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Comment by jameslk | Hacker News Reader

I can't wait for weapons to be attached to this thing so it can be used against us in the future. Imagine the part where it was spinning, but instead with a firing automatic weapon. What prevents democracy from collapsing when a certain technical elite control the most powerful autonomous weapons and keep tabs on everyone's daily lives?

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Probably a few years before they finish developing the flying machines that can be anywhere on the planet within 20 minutes to drop a bomb and obliterate the entire building you're in. Those jet engines they're talking about would be hot enough to melt tungsten, this is just math, it's trivial in comparison.

Edit: and don't get me started on the "cruise missiles". 1000 km range and they hit within five meters, and with unit cost less than training for a single infantryman? Total bullshit, I can't believe anyone buys it.

What are you saying is bullshit? I'm pretty confused.

If you want to complain about robot weapons giving people the ability to kill without personal involvement or compunction, you should have complained:

* Ten years ago, when we started arming drone aircraft with anti-tank missiles

* TWenty years ago, when cruise missiles gained active guidance

* Thirty years ago, when we got laser-guided bomb technology working

* Eighty years ago, when radio let commanders give orders to subordinates without seeing their suffering

* A hundred years ago, when artillery gave us the ability to kill tens of thousands of people without them ever leaving their trenches

* Three hundred years ago, when firearms became truly viable and infantrymen could kill their opponent from far enough away that they didn't get blood on them

Don't let the human shape make you afraid. The Terminators had human faces because that made them scary, not because it was effective. People are afraid of these robots because they have two arms and two legs, not because of what they can do, and these fears about "spinning in circles shooting machine guns" are pathetic rationalizations of their loss of reason in the face of emotion.

Someone still has to man the lengthy manufacturing and supply chains to build these things and their consumables plus someone needs to be deployed into the theater of operations to perform logistical support and maintenance to keep your hypothetical killbots in action. (Automated manufacturing is one thing, automated diagnosis and repair is quite another.)

Someone also has to have acquired enough military expertise to command these units effectively, something "a certain technical elite" feels is beneath them.

> something "a certain technical elite" feels is beneath them.

A very common sentiment. However, please remember that the skills to get in at the bottom of each field are radically different and don't let that colour your perception of the top of each field.

Additionally - If the elites make it lucrative enough it will be easy enough to get labor necessary to complete the tasks. Tribalism is real and if they were able to convince a subset of people to complete their ends then controlling the minority/subset would be easy. It boils down to basically why Nazi's and Aryan pride were successful.

yes but in the end they lost, nazi's were defeated, the freedom-loving humans won :o

The elites mentioned would just use ML to war game and hone tactics, and no one has experience fighting with (or defending against) this type of mechanized warfare.

Plenty of videogames have trained people for that. The lower end of the technical elite.

>Plenty of videogames have trained people for that. The lower end of the technical elite.

This is a prime example of the disdain for the military I was talking about. Actual warfighting is far more complex than noob tubing and zerg rushes, I assure you.

Wait until robot personhood makes disabling one of these things equivalent to murder, then we're in real trouble.

Citizens United (corporate personhood) already has laid the groundwork for that. If a corporation has the same rights as a person and an ai is a representative of said corporation, the ai would be protected under the corporate personhood umbrella.

How many muscles did you pull with that stretch?

Chances are, you don't live in a democracy anyway. Most "western" world is either a representative republic or the same mixed with a monarchy.

Switzerland is the only country that gets close to a democracy - they let their citizens vote on many issues.

A representative democracy is still a democracy.

That's technically true (the best kind of true) -- a representative democracy is a republic --, but the problem that the poster was pointing at was that the people are not being actually represented by our elected representatives.

Is it? When was the last time anybody asked you whether your country should go to war? Or how to spend your taxes?

Finding a representative that you agree with on most (let alone all) issues is pretty much impossible.

The Economist Intelligence Unit, amongst others, ranks countries on this dimension: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/01/daily-c...

People itself are the cheapest and most versatile "killbots".

Guess we should be building our own ... to respond in kind.

yes, things are finally getting interesting around here.

> used against us

Is that us the US by any chance? Because if these things ever become war machines I doubt the US will be second to anybody in using them.

You mean like the kind that comment here and have all sorts of interesting ideas that 90% of people don't care about or would resent? I wonder about that a lot too. Like what are googlers really up to with all that control of knowledge... </scaremongering>

If you thought I was referring to Google, or any specific corporation, government or entity, I wasn't. Technical elite was ambiguous intentionally, because it really can be anyone who has the ability to fund this type of technology, forward thinking enough to realize the power of it and isn't concerned about using it against others. Historically, this doesn't seem far fetched.

Given that this is Boston Dynamics were talking about I would say this isn't just far fetched, it's probably dead on.

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