In Dune, a fiction novel released nearly sixty years ago, the brutally exploitative tech-enabled Harkonnen use remotely-piloted kamikaze drones, “Hunter-Seekers,” to conduct assassinations of their political enemies.

More than a decade ago, the advent of ArduPilot brought quadcopters and drones in general from the cutting edge of technology to the hands of hobbyists and consumers. A forum, DIYDrones, hosted tens of thousands of new developers of the technology.

New York Times ArduPilot article

Only a few years later, in 2015, a teenager in Connecticut attached a pistol to a quadcopter and put the video on YouTube.

Two years after that, in 2017, a short sci-fi film titled “Slaughterbots” was released. It starts with a keynote presentation about a new, artificial-intelligence-enabled quadcopter featuring facial recognition and a shaped explosive charge.

In the film, drones are shown attacking a university campus.

In 2022, an Israeli arms contractor, SMARTSHOOTER, developed a drone capable of firing a sniper rifle while flying. Their SMASH product line uses Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Machine Learning technologies to maximize rifle effectiveness.

The same year, another Israeli company, ELBIT Systems, published details of their LANIUS drone — showing a drone detaching from another drone, flying into a building, and exploding on a human.

In 2023, UAVHE of Barcelona published information regarding their development of a drone for long-distance (200 meter range) hog hunting.

UAVHE Baduga drone sniper rifle

In April 2024, Snopes reported on claims that the Israeli Defense Force had used sniper drones playing recorded audio of crying infants as bait.

In June 2024, a report from the Euro-Med Human Rights Watch indicated that the Israeli Defense Force used drones to kill civilians.

Google Trends, “drones”, March 31 2024 to March 31 2025

In November 2024, National Public Radio reported eyewitness accounts that quadcopters equipped by the Israeli Defense Force with projectile weapons were being used to shoot at and kill civilians.

In one message, she’s interrupted by the sound of four quick gunshots.

“Oh, hear that?” she says casually. “That’s the quadcopter. It’s here most of the time. If I go to the door to get better cell service, the quadcopter starts shooting at me and I have to go back inside. It’s very dangerous.”

In December 2024, the news erupted with reports of unidentified flying objects across the United States: a drone hysteria. The Federal Aviation Administration activated several temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) around the same time.

TFRs circa December 2024

In February 2025, a report was released by the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor indicating extensive use of weaponized quadcopters in Gaza.

Between 2004 and 2020, according to a report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, drone strikes conducted abroad by the United States resulted in between 8,858 and 16,901 deaths. Of these deaths, between 283 and 454 were children.

Bureau of Investigative Journalism infographic

From NPR: “We’re reaching a point where there is increasingly diminished human oversight over the practice of killing in war, and also the decision-making process around who lives or dies,” says James Rogers, an expert on drone warfare and emerging technologies at Cornell University.

“No matter how precise your weapon systems are,” he says, “if your intelligence is wrong, then all that precision, that guaranteed destruction of the target, means is the guaranteed death of the wrong person.”