Phil003

I don't think this would be a feasible option. I was working on autonomous driving for a while, around when the hype started, and I am still in the automotive sector and follow the topic more or less for different reasons (it seems engineers 'coming out' is the current theme of this thread ) Based on what I see, I am pretty convinced -even though Elon Musk repeats every year, that full autonomous driving is just 1 year away- that considering the current state of the 'AIs', you can't trust them to make reliable/safe decisions (without human supervision) in an uncontrolled environment, like driving in a city, or selecting targets in the chaos of combat, etc. So if you could make 100% sure that the drone is over the airfield when you allow it to select a target, then sure you can give it a try, and the worst thing that can happen that it will strike the helicopter statue in front of the base instead of a real helicopter, or something like that (here I am making the reasonable assumption that Russian pilots don't have 'take your child to work' days during wartime), but I guess, you can't guarantee close to 100% sure location information under all circumstances if you want to keep the drone cheap, so it might start looking for targets above a school, and pick a playground piece resembling to a helicopter to hit... And even if this plan would work once (which is not impossible), when Russians realize what's going on, the next time they could easily fool the drones e.g. by putting tents over the helicopters, or make their shape unusual with some wooden attachments, or by anything that would confuse the image recognition, and for the best result they can combine this with deploying decoy 'dummy' helicopters a little bit away from the real ones. So, basically I agree that something like this is possible to be done, but I would estimate that it would take a huge amount of development effort to make it more or less work, let's say with 90% reliability, but you have the problem of the risk coming from the remaining 10% which can result, in worst case, in killing a lot of civilians, and once the element of surprise fades, it is quite easy to fool the drones, so I would guess it just doesn't worth the effort and the risk. I am aware that similar ideas, such as using 'AIs' to make critical decisions during combat, like target selection, were popping up on this thread repeatedly, and to be honest I am a bit puzzled about the confidence. So I never worked in the defense industry (though in case a CTO or similar is following this thread, I would like to state that currently I would be interested to do so ), but I am sure that the core of the problem is the same as in case of autonomous driving, you can make it work pretty good, but pretty good is not good enough when a single mistake can kill somebody (in case of military application, kill somebody you didn't intend to kill). Also, so far whenever I read about military autonomous systems which seemed reasonable close to actually being fielded (so not about experimental systems or prototypes), these systems are either performing non critical tasks, so definitely they are not firing weapons on their own, or they work under human supervision, so e.g. proposing targets, but a human operator makes the final decision (which for me seems to be the perfect setup, combining the capabilities and speed of the 'AI' with the (in this case still better) reliability of humans) So my feeling is that engineers in the defense industry are also quite cautious about the topic.

I really don't want to defend the behavior of my country in general (I am a Hungarian), but in this case I see no sufficient evidence behind this claim. So what seems to be true is that there was some kind of conflict with Hungarian authorities when the video was recorded, because somebody in the background keeps saying in Hungarian 'put the phone away'. The words he is using indicates that he is perhaps a bit tense, but he does not sound especially aggressive or threatening. Also the incident was supposed to happen on the 26th, but there is no mention of it in the Hungarian independent media. Anyway, a friend of mine now forwarded the link to this tweet to one of the independent news outlets in Hungary, so perhaps they will have a look to clarify what really happened.

Sorry it seems, the https://t.me/s/wagner_ap_chvk channel labeled as the "real" Prigozhin might actually be a fake one. Anyway information warfare is ongoing obviously.

It seems there are concerns about the authenticity of the message from Prigozjin: (google translate from Hungarian) " UPDATE: the suspicion was correct (thanks to Balázs Trautmann): 1) There is a misleading voice message on Prigogsin's previously used official channel. 2) Someone created another deceptive channel with the same content: https://t.me/s/wagnernew (and obviously there are x others) 3) Meanwhile, Prigozhin is currently communicating on this channel: https://t.me/s/wagner_ap_chvk 4) And TASSZ was the first to report the news (Natália Pikli, special thanks for this) " https://www.facebook.com/andras.racz.526/posts/pfbid0J3dmyLgXkKVuxkgqBD6UBAmXoE7ivfXro3YNTLrxCiuXugQobHWfCdUuFHtU1WTzl (The guy is the most reliable Hungarian expert on the Ukrainian war)

Perhaps this is a bit off topic, but I was always wondering what is the root cause for this quite popular anti-US/anti-west viewpoint, not only on this thread, but in many other places. My theory is that actually it is the 'good' things in the US and the west that make them 'look bad' at the end of the day. So I think what happens that in Russia (China, Iran, etc.) 100 'bad things' happen per <enter unit here for comparison>, but because of the lack of free speech, lack of independent news sources, etc., and in general let's say due to the lack of rule of law, only 1 of these 'bad things' (out of 100) will be known by the public. While in the US and in the west, 'only' 10 'bad things' happen per <enter unit here for comparison>, but because in the west all the institutions that are not present in autocracies are actually at least partially working, 5 of these 'bad things" (out of 10) will be known by the public. Therefore if somebody just follows what's going on in the world in a very superficial way (and I think most people do like this. They have work, they have families etc.) then by simply browsing through the news, I think it is easy to jump to the conclusion that democracies are no better than autocracies, in the west companies/politicians/lizard men exploit the common people in the same way as dictators do, and that the Iraq War was that exact same thing as the invasion of Ukraine, etc. I really don't know what the solution could be here, but I think this 'distortion' really exists, and it is definitely not helping to discourage people from following extreme or autocratic ideas.

This is my first post here, so before I start, let me thank you all for the enormous amount of info and analysis found in this thread, I've read hundreds of pages of this discussion and I really learnt a lot. So, finally a topic where perhaps I can contribute a tiny bit! Being 'lucky' to be a citizen of Hungary, I would say it's quite likely that Hungary will approve the NATO membership of Sweden as soon as Erdogan decides to do the same. Quite interestingly, it seems that in addition to the usual stuff behind Orban's 'trouble making' in connection to the war in Ukraine (showing loyalty to Putin, trying to look internally as if Orban/Hungary would be a significant player in the EU, portraying Orban as a "rebel" against the west, etc.) there is some kind of 'Turkish connection' behind delaying the approval of the Finnish and Swedish NATO membership. So even though for 8 months Hungary delayed the approvals with the exact same excuses for both countries, pretty much immediately after Erdogan announced publicly his support for the Finnish membership, the leader of the Fidesz (Orban's party) faction in the parliament announced that they will support the NATO membership of Finland during the vote in the parliament, and suddenly the schedule of the vote was moved to an earlier date than originally planned (which might happened to make sure that the actual formal voting would happen sooner than in Turkey, thereby avoiding the situation where Hungary approves formally as the last one among the NATO members). The announcement was made by the faction leader, because the latest excuse was that even though Orban and his cabinet supports the memberships of both countries, there is some disagreement (LOL) among the members of the the Fidesz faction because of some disrespectful statements from Finnish and Swedish politicians regarding Hungary in the past, and you know, in a democracy members of the parliament are free to vote according to their best judgement (LOL) and they need some additional time to carefully consider the situation to make the best decision possible... Regarding Sweden the excuse remained the same, without any sort of clear expectations about what they should do to change our mind. Also there was no real explanation why the wise members of the Fidesz faction suddenly forgave the similar statements from the Finnish politicians. As an interesting additional detail (even though obviously it is not possible to tell if there is a causal relationhip between the two topics) Erdogan announced around the same time that using the TANAP pipeline Turkey will do everything to help the gas import to Hungary. I guess if Erdogan will lose the election in May without approving the membership of Sweden previously, the situation will probably change