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this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
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What the article finds worrisome about this is that it is a "hobbyist in a garage" building what's essential a voice activated and commanded killing machine. They are concerned because it is not "a government lab" or similar. Nobody should be doing this, but okay.
This cat is thoroughly out of the bag. People have been building computer vision powered automatic sentry guns that shoot paint balls or nerf darts or spray water for a while now.
See, for example, this video from 2012, which was probably about one of the first ones.
In comparison, here's a new video from a few weeks ago as part of "YouTube Maker Secret Santa" where the guy built a very good working Nerf replica of a TF2 level 2 sentry gun. He didn't even bother talking much about the motion tracking part because it was already a solved problem (see timestamp 17:50), so instead he spent the video talking about the ammo chain design and the aesthetics (and playing with the Secret Santa gift he had received from another maker).
That's the state of automatic AI turrets in 2025: trivial enough to omit discussion of the tracking tech and cheap enough to build to fit in a Secret Santa gift budget.
I saw a video before 2008 where a guy hooked an air gun up to a laptop and it was targeting and calculating projectile velocity and leading targets.
I have to build one of these in my garage before the Chinese do it.
Maybe lock your garage so the Chinese can't get in?
I think it’s worrisome because if hobbyist can do this, imagine what professionals with more time and money can do
He's not just any hobbyist. He's a professional. A literal engineer according to the article.