Comment by 233mhz
1 day ago
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
Reiterating this sentiment from a recent episode of the Normal Guys Podcast: Even if you imagine that driverless trucks become a solved problem, just pumping fuel from those trucks into tanks for backup generators at the data centers is a long way off.
>We have a looong time before we get fully autonomous self replicating decentralised robot armies.
We do have them actually. It's called: an engineered virus.
> We're at the "this thing is kinda useful sometimes but still mostly annoying" part, not at the "skynet in 48hrs" part
Without some really fundamental social and economic reform, I'm anticipating a squeeze as automation increases, that ends with something like robot armies finally reducing the working class to barbarism, by blocking access to all the valuable resources.
And it will be some oligarch(s) commanding it, not some rogue autonomous AI.
So not "skynet in 48hrs," but capitalism taken to its logical extreme.
7 replies →
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.
How do you do asymmetric warfare against autonomous self-replicating killer nanobots? In other words: AI-engineered bioweapons (with AI-engineered antidotes for the rich).
10 replies →
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.
Well sure, who says that the oligarchs are human.