Will "the rest of us" just give up on automating anything for ourselves and mindlessly become dependent on using the systems operated by "a handful of gods"?
I hope not.
The major problem with advanced robotics is the same problem with many advanced technologies. The government is afraid of the power it will give citizens, perhaps rightly so, and thus only a handful of highly regulated large organizations can have the power to utilize the technology and thus power will consolidate in those organizations. This is not a big deal when it comes to technology like advanced weaponry, but it becomes a huge deal when it replaces most of the economic framework that people rely on for survival.
If everyone has access to advanced robotics like they have access to publish a blog then the issue would be largely mitigated.
I think about this when reading studies/articles about wealth consolidation: "billionaires control xx%" of the wealth" etc. Almost always, there is no longitudinal component to the analysis. The majority of billionaires are self-made, and the billionaires today are not the same as the billionaires of 15 years ago, are not the same as the billionaires of 15 years before that.
That day is already here. It'd be easier for you to envision if you could look see all the people on my Facebook feed natter on endlessly about guns, beer, and boobs without a coherent thought on any other topic. Do I think these people will be willing to be dependent on others? Absolutely! They won't even write their own memes to share, they let creative gods upstream take care of that for them.
Ultimately that's what capital is: the ability to make a big investment in something before it provides a return.
Speaking of IBM, it seems like only yesterday that IBM and Microsoft were invincible. And now Google, Amazon, or Apple seem far more formidable.
Now we're talking about a situation in which everyone can be watched for suspicious behaviour by computers, every minute of every day. Where you need fewer and fewer people, so your acceptable rate for false positives is going up rapidly. And in which the military force that can be applied by per dollar is increasing very quickly.
At an extreme, if you can automate everything, you and your mates hold up in a bunker and just gas every other living thing in the country. Before that, you send your robots into the ghettos if the peasants start getting uppity and kill every second person or something like that - you don't have to worry too much about false positives there because the people you need are a bit richer and get nicer digs. Before that you drag those who defect up before the courts and there's no revolution, there are just criminals harming the wealth of society - the war on drugs writ large.
You don't get a civil war when the disparity between the rich and the poor is very great. The poor don't get to organise and arm. They just get arrested at the low end and slaughtered at the high end.
No-one's going to get into a field with you and have a fair old dust up. At least, not unless the dust up involves nerve agents and ghettos.
Just like they aren't human and don't feel empathy, I don't feel empathy for shutting down a robocop or subverting his programming to ignore me or sending it on a suicide mission back to its makers.
How many people run their own e-mail servers?
What about personal websites vs facebook?
The direction is quite clear.
How is this different from the current situation? Genuine question.
To what extent will the "rest of us" give up on automating anything for ourselves and mindlessly become dependent on using the systems operated by "a handful of gods"?
In what ways can "the rest of us" be persuaded to accept such a state of affairs?
If a considerable number of us can't be made to refrain from pirating simple entertainment such as games, music, books, and movies, then what are the odds we can be stopped from doing the same for access to technology necessary for our very survival?