Slaughterbots (2017)

Directed by

Stewart Sugg

Genre

dystopian film

Country

United States of America

Runtime

8 min

Rating

6.8 of 10 from 13 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A short film shows a near-future where tiny drones use AI to find and kill specific people. It warns how this technology could become a cheap weapon of mass destruction.

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What happens

Slaughterbots is a 2017 arms-control advocacy video presenting a dramatized near-future scenario where swarms of inexpensive microdrones use artificial intelligence and facial recognition software to assassinate political opponents based on preprogrammed criteria. It was released by the Future of Life Institute and Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at Berkeley. On YouTube, the video quickly went viral, garnering over two million views and was screened at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons meeting in Geneva the same month. The film's implication that swarms of such "slaughterbots" — miniature, flying lethal autonomous weapons — could become real weapons of mass destruction in the near future proved controversial. A sequel, Slaughterbots – if human: kill() (2021), presented additional hypothetical scenarios of attacks on civilians, and again called on the UN to ban autonomous weapons that target people. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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