Comment by oersted
19 hours ago
Then we regress back to relying on the fact that the ability of an average person (not) to be violent has inherent value. This has been the dominant factor in many moments in history.
Although if you have killer robots, then all bets are truly off, and we go the way of the dodo, literally.
(I don’t actually believe in this LessWrong-esque rhetoric, reality is more complicated, but it’s fun to muse about.)
EDIT: If oligarchs with magic AGI really don’t need our labor, nor are they concerned by our violence, then perhaps we become more like ants rather than dodos: we organize to help each other, creating a somewhat traditional economy around the scraps that don’t matter to the oligarchs, relying on obscurity and harmlessness to avoid getting toyed with a magnifying glass. I suppose that’s slightly better.
Farmers attacking king's armies weren't so different from an army of average joe with a hunting rifle attacking killer robots imho.
Even like 1-2% of the adult population going in the streets with makeshift weapons is enough to take over any country on this planet.
Data centers are extremely easy to disable too, take down power, data or both
Kings didn’t have robots that gather resources and make more robots, that make killer robots, exponentially.
Although actually: that’s kind of what humans are… Hmm.
I suppose humans can’t make better and better humans, that’s the difference.
Although actually: that’s what technological progress is… Hmm.
> Kings didn’t have robots that gather resources and make more robots, that make killer robots, exponentially.
We still live in a finite, constrained, physical world that has to obey the laws of physics. We have a looong time before we get fully autonomous self replicating decentralised robot armies.
I think people conflate the real world, sci fi and their wet dreams a bit too much.
We're at the "this thing is kinda useful sometimes but still mostly annoying" part, not at the "skynet in 48hrs" part
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If you haven't learned anything about the state of asymmetric warfare, an autonomous robot is going to be very expensive and timely to build and will be disabled by a $30 drone with C4 attached to it with sufficiently good skills at dodging. I'm assuming that we're in your supposed fantasy world where robotics has progressed to that point, meaning that the people opposing the robots also have access to much better drone software too, to keep things fair.
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There's this documentary about how badly that can go. Called Horizon Zero Dawn.
On the other hand, that way we'll finally get to "reconnect" with nature...forcefully.
Neither do we have those now. Also in the future, we’ll have opposing nations having their own robot army. It’s not as simplistic as some make it out to be.
3% is the target. 3% of colonists fought in the US revolutionary war. You need a majority to support you, and 3% to fight.
The raw resources you need to build robots are constrained and have a very very long and complicated supply chain.
In the second world war, Germany had impressive science and technology, but, as Stalin said, quantity is a quality in itself, and The Third Reich found out that it was an impossible task to get the metals and fuels for their advanced jet engines, rockets and U2 boats, when between then and those resources there were masses of tens of millions of under-equipped and malnourished soviet soldiers fighting what was an existencial war for them.
I suspect any intelligence powerful enough to pull this off would quickly realize that it had no use for the oligarchs, perhaps even more quickly than the oligarchs realize they have no use for us.
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>Although if you have killer robots, then all bets are truly off, and we go the way of the dodo, literally.
Bombs. You mean bombs. Throwing killer robots at a "problem" is like throwing knives or spears: you just gave the enemy your weapon. Unless they explode. But then you just wasted a lot of money on a really smart grenade.
> Although if you have killer robots,
we already do..
The oligarchs should not be concerned about the masses. It's the president of the United States, with a wave of his hand, that will wipe out all the data centers when that becomes necessary. I'm predicting that will become necessary and will happen within five years. I'm predicting anthropic stock price goes to zero.
yeah it's all fun and games until the tax man doesn't get his cut. If an AI company starts thinking they're bigger than Washington then first comes the SEC, then the FBI and it escalates from there all the way to SLBMs.
Regular fighter jets and helicopters will suffice.