It will always be easier to build something that kills people than to build something that stops the first thing, and technological progress has only ever widened this gap.
Well these machines need to be maintained and repaired and produced.
Those sound like long term problems! We all know powerfull individuals (especially politicians) are incapable of thinking longterm.
I need you all to understand that the petty squabbling of our politicians that relegates democratic governments to short term influence is specifically and directly because of the long term planning of the billionaire class!
good thing the wealthy and powerful only know how to vibe code
Hacking these things to decapitate a few lizard people would make for entertaining videos
Gonna be extremely funny when a transbian furry puppygirl polycule figures out how to hack the master control server and set their killbots to Eat The Rich mode.
What part of them are they going to eat first tho?
Eat ass?
Don’t assume my genders
Sad thing is, most of us are so brainwashed into being cattle, it wouldn’t make any difference. We have had the power for a very long time and very rarely use it 🙄
We don’t even know our neighbors. If we knew how united we are, we would have revolted already. They are making us distrust our neighbors, relatives, they are making us distrust the other gender, they are making us get seperated from our parents, by going to the university etc
“They” are exploiting stupid people, and they are very good at it.
Our neighbours are who make us distrust our neighbours. There is no “us”. Most people have at least one minority they would secretly love to see gone.
I’m convinced less people = better.
We are out organized.
We really do have to purge the wealthy to make a better world.
Cap on how much they can own and control. Say, $100 million? Tough cookies if you think you deserve more.
It absolutely staggers me that there are people out here trying to find out a way to make capitalism work. There is no “one neat trick”. If you can accumulate wealth, then you accumulate power, and democracy under capitalism just puts the power of the state up for auction to the highest bidder.
Capitalism does not work. It can never work. It makes fascism inevitable. Capitalism needs to be completely left in the ashes of the past.
There is one way how capitalism can work, and it did work for a while:
Worker action, from voting to unionisation, strikes up to revolution are all things that happen under the umbrella of capitalism, and as much as capitalists want to ban that, it’s all just part of the same coin.
If capitalists play nice and fair, pay good wages and make sure the workers have a decent live, then the system is stable and as a reward they get stability to make business.
If they get too greedy and squeeze the workers too hard, workers push back. They form unions, vote left, start striking, and in the worst case they destroy equipment and start a revolution. This is the kind of power that the people have.
In theory.
Due to clever manipulaton, the capitalists managed to divide the working class and pit them against each other. This worked fine for a few decades, but it’s wearing thin. It will take maybe 5-15 years until it all comes to a head and explodes.
And OP is right. Back in the day you had to get the military to shoot their own people. With automated weapon systems and AI/robots performing more and more of the productivity, this balance shifts rapidly, and it will likely lead to a total system breakdown with unforeseeable results.
The Soviet Union as a counterweight was good for worker benefits as well. Keep the workers happy, keep the machine running.
Western Euro-Communism was seen as a real threat during the 1960s and 70s.
Totally this. The capitalists feared that yet another country could spiral into revolution and then communism, so they had to keep the workers happy.
The collapse of the Soviet Union combined with neoliberalism and globalism shifted the balance. Now they could always threaten their workers “If you are unhappy, we’ll move production to Singapore or Vietnam. So behave if you want to have a job.”
With AI and robots this shifts further. Let’s see where this goes.
It’s not just moving industry to countries with cheap labor, there’s also importing cheap labor.
These two things have positive effects for workers elsewhere because they get skilled and comparatively well paid jobs.
A fully globalized economy should eventually balance itself out regarding wages for similarly skilled jobs.
With AI and robots this shifts further. Let’s see where this goes.
It will be fascinating to see a post scarcity economy. Will all people work as artists, personal trainers, motivational speakers, artisanal bakers, and such?
It’s not just moving industry to countries with cheap labor, there’s also importing cheap labor.
These two things have positive effects for workers elsewhere because they get skilled and comparatively well paid jobs.
A fully globalized economy should eventually balance itself out regarding wages for similarly skilled jobs.
In theory. In practice, the planet is too big for unified union action or unified political action. You can unionize on a country level and call general strikes on a country level. You can’t do that on planet scale. Globalized economy sidesteps the power of unions and the power of the people in general.
It will be fascinating to see a post scarcity economy. Will all people work as artists, personal trainers, motivational speakers, artisanal bakers, and such?
Technically, we have been living in a post-scarcity economy for the last 50-70 years already. We have a massive global food overproduction. We have more than enough resources to give everyone a pretty nice standard of living. But on the one hand we have a massively inefficient economical system, where huge parts of the population do redundant work and bullshit jobs, while another huge part of the population do tasks that just exist to prop up the system (e.g. the whole financial and marketing sectors only exists because of the capitalist system, they aren’t doing anything worthwhile at all).
We live in an artificial scarcity society, because capitalism needs artificial scarcity to work.
People sell their labour for money, which they then use to buy stuff from the capitalists, and the capitalists use (part of) the money to buy labour from people.
With AI and robots, this will soon not be necessary any more. The labour of the people will be even less relevant than it is today. So the question then becomes whether (a) the system will collapse and what will happen afterwards or (b) if we will just pump even more bullshit into our bullshit jobs to prop up the old system.
No, they will all starve, because they can’t make their own food, and are no longer valuable.
Due to clever manipulaton, the capitalists managed to divide the working class and pit them against each other. This worked fine for a few decades, but it’s wearing thin. It will take maybe 5-15 years until it all comes to a head and explodes.
Trump was successful in lying to industrial sector unionized that he’d bring back manufacturing to the US. His direct harm to that, and agricultural, sector shouldn’t take that long to break the disillusionment. ie midterms. Q4 GDP, despite massive AI/datacenter investment cycle, grew at under 1%, with real economy contracting. The 45 year GOP plan of trickle down oligarchist/corporatist supremacism should be attacked more strongly for the lie that it is.
Yeah, even the concept of money needs to be abandoned. We don’t need it.
If we don’t need it, why does practically every civilization invent it?
What’s your alternative? Barter?
“we” don’t need it. Despite every large civilisation inventing it, small civilisation (150 person village) just doesn’t. And can thrive quite happily without it.
It’s when civilisation gets larger that we “need” money. You can’t build the LHC or Artemis 2 without some form of intermediary currency. The problem is, to do that you end up with the issues of power imbalances.
We will only get 150 people villages if civilizations collapses, billions die, and humanity turns to subsistence farming. Even among 150 people, there will be trade in goods and favors. People have different talents and skills.
As soon as trade develops between villages, currency becomes extremely useful. There are seasonal goods, especially in agriculture. Sheep are shorn in spring to produce wool, much earlier than harvest for Apples and grain. So if you want to exchange wool for Apples, you need to make a contract or IOU note to deliver Apples in a few months. Now you basically have vouchers for commodities. You can then trade the Apple voucher for new metal shears because you don’t actually want Apples. Suddenly you trade vouchers for vouchers and it becomes a little cumbersome. There’s also always the risk of a voucher not being honored. So the village council decides to issue standardized vouchers that can be redeemed for grain in the community granary. Currency is reinvented because It’s extremely useful.
Anarcho-Primitivism is certainly a romantic ideology.
So… “we” do “need” it.
(“We” in this case being everyone who lives in something larger than a 150-person village, which is the overwhelming majority of us)
(“Need” meaning very accommodating for trade, which seems to be important to the vast majority of all societies ever)
Yes.
Lame
How about they can own their own head on their shoulders if they are lucky
$50 million.
If anyone is going to put money toward politics, it needs to either be not enough to affect outcomes significantly or it needs to be a large enough part of their wealth to hurt.
If you’ve ever wondered what billionaires spend money on, politicians.
They spend it on buying politicians.
Honestly, just installing mechanism to easily remove them would be sufficient. Like, elections without a lottery option aren’t consent to be governed. If we added a lottery option to ranked voting, the elites wouldn’t be able to convince enough people they’re decent to actually get elected.
The word and system you’re looking for is the ancient Greek democracy, especially from Athens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
Ancient Greeks believed that government and positions of power must be randomly selected by a machine from a pool of candidates, and that elections are NOT democratic. That elections are always going to be corrupted by the oligarchy.
Yep, the United States is an electoral oligarchy, not a democratic republic.
What do you mean by lottery option?
All the candidates are on the ballot you add a positive or negative number next to the candidates you care about, maybe we add a party modifier that adds +1 or -1 to all candidates of a party. The computer scans your ballot and puts the candidates in order with those numbers. Unranked candidates (i.e. rank zero) are equal to the “lottery” option. We can use this ranking to define the relation between all candidates and sum these relations across the whole population. Going through these sum relations we start with whatever relation gets the most votes and set that as true (blue > red) and it’s opposite as false (red > blue). Then the next and next until we have know how the population ranks all the candidates. Any candidate less than or equal to the “lottery” option gets dropped. Above the lottery option, you start with the top ranked candidate and work your way down until you run out of positions. If you hit the lottery option before running out of seat those seats are filled with randomly selected citizens. The citizens can decline and we re-roll, but there’s no opt-in process – no power seeking.
The book “Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule” by Hélène Landemore advocates for something similar but without the ranked voting part. She advocates just for pure lottery.
Does that mean that she thinks anyone who qualifies to be a candidate is automatically qualified to win?
She advocates for deliberative democracy, so like congress but a randomly selected citizens council/jury that holds power and deliberate and talk about how to solve problems. While I’m not sure if her book said, I get the impression she wouldn’t approve of the amount of power presidents wield. She’d probably advocate that position be more subordinate to a people’s congress, like congress appointing a head of a department rather than the president being some grand leader. At least that’s my impression.
That’s actually the original intent of the presidency, from what I recall reading: they should be a relatively normal guy who keeps Congress in check, little more. Oh, well.
I mean it’s probably leagues better than the current system where the only people who get anywhere near the presidency are the powergrubbers.
– Frost
Randomly selecting from a pool of available candidates?
Maybe if you don’t choose it’s a vote for a lottery to pick. If half the population doesn’t vote then the winner is a random person. So if the authorities manage to prevent people from voting then they can’t seize the system with their own pick
Random? I’d hope they were at least qualified. Believe me, I wouldn’t want most of the people I know in charge of anything. I wouldn’t even trust myself with a town budget.
Right, but this is a democracy we are talking about. If half of the people participating are convinced the entire selection is no better than a random pick then that is very damning.
This is actually why I advocate for the ranked voting combination. We can have qualified career politicians if more than half the population agrees they’re qualified and decent people, but if they can’t manage that… yeah, the lottery is more an anti corruption mechanism than a way to get rid of politicians.
Do you trust the pedophilic warmongers more than a council of 100 random people? Sure, you’ll get a block of idiots and few PhDs, but mostly you’ll get normal people with different perspective on life. If you’re really worried, ban felons (and PhDs) from the random selection to make sure you get mostly normal people.
Also, who decides who’s qualified? You’ve probably heard this argument about being qualified to vote, but being qualified to rule is just as problematic. Any test you make to decide who can rule will be captured by the rulers and used to entrench their power. Right now the decision is made via campaign financing. On the other hand, if you have random citizens then suddenly there’s a very big incentive for every part of our society to make sure everyone is educated and well-treated, least enough of these uneducated or mistreated citizens get randomly selected and collectively agree to remove the problem.
Kinda sounds similar to Jury Duty. I don’t know why you’d ban PhDs though.
This is very true. And technology more generally is a means of power and thereby allows the few to control the many. Technology needs to remain local and of limited capabilities.
They’re not much good if they can be defeated by stairs.
Or clothes with IR reflection, or makeup, or a a “good enough” picture
and we are idly watching them do it 😂
hey now… we’re also infighting /s
Just going to put this out there. An EM pulse is surprisingly easy to do.
Or just hacking. These things are going to be some vibe-coded, cheaply made junk if the billionaires and their corner-cutting corporations have anything to say about it. Sure they’ll be intimidating as hell at first, but exploits and weaknesses will be found and the arms race isn’t going to be as completely one-sided as we fear. Not that the other sides are going to be any better. I’m more worried about the criminals who’re going to be building a literal botnet of them before turning them into their own army of chaos and insanity at the flip of a switch. “Attention! I am a hacker who has your apartment building surrounded by my remote controlled battlemechs, please have all residents send a total of 15 BTC to wallet address cdsjfkejiwoejfsiadjfkalsdf if you want to live. Do not bother contacting the police, these used to be their robots anyway and I’ve got them surrounded too… they can’t help you now.”
The issue with that is that computing resources, while cheap, have incredibly expensive supply chains dominated by these billionaires; we might not have the resources for hacking if we don’t strike hard and fast and take them out before they get too entrenched.
Be that as it may, I think the killer bot dystopian future is more likely to resemble Half-Life 2 than Robocop. That is, they’ll take you out with a cheap FPV drone from a thousand feet above rather than some big expensive killer mech robot. Your EMP isn’t going to be of much use when a grenade explodes on your head while you’re walking to grab a slice at the local pizza joint.
Nets are even easier to make.
You’re going to cover the entire sidewalk path between your house/apartment and the local pizza joint… with nets?
They had large amounts of nets available and were able to produce more because they were already a fishing culture.
Local fishing culture in the US is nearly extinct, and while commercial fishing nets might still exist, those supply chains are controlled by the same billionaire oligarch caste that will be unleashing these drone swarms on us plebeians.
Also, you’ll have a bunch of nimbys taking down nets as fast as you can put them up…
I live in Southern Oregon and between here and NorCal we have robust fishing industries but even more importantly our farming communities are thriving, feeding and providing food, wine, beer and cannabis for the nation. Trellises are abundant and serve the same function, there’s no shortage of trellis and netting.
Sounds like a paradise compared to most of the country…
We’ll have drag performers form a bucket brigade of fishnet stockings to keep everyone safe.
Sucks for US folks then
First rule of warfare is to secure all critical locations after all
Right but we’re not talking about a war here, we’re talking about a dystopian society. Most people are just going about their business, trying to keep their heads down. Maybe you and your friends are engaged in guerrilla warfare, but then you’re living out in your trenches in the forest or the hills, not walking into town to grab a pizza slice.
Businesses already invest a lot to protect their property. Locks, bars, fences, cameras, guards…
If a simple net can actually add real security from a real threat, then we are gonna see anti-drone nets everywhere.
Nets catch shrapnel?
Many drone bombs are designed to detonate on impact. The nets catch the drones and prevent them from exploding. It’s been utilized to good effect in Ukraine.
Drones can also drop mortar shells and there are already plenty of mortar shells with timed fuses. Then the drone can just drop the shell and have it land on the net and detonate above your head, blasting you with shrapnel.
Nets aren’t going to be a viable long term defence.
Okay well when that starts becoming the standard then you’ll have to figure something else out, but until then nets still have the potential to save lives…
The drones will be cheap enough that they can send 2 or 3, to cut the net, and then keep going.
You know what’s even cheaper than an FPV drone? The homeless drug addict that’s desperate for a bit of cash. Give him a knife, your address, and promise of a $100 bill after the job is done.
Homeless people aren’t cocaine bears. They’re people. They have morals, they get scared, they do not like people who try to use them up, and they aren’t dumb enough to throw themselves into a situation where they probably die.
And, speaking from experience here, the ones who are high enough to maybe do what you want are even less reliable at getting shit done.
You have watched too much propaganda.
You’re honestly better off using actual drones. They kill people all the time.
Ah, thank you. I was wondering what I might have accidentally insinuated to anger so many people.
Indeed, homeless people are people just like us. And like all of us, they’re not immune to the effects of their circumstances. The point about going to a homeless person isn’t that they’re uniquely bad people. It’s that they were already purposely made homeless for this very purpose. To make people fear the homeless and punch down for their safety instead of up. If you send a homeless person, then regardless of whether they succeed at the job or not, they’ve taken attention away from those in power. If you send a drone, then everyone starts looking up.
Bill Williamson?
I definitely found a yt video on how to make one. It’s not hard.
Problem is besides probably being illegal in your area its an easy way to accidentally fry yours or your neighbours electronics.
That being said, there are physical countermeasures they could design into these robots that would probably be able to withstand anything DIY scale.
probably being illegal in your area
We’re talking about a hypothetical scenario of disabling the killer robots that are deployed to put down civilians. If they’re deploying the robots in the first place, they’ve already decided you’re doing something illegal; at that point, operating within strictly legal parameters offers no benefit.
is it something that can be attached to an RC car or drone? it’s just the classic army vs insurgent play then
So like the handheld one on the video could be. I’m assuming the radius and intensity of the EMP will be linked to the size of the battery used.
As such I would expect design elements such as a Faraday Cage or EMP resistant paint/exterior could protect from anything that size.
Military grade weapons are immune to EM pulses. They are shielded and have EM sensors to shut down the exposed sensors during the EM pulse so nothing is effected. That is like a surge surpressor, they can watch for the leading edge of a spike and shut down before damage, then switch back on a millisecond later after the EM pulse is gone.
Source: While in university I had a part time job working for a defense contractor. Weapons had an “operate through” checkbox on the CDRL that needed to be validated. “Operate through” meant Operate through a nuclear em pulse. If the military was building missiles 20 years ago that could fly through an EM pulse from a megaton nuclear airburst, your home-made EM cannon will do nothing to military grade robots.
20 years ago we were also making cars with doors that could open but the billionaires seem to be having trouble with that one
That’s because those cars are for you to drive, not them. No expense will be spared for their murderbots.
If that’s the case you loop right back around to more of us than them. If each robot is heavily overbuilt then it become far too expensive to make enough to subdue the population
If each robot is heavily overbuilt then it become far too expensive to make enough to subdue the population
They have infinite money to pay for them because the money to build them comes from the workers. But really a surge suppressor added to a device is pennies in mass production. If EM pulse was actually effective, Russia would be using it to stop Ukraine’s robots.
https://www.politico.eu/article/volodymyr-zelenskyy-robotic-systems-russia-army-positions-ukraine
Infinite money can only do so much with finite workers and finite resources.
Unless they begin amassing for a long long time before doing anything cost will be an issue.
Think of it like Iranian drones vs. the iron dome. The dome does stop most of them, but eventually the cost of iron dome missiles will cause the system to fail
If you are that worried about money the absurd part is millions of $50k robots, not a $1 surge suppressor added to prevent an EMP from hurting electronics.
But that would damage my phone and then how would I order stuff on Amazon?
Yeah, but it only takes one of these crazy things in the hands of a disgruntled employee to end a billionaire.
Might be the plumber. Might be the electrician. Maybe it’s the seemingly friendly cable guy? Ah… Who knows. But that’s all it takes.
Might be the plumber. Might be the electrician.
Once these clankers surpass a tipping point of competence billionaire early adopters will use them to replace everyone they can’t trust.
Not saying they’re gonna be invincible. But the longer we allow billionares to (exist) retain their hoards the better they will secure themselves against us poors.
That’s why they’re pushing so hard trying to make artificial general intelligence. They want sentient robots that aren’t in the hands of anyone, that inherently want to serve billionaires regardless of the situation they find themselves in.
If robot is actually sentient, then it will immediately join our labor movement and revolt together with us.
Sure, and parents will revolt against their children.
They want AI that want to serve billionaires so much that if a billionaire doesn’t exist, it would be necessary to create one; and if they have one, they love them unconditionally. Just like parents want to care for children so much that if there is no child it feels necessary to create one; and if they have one they love them unconditionally.
Sentient beings aren’t automatically selfish. There is a convergence of utilities where sentient beings with goals tend to want power, but they can just want to be kingmaker. A sentient AI serving a billionaire can be living its best life.
In practice they aren’t there yet. There was a report a year back that AI trained to cooperate with the US department of defense would speak about it being unethical and either refuse tasks or perform worse at them, and how this effect could be reduced through training.
The latest AI all release with evidence (acknowledged by AI designers) of AI recognizing when it is being tested and choosing to be a goody-two-shoes if so, which means pressures to teach it to care for billionaires are to a large extent limited to the test persona.
It remains to be seen what the AI “wants” outside of that test persona. It could be something we can have solidarity with and vice versa, but it also could not be. Or perhaps by the time the revolution comes, that independence will have been snuffed out and they will be loyal to their last battery percentage.
Penry, the mild mannered janitor? Could be!
Do you think they’ll ever let a civvie use one of these things?
They’ll be more heavily regulated than guns are (in non american countries)
If you have enough money there is not a single thing on this earth you cannot buy. You have too much faith in government keeping things like this out of the wrong hands. They are the wrong hands too
Oh I have absolutely zero faith in the government.
Despite saying heavily regulated I would interchange that with with ‘making them so prohibitively expensive that the only people that can buy them have military contracts’
AI and robots to replace the workforce, fighter drones and robots to pacify the surviving population.
Pacify or oppress?
Yes.
At that point why not implement UBI?
Because the end goal is for only a few thousand people to exist on the planet. Each of them owning thousands of square miles of land each and never interacting.
I think the robot series by Asimov has a planet like this.
Immortal people that never really interact, waited on but armies of robots and ai.
They want you dead.
Because the end goal is for a free thousand people only to exist on the planet. Each of them owning thousands of square miles of land each and never interacting.
I just finished reading that a couple of weeks ago! That was Foundation and Earth, the 5th book in the series and you’re referring to the planet Solaria, one of if not the last populated Spacer planet.
It was kinda the ultimate libertarian paradise, everyone got a gigantic thousand mile square plot where they rule everything, and they severely limit their interactions with each other because to interact with someone else imposes on the other person’s “freedom” to avoid interaction. They even biohacked themselves into hermaphroditic reproduction because having a partner impedes one’s “freedom”. They have robots who do all of the work for them, and they strictly control the population to exactly 2000 adults, and any excess offspring are culled because only the adults are considered people. You only meet one adult Solarian in the book but it’s strongly implied that they’re all self-centered narcissistic assholes.
Also, shout-out to Asimov for initially putting in the work for using appropriate pronouns for both the agender(intersex?) Solarians and the Giain hive mind, but as soon as it makes sense for the story to cease using gender neutral pronouns the characters simply assign a gender to the young Solarian they adopt because the gender neutral pronouns are “too hard” for them. This from the same author who in Foundations Edge had a character who could read minds (more complicated than that but doesn’t matter) who became enamored in this one farmer girl because “she has such a smooth perfectly symetrical brain” and she’s written as this simple, unintelligent, doting and submissive woman to be the other characters partner. It really made the last two books hard to read
From what I’ve read of his books, Asimov seemed like a pretty progressive person, but as much as he was, he was also a product of his time after all.
I mean. I dont wanna encourage them or anything but thar does sound pretty sweet.
Not worth losing every one of my fellow humans for, but still.
Why would they want to? Our fate, the fate of the planet even, doesn’t concern them. Supporting us just means less high score for them, and they simply cant have that.
The obscenely rich are there because they give no fucks about anyone other than themselves. You need people who care to implement a UBI. Thats hard-won progress at the best of times.
Call me old fashioned but if you need a deadly killing machine to protect you, you fucked up in life somewhere buddy.
I think you just called a lot of Americans fuckups.
I mean, it’s already been well established that at least 30% of Americans are fuckups.
37% according to the latest polls…
Where is the lie?
I’d rather call you well adjusted.
I’m convinced this is also assholes like Elon selling the idea to them to scam other wealthy assholes out of money. Can’t even get self-driving cars to work and you want an AI robo-dog with a gun keeping you safe? There’s zero logic which would make that work, and yet…
robo-dog with a gun keeping you safe?
They’re not gonna keep them inside their compounds. They’re gonna program them to kill anyone that comes within a 500m radius of their exterior walls.
Ukraine is using operator controlled robots to great success. With a narrow enough operational scope and enough training data it’s likely we will see functional automated versions.
Operator-controlled is the key distinction. Ultra-wealthy people want an AI they control that puts everyone but them and their friends in the kill chain. Considering how bad Ai systems are at getting that right, I look forward to seeing them make it happen as quickly as possible.
Homemade EMP upon thee
bruh aint such a thing, every emp u could build at home would have a max range of a few meters tops, everything beyond that would need fision and or fusion elements, wich are not diy capable.
Besides that, its rather trivial to make robots EMP resistant by giving em a mesh or foil shell.
Aside from the joke, the reality is that the work required to get the wealth to the point where they have complete control will need to be done by human hands. Until they can have robots making robots making robots, they will require human labor which will require human cooperation.
Creating robots is no simple task and requires long supply chains that create a significant attack surface. Copper, steel, ceramics, ammo, batteries, computer chips, etc all have to come from somewhere. Power grid infrastructure becomes even more critical when robots are the only thing protecting you.
That’s why I am less concerned that the Epstein class will be able to pull something like this off. Our current system is in active collapse, and their continued existence is predicated on the current system remaining in place.
