Roboautarchy

The drone warlord has little need for peasants

One of the current linchpins of societal niceness is that it’s hard to coercively extract intellectual work, and advancing technology is largely intellectual. If all you want is gold, dug out of them there hills, you can press slaves into the mines and force them to meet a quota via fire and lash. But if you want to be militarily relevant, you need complex top-of-the-tech-tree materiel like aircraft carriers, each itself made of a thousand difficult fiddly tech pieces which each need entire industries behind them. There is no mountain cave you can press slaves into at gunpoint and then receive an aircraft carrier.¹

No dictator can rule alone. He² is dependent on various other people to manage various sectors of a country. These “selectorate” are themselves ruled by monetary self-interest, perceived legitimacy, the ineffable bonds of human fellowship, and naked fear. The default emergent structure of human organization appears to be feudalism, all the way down.

But humans can’t yet purchase personal security beyond distance and body armor and bodyguards. A billion dollars is an inconceivable wealth disparity, and, if a billionaire CEO president is sitting in a room with some random military private with a gun, one of them has the ability to kill the other.

This is a somewhat egalitarian game-state, in truth! In our modern era, guns are a great equalizer. It used to be the case that if some samurai in armor decided to start slaughtering people in a village, there wasn’t a ton the village could do about that.

With recent technological progress, we’re on the verge of RETVRNing to a more brutal era.

It used to be the case that military might was mostly comprised of people. Some President and/or Congress decided the country would go to war, they tell the Generals to mobilize the specialized warfighter class to go make that happen, and the Generals order all of the military folks who’ve trained on the war machines, to go wage war. Then, after a series of logistical and tactical decisions are made, various staff are pushing the “Launch Missile” buttons on their battleships, and many teenagers are holding guns and pulling triggers.

People bring all kinds of logistical problems, and, people also contain moral checksums within them. If tomorrow somehow both Congress and the President decided we were going to genocide Africa “just because, lmao”,

then it’s unlikely that the military would uncomplicatedly carry out that command. Despite the military’s emphasis on quick obedience, we do have a few historical lessons around “it is important to refuse an unlawful order” which have made it into the curriculum. You would still face resistance, if you tried to order a genocide.

A billionaire who buys himself an air force of gun-drones with ethnicity-recognizing software, does not have this issue.

“Drones need upkeep”, you argue. “There will still be technical staff necessary”. Yes, agreed. For now. Repair and maintenance are also obvious high-priority targets for automation. And there’s no law of physics which says machines cannot automate their own maintenance.

We are not talking about whether this can happen, we are talking about when.

1. I assume.

2. There has not to my knowledge been a female dictator—yet! #feminism #girlboss