Restricting access to this type of technology through laws and regulations is not the answer. If you try to prevent bad people from slaughtering their enemies en-masse using technologically advanced and highly efficient means, they're just going to do it another way. Will you outlaw knives or trucks next?

And if only the government has this weapon, then you have no means to fight back when they come to take your rights away. We have a constitutional right to arm ourselves against a hypothetical tyrannical government.

The only way to stop a bad guy with autonomous murder drones is a good guy with autonomous murder drones.

"BTW, the batteries comment because: short flight life"

Yeah, but how far does the drone actually have to travel?

Even the most basic drone can fly for over a kilometre. The range is generally limited by the control signal, more than the flight time.

I would hazard a guess that a decent spec autonomous drone could easily fly 5km with existing battery technology.

Isn't that enough for this kind of purpose?

You're welcome!
I think there's an acronym that applies to the goosebumps that hit you in anticipation of a pleasurable experience--- ASMR?

"Autonomous sensory meridian response"

I try to arrange the non-working parts of life to stumble into it as frequently as possible (art really helps!)---
Glad you found it in this...

Interesting and good, but it missed an opportunity to talk about another reason that Clinton removed the scrambling that reduced accuracy to ~100m in 2000:

It was fairly easily circumvented.

Your GPS device isn't sending anything TO the satellites -- just receiving FROM them. So, the scrambling had to be done on a system-wide scale; it couldn't skew your location 37m to the west and your friend a block away 62m northeast. So, every device in a particular area (that can see the same satellites) would be skewed by essentially the same distance and direction.

That means that all you needed to circumvent the scrambling was a GPS device relatively nearby at a known latitude and longitude. Then you took the GPS reported coordinates of that device and compared them to the known coordinates, and badda-bing you've got the skew figured out.

I remember that system being used to overcome the scrambling in the late 90's for robotics / AI competitions where things like early versions of drones or other robots had to autonomously navigate a maze or move towards some particular target coordinates.

Basically, if nerdy robotics enthusiasts could circumvent the scrambling, surely a motivated enemy military or terrorist group could too. So, there wasn't much point in continuing it. Ending the scrambling was a good thing for Clinton to do, but I'm sure that impracticality played just as much if not more of a part in his decision as benevolence towards citizens of the Earth / potential economic rewards for American companies did...

No snow here. Can they adapt them to be autonomous lawn tractors?

@newtboy,

Then, you (We) are suggesting legitimizing their claim to be autonomous states by accepting that classification to be able to declare war against them.

I addressed exactly that in my longer follow up to Enoch. I am asking you to open your eyes and look at the reality on the ground. It's not about legitimizing claims to statehood for convenience or opportunity or semantics or whatever. It is that an area of land larger than many European countries was running under their laws. Was paying them taxes. Was under their justice system. Was under their rule in every single manner. At that point you need to recognize the reality and call a spade a spade and start acting in accordance with reality and not just the borders drawn up on somebody's map somewhere.

You want an analogy in America, than have the whole state of Texas under the control of Richard Spencer and his likes. The American police don't go there, because they fear for their lives. Even the American military has stopped pushing in because their losses were too much. Instead the American military is using back chanels to mostly direct their violent terrorist attacks towards the Mexicans. If Mexico gets tired of Texans coming in and killing them, do they have no further recourse than to ask pretty, pretty please to the US to extradite Spencer and crack down on extremists? That is the reality in Tribal Pakistan with the Taliban calling all the shots.

Then, you (We) are suggesting legitimizing their claim to be autonomous states by accepting that classification to be able to declare war against them. Horrible idea, and against international law.

I call bullshit. That's like saying if an American commits a crime outside of America, or inside it against a foreigner, America just declared war on that country. Absolute bullshit. if Pakistan's government didn't direct the attack, they aren't declaring war. You don't hold a nation accountable for the actions of a few criminals within their borders unless they are backed by that nation. Because they can't stop the monster(s) we made (neither can we) absolutely in no way means they yield their sovereignty...that's asinine. EDIT: your theory would mean the Bundies would be their own country now, sovereign and at war with America, because we were unable to stop them from taking over public land (repeatedly), and didn't prosecute any of them.

Bullshit again. Because they aren't a state, they shouldn't be treated as one, no matter what bullshit they claim. Duh. Maybe they claim to be one, but they don't run away from that claim, it just isn't given credence by accepting it. They mostly are illegal aliens in the countries they now live in.

Afghanistan had good reason to refuse Bush....and you might recall were fighting the Taliban and Al-Qaida already for control of their own country.

Afghanistan was not hosting the terrorists, they 'invaded' or morphed out of non government controlled militias (Al-Qaida started as a retirement unit for the 'freedom fighters' we trained to fight Russia) . The Afghan government has excellent reasons to never invite a super power to cross their borders ever again.....and empires have good reason to avoid doing so. Afghanistan did not start or declare war with us, some invaders and criminals squatting in caves there did.

Exactly, the terrorist organizations aren't the fault or beneficiary of the government's in the countries where they hide or invade, they are the fault of those that support them, oddly missing from the travel ban and our assassination plans. See how that might piss off Afghansans and Pakistani?

Trying split up addressing your points and enoch's here, forgive me if things bleed over between a bit.

Large terrorist networks like Al Qaida were and still are using your definitions against your country. They operated with impunity and effectively as their own autonomous state within the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The question is whether acts of war launched from that region then are classed as an act of the Afghan or Pakistani state. If they are, then Afghanistan and Pakistan are to be held to account as states launching the act of war. If they are not, then they have for intents and purposes yielded the sovereignty of that territory to a new independent state waging it's own independent war.

The jihadists are trying to hard to live in an international loophole where they are operating with the autonomy of a state right up until another nation state wants to wage war back against them and then suddenly they are just citizens of the larger state they are technically within the borders of.

When the Bush admin pushed back hard, the Afghanistan government refused(more on this in my reply to Enoch) while the Pakistani government extremely begrudgingly agreed to at least pretend they weren't friendly with them in back channels anymore. Thus act of war met with war in Afghanistan, and yes, I would insist a war that Afghanistan initiated and NOT GW.

As for Saudi Arabia, they are more responsible for Jihadi ideology and funding than any other state, and yes the west largely has ignored it so long as they sold their oil and then used the money to buy back top of the line American made military hardware. I have to say I think it's a bit shortsighted to have made Saudi Arabia number 3 on the global military budget charts... You won't find my hypocritically trying to defend them, they are the ones sending most of the money into Pakistan's mountains to build the madrasa's that don't seem to teach anything after how to fire and assemble your AK.

I predict autonomous F1 cars pitting with robots at some point

@newtboy
I admit that perhaps invading Palestine slowly was their best viable option before the war ended.....I just think it's helpful to be perfectly honest that that's what happened and not play some game about it and pretend they hold the moral high ground on that part of the issue.

I guess I just don't agree on calling it an invasion from the outset. European Jews had the doors closed to them everywhere the world over, illegal immigration or staying in what would become Nazi occupied Europe were their only options. Palestine was hands down the most attractive option, despite a hostile Arab Palestinian population. The main reason being that the Jewish Palestinian minority were basically a state within a state. The Arab and Jewish populations had both sufficiently failed to integrate already that they were operating as largely segregated and autonomous regions. Thus, Jewish Palestine was both reasonably close to Europe, and very much welcoming to the people leaving. I don't believe that's fair to be marked as an invasion from the outset. I must insist that if we get to insist all actors conduct themselves in their own self interest, that the Jewish immigration from Europe to Palestine could have been entirely peaceful, and if the Arab population had taken a live and let live approach things could have gone swimmingly. Of course humans aren't ideal or moral very often, so both sides fought and tensions arose. By the time WW2 was over it was too late, the dice were cast and another Jewish exodus from Palestine back to Germany wasn't gonna work. Neither were the Jewish people promised a thing from Germany and it would all be on a hope and a prayer. They had a better shot making their own future by standing their ground in Jewish Palestine. Truth be told, I really can't blame the Jewish side for saying enough is enough and we're gonna stand and fight. Neither can I blame the Arab Palestinian's over much as their biggest fight was really just for independence from the British. With the British gone, both the Jewish and Arab residents fought it out over who would control what, which is sadly fairly natural.

The point I DO lay blame is when the civil war took a pause and Israel declared independence on the UN mandated borders. The Arab world(not the Arab Palestinians) jointly refused to accept any Jewish portion of Palestine and swore to drive them into the sea. Worse, they vehemently called for the retreat of all Arab palestinians from the region to make it easier to clear the country out. Of course, they failed to win that fight and it's been a source of great shame and horror ever since. They didn't fail for lack of strength in arms or numbers, but because each neighbouring Arab state cared not a whit for restoring Palestine to the Arab Palestinians but instead each sought to seize a portion of it for themselves, as invaders. Luckily for Israel they exploited those divisions to come out the other side.

There's plenty of atrocities to blame on the Palestinian response, but also empathy for a displaced and, today, a decimated people still suffering horrifically, mostly for 'sins' of their grandfather's, namely the sin of fighting invaders stubbornly.

But that is all the more the tragedy, as that is very clearly the way the Israeli's started out. They remained peaceful and fled as nation after nation tried to destroy them. The most open place to them in the time probably was Jewish Palestine. For all the atrocities to blame on Israel, I also have empathy for the plight they started from. Even their whole history through today is a tight rope walk were losing any single one of the wars from then till now would have seen the end of Israel as state.

As much blame as one can put on Israel for meeting homemade rockets with professional air strikes, they aren't the only ones to be blaming. Yes, more empathy is needed for the Palestinians than blame. But their are plenty of states, mostly Syria and Iran using the Palestinians as proxies and pawns. So many Arab entities WANT to see dead Palestinians in the news because it plays well for them. I really insist they get as much or more heat than Israel for the tragedy unfolding.

For starters, I have to oppose the implied thought that Saddam's reign of terror was preventing this sectarian violence. His rule through the Suni minority to wage genocides against the Kurdish and Shia majority and decades of brutal repression of same all served to make the sectarian hatred and violence worse. Tally up the hundreds of thousands he killed through genocide, the million plus he killed in the Iran-Iraq war and everyone that died by direct execution or deliberate starvation level poverty and compare it doesn't stand out as starkly and objectively a desirable alternative to today.

Now if you ask what would I do differently it depends on what level of power I've got to act with. Ideally, we can go back to first Iraq war and have Bush senior march on Baghdad. This would've aborted one of Saddam's genocides. Equally importantly, this would have kept the Shia Iraqi population's view of America as a liberating force. The standing in the desert and watching Saddam slaughter them thing still carried their mistrust of American forces after Saddam's actual removal later. That singularly stupid move of leaving Saddam in power, at the urging of most of the planet, drove the Shia population of Iraq back to Iran as their sole sympathetic ally.

Next step, after the removal of Saddam, whether we can do it back then, or only a few years ago as it really happened is to truly setup an occupation government. You don't bring stability to a region by immediately trying to transition to a democracy before the shooting has even stopped. The occupation government would be run by somebody with actual knowledge and experience with Iraq, rather than as Bush senior did by sending in a guy with zero experience and a two week lead to brief himself. The task you should place on this leader, is to setup a federated Iraq, with distinct and autonomous Shia, Sunni and Kurdish states. The occupation government would dictate things after taking input from Iraqi's rather than holding them to the tyranny of the majority as Bush and co allowed. The occupation would setup an initial constitution defining what laws and agreements spanned all three Iraqi provinces/states and what extent of autonomy they had to define their own systems of government. The American military's job would be to enforce this very basic constitutional framework. Each Iraqi state/province would be aided in setting up their own governments with a transition plan again dictated not voted upon. The transition plan would define the point in time when each state transitioned from occupation rule to a self determined future and rule of law.

The above plan on the whole would work, but Bush and co couldn't have managed post Saddam Iraq more poorly if they had actively tried to.

If zero time travel is allowed and we are to 'fix' things today, you need a lot MORE power. You need an army the size of America or Russia's and the political will to spend several years doing things the public will hate you for. The end game is still the same as above, a federated Iraq kicked off under a dictatorial occupation. To get there from today though you need to create stability. You need to take an army and march it across the entire country. As each city is cleared of militants you take a census of everybody and keep it because you need it to track down future militants. In entirely hostile locations like were ISIS has full rule, you bomb them into the stone ages before marching the army in. The surviving population is given full medical treatment. Now, as for sorting militants from civilians though, you do NOT use American style innocent until proven guilty justice. Instead, any fighting age males are considered guilty until proven innocent. This level of rule of law needs to remain in place until stability can be restored. You of course guarantee lots of innocent arrests, but your trying to prevent massive numbers of innocent deaths so it's required. As you stabilize the nation you can relax back to innocent until proven guilty and work on re-integrating the convicted.

You'll note that although the methods I'd declare necessary above are by any count 'brutal', they do not extend into Saddam's usage of genocide, torture and rape as the weapons of choice.

Actually, I would say I have a pretty good understanding of machine learning. I'm a software developer and while I don't work on machine learning day-to-day, I've certainly read a good deal about it.

As I've already said, Tesla's solution is not autonomous driving, completely agree on that (which is why I said the video is probably fake or the driver was just messing with people).

A stock market simulator is a different problem. It's trying to predict trends in an inherently chaotic system.

A self-driving car doesn't have to have perfect prediction, it can be reactive as well as predictive. Again, the point is not whether self-driving cars can be perfect. They don't have to be, they just have to be as good or better than the average human driver and frankly, that's a pretty low bar.

That said, I don't believe the first wave of self-driving vehicles will be passenger cars. It's far more likely to be freight (specifically small freight, i.e. courier vans).

I guess we'll see what happens.

@ChaosEngine

I'm not sure you understand what machine learning is. As I said, the trigger for your child.runsInFront() is based on numerical inputs from sensors that is fed into a formula with certain parameters and coefficients. This has been optimized from many hours of driving data but ultimately it's not able to predict novel events as it can only optimize off existing data. There is a base level of error from bias-variance tradeoff to this model that you cannot avoid. It's not simply a matter of logging enough hours of driving. If that base error level is not low enough, then autonomous cars may never be deemed reliable to be unsupervised.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias-variance_tradeoff
Or specifically: http://scott.fortmann-roe.com/docs/docs/BiasVariance/biasvariance.png

It's the same reason that a stock market simulator using the same method (but different inputs) is not accurate. The difference would be that while 55% correct for the stock market may be sufficiently accurate and useful to be profitable, a driving algorithm needs to be near perfect. It's true that a sensor reaction time to someone braking unexpectedly may be much better than a human's and prevent a crash, so yes in certain cases autonomous driving will be safer but because of exceptional cases, but it may never be truly hands-off and you may always need to be ready to intervene, just like how Tesla works today (and why on a regulatory level it passed muster).

The combination of Google hyping its project and poor understanding of math or machine learning is why news reports just parrot Google's reliability numbers. Tesla also, has managed to convince many people that it already offers autonomous driving, but the auto-steer / cruise and changing lanes tech has existed for around a decade. Volvo, Mercedes and Audi all have similar features. There is a tendency to treat this technology as magical or inevitable when there are some unavoidable limitations behind it that may never be surmounted.