A meme is born: autonomous = secure

Posted on 11 October 2013 by Mark Gubrud

One of Joshua Foust’s assertions in his debate with Heather Roff was that making weapons autonomous was necessary in order to secure them against the threat of hacking. I posted a response after Foustreiterated this surprising argument, and provided a few scraps of pseudo-evidence to support it, in an article which seems to have gone semi-viral on the internet–launching what seems likely to become a persistent meme (canard, for those less fond of neologisms) in this debate.

Briefly, Foust argues that teleoperated drones today are too vulnerable to hacking through their communications links, and that the solution is to make them fully autonomous. And just as briefly, I show that this is wrong in a number of ways.