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AndyTheAbsurd submitted a link, via IRC, which became the inspiration for this story.

Tech's Most Controversial Startup Now Makes Drone-Killing Robots:

Jason Levin stood on a craggy hill on a Southern California ranch in late July and prepared to destroy a drone. First he grabbed the controls for an Up Air One, a remote control hobbyist model that retails for about $300, and steered it until it was hovering about 100 feet above the ground. Next he used a laptop to activate a system he'd spent the past several months building.

A second drone roughly the size of the Up Air quadcopter spun into action, buzzing like a mechanical wasp as it ascended to about 20 feet below its target. As it hovered, a crowd of Levin's colleagues gathered around. A prompt appeared on-screen asking for permission to attack. Levin tapped a button, and the second drone, dubbed the Interceptor, shot upward, striking the Up Air One at 100 mph. The two aircraft somersaulted skyward briefly, then they plummeted back to earth and landed with two satisfying thuds. Levin grinned and explained that he hadn't been controlling the Interceptor after telling it to attack—it finds targets and steers toward them on its own. If the first collision doesn't take its quarry down, the drone can circle back and strike a second and third time, all by itself. "It's a good feeling as an engineer," he said. "You've put in the work, and it knows what to do. It's like sending your kid off to college."

[...] He [Palmer Luckey], Levin, and a handful of colleagues came up with the idea of the Interceptor while hanging around the office one weekend earlier this year. The idea was to equip small drones with computer vision software that would scan a slice of airspace that needed protecting, then automatically ram any objects deemed hostile. They built a rough prototype that could knock down its target some of the time, then shot a smartphone video of a successful attempt and passed it to their contacts at the Pentagon.

[...] The prospect of a 2-year-old startup building and distributing a new class of potentially lethal weapons will undoubtedly raise ethical questions, especially amid a larger backlash against overreach by tech companies. The Interceptor in its current form doesn't target humans and requires explicit permission from a human operator before each attack, but it's conceivable that those controls could be changed in the future. "You've already developed this technology, opened the so-called Pandora's box," argues Marta Kosmyna of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a group opposed to autonomous weaponry. Technologies such as the Interceptor are "very rarely used as intended," she says.

Bloomberg posted a 5m41s YouTube video with background information on Anduril (the company selling the attack drone), Palmer Luckey (of Oculus Rift fame) as well as a couple short demos of attack drones in action.

Original Submission