American engineer Louis Venus has built artificial intelligence and facial recognition into a small commercial drone so it can chase people quickly. The developer said it only takes a few hours to build a drone that can track a target on its own.

He configured the drone to use an object detection model to find people and fly towards them at full speed. The engineer also installed a facial recognition system on the drone that works from a distance of up to 10 meters. This means that the armed version of the drone could be used to attack a specific person or a group of people.

“This project literally took a few hours to create and I realized how scary it was,” Venus wrote. “You can easily add a small amount of explosives to them and make them fly.”

Venus has described herself as an “open source absolutist”; This means he believes code and software should always be shared through open source channels. There is also a desire to accelerate AI research despite shortcomings, due to the belief that the advantages always outweigh the disadvantages.

The engineer warned that a terrorist attack could be carried out using such technologies in the near future. Although people need technical knowledge to develop such a system. Over time, writing software will become easier, thanks in part to advances in artificial intelligence as a coding assistant.

Venus said his experiment shows that society urgently needs to create a drone protection system for civilian areas where large crowds of people may gather. Source