"Once upon a time, in the very earliest days of interplanetary exploration, an unarmed human vessel was set upon by a warship from the planet Kzin-home of the fiercest warriors in Known Space. This was a fatal mistake for the Kzinti, of course; they learned the hard way that the reason humanity had decided to study war no more was that humans were so very, very, good at it." -- from the jacket of the anthology 'Man-Kzin Wars'.

The same technology that makes for beautiful eye-detection autofocus in portraits can also make for efficient slaughter of those designated to die.

We must each choose the world in which we wish to live.

Marksmanship isn’t a problem. I don’t understand what problem this solves except for snipers. Most infantry engagements happen within 150yds. Anything further (like across a mountain valley in Afghanistan) your target is the muzzle flashes of the enemy. Is this thing going to be an aimbot for muzzle flashes? This is where crew served weapons come in handy, and snipers. This device would not have helped me getting ambushed within 100yards or being the first guy in the door on a raid.

That technology has been for sale since 2013.[1] The original version cost $22,000 and was quite bulky. This looks smaller, but still on the bulky side. It will probably be made smaller and cheaper in the future. There's less electronics than in a cell phone in there.

[1] http://www.tracking-point.com/

The main problem for the military with those kind of electronics assisted weapons are the fucking batteries. Infantry already has a heavy load to move around. Adding battery packs does not help. Best case scenario you're tethered to some vehicle. Worst case your heavier rifle has no special system anymore because your 10lb of batteries are depleted.

For militarized police which do fast action like SWAT the battery problem is not a thing anymore.

I remember reading somewhere that there is money to fight climate change. It is just that it is being spend on weapons, like this one. Efforts would be much better spent, trying to reduce the rate of destruction of ecological services. There are between 200 and 2,000 species extinctions occur every year. Could one be saved for a price of one rifle like this?

I hope someday humans can evolve past war. The cold unfortunate truth is there are people in the world right now that seek to gain power through whatever means they can. To that end, it would be incredibly naive to not develop these weapons systems, and police ourselves to use them for purely defensive purposes. The alternative is to face annihilation when they are developed and used against you. I'm will forever be anti-war, but in order to be peaceful, one must first be dangerous.

Suddenly adversarial AI becomes more than a cool tech talk and paper.

It seems reasonable to imagine spies and hackers trying to acquire the models from sights so that, on the day of actual battle, their soldiers can be given carefully prepared masks that defeat the sights of the enemy etc.

There is an early window with tech like this where it feels okay because the "good guys" have it.

Only soon enough everyone has it.

Every dollar towards tech like that is effectively R&D for every regime on Earth.

This doesn't really seem like technology that is "needed". When you can actually see the enemy a holo sight in the hands of a trained soldier is probably more than sufficient. Whether it takes one round or 3 to stop the enemy it doesn't matter. Watching this tech it seems super slow to use. Perhaps it might be useful for hitting a target at 1000 yards. But that's such a rare use case.

Details are lacking, but this seems ok-ish. It sounds like this is focused on "found my target and now I'm in the figure 8 where my sight is bouncing around because of my heartbeat or other outside physical influence". Assuming it's focused on that sort of bias, it seems fine. If it reaches beyond that it clearly needs more research.

Adding to that: most soldier who died in WWII didn't fire a single shot, and never seen the enemy.

A lot more of who survived just spent the whole war walking and doing maneuvers.

I suppose you could equip a team with these and bluetooth an AND function. Every team member could pick a different target, all weapons would fire simultaneously when every weapon met 'guaranteed hit' criteria, not before. Should make for a highly effective one-shot tactic against multiple targets.

Didn't tracking point have a security flaw because it worked on local wifi or something? Don't recall for sure. Looks like they just put everything on the weapon now. Interesting what modern miniaturization can do. Same tech that advances smartphones makes guntech better.

Can use this tech to train it to recognize hogs for pest control

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It's so funny how sci-fi gets so many things wrong. In the future every infantry level soldier will never miss, yet we have Star Wars.

if you work for a company that helps people kill, you are guilty. to address this guilt, you can quit and feel much better about yourself.

“An Israeli company”-oh that’s where I stop reading.

so they implemented a triggerbot irl. gamers rise up.

Hard not to read this with some sadness and bitterness ...