PERSPECTIVE: Robot assassinsHow Easy Is it to Build a Robot Assassin?
Someone—almost certainly Israel—recently assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the leading scientist behind the Iranian nuclear program. The latest reporting from Iran suggests that the assassins employed a remotely controlled machine gun mounted on a pickup truck. So how hard is it to build such a tool? How expensive? Nicholas Weaver writes that “Unfortunately, the answer is “hard but doable” and “not much money”—with the further complication that in a few years, it will probably be possible to pick up the necessary equipment online from vendors like Banggood.”
Someone—almost certainly Israel—recently assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the leading scientist behind the Iranian nuclear program. The latest reporting from Iran suggests that the assassins employed a remotely controlled machine gun mounted on a pickup truck. Nicholas Weaver writes in Lawfare that if this reporting proves correct, the death of Fakhrizadeh will not be the first instance of successful or attempted assassination-by-robot: In 2018, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro survived a possible attempt on his life carried out by small drones armed with explosives. And the U.S., in targeting Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani with a drone strike, has made clear that it is not above the use of such tools in modern statecraft.
So how hard is it to build such a tool? How expensive?
Weaver writes:
Unfortunately, the answer is “hard but doable” and “not much money”—with the further complication that in a few years, it will probably be possible to pick up the necessary equipment online from vendors like Banggood. I know, because this field is something of a hobby for me. For three years, I’ve been trying to build an autonomous computing package for drone-hunting drones, and this work has familiarized me with the relevant technology.
It doesn’t take much for a robot to kill an exposed person. 200 grams (seven ounces)—not that much more than a baseball—is enough explosive to kill anyone within five meters (15 feet). A small ground or air vehicle can easily carry that payload, creating a robotic assassin.
Weaver notes that currently, the remote control needed to maneuver such an assassin is easily defeated with broad-spectrum jamming, which interferes with the radio signals necessary for communication. “In order to avoid this problem, successful robotic assassins will need to be autonomous, capable of identifying targets and attacking without any human intervention,” he notes.
Likewise, a drone-hunting drone needs to be autonomous because it needs to deal with autonomous—and therefore fast-thinking—adversary drones. “Basically, to fight autonomous robot assassins, I need to build autonomous robot assassins to assassinate the autonomous robot assassins.”
The available hardware and most of the software pieces are already available—it’s simply a matter of assembling everything together on a single circuit board. Combining a low cost hardware autopilot, a powerful compute module, a GPS receiver, a cellular modemand a machine-learning acceleratorall on the same board—and getting it to fit in a small footprint—is a fun design exercise.
The software is also widely available.
And this is where the modern supply chain comes in. Every piece I’m using is already widely available in scattered pieces—and providing a single integrated package would be useful for so many tasks, not just offensive ones. The same software and hardware needed for killer drones can just as easily act as a synthetic peregrine and chase away birds from a vineyard or keep a continual watch for wildfires. Because the benign market is so large, I suspect that the “brains” needed for small autonomous robots will be available in integrated packages in less than five years.
Scary times may be ahead. Will it soon become dangerous for world leaders to walk in open air while in office?
