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Comment by subw00f | Hacker News Reader

Horses can't revolt.

In the era of governments with ubiquitous electronic mass surveillance, complete control over all communication channels, and autonomous suicide drones, humans can't revolt either.

And yet, they continue to do it. States always had the upper hand since the invention of the standing army. The thing with capitalism is, as Engels noted, the military is the proletariat in uniform. Any successful revolt needs to have partial support from the military.

In other words, people don't revolt, warlords revolt. Warlords in control of weapons which are decreasingly reliant on humans and increasingly reliant on remote and autonomous technologies. A drone swarm is not "the proletariat in uniform".

Your argument doesn't really make a lot of sense. Warlords, factions, rebels, or whatever you'd like to call them, they are people, and sometimes they succeed in toppling a form of government and implanting a different one. A drone swarm doesn't control itself. There are no fully autonomous weapons that can continuously implement higher-level strategies to achieve a certain goal. Of course a drone swarm is not part of the proletariat, the same way a rifle is not part of the proletariat. A drone swarm is a tool in the hands of humans that belong to or are in service of a certain social class.

> Of course a drone swarm is not part of the proletariat, the same way a rifle is not part of the proletariat. A drone swarm is a tool in the hands of humans that belong to or are in service of a certain social class.

Every rifle takes one person to wield it; one more person that might decide to turn that rifle against the ruling class. A drone swarm is worth ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand people with rifles, capable of being controlled by one person issuing high-level kill orders. The tyrants of the future won't need to risk arming "the proletariat".

What? How many people is a tank worth, or an helicopter, or a fighter jet. You keep insisting that a hypothetical thousand-drone swarm can’t be used against a tyrant in case of a civil war and that the tyrant himself will operate the weapons directly. They won’t. They will need workers and soldiers and a chain of command that is convertible to a cause.

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