The anti-guillotine
(media.scored.co)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (60)
sorted by:
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.