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Sci-Fi Short Film “Slaughterbots” | DUST

DUST5 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2021-2026
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2.2M views · 7 years ago · other · evergreen

Slaughterbots is a short sci-fi film in which swarms of cheap autonomous drones are programmed to kill targets by profile. It was made as arms-control advocacy against autonomous weapons.

HN keeps citing it whenever drone swarms, autonomous weapons or AI warfare come up, as a believable depiction of where this leads.

AI safety, AGI & impactRoboticsMilitary history & warfare#slaughterbots#droneswarms#aiweapons#armscontrol#sci-fishort

20 comments from Hacker News

@palmotea2026 · in “Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It's Almost Hard to Believe”

> Lets suppose everyone in the world miraculously loses their jobs to AI, who is paying for it? How? What are they selling? The paying/selling part will be transitory. Right now the people paying for it are investors, and they're selling a cost-cutting dream to executive managers. If someone builds a machine that automated all the jobs, they've have amassed an unprecedented amount of power, even if the economy is in ruins for everyone else. They won't need to sell anything to anyone. > What stops the rest of humanity from turning data centers into a pile of ash? AI slaughterbots. Think the Ukraine front line, but completely automated. ▶ this video

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@zer00eyz2026 · in “American AI is locked down and proprietary. It's losing”

link - A ycombinator company just killed its first bug: link Ukraine admits to making autonomous kills on people 2 years ago: link Slaughterbots Sci Fi short was 6 years ago: ▶ this video Today this is buildable, many models will happily help you glue everything you need together to make swapping in a new version of YOLO to track humans viable. AI researches are out there worrying about the paper clip problem, about the singularity, about cyber security, about bio weapons, and drug manufacturing. None of them are thinking about forward looking threat actor models.

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@Tangurena22026 · in “Ask HN: I quit my job over weaponized robots to start my own venture”

I don't see bipedal murderbots being commonplace - they're a lot slower than 4-legged "Big Dogs". I think that the Ukraine war has shown that "slaughterbots" are far more likely. ▶ this video

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@beeflet2025 · in “Anatomy of US inequality”

As a libertarian I also dislike the "crabs in a bucket" mentality people have towards inequality because it is clearly motivated by jealousy, but the massive amount of inequality we see today seems to undermine some of the assumptions behind democracy. I think the reason why the social contract of democracy evolves from natural law is that the basic assumption is that we all have about the same fighting power, and voting is representative of this. This assumption does not hold when some minorities have 1000x the economic power but 1x times the voting power: the majority of people will vote to redistribute wealth, while the rich will be motivated to destabilize the peace and take advantage of their disproportionate fighting power directly (killbots? [1]). Additionally, special interest groups will lobby to protect their cash cows. An increasing amount of the economy flows through government expenditure (including tax incentives, nationalization, etc.), for example palantir, flock, openAI and others. We live in an increasingly planned economy. In the USA, we import pretty much everything and we only build for the military and real estate. The state of inequality is also concerning considering the recent technological improvements that threaten to totally devalue all labor. There's this notion that the lives of the 1% don't matter as long as we raise the standard of living for the lower class as you suggest, but what is happening now is more like a doomsday situation where we ar

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@bostik2025 · in “Samsung embeds IronSource spyware app on phones across WANA”

> 30 milligrams of high explosive is enough to open your daughter's skull, or, more relevantly, your commanding officer's daughter's skull, and there are a thousand ways to deliver it While we are talking about flying drones, we are not far off from Slaughterbots becoming reality.[0] Why bother with surgical assassinations if you can blanket entire regions with with swarms of autonomous seek-and-destroy explosives? After all, as last two years have so amply demonstrated: people are fine with genocide. 0: ▶ this video

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@nothrabannosir2025 · in “Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first”

Obligatory link to the short film (future documentary) “Slaughterbots” (2017), which depicts exactly this in harrowing detail: ▶ this video

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@zellyn2025 · in “Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first”

Looks like most of the comments here are about the use as weapons and the possible dangers. I believe "Slaughterbots" is the canonical sci-fi video on the subject, and it appears to be aging pretty well. Unfortunately… ▶ this video

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@EGreg2024 · in “LLMs have reached a point of diminishing returns”

I dont think LLMs are the only type of AI. By the way, robot dogs now have perfect auto-aim, they can multi-shoot 50 people at once without wasting any bullets. link Also, the AI robots can detect infrared and heartbeats all around them, and can also translate wifi signatures to locate humans behind obstacles. link Self-organizing deadly drone swarms can sweep a building methodically: link Currently they’re working on network analysis to help police to do precrime at Palantir. link They can then have ubiquitous CCTV+AI feeds allow AI assistants to suggest many plausible parallel construction cases to put people away. And this is in the Western democratic countries. link Oh yeah, and they can do warrantles surveillance of everyone at scale with AI far more easily than Five Eyes and PRISM did in 2013: link It will be very hard to keep your privacy considering AI can recover your keystrokes from sound in Zoom calls, can lip read and even “hear” your speech through a window thanks to micro vibrations: link Not like they’ll need it though once everyone has a TeslaBot in their house. You won’t ever have another revolution again by peniless plebs out of a job. Their walking around the street and personal associations will all be tracked easily by gait, heartbeat etc. Their posts online will simply be outcompeted by AI bot swarms as well. Don’t worry, your future is Safe and Secure from any threats, thanks to AI! Here it is in more totalitarian countries: link link

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@CalRobert2024 · in “National Guard soldiers training with 'pocket-sized' drones”

Reminiscent of the tiny autonomous drones with shaped charges that could kill people in Slaughterbots. ▶ this video

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@ortusdux2024 · in “Robots Are Entering the Ukraine Battlefield”

I was watching a video about Red Bull's new drone that can keep up with a F1 car and the whole time I kept getting Slaughterbot vibes. Zero to 185mph in 4 seconds with a top speed of 215mph, relatively cheap components, multiple cameras, and decent onboard computing power. I am not looking forward to the future of warfare. link ▶ this video

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@toss12024 · in “Fastest camera drone vs. F1 car (ft. Max Verstappen) [video]”

That cat has been out of the bag for at least seven years. The Slaughterbots video was for arms-control advocacy[0,1], but definitely speedrunning near-real dystopias way more than anything here... [0] link [1] ▶ this video

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@echelon2023 · in “Maersk ship hit by missile in the Red Sea”

> The US carrier group may even adequately suppress the Houthis but this is attrition and Houthi investment is a drop in the ocean compared to the cost to the US. Between this, Ukraine, and the decades-long misadventures in the Middle East, the US is learning how to handle the next generation of conflicts. (As is everyone else that is paying attention.) The future looks increasingly more drone dependent. Explosives tied to cheap and plentiful delivery systems. Startups like Anduril are going to take over. Submarine drones, jet-powered drones, assassin drones. Signals intelligence and radio algorithms... This is old, and a bit too Black Mirror, but seems to be tracking the future of conflict correctly: ▶ this video

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@InvertedRhodium2023 · in “Hamas's Cheap, Makeshift Drones Are Outsmarting Israel's High-Tech Military”

I really enjoy this video, which is set in a theoretical future where just what you describe eventuated: ▶ this video

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@EGreg2023 · in “Sam Altman: Why You Should Fear Machine Intelligence (2015)”

The paperclip optimizer is given a program and is not aligned with humans, it just pursues its goals What you should all be fearing is bot swarms and drone swarms becoming cheap and decentralized at scale online and in the real world. They can be deployed by anyone for any purpose, wreaking havoc everywhere. Every single one of our systems relies on the inefficiency of an attacker. It won’t any longer be true. Look up scenes like: ▶ this video link And see it coming: link Also ubiquitous cameras enable tracking everyone across every place, as soon as the databases are linked: link

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@lxgr2023 · in “The future of warfare: A $400 drone killing a $2M tank”

“Only a net can help. And I predict that soon we will have to put up such nets above our cities, or at least government buildings, all over Europe.” That’s quite some food for thought, especially in a non-war context. Reminds me about the short film “Slaughterbots” [1] and that one Black Mirror episode with the weaponized robotic bees. [1] ▶ this video

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@FrustratedMonky2023 · in “The thinking path”

In reading lately have come across a lot of famous names that made 'walking' a big part of their learning. It is good way to let brain wonder and have subconscious solve problems. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Aristotle, Thoreau Also. Buried in the page farther down. One of the more scary takes on how we could have 'Killer AI'. Everyone seems to argue 'Killer AI' is still far in the future, because they associate it with the Terminator Movies and current Robot Tech is lagging AI. So why worry, we can still un-plug them. This video is how it will actually happen. AI can be incorporated into a lot of weapons. From the linked site ▶ this video

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@m348e9122023 · in “Proliferation of AI weapons among non-state actors could be impossible to stop”

>>Can anyone shed light on what the weapons would be? I guess you haven't heard of AI slaughter bots. ▶ this video

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@jackothy2023 · in “Ask HN: Science fiction movies that are appropriate for 12 year olds?”

First some that I don't see mentioned here yet: Edge of Tomorrow (2014) Limitless (2011) Looper (2012) Upgrade (2018) Source Code (2011) District 9 (2009) Black Mirror S3E2: "Playtest", S4E1: "USS Callister" The 7 minute YouTube video "Slaughterbots"[1] The YouTube series The Backrooms [2] If you are worried about your son hearing swear words and seeing blood, and not just whether or not he will be able to understand/appreciate the movie, then you probably want to wait with a couple of those. And then I would also agree with those here that mention Inception , Interstellar , Back to the Future , The Martian , Men in Black , Minority Report , The Terminator , Terminator 2 , and The Expanse . I also don't think he should have much of a problem following along with The Matrix . [1]: ▶ this video [2]: link

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@wing-_-nuts2023 · in “The US Air Force successfully tested AI-controlled jet fighter”

The military always claims they will have a human 'in the loop' to make kill decisions. That promise will go out the window just as soon as other nations arm ai enabled drones with anti air missiles. There's no time for 'human in the loop' when the first to act survives. Thus down the slippery slope we go. In 20 years time we'll probably have aircraft that do figure eights over enemy territory for hours before automatically engaging 'military aged males'. Slaughter bots is the ultimate conclusion to this: ▶ this video

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@fxtentacle2021 · in “Shoot Paintballs With Boston Dynamics' Robot Spot”

Reminds me of this short film: ▶ this video Just like this, it's scary because it is believable. FWIW, here's the real military using Boston Dynamics: link And here's a remote controlled sniper rifle: link So I would be very surprised if nobody had combined them yet. In that sense, I think it is very good that MSCHF is bringing more attention to it. The sooner we start talking about laws to govern this tech, the lower the chance of it ending up in the wrong hands.

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