Slaughterbots is just the beginning; it's definitely too late to prevent that scenario now.

Why bother? For the same reason to bother with surgical assassinations if you can blanket entire regions with nuclear fireballs. Radioactive wastelands are unprofitable! This is a general problem with genocide: it only gets you land, and since the Green Revolution land is abundant. Protection rackets, on the otehr hand, are highly profitable, but only with some exclusivity; if extortionists multiply, the unique Nash equilibrium is multiple gangs that collectively demand many times the victims' total revenues, resulting in ecological collapse.

More generally, the threat of violence is only effective as a form of coercion when you can credibly withdraw the violence as a reward for compliance. Violence provides no incentive to comply to someone who believes they are just as likely to be a victim whether they comply or not.

But swarms of autonomous seek-and-destroy explosives are plausibly the most effective way to provide that surgical-assassination threat, perhaps combined with poisons, solid penetrators, and/or incendiaries. The Minority Report spiders (not yet technically feasible) or a quadcopter can be enormously more selective than a GBU-57, a Hellfire missile, or even a hand grenade, and can choose to avert their attack at the last millisecond upon the presentation of properly signed do-not-assassinate orders, even if long-distance communication is jammed.

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