There's been a convergence of, for lack of a better term, dual use technologies that have gotten progressively cheaper and more available.
AI modeling software and AI base models themselves have made it much, much easier and less technically challenging to roll out image recognition software. It used to take years and millions of dollars of R&D to develop image recognition hardware for guided missiles. You can literally use off the shelf models now that run on android level hardware for that, making fire and forget, and fire and seek (without operator control) conceivable for a single person level actor.
Better battery tech + commoditization of drone hardware makes it cheap to deploy drones that have 10-20 mile ranges.
Give a somewhat technically capable dude with $100k, and he could self fund and create a drone swarm that would cripple a modern city.
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