The Kill Chain Has No Driver—EP46

On July 6, a Russian drone killed three civilians in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, including a 19-year-old university student. What makes this strike different from the thousands of others in this war: no human pilot chose the target. Ukrainian investigators recovered an unencrypted Nvidia Jetson Orin, a $300 commercial AI chip, from the wreckage, and found the drone had picked its own aim point based on object-detection training. It's being called the first documented case of a civilian death caused by a fully autonomous AI weapon. This episode breaks down the technical reconstruction, the physical countermeasures Ukrainian civilians are using to survive it (netting, camouflage, and why one of those actually works), why Ukraine is testing the same capability, and why the accountability question this raises isn't really about the drone at all.