'I bought a drone and killed my boss - it was easy'
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I see emerging drone swarm technology as potentially representing a future weapon of mass destruction with similar concerns to nuclear, chemical, biological and radiological weapons that we've seen in the past. They said he will start a war. I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars. I recognize the challenges from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan and beyond. War, hunger, terrorism. I just find bombs and I find dead people, but it's a really scary thing.

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I'm Roland Oliphant and this is Battlelines. If there is one technology that is defining warfare in the 21st century, which has shown up in every one of the wars that we have covered on this podcast over the past year, from Gaza to Ukraine to Sudan, it is the drone. Not so long ago, remote-controlled attack robots were the stuff of science fiction. Then they are the exclusive toy of the world's richest and most advanced militaries.

But in just two decades, they have become ubiquitous. They are now dominating battlefields in Ukraine, Syria, Myanmar, Sudan. Turkey, China and Russia have massively expanded their own drone programs. And non-state actors are also in on the act. The Syrian rebels who toppled Bashar Assad had a brilliant, militarily speaking, drone program, we are told. And now the advent of AI has added another layer. It means that literally anyone can build a

A flying killer robot. The Telegraph's deputy global health editor, Arthur Scott Geddes, did just that. Arthur, why did you kill our global health editor, Paul Newkey, and how did you do it? Well, there are many reasons why someone would want to do something like that to Paul, but the reason we did it was to make the point about how easy this is to do now, basically. There was a film that came out in 2017 called Slaughterbots...

science fiction short film where they kind of presented this very dystopian view of the future where this technology the autonomous weapon gets into the wrong hands and it's used for all these kind of nefarious purposes and terrorist attacks and all this kind of thing

But we feel that a kind of like a watershed moment has been crossed where that kind of vision of the future is now with us and that is now the kind of world we're living in. And so to make that point, we found this amazing engineer and tech entrepreneur living in Munich called Louis Venus. And he basically took a drone that you can buy from a shop, you know, not an expensive piece of kit. It's basically a toy. In fact, I think it would be classified as a toy under most laws.

and took some software that you can freely get online, reprogrammed this drone and gave it a few things which were object detection, which is how you kind of like help it avoid crashing into stuff, and facial recognition. So you can then give it a picture of a face and tell it to crash into this face. We obviously didn't add explosives to the drone, but it's not that difficult to see how you could do that. And so...

that was basically it. We set up this kind of experiment in this conference room in Munich where we had a

a target with Paul's face on it. We uploaded a picture of Paul's face to the drone and then all we had to do was press enter and the drone would take off and fly around the room. It would fly up to the other people that we'd set up in this testing area and rule them out as being potential targets and then eventually when it locked onto Paul it was programmed to fly into him. Just to be absolutely clear to listeners, this was a cardboard cutout with a photograph of Paul's face on it. That's right, yes. You didn't actually kill your boss.

It's a very powerful illustration of what's now possible. How much did this cost, roughly? I think it was 100 euros, 99 euros for the drone. I don't think the software costs anything. And basically anyone with rudimentary knowledge of how to write code can cobble this sort of thing together. We talk about it now and it's all a great big joke and we're all kind of laughing at it, but it's actually quite terrifying. How has it already and how is it going to, in your view...

So the autonomous drone is the thing that's just arriving now. We spoke to some Ukrainians who are putting this technology together, an autonomous drone swarm that they hope to field against the Russians by the end of the year. But really that's just the latest kind of iteration of a technology that's been around for quite a long time, which is just the uncrewed aerial vehicle or the armed drone.

Those have already totally transformed, I think, the way wars are fought. You had the period from beginning in the early 1990s when it was really just the US and other top military powers that had access to this technology. Since then, everyone basically has been able to get hold of this technology. Armies in Africa have managed to get hold of it. It's being sold all over the place. It's getting into the hands of non-state actors as well.

it's making warfare more intense because it's giving an outrageously powerful destructive power, a very precise destructive power to basically anyone who can afford it. So if you look, for example, at the Sahelian countries, which is Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger,

There you have this extraordinarily violent insurgency being waged by kind of like an umbrella group of various al-Qaeda offshoots and things like that. And they're ranged against the militaries of these countries. And both sides basically are using drones against each other. The al-Qaeda kind of groups have got very adept at using them for reconnaissance and assassination and, you know, attacks like that. And then on the other hand, you have these African armies who are buying drones from Turkey and from China and from Iran. And they are...

wielding them with an extremely heavy hand. So you have numerous stories of, you know, dozens of people being killed in individual attacks or even hundreds of people being killed in individual drone strikes. So I think what they've done is they've made conflict much more dangerous for civilians. There's a greater chance you're going to be involved in one of these things.

And they've also given new capabilities to non-state actors which have previously never been able to carry out reconnaissance with a drone or never been able to stage such elaborate assassination missions targeting army commanders. Has it, in a way, levelled the playing field? I think so. So I spoke to a lot of experts in the piece and that's essentially what it has done, I think, is it turns these insurgent groups into a much deadlier force. Is it comparable to things like...

I don't know, you know, we often talk about things like the arrival of the tank and the blitzkrieg the Germans invented in the beginning of the First World War or the machine gun or before that the arrival of gunpowder. Is that the kind of scale of thing we're talking about here? I think it's had a similar transformative impact on warfare, certainly to the arrival of a new technology like the tank. There's something else that occurs to me here, which is about, it's about kind of the remoteness of,

So there have been very famous studies looking at military training and finding that one of the things that is very difficult to do with military training is to actually get soldiers to kill people. Does this somehow change this? The idea that you're sitting maybe with a first-person view headset on, like you're playing a computer game kind of, I don't know, a few miles away or even on the other side of the world or something. Yeah.

How does that affect the attitude perhaps amongst soldiers, amongst militaries, amongst others?

to killing? Does it make it easier? I think that's certainly probably what we've seen so far. And there were a lot of whistleblowers who came forward during the US-led drone bombing campaign that took place over Pakistan and Afghanistan and Yemen. Lots of drone operators and drone pilots came forward and they gave very, very vivid depictions of how this process where they would be sitting in a little air-conditioned sort of shipping container thousands of miles away in California and dropping these bombs on people was

It was very kind of dehumanizing. It takes the kind of like the dehumanizing element of warfare to a whole nother level because you're watching everything through a screen, you're physically removed from the violence. And what was also interesting, one of the ways that it works is because it removes the risk to the individual who's carrying out that attack. You know, if you're a pilot in an aircraft flying over a war zone, you're still at risk of being shot down. Whereas if you're sitting in a shipping container, there's not that personal risk to yourself. So it's like, I think it does make it easier for people to take people's lives.

Another aspect of this is that just as it makes it easier for individuals to kill, it also provides a kind of shield for the countries or the states or the groups that would use these things and kind of brings down the threshold for using armed violence. And so if you're sending in a drone, you're not risking the lives of one of your pilots and all the fallout that that would bring and all the political cost of suffering casualties in a conflict.

The fear is that these weapons become more attractive and that they'll be used more often. And I think that that certainly bears out in what we've seen, you know, in the last sort of five or six or seven years. To game that out, you're saying, you know, something happens in the world and the prime minister asks for, you know, a number of options. And they said, well, sir, we could, you know, we could we could.

blow up Moscow you can't do that that's crazy we could do an airstrike oh but what if one of our planes gets shot or we could send an unarmed drone to hit this oh well actually I'll do that because I don't have to worry about what happens I'm not there's less political risk involved and so therefore countries are potentially more willing to go to war with each other than they would be otherwise

Yes, essentially. Not necessarily go to war, but they're more likely or more willing to carry out attacks on each other. And there's also something weird, which I've noticed, is that somehow this is tolerated and that states seem to be able to carry out drone attacks on each other without really the reprisals that you would expect if you sent manned aircraft or troops into a country. It's something that happens with the kind of escalation dynamics in the way that conflicts progress.

that also makes these drones more likely to be used, I think. Can you give me an example of that? So the Iranians carried out this really brazen long-range drone and missile attack on Saudi oil facilities. Nobody really knew how to respond to it, right? Because, A, it took a while to establish who was behind it. Was it the Houthis who they'd been arming with similar drones? And then actually, after a while, they started accusing Iran of directly launching this attack. And so there's this kind of shroud of plausible liability as well that goes along with drone use.

that also kind of provides further cover. And then, you know, four months later, you then had the US taking out the head of the IRGC in a drone strike in Iraq and kind of nearly pitching the world into a massive conflict. And it's not just on the battlefield. One of the implications of what everything you've just said is that, OK, various countries can have it, every government can have it, organised armed groups can have it. But what does this mean for things like

assassinations, domestic terrorism, that kind of thing. Yeah, so that's one of the most alarming kind of aspects of this whole thing. Really, the kind of like the explosion of military drone technology has happened alongside a massive explosion in the kind of like civilian drone industry. So, you know, anyone can go into a shop now and buy very sophisticated drones that already have very sophisticated software on them.

And it's very, very easy for someone to weaponize, you know, this civilian technology, which has really flourished. So a good example of that would be in Iraq, where ISIS in, you know, in the 2014, 2015, 2016, were buying large numbers of Chinese quadcopters with cameras on and using them to take out battle tanks and things like that of the Iraqi army.

So terrorist groups have been pretty quick to cotton on to that. And where it's very easy to see that having a big impact is in basically for them being used to stage attacks on people.

So there was an attack, if you remember, on Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. What happened there? So, I mean, it's not quite clear. And some people say that it was all staged and things like that. But from the footage, what you can see is that some drones fly into this area where Maduro is presiding over this parade. And they begin exploding. There's extraordinary footage of all of these soldiers scattering out this avenue.

as these drones start going off and obviously Majuro's bodyguards leap to his defence and start covering him up with these ballistic shields and things like that. And that's one example of an actual kind of, well, of a supposed drone attack on a politician. Iraq's Prime Minister has also been targeted with drone attacks. So it is, it looks like an age of kind of drone-based assassinations is beginning. A guy called James Patton Rogers is a British academic who's also an expert on drone warfare. He

He finds it very difficult to imagine anything other than, you know, a new age of kind of drone based assassinations. This is what he said. I do think that we'll see the emergence of a new age of assassinations. I think the Maduro attempt highlighted that. Attempts on Iraq's prime minister has highlighted that. The use of a commercial quadcopter drone to scope out the perfect site to take the shot at President Trump.

is obviously a key example of that. Drones not just being used as the kind of lethal end result, that kinetic strike, but used in the broader setup as well. I think what you'll just get is you'll have far more choreographed public appearances where you'll have the air defense systems in place to protect against kind of most lower tech devices

strikes, right? You'll have the electronic warfare measures, the jamming measures in place. So you won't have politicians moving as freely as possible. I don't think you'll have politicians having to sit in the Churchill war rooms and deliver all of their speeches from inside Churchill's command and control space. But it will just mean that we have to be very, very mindful of

threats of death from above. And we've seen that even the most sensitive government sites, military sites around the world have been breached by these drone systems. Drones crashing into the White House lawn, hundreds of drones intercepting the space over the Pentagon, to the point where we don't even report on them anymore. The basic question I've got after listening to everything you've said about these weapons is, do these drones count as

Yeah, I mean, I found the arguments for that very, very persuasive. I heard from a drone warfare expert called Zachary Callenborn. He was one of the first people to argue that autonomous weapons, particularly operating in a swarm, so where you have tens or thousands of these drones working together, he thinks that they could easily meet any definition of weapons of mass destruction.

Global concerns about weapons of mass destruction really stem from two primary factors. Of course, the extreme destructiveness, you know, imagine Nagasaki, Hiroshima, the extreme explosions, but also the concerns about lack of control. When we talk about chemical weapons, for example, they might not go off in a gigantic city-destroying explosion, but the problem is that they're really difficult to control. You know, a single wind blow might spread a bunch of extremely deadly gas into buildings

the faces or the lungs of civilians, other folks who may not have intended. So when I look at those two issues of destructive capability coupled with potential for lack of control, I see emerging drone warm technology as potentially representing a future weapon of mass destruction with similar concerns to nuclear, chemical, biological, and radiological weapons that we've seen in the past.

And this is because I believe it could meet both of those criteria. That is, you know, it's easy to imagine if you have a swarm of 1,000, potentially even 10,000, even 100,000 drones, that that could go past pretty much any arbitrary level of what constitutes mass destruction. And states have been looking into that technology.

Conversely, once you potentially have 1,000, 10,000 drones, that's going to be extremely difficult for humans to actually control in a meaningful way and make specific decisions about, you know, that drone should attack this target, that type of thing.

And that's a concern because what we've seen is current autonomous weapon systems that use artificial intelligence and are based on using like cameras, electro-optical sensors, they are fairly prone to making mistakes where they can't necessarily recognize, say, the difference even between a dog and a stealth bomber. They can make lots of mistakes. So if you have 10,000 drones...

You get all operating autonomously. There's 10,000 points of failure. And what's more, within a technical drone swarm, there's also communication and collaboration between those drones, which means where if one drone makes a mistake, it may share mistaken information with the other 1,000, 10,000. So one small mistake may represent catastrophic harm.

So let's get on to what we do about this. It seems like the cat is out of the bag. The technology's been developed. It's been deployed. It's in the wild, as it were. You can't

turn back the clock. But can all this be controlled? So I asked Stuart Russell, who's the British scientist who is behind the Slaughterbots film that partly inspired our piece, I asked him what he thought about this and whether he was optimistic that anything could be done. And this is what he said. The precursors of chemical weapons are ordinary industrial chemicals. And so part of the Chemical Weapons Convention policy

includes requirements that national governments impose constraints on the chemical industry. So they have to know who they're selling it to. They have to account for the sales of particular chemicals. There's a long list of things that are under control. And that's been pretty effective. So when Syria tried to make a new, which is a non-signatory, when Syria wanted to use chemical weapons, they had to

create all kinds of subterfuges and shell companies and so on just to get the ingredients. So if you can imagine a drone manufacturer, they get an order for a million drones from some post office box in Libya. Probably if we have appropriate regulations in place, they wouldn't be able to fill that order. Other things you can do is to say that platform, even civilian platforms,

that have onboard cameras and so on that will be easy to convert in the garage to a weapon, as the Ukrainians are doing. You can make those so that they're not reprogrammable, that the software is actually burned into the chip. It's called an application-specific integrated circuit, or an ASIC. So if your civilian drone is controlled by an ASIC, then you can't reprogram it. You actually have to rip out that chip.

and put in a new one, the platform won't have support for a general purpose computer, which is much bigger and draws a lot more power. So you'd have to create your own application specific integrated circuit for the military application, which again, it's not impossible, but it puts a huge barrier, a big obstacle in the way of non-state actors who want to create an armory of these weapons.

That's interesting. So in the coda to Slaughterbots, you say that the dystopia that the film describes is still preventable. Do you still believe that's the case? Yes. The obstacle really seems to be twofold. So one is I think that there are forces within the major military powers that just want the freedom to create whatever weapon systems they think would give them a military advantage. And

The argument that the biologists used, so just if we wind the clock back to the 1960s, the US was spending billions of dollars developing biological weapons. And they had plans like, well, we're going to inoculate all Americans and we'll kill everybody else in the world. Or we'll develop a biological weapon that only kills people of Slavic descent. It's hard to believe, but this is the kind of talk

that was going on. And the biologists said, look, if we succeed in developing these kinds of weapons, they're going to be very cheap, they're going to be very easy for lots of other countries or even non-state actors to build, and they're going to be used against the United States. So by creating this technology, you're reducing the security of the United States. And I think the same argument applies to, certainly to sort of these low-cost anti-personnel

autonomous weapons that we're talking about. The other problem we have is trust. So even if the US could be persuaded to ban lethal autonomous weapons, they wouldn't trust that China would comply with such a ban.

He was surprisingly optimistic, I found, that actually the future that he depicts in that film where these weapons have proliferated all over the place and are in the wrong hands, he was surprisingly optimistic that that could be avoided. And as you heard, he gave the example of how the precursors of chemical weapons are restricted. But of course, Syria did actually get hold of chemical weapons and then it did use them.

So I think there are still obviously quite a few holes in the kind of, you know, in the walls that we're building to try and contain how this technology spreads. And one of the things that he mentioned, I think he called it a fly in the ointment, was 3D printing, which means that basically anyone can make anything now. I mean, maybe that's a massive oversimplification of it, but it's...

I do feel that the cat is out of the bag and that this technology is out there now. In the past, when these massively destructive kind of weapons have appeared, we think about nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons, the world has made an effort to contain them. There are non-proliferation agreements. There are agreements that control the spread of chemical weapons and biological weapons. Are those models applicable here currently?

So Professor Russell seems to think that that would work quite well. So he gives the example of something called an ASIC chip. It's basically a chip, a computer chip that you can't reprogram. So you couldn't do what we did with our drone and buy the toy drone, reprogram it, load new software on it and give it new functions. You would have to rip that chip out and install a new one that would allow you to do that. So that was one example. You could mandate that drones have to be made with those sorts of chips so it would make it much harder to do that. But I...

I'm not so sure. I think a lot of the other experts I spoke to were not confident at all that we would be able to stop this uncontrolled proliferation of this technology, which has already kind of begun. Those drones are everywhere. Like you said, they're in every conflict zone now already.

It's very hard to see how this next generation of the technology can be stopped. What about going back to that domestic security, that law enforcement counter-terror kind of thing? And I'm thinking either about the disgruntled worker who might, the lone wolf attacker...

who might otherwise be toting an AR-15 or, you know, attempts to, I don't know, kill Keir Starmer, right? I mean, we remember, you know, back in the 90s, the IRA managed to park a

lorry with some kind of timed mortars and fire them over across Whitehall into Downing Street essentially. What other solutions are there? Are there solutions? I don't think anyone really knows the answer of how to stop that. You know, people tell me about how often it is now that drones will go and crash and land on the White House lawn, hundreds of drones all the time flying over the Pentagon.

Nobody's really figured out how to stop them. But there is an arms race on the go. So there are some optimistic people who think that the countermeasures that we have against drones, that's sort of like things like electronic warfare. You've seen probably pictures from Ukraine or from other war zones of people toting these bizarre-looking kind of sci-fi drone guns, which intercepts... Massive, huge, big kind of space-age things. So those sorts of things. We do have defences against them, but...

It's very difficult to tell, you know, what's in place already. The overwhelming impression I got from speaking to people is that I don't think that Western security services are ready for this. But it's not hard to imagine a future, you know, where, you know, just as American presidents used to ride around in open-top cars, you know, politicians might no longer give speeches outdoors or, you know, might not be so exposed or...

I can easily imagine those funny-looking drone guns being a much more common sight at political rallies or speeches. Before we go, what is the key takeaway that you would like to leave our listeners with? So I think the key thing we're trying to get across is that this is no longer the stuff of science fiction. You've got people being killed by artificial intelligence now on battlefields all over the world.

And there's a new weapon of mass destruction emerging. We may yet be able to stop that from coming fully into being in the way that it's depicted in Slaughterbots, but it already exists. So if you want to listen to something we have, it's audio that was recorded from an American swarming drone experiment. This is a project that was done by MIT graduate students, and they cooked up this AI swarming drone experiment.

And this, I think, is the best sneak preview of what this new weapon of mass destruction will sound like. And it's absolutely terrifying. Arthur, thank you so much for explaining this. The excellent article on the Telegraph website is called How I Assassinated My Boss. Have a look. It is brilliantly produced. It's an absolutely fascinating read. Arthur Scott Geddes, thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me on the show, Roland.

Battle Lines is an original podcast from The Telegraph, created by David Knowles. The producer is Yolaine Goffin. The executive producer is Louisa Wells. Stay on top of all our news, analysis and dispatches from the ground in Israel and Gaza. Subscribe to The Telegraph or sign up to Dispatches, which brings stories from our award-winning foreign correspondents straight to your inbox. We also have a live blog on our website where you can follow updates as they come in throughout the day, including insights from contributors to this podcast.

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