> 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.

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233mhz 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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

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10111001 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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233mhz 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> 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.

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an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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