A watershed moment occurred on the battlefields of Ukraine in 2024 that we are only just hearing about today: the use of fully autonomous drones to kill humans. Ten fully autonomous quadcopter drones were sent to the front line by Ukraine with their AI-controlled ‘Terminator Mode’ engaged. “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead,” a drone maker, Alexander Kokhanovskyy, told New Scientist at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy. Human-piloted drones were later sent to recce the target area, and the machine-slain victims were concluded to include “a couple of soldiers, one truck.”
The New Scientist interview provides the most compelling evidence yet that humans have been killed at the sole discretion of an AI. This wasn’t an accident of any kind, or an AI gone rogue; the 10 drones were sent to the front line purposely switched to an autonomous mode to search for and intercept targets. Significantly, “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed,” explained Kokhanovskyy.
