believe that they can be. We can build this future. I believe it’s entirely possible to do all of this in today’s world.

With this army we can accomplish the objective of battle because we can break the will of the enemy in battle. We can find the very few people whose killing will is magnified through the population and neutralize them specifically. We can spare every single innocent life. We can pacify the mountains of Afghanistan that have for thousands of years been the graveyard of Empires and bring peace to every warring nation.

We can do all of this because we have never forgotten that the ultimate goal of war is peace.