Hacker News Reader

Comment by cbanek | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I have to mention the story of the gatling gun.

"Gatling wrote that he created it to reduce the size of armies and so reduce the number of deaths by combat and disease, and to show how futile war is."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatling_gun

And yet, by making one person more powerful, I'm not sure that we've reduced the size of armies (certainly not in terms of support and logistics), but we have made it possible for one random person to do a lot of damage.

Theoretically, by only having robots fight each other, we could eliminate human warfare and human losses. Morality would be some kind of cold equation that could absolve people of guilt. In reality, this would just never happen. People are the source of conflict, and the source of killer robots.

I, for one, welcome the Butlerian Jihad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad

View on HN

If war can be waged without loss of life the biggest incentive to avoid war is gone.

We have seen countries start attacking each other on the internet in peace time because it's hard to prove and the costs are abstract. I fear the same will be true for war with robots.

I totally agree, but I sadly think we're already there. Part of the magic behind using remote controlled drones is that we can attack people far away without putting American lives at risk. If we actually had to go there and risk casualties, it probably wouldn't be worth it. But if it's just some innocent by-standards that don't happen to be American, that doesn't seem to stop us.

I think GP's point was more focused on the threat of allowing a small number of people (or an individual) to do a large amount of harm.

>If war can be waged without loss of life the biggest incentive to avoid war is gone.

There will be a loss of life in any war. Note that they are called 'Killer' robots. It's just that the loss of life will be of noncombatants.

My concern is not countries waging wars against each other because that can always be deterred, but instead governments using it on its own people. Right now authoritarian governments need to worry about soldiers rebelling but computer code powering the robots isn't gonna rebel when you ask it to kill a city square full of protesters.

The Butlerian Jihad won't be successful. Tech creates wealth and often concentrates power. The elites will push ahead with tech development. Power imbalance in our current society means they will succeed if people do not resist in unison. Tech also has a lot of economic benefits so regular people will be divided on the Jihad.

Perhaps when the ~100,000 rich people kill off the poor (using technology), we can establish an Aristotelian utopia?

I think you're the only person in the thread who actually gets it.

The true danger of robots for mass combat is that it moves the power squarely into Capital and away from Labor. As long as humans are in the equation, you can always have troopers (and the populace that birthed/supports them) say "No more, this conflict must cease".

If war becomes a matter of some rich asshole turning the murderbot factory knob a little higher to deal with the riffraff, we're in trouble.

Has "No more, this conflict must cease" ever happened?

It contributed to USA pulling out of the war in Vietnam

Very regularly, throughout history. To take one example, there were numerous mutinies during WWI and commanders had to take great care to keep the war going. Britain was pretty much the only European power that _didn't_ encounter serious mutinies.

http://www.westernfrontassociation.com/the-great-war/great-w...

Well, you've had war protests and resisting a draft. In a different manner, there was the Christmas truce of 1914.

I think though on a different scale, if your people aren't out there dying, it's easy to forget about the massacre and tryranny your country might be perpetrating. The out of sight out of mind problem.

Alternative hypothesis: once robotics hits a point where it's possible for an average person (or small group of people) to own the capital necessary to carve out a decent life (by modern standards), labor starts splintering away from the global economy en masse. With their foundations gone, the pyramids schemes crumble, and Capital is the one caught out.

Capital has superior access to Research and Politics than a random Joe with a robot.

These won't splinter nowhere near as easily as manufacturing.

Or keep them alive and use their bodies to harvest organs and genetic/nanomaterial capital.

Rich people are not evil. Some may be. Most are not, at least not to the extent you imply. Many rich people are doing good things with their money and time. They have the power to resist the evil ones.

> They have the power to resist the evil ones.

Wonderful. When are they planning to start?

I don't mean to condemn them, genuinely charitable billionaires are doing a lot to improve living conditions around the world, but most of them aren't doing much to oppose the people who use their money to buy laws, lawmakers, and governments. (What they even could do without using the same corrupt tools is an open question.) A world with no hunger, no disease, and an absolute dictatorship of the wealthy is no utopia.

How would the good rich people resist the evil rich people? Perhaps by striking first and eliminating them?

You see where it goes?

A structure where anyone can build a world-destroying monster implies that anyone remotely evil has to be destroyed, right? But that suddenly starts to look exactly like the program of "evil".

It seems like future will look like: benevolent dictatorship, butlarian jihad or end of humanity (and I wouldn't bet on robot survival either).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com