It turns it into a kind of prisoner's dilemma where all guards rebelling means everyone dies, while only some guards rebelling means the guards that rebelled die while everyone else (including the billionaire) get to live

It's incredibly unethical, but in a game theory sense it seems sound. Any one guard is punished for rebelling, and even if everyone coordinates they can't do anything about it. At least if you can eliminate the obvious weak points: the collars would have to be automatically activated

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chongli an hour ago | parent [-]

The other obvious weak point is that you can’t surveil the guards 24/7 to make sure they don’t swap the live explosives collar with a placebo collar.

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mrob an hour ago | parent [-]

The obvious countermeasure is adding tamper detection to make it automatically trigger if they try.

	▲	chongli an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Right, that’s what they do in sci-fi books and movies. But then those collars magically never need batteries replaced, service, or replacement. They also don’t have any issues with false positive detonations. If the collar can be deactivated to be removed for servicing/off duty/retirement/replacement/etc then it can be hacked and replaced with a placebo.