Umm, robots need to be certified and regulated to hard coded robotic laws or something. Before criminals give them guns, or strap explosives to them, or remote takeover and untracibly murder people in their homes then burn the house down.
Strapping explosives to hobby level drones has been standard operating procedure for some time now. You can also find videos of regular handguns strapped to drones being fired. Certification cannot help with this issue.
The idea is older than what we call drones, or robots.
Original GTA had an RC model car you could drive under your target and detonate remotely - that was in 1997, and they didn't invent this trope. US Navy trained dolphins to deploy ordnance in the 1960s; before that, together with the Air Force they played with strapping incendiaries to bats, packing them into a bomb casing and dropping from the air, with hopes of creating what we'd today call a "Slaughterbots" scenario except EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE.
And I doubt these were very original ideas, either - I bet you could trace them back to other such R&D across history, all the way to Ancient China, which figured out gunpowder much earlier than Europe, and like with any general enough scientific discovery, had a field day trying to apply it to everything they could think of. They didn't stop at fireworks, they built land mines and unguided missiles too, even multistage rocket and IIRC (read that in some book long ago, can't find independent source now) rockets that could drop payload and fly back home to be recovered. (And yes, apparently someone was crazy enough to try for manned rocket flight, too.)
Anyway, I digress.
I guess, the larger point I'm making is this: in terms of their relationship with individuals and societies, robots are nothing new. Robots and automation are answers to needs that even first human societies had, and they have not changed. History is full of attempts at fulfilling those needs, many quite successful: domesticating and training animals, forced labor for prisoners, slavery. All these impacted socities, informed laws and fueled imaginations of poets and writers.
Which is to say, humanity has been dealing with robots and AIs for a long time now, we have way more accumulated experience with them at social and economic level than people realize - people just called them by a host of different names. "Slaves" and "servants", "genies" and "demons" and "fairies", etc.
The US military has been using robots to murder people for over a decade now, the horse hasn't just bolted, it's won the Kentucky derby before you shut the stable door.
I imagine they're talking more about missiles, which have had "autonomous" (for some definitions of autonomous) guidance systems for decades.
"Drones" aren't really a new thing apart from how cheap they are. We've had television guided missiles (the level of autonomy most modern "drones" in Ukraine have) since WWII. Arguably we've had non-TV guided missile prototypes since WWI (Kettering Aerial Torpedo). We've had autonomously guided missiles (radar homing) since the early 50s, and optically guided ones since the early 70s.
The capability keeps expanding of course, but it's been pretty incremental.
I, Robot is exactly why I’m concerned, but in this case it’s not a sentient AI gone rogue but any random script kiddie who can get on your wifi and send your robot commands. Or your neighbours robot. Or their own robot.
We thought this might happen with DJI drones, but let’s be honest it’s way easier to do real damage with a humanoid robot that has a kitchen knife taped to its arms (especially to a sleeping victim) than it is to source explosives for a DJI drone.
(I’m an engineer, but making assumptions) I think physics kind of blocks that from working, a DJI drone doesn’t have the weight and inertia to do serious damage, and they are hella noisy. Can’t open doors. Don’t have servos to do a proper swing or stab.
Maybe theoretically possible… but I’m more scared of robots personally.
By the same logic, autonomous cars are an even better murder weapon than robots because they are very heavy and can drive through walls. Mow down tens or hundreds of people at once.
A drone dropping 30m onto your head, though (assuming it could aim a little)... Not as versatile as a robot on the ground, but also an order of magnitude cheaper.
And yet people aren't scared of cars. Maybe we need a cautionary tale scifi movie starring Will Smith being chased by evil cars, a la Futurama's The Honking
IIRC in “I, Robot” Will Smith had his Audi taken over by the robot uprising, a film which was a cautionary tail scifi movie.
> “people aren't scared of cars”
Under “normalisation of deviance”, NotJustBikes YouTube talked about how he sees almost no Netherlands news pieces about cars crashing into buildings, because cars basically never crash into buildings in the Netherlands. When they do, the Dutch treat it as a road design issue and update the road and regulations to stop it in future. Whereas in Canada he had four cars crash into the buildings around his child’s school in a short time, and there are almost no mainstream news stories about cars crashing into buildings in Canada because it’s so common it’s fallen below newsworthiness into just local newspaper small comment. USA/Canada blame the driver and fix nothing, so it keeps happening, so people are used to it.
Although cyclists are scared of cars. And drivers are which is why there’s the SUV arms race to be in the bigger car to be more protected against other cars.
You can buy a kitchen oven with pyrolysis functionality connected to the internet right now. I'm not sure if running that for an extended time can burn down your house or just destroy the oven, but I'm sure some attacker is going to take the time to find out one of these days.
