A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one-or two-gram shaped charge,” he says. “You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: ‘Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target.’ A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone’s head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don’t have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target.

I think this is my new favorite quote of all time.

This is the future that generally haunts my dreams. I've watched elaborate videos of hundred of drones executing programs in perfect choreography. Mix facial/etc recognition targets for the swarm that eliminate targets on a list as they are located and eliminated. Short of any human team being able to provide an adequate field of flak there is no defense. Lots of security holding weapons w/ too much spread for the surrounding crowds. The only counter is the hypothetically more responsive drone swarm, a system capable of providing flak cover to crowds below, some sort of jamming technology. I'm sure I missed something.

How does a govt. even anticipate the capability of a foreign govt performing such a weapons test? It's not some obvious nuke shit going off detected by satellites, radiation, etc.

Like the article pointed out, thinking firearms are scary is simply a lack of imagination compared to the open source software and hardware at our fingertips. Drone delivered, easy to fly, quadcopter IEDs... no longer a need for the suicide bomber except in service of ideological statement.

The only positive I see in swarm technology is in eliminating a foreign govts leadership before they can launch nukes. Assuming their firing capability isn't a deadman's switch w/ preselected targets when x amount of leadership dies. The possibilities are endless, cruel, and the future can be a terrifying prospect to consider

Not a real threat:

The smaller you go, the harder it is to resist environmental effects (wind, rain, etc). Go small enough to be unnoticeable, and they'll be impossible to fly in any area that has aircon. Also, because the flight speed is kind proportional to the size of the motor/propulsion, they wouldn't be very fast, so you could probably just... run away? Finally, the payload (bomb) gets smaller too, small enough and a bomb becomes just a minor annoyance, like poking someone with a toothpick, even failing to pierce the skin.

A group effort requires communication, communication can be monitored, interfered with, and jammed. Hell, even background noise will be a major issue because you can't make the signals very strong on tiny drones.

The smaller you go, you the more fragile the drone. The radiant heat from fire (flamethrower) would probably be enough to fuck them up after a second of exposure (not neccessarily a direct hit). You could probably swat them out of the way with your hand.

Now just for arguments sake, let's say that in the future they somehow do manage to make a swarm of these things that don't have any of the problems listed... Well we already have lasers that we use to destroy bits of space junk. If they can destroy bits of metallic rubbish out in space from the ground, I'm sure they can make a miniture laser turret system that'll protect you from these things.

Finally, nerve gas is better than any drone and already exists.