this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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The part I'm worried about is the part where military tech becomes police tech, and autonomous flying assassin robots are gonna be rolling down main street in a few years. They'll say it's to "protect our brave officers serving high risk warrants" but the police are already not responsible no matter who they kill and I don't see that getting any better when they can just zoop a kamikaze drone in through a window and kill everyone in the house at once.
What a crazy dystopian future that will be.
Which is also a good reason to make sure automated killbots are developed, because we're entering a time where one person could decide to commit a genocide, press a button, and have a chance at seeing it happen. And the best defense against that is to already have friendly automated killbots that can react quickly quickly enough to deal with a killbot attack. Or to have other counter-measures. But even developing other counter-measures works best if you develop the target system along with them, otherwise you risk allowing your counter-measures to fall a step behind in the race.
All of this is inevitable. Avoiding an arms race is like a prisoners dilemma where everyone is better off if everyone cooperates, but any single individual (or group) can gain a huge advantage if they time a betrayal well.
you're proposing....what, private ownership of automated killbots to counteract police abuse of automated killbots?
I think the main thing I'm proposing is that the future is looking pretty bleak in some ways and that trying to avoid that outcome might instead cause it to be worse.
That is a bit of a non-answer though. I think the best way to handle it would be like the 2nd amendment should be handled: that well-organized militia bit that the supreme court for whatever reason decided isn't actually important. That could still get messy, but the state monopoly on violence is already pretty messy and is essentially just a ruling class monopoly on violence.
Give too many access to that power and random violence increases. Give too few and you risk getting fucked if the wrong people end up in charge of it. Finding a compromise between the two could still result in half of them deciding to go to war against the other half or something like that.
Ultimately, I don't think there's a perfect solution; it's the same problem as trying to achieve world peace as a species that is capable of murderous rage and murderous cold intent.