Drone apocalypse

Warning -- this video is somewhat disturbing:

It actually wouldn't be surprising if some of the major national militaries already have technology like this.  They certainly have weapons the general public doesn't know about.  That, however, wouldn't be the true nightmare scenario.  Governments already have the capacity to do all kinds of horrible things, and life in general goes on.  Some governments can be held accountable by elections, while others can be deterred from aggression outside their own borders by the threat of military retaliation.  There are only a couple hundred national governments, and only a subset of those have really advanced technology, so the pool of potential actors is limited.

Indeed, drone warfare in the Ukraine war has already reached almost this level of hunting down and killing individuals, though those drones are remote-controlled by human operators, not autonomous -- which makes them a more cumbersome tool for larger-scale targeted killing.

But the scenario shown here, where fairly inexpensive killer mini-drones become widely available (legally or not), would actually be even more terrifying than the video depicts.  Pretty much any person would be able to kill any other person, with little risk of any consequences.  It wouldn't be just a matter of whether you hate a particular personal enemy enough to want to kill him.  You'd worry that he might use this to kill you, unless you got him first.  In many cases a pre-emptive murder would feel like a matter of survival.  And you'd know that your enemy was likely thinking along the same lines.  No one would be safe unless they spent the rest of their lives in a heavily-armored bunker and never came out even momentarily (which would probably drive them insane eventually), and perhaps not even then.

However, there are a couple of reasons I can think of why this scenario is unlikely to materialize, or at least wouldn't last long if it did.

First, if such technology were widely available, almost every politician in the world above a very low level would be killed off almost immediately.  For any member of Congress you can name, any high-level member of the executive branch, even many state governors and legislators, there are people out there who hate that person enough to kill him or her if the means to do so with no consequences existed.  The same applies in other countries.  And those politicians know that.  If something like this was on the brink of becoming widely available, I think Congress and similar bodies elsewhere would take whatever action was needed, no matter how draconian or unconstitutional, to prevent it.  Fear of their own extermination would create an unprecedented incentive.

Second, nobody wants to live in the kind of nightmare world these things would lead to.  Some, perhaps many, would fight fire with fire.  As soon as such killer drones became available and the results became apparent, every executive at the companies that produced them, every engineer who understood the technology involved, and anyone else who might even tangentially be able to help facilitate designing or making the things, no matter how personally innocent, would end up being massacred by their own creation.  It wouldn't stop until the knowledge and technological capability to create such devices had been erased from the world.

Nevertheless, there is value in considering scenarios like this.  Technology always has the potential to develop in dangerous directions, and it's best to be aware of such possibilities before actually being faced with them.