Killer drones are the weapons of the future

By Zanny Minton Beddoes Editor-in-chief The Economist. China’s stockmarket has been on a hair-raising ride so far this year. In January the value of equities on the mainland and Hong Kong exchanges fell by $1.5trn. Engineering a recovery will not be easy, though, as our leader this week argues. A property crisis and worsening deflation are sapping any positive sentiment. Foreign investors are fleeing; most worrying of all, so are China’s wealthy. Our Briefing traces the reversal in fortunes of the generation who were the first to get rich after the country opened up. China is no stranger to crashing markets, or to Xi Jinping’s attempts to prop them up—indeed, our cover this week is a deliberate echo of one we published in 2015, which Mr Xi is reported to have disliked. But this time feels much worse. Our other cover this week looks at how cheap drones are transforming warfare. We have published a report on first-person view drones, which have achieved near-mythical status on the front lines in Ukraine. As the drones multiply, self-co-ordinating swarms will become possible. Humans will struggle to monitor and understand their engagements, let alone authorise them. These mass-produced hunter-killer aircraft are already tilting the balance between humans and technology in war.