Killer Drones Run on Swiss Student Software
This was revealed in the course of a journalistic investigation by the Swiss radio and television station RTS
Pope Francis will attend the G7 summit led by Italy, which will be held June 13-15 in Borgo Egnazia, Puglia. According to the Vatican press office, the pontiff will speak at a session on artificial intelligence open to non-members. This is the first time, as the Holy See clarified, that the pontiff is leading a group that, in addition to Italy, also includes the USA, Canada, France, Britain, Germany, and Japan.
The topic of artificial intelligence in its deepest ethical and moral dimensions is at the center of a heated international debate. The Holy See’s contribution to this burning issue has certainly not gone unnoticed, in particular thanks to the 2020 “Roman Call for AI Ethics” and the “Pontifical for Life” initiative, on a path “leading to a concrete application to the notion of algorithmics, that is, to give ethics to algorithms.”
The need to be very careful when developing modern digital technologies based on the principles of artificial intelligence received an unexpected and very dramatic confirmation when it was revealed that the automatic drone piloting program developed by a group of students at Zurich Polytechnic University and available as “open source” is being used on kamikaze drones in Ukraine and Gaza.
As revealed in a journalistic investigation by the French-language Swiss Radio and Television (RTS), “the automatic piloting software called PX4, as well as its Pixhawk upgrade, were developed between 2008 and 2011 at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) by a team of fifteen students under the guidance of some of their professors.” Revolutionary Swiss student software that allows the drone to operate autonomously, without the aid of a remote control, is now being used in war zones around the world.
As Italian-language Swiss Radio (RSI) also writes, “the source code of the software has been placed on a special Internet platform, which means that the system is regularly updated by its users, particularly to the great satisfaction of the Ukrainian armed forces.” Specifically, Swiss software “was discovered in Ukraine, on the battlefield, by Russian units in at least four cases identified by colleagues of the RTS Investigation Team. In one such case, a version of the Pixhawk software was inside a Ukrainian drone equipped with explosives.”
From Ukraine, where German Economy Minister Robert Habeck opened a new German Quantum Systems factory worth €6 million to produce killer drones on April 18, 2024, to the Middle East, where autonomous piloting has also revolutionized the combat drone industry. The Pixhawk program, sold online for just over 100 euros for the latest models, has spurred the growth of a new economy – that of low-cost autonomous military drones. RTS TV reporters managed to “familiarize themselves with a document, in which the US-led coalition to defeat the Islamic State group warns its members about the terrorist group’s desire to purchase this software for its drones.” According to RTS, “the terrorist group has already succeeded in acquiring the software.”
