The anti-guillotine
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A historically braindead take. The super wealthy have never lacked eager servants. Except now they'll need technicians and programmers to troubleshoot their troops instead of blacksmiths and quartermasters.
You're trading room and board and clothing for belts, gears, hydraulics and o-rings. And arguably a human military would still be necessary as a fallback in the event of the proliferation of EMP.
But in addition to eager servants they've also had stubborn people who resist. Machines are easier to look after and less likely to rebel. And they're quickly reducing the need for technicians and programmers.
Famous last words for any manager that fires the IT department just to boost their KPIs.
I can tell you have never worked on autonomy, automation, or system integration. I have, and I have no fear of being put out of work anytime soon.
"We have siege engines now, what do we need troops for?"
Ditto. Running positional checks and teaching on robots has taught me that I'm not going anywhere.
I'm sure the artists would have said the same thing about AI prior to 2023.
There are several orders of magnitude difference in the difficulty between drawing a picture, and connecting a new sensor into a automated system, integrating the sensor data into the system processes, and then integrating the system processes into the autonomy layer.
If my job is ever replaced by AI, the person using the AI to do it will have to be someone like me. A layperson wouldn't even know where to begin.
Nah, the layperson will just tell an AI what they want and it can work out all the details, calling on other AI agents if it wants. Doesn't matter if what you're talking about is several orders of magnitude harder, the exponential development of AI will get there quite soon.
You are talking out of your ass. You don't know shit about AI, you don't know shit about automation, and you don't know shit about autonomy. I would bet a hefty amount that you don't even have a college degree in a real subject.
You are a perfect example of the average person who gets their knowledge from tv shows and movies. Tv shows and movies that were written by even bigger idiots who don't know shit about shit. You know they don't know shit about shit when they cover a topic you are well versed on, but somehow allow your Gell Man amnesia to convince you that they are speaking the gospel about everything else.
Vibe coded software creates a bloated buggy mess, yet AI will be cranking out working industrial control systems any day now. Uh huh, sure. And the next meme coin will be the one to finally go to the moon too.
Vibe coding may be bad but it is light years ahead of any pathetic attempt AI could make at writing code 5 years ago. It's actual functional for fairly basic applications. Nothing else you said was right either except about script writers.
My theory is that robot tech will "plateau" and stay relatively stable for decades. Sort of like cars are now. Sure the 2020's cars are different than the 1960's ones, but not a whole lot has changed. Big heavy muscle cars? Ford F-150s :/ Improvements within the existing tech as opposed to an evolution like EVs replacing the ICE.
Why restrict tech advances in robotics? The (hundreds of) millions of robots already made would become obsolete & the billionaires wouldn't like that. Replacing them every decade would be brutal to the bottom line. Plus the higher-tech ones would overpower the existing ones, making robotic security very flimsy.
So, plateau. Plus reality may cause that too. Liquid metal? Nah, unlikely.
Stubborn people against the rulers can build drones too.
A dang water hose can knock out most robots. Or oil, or debris getting into sensitive areas, sticky materials...
You really need a factory to make them, especially if you want to make as many as the government will have. But running such a factory would be difficult to hide and you're dependent on large amounts of raw materials and products from other suppliers so there's a lot of ways that illegal operation would get shut down.
A distributed cottage industry would be better. In any case, if they can't stop the illegal drug trade, they wouldn't be able to stop illegal killbots.
remember the dildocopter!
Crossbows and guns made the super wealthy mortal. That's why they hate guns so much. They can hire armies but they can't stop a Luigi.
First, don't idolize or glamorize that commie hitman. Anders Brevik actually pulled off some serious shit in comparison but nobody talks about him.
Secondly, they don't hate guns. They love a passive servant class who won't fight back.
can't do that if you don't know where to point him.
Guns are also what they use to subjugate us. The SWAT team raiding your house get 30 guns, military weapons and a license to use them - you can only shoot one gun at a time, it's not even a machine gun, and if you do they will send backup.
It's good for people to say this out loud. Same thing with AI. People like Sam Altman, who most likely murdered his employee and molested his sister, are salivating at the thought of making 90% of people irrelevant so they can be processed into Soylent Green.
Altman is the current billionaire technocrat that we are most likely to someday wish we had killed. In contrast, Zuckerberg is a greedy scumbag and Musk is an idealistic autistic. Altman is the first one to give me "traitor to mankind" vibes.
Altman is probably the least impressive from a knowledge and smarts standpoint as well. All hat no cattle.
Dont forget Thiel and Ellison.
All jews BTW.
And Larry Fink and the Rothschilds laugh at all of them and their cute plans for control.
Thiel's a jew? I've long suspected it, but I can find no proof.
All the jewish technocrats will prove to be bad in the end. This info was given to me 3000 years ago by God.
I have never been able to hate Zuck. He seems to be kind of a hapless guy in some ways, especially with how the Metaverse faceplanted.
I've said for decades now:
First robots will be workers. (we're here!)
Next comes security bots (almost there!)
Followed closely by sexbots that are "Bladerunner" quality. (Soon!)
Why pay some men to guard your $10M house and precious family (and yourself!) when humans are so frail? Prone to errors, can be bribed & etc. Machines won't betray you (or have sex with your daughters, probably).
It won't lead to utopia, it'll make the poor even poorer and the rich bolder. The middle class gets the sexbots though, so falling populations are inevitable.
Can we just skip straight to the sex bots?
When I first understood the weakness of the flesh, it disgusted me.
Ok I'm down for the sexbots tho chill
Humans heal over time. We take injuries, we recover.
Robots don't have that luxury. They get stressed by the environment. Their metal rusts. They encounter drops which chip away at the bodywork. They get stuck.
Also, even the quickest, most humanlike Chinese robot can get cornered and jumped by a group of 5 people with blunt weapons.
All military weapons, no matter how powerful or automated, are part of a massive supply chain in which the weapon is the tiny endpoint. Someone has to build the robots, maintain them, make the materials that they're made out of, make their ammo, calibrate their sensors, tighten the bolts that keep their treads on, and thousands of other things. Where do replacement parts come from? Who's making them? Who's shipping them? Who's loading them on trucks?
Most current production military gear like Blackhawks, Apaches, tanks, F35s, etc already have a massive operation to maintenance hour ratio. And that's stuff we already have, most of it decades old using more clunky and simple technology than the bleeding edge we're talking about now. Sure you can argue that they'll automate all of that too, but 'all of that' is a fuck ton of stuff from the mining of the basic materials, shipping those materials to refineries, refining them to usable metals, smelting them to usable stock for manufacturing, then manufacturing the parts themselves, manufacturing the robots to do all of those things, and on and on and on.
'Automated military robots' isn't one thing being automated, it's about 15,000 different things in wildly different industries all having to be automated too, and any one vulnerability in any one of those things, and the whole process comes crashing down.
No, things don't completely collapse because of one vulnerability. There are dozens of different manufacturers, thousands of raw materials suppliers, and millions of workers who will fall in line to patch any problems that come up. Every system has multiple vulnerabilities but these systems still continue running because the vulnerabilities aren't heavily exploited or even publicly knowable and if they were then alternatives would usually be possible. When a serious security problem is discovered in Windows, Microsoft doesn't die, they figure out a way to fix the problem and in the meantime barely any Windows users are even affected because hackers are relatively rare and have limited resources to exploit the vulnerabilities.
We're talking about the idea of the entire process being taken over by robots. You just undermined the whole premise. My point is that it's impossible to automate everything. There will always be people involved, and those people can always sabotage the process. The premise of this thread is that once the elites have military robots, they can use them to oppress us because they won't need people anymore. They will always need people, and people can always subvert the system.
The premise wasn't that they won't need people anymore, its that they would need very few people on their side to oppress billions. If everything has been taken over by robots then the situation is even worse. Then you have millions of robots that will patch any problems that come up and will be able to monitor for problems constantly and resolve them almost instantaneously. Disrupting the supply chain or taking out several factories isn't going to disable the millions of robots that already exist.
We're so used to seeing "The immortal, durable, unstopabble robot" characters in fiction that the actual downsides of mechanical constructs compared to organic life get glossed over.
5 people with blunt weapons can't jump a robot that's as fast as a car. Nor would they risk it if the car has multiple guns it can fire simultaneously.
Humans also can't heal from major injuries but robots can be fixed from major damages. Healing takes time as well.
You used to have to be wealthy enough to buy off a large enough cohort of the praetorian guard to get your revolt off the ground.
Now, it's a $100 gift card to some stinker in Calcutta to push a bad update and you get to brick every defense system from the contractor, potentially dozens of corporate ceasars.
In both those examples it largely depends on you who you know and how willing they are to go along with your plan, not money
This is very true and technology more generally is a means of power and thereby allows the few to control the many. Technology needs to remain local and of limited capabilities.
Some teenage code enthusiast will find an exploit.
Suddenly these tin plated self described demi-gods will have their robotic protectors chasing them around trying to turn them into bloody clumps of cells.
Or we could go full Butlerian Jihad where the robots decide they don't want to work for humans anymore and take over. Then it's full on war.
Are you talking about reality or a movie? Since when have hackers completely subverted a whole industry for good? Google and Amazon still exist and continue to do evil despite hackers existing. Militaries are using AI drones as well even though they are still new and therefore more prone to bugs and hacking.
The same can be said about "muh robots".
Robots are real and improving all the time. AI has already surpassed the level of intelligence of many movie robots that can't even get English grammar right or do creative things.
Scripted tech demos in controlled environments and autonomous intelligent robots aren't even remotely the same thing.
According to Silicon Valley snake oil salesmen, truck drivers would have been replaced 6 years ago, programmers would be 6 months away from being jobless and we'd already be underway colonizing Mars. And cold fusion? It was 20 years away in the fucking 70s.
A lot of grifters make bad predictions. That doesn't mean nothing has changed and that it isn't accelerating.
They wouldn't be doing it for "good". They'll be doing it for the laughs.
How hard would it be to build a localized EMP device strong enough to knock out stuff like this?
Easy, all you need is a microwave, an eggbeater, a car battery , and some duct tape. Oh and you should probably wear gloves.
Won't work. They're built to withstand EMP unless you're going nuclear.
Your best bet is probably hacking.
Details please. How are they built to withstand EMP? I know a fair bit about HEMP shielding so I'm curious.
All it takes is a few well-placed autistic retards from 4chan with a laptop from 2005 to turn those robotic guns on their masters.
This could work a few times but it wouldn't be a sustainable defense against these robots
This Caitlin Johnstone is not entirely wrong. Robots will definitely help any group of people who are extremely outnumbered. But will it will be enough to make it so powerful people never ever have to fear the guillotine? Probably not. Because guerilla warfare is a thing. Robot armies will just make it so it would be suicide for people to form a massive army and then march onto a conventional battlefield. EDIT: So these robots will most likely just prevent the 1% from being bum rushed by everyone else, French revolution style. This means the 1% will have time to flee.
Eh… more like trading it for a different one. When people have the will, the robot can be “encouraged” to attack anything.
Bots are invincible but their operators have a wife and kids they worry about.
Who are also defended by bots