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points by oersted 3 days ago | 0 comments

Kings didn’t have robots that gather resources and make more robots, that make killer robots, exponentially.

Although actually: that’s kind of what humans are… Hmm.

I suppose humans can’t make better and better humans, that’s the difference.

Although actually: that’s what technological progress is… Hmm.

> Kings didn’t have robots that gather resources and make more robots, that make killer robots, exponentially.

We still live in a finite, constrained, physical world that has to obey the laws of physics. We have a looong time before we get fully autonomous self replicating decentralised robot armies.

I think people conflate the real world, sci fi and their wet dreams a bit too much.

We're at the "this thing is kinda useful sometimes but still mostly annoying" part, not at the "skynet in 48hrs" part

[–] surfaceofthesun 3 days ago

Reiterating this sentiment from a recent episode of the Normal Guys Podcast: Even if you imagine that driverless trucks become a solved problem, just pumping fuel from those trucks into tanks for backup generators at the data centers is a long way off.

[–] meindnoch 3 days ago

>We have a looong time before we get fully autonomous self replicating decentralised robot armies.

We do have them actually. It's called: an engineered virus.

[–] 10111001 3 days ago

> We're at the "this thing is kinda useful sometimes but still mostly annoying" part, not at the "skynet in 48hrs" part

Without some really fundamental social and economic reform, I'm anticipating a squeeze as automation increases, that ends with something like robot armies finally reducing the working class to barbarism, by blocking access to all the valuable resources.

And it will be some oligarch(s) commanding it, not some rogue autonomous AI.

So not "skynet in 48hrs," but capitalism taken to its logical extreme.

[–] 233mhz 3 days ago

Half of Europe is having protests and riot right now because they understand their future is fucked, if it keeps going that way I have no doubt it'll get worse, people who have nothing to lose won't be stopped by robots

[–] 10111001 3 days ago

> Half of Europe is having protests and riot right now because they understand their future is fucked, if it keeps going that way I have no doubt it'll get worse, people who have nothing to lose won't be stopped by robots

I'm not so sure. The front line in Ukraine seems to be pretty good at stopping people with access to military technology. I don't think an untrained and uncoordinated mass of civilians could do a better job, especially against future tech that's more sophisticated and available in larger quantities.

As military tech gets more and more inhuman, the power of masses of bodies is likely to decrease, and there will be even fewer opportunities for moral qualms to give civilians a chance.

[–] chasd00 3 days ago

armies are made of humans though, if came down to human vs ai then i suspect many humans in the armed forces would switch sides. Their neck and livelihood is on the line too.

[–] 233mhz 3 days ago

You can do a lot of damage without much gear. Train tracks, power infra, data infra, most factories, are basically free kills, they're safe because we're in peaceful societies in a peaceful era, things can move quickly if the social contract is broken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Metcalf_sniper_attack

Some dude in France just carried an attack with a ww2 sten gun, there are hundreds if not thousands of AK47s, grenades, etc. available on the black market. You can buy drone ready fiber optics cans on aliexpress, thermal/night vision cameras, etc.

Military tech is good but you still need people to follow orders, I very much doubt they'd side with the sociopath tech execs, nor their governments.

[–] martin-t 3 days ago

Train tracks are actually very hard to sabotage, the US did a lot of research on that during WW2. You can take out a huge chunk of track before anything derails. Sabotaging the safety equipment is easier but with today's tech you can switch to GPS trackers on every train.

Data centers might be easier but

a) Will have a lot of security. It's much easier for somebody with money and connections (and now even intelligence+knowledge) to assembly a defense force than it's for a ordinary people to learn how to make proper molotovs, let alone learn how to shoot. And they will know when it's coming because even today's LLMs are good enough to surveil the entire internet.

b) I don't think they burn that well. When Ukraine strikes oil depots or warehouses, you can easily find images of them burning. I haven't looked particularly hard but images of droned data centers burning are quite a bit rarer. (I haven't seen a single one before actively searching, they do burn, but that's with military grade explosives.)

[–] 10111001 3 days ago

> Some dude in France just carried an attack with a ww2 sten gun, there are hundreds if not thousands of AK47s, grenades, etc. available on the black market. You can buy drone ready fiber optics cans on aliexpress, thermal/night vision cameras, etc.

"Hundreds if not thousands"? That may be enough for "rando attention-grabbing but ineffectual terrorist attack," but we're talking about violent resistance to a fully-automated tech bro.

> Military tech is good but you still need people to follow orders, I very much doubt they'd side with the sociopath tech execs, nor their governments.

I already addressed that, and that may not be true in the future:

>> As military tech gets more and more inhuman, the power of masses of bodies is likely to decrease, and there will be even fewer opportunities for moral qualms to give civilians a chance.

Say you have some area you want to exclude a desperate mass of civilians from. Technically you could do that today: just stick a guy in a pill box with a machine gun, and slaughter them like it's World War I. But said guy might have a problem with that, and refuse to pull the trigger (or stop after gunning down a few hundred).

An automated AI machine gun in the same pill box will have no such qualms, and will mercilessly gun down civilians to the last bullet. And that gets more and more true the more and more you automate combat. Maybe a technician wouldn't setup the machine gun in that place or reload it after what happened, but that goes away if setup and resupply is automated, etc.

[–] ashkankiani 3 days ago

If you haven't learned anything about the state of asymmetric warfare, an autonomous robot is going to be very expensive and timely to build and will be disabled by a $30 drone with C4 attached to it with sufficiently good skills at dodging. I'm assuming that we're in your supposed fantasy world where robotics has progressed to that point, meaning that the people opposing the robots also have access to much better drone software too, to keep things fair.

[–] meindnoch 3 days ago

How do you do asymmetric warfare against autonomous self-replicating killer nanobots? In other words: AI-engineered bioweapons (with AI-engineered antidotes for the rich).

[–] ashkankiani 3 days ago

I'm not sure, why don't you finish your scifi novel and tell us. I'm assuming this is part of the plot?

[–] kaffekaka 3 days ago

I could not find this in the S-1?

[–] meindnoch 3 days ago

Learn to read between the lines then.

[–] 233mhz 3 days ago

Yeah and what if superman just shows up with spiderman and captain america, uh, didn't think about that?

This is pure sci-fi...

[–] meindnoch 3 days ago

By "self-replicating killer nanobots" I meant "viruses". We already have the tech to engineer them, even without AI.

[–] chasd00 3 days ago

> autonomous self-replicating killer nanobots?

this conversation is making my day!

[–] meindnoch 3 days ago

What if I told you we already have the tech to manufacture these autonomous self-replicating killer nanobots?

We just call them "virus".

[–] ashkankiani 3 days ago

I agree that viruses are tiny machines, but I disagree that we can manufacture them to that level right now. But that is a valid concern that near future it could be possible. But why would billionaires want to kill everyone, exactly?

I feel like I still don't understand your logical endgame.

[–] meindnoch 3 days ago

>But why would billionaires want to kill everyone, exactly?

Most billionaires probably wouldn't. But the whole premise of A(S)I is that all it takes is a single billionaire with access to sufficient compute to do it.

Maybe they wanted to save the planet by culling the human population? Wouldn't be the weirdest thing the "effective altruists" (and their "rationalist" ilk) believed in.

[–] ashkankiani 2 days ago

It doesn't take a billionaire to do it at this point. In case you've forgotten, there are still plenty of very intelligent humans around. All it takes is one intelligent misanthrope with sufficient access to the resources (not even that expensive relatively, likely not more than $1 million in tools, but i would guess far less is possible), to pull off an attack like that.

I guess billionaires are more malignant/misanthropic/sociopathic/narcissistic than most, and so I could see them being a higher risk factor.

I was kind of joking with you before, but tbh we actually are closer aligned on this than I expected. Including how strange the "effective altruists" are. I was expecting you to be talking about a much more far fetched scenario based on the language in the parent comment.

[–] LinXitoW 3 days ago

There's this documentary about how badly that can go. Called Horizon Zero Dawn.

On the other hand, that way we'll finally get to "reconnect" with nature...forcefully.

[–] elzbardico 3 days ago

The raw resources you need to build robots are constrained and have a very very long and complicated supply chain.

In the second world war, Germany had impressive science and technology, but, as Stalin said, quantity is a quality in itself, and The Third Reich found out that it was an impossible task to get the metals and fuels for their advanced jet engines, rockets and U2 boats, when between then and those resources there were masses of tens of millions of under-equipped and malnourished soviet soldiers fighting what was an existencial war for them.

[–] geraneum 3 days ago

Neither do we have those now. Also in the future, we’ll have opposing nations having their own robot army. It’s not as simplistic as some make it out to be.

[–] jpadkins 3 days ago

3% is the target. 3% of colonists fought in the US revolutionary war. You need a majority to support you, and 3% to fight.

[–] deepwoods 3 days ago

I suspect any intelligence powerful enough to pull this off would quickly realize that it had no use for the oligarchs, perhaps even more quickly than the oligarchs realize they have no use for us.

[–] oersted 3 days ago

Well sure, who says that the oligarchs are human.