With robot armies, the few will be able to do whatever they want to the many.
…A.I.’s–if they ever exist–may or may not have any reason to dominate, marginalize, or slaughter humanity. But we know that humans often like to do those things. Humans already exist, and we know many of them are evil. It’s the Robot Lords we should be afraid of, not Skynet.
As military research pushes robotics prices down and Pentagon policies push battlefield gear to domestic law enforcement agencies, expect to see more armed robots on American streets.
Feel free to make guesses as to how the future will play out. I would place a low probability that it turns out to be simply people who own drone armies repressing the rest of us. At the very least, things will be complicated by the phenomenon of people with drone armies fighting other people with drone armies.
We can carry this dystopian thought exercise through to its ultimate conclusion. Imagine a world where gated communities have become self-contained cantonments, inside of which live the beautiful, rich, Robot Lords, served by cheap robot employees, guarded by cheap robot armies. Outside the gates, a teeming, ragged mass of lumpen humanity teeters on the edge of starvation. They can’t farm the land or mine for minerals, because the invincible robot swarms guard all the farms and mines.
Why are the Robot Lords going to be running these huge farms if not to sell the food they produce to the ragged masses? Noah Smith just can’t help himself can he? In Smith’s world, Adolf Carnegie is always one step away from taking over.
Haha I’ve always wondered the same thing, in a world of all powerful robot lords, it seems all it would take is a handful of benevolent ones to make life fairly pleasant for the majority of humanity, perhaps along the lines of charities whose sole purpose is putting robots to work for the “mass of lumpen humanity”? I’ve never understood why the predictions have to be so pessimistic even granting the assumption that a handful of people own all the land in the world.
To quote the Simpsons: “…most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. ” So
Long term (100 – 200 Years), I still think the power of the nation-state will diminish against the power of multi-national corporations. (I think one you applaud up to a point.) So I do expect the corporations to start developing these armies as a way to better protect their assets against small states and maybe even take over small nations to fit the global economy. (I vote Valenzuela although Argentina seems to more likely.)
However, I do believe people are going to less war like as we have seen that most developed nations have aging populations, and seem to really hate violent revolutions.
As for the subject at hand, I had the following half baked scenario come to mind:
Suppose that Smith is right, and 75 years from now the fighting’s all done by drones and robots with precision munitions. Generally speaking, war equals conflict plus uncertainty. That is, if your capacity to wage war is clearly inferior to your adversary’s, you’ll strike a deal before a shot is fired, so war is more likely in circumstances where both sides have legitimate reasons for believing they can win. We could reach a point where this uncertainty increases substantially, because I assume the sophistication of the software running each side’s war machines becomes a primary determinant of tactical or strategic advantages in this scenario, and states will of course keep this software pretty well under wraps, so it will be difficult to determine ahead of time whose drones would win an automated dogfight.
I could imagine what results is a situation where countries build substantial fleets of drones for defense and aren’t terribly shy about using them, since the human cost is now either extremely low or actually zero, so war becomes more common but not terribly destructive, as battles take place entirely in the air (or in space) and one side or the other immediately capitulates once its drone fleet has been defeated. One other implication of this scenario is that war-making capacity and thus global military might comes down not to the 1.2 billion population of China vs. 350 million Americans, for example, but to the talent and skill of a few hundred or few thousand software and aeronautical engineers. One really smart dude switching sides could wind up altering the geopolitical balance of power for decades.