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When it eventually happens, society will have to change. viva la revolution baby!

• felipemnoa 15y ago
  This. You do not want to have too many poor people or somebody will take advantage of this and use them to overthrow whomever is in power and put himself in power.
  • ebiester 15y ago
    Tanks make this a difficult proposition.
    • zizee 15y ago
      Only if you have brainwashed the tank crews (which admittedly does happen in the military).
      • billywitchdr 15y ago
        In this scenario, I'd imagine the tank crews to be automated too.
        • zizee 15y ago
          Yes, this would be a big problem if warfare was to become fully automated. I guess we have to hope that when the ability to completely automate warfare that the people in power aren't genocidal sociopaths.
      • zizee 15y ago
        In this situation a tank crew would be attacking their fellow country men, so one would hope hope they would be questioning their orders to fire on civilians. If they didn't question the orders you would have to question whether they were brainwashed into thinking the fellow country men were deserving of attack. A lot of militaries train their soldiers to not question the orders of their superiors. I believe the US military does allow a solider to question orders, but I would expect that it is not encouraged.
        • ck2 15y ago
          Police fire on and kill civilians every day in the USA, why would someone in the military behave any differently if ordered to do so? They've already agreed to obey to kill at someone else's request.
        • zizee 15y ago
          ck2 wrote: Police fire on and kill civilians every day in the USA, why would someone in the military behave any differently if ordered to do so? They've already agreed to obey to kill at someone else's request. I think we are in agreement. I was just trying to clarify my comment above because I was confused as to why my previous comment had been down voted. +1 for you :-)
        • nknight 15y ago
          US law in this area is largely illusory. It makes reference to "lawful orders", but provides little guidance on what would constitute an "unlawful order". Getting it wrong means prison, and getting it right can still mean prison -- the last case I heard about, the military court basically said "the order is lawful unless you are told otherwise by a superior officer", making the entire question moot.
        • TeMPOraL 15y ago
          You don't have to look too hard for a real-life example of this scenario. Just look at what happened in Libya and other countries affected by the Arab Uprising - how military behaved in different countries. They're facing this dilemma right now.
        • forensic 15y ago
          The precedent has already been set in the biggest country in the world. The Tiananmen square massacre was committed by the current Chinese government. Do you think they've grown a conscience in the last 20 years? Or does killing over a thousand (1,000) civilians agitating for Democracy just make it that much easier to kill a hundred thousand (100,000) civilians later on?
    • deleted 15y ago
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    • nTsplnk 15y ago
      Yes, if the tanks are enemies. But what if there are two powers, each with tanks? What he is suggesting is, if there are two rich people, both with enormous power, they will ally themselves with the poor to gain an advantage over the other. These propositions of the rich getting robots and killing all the poor are so absurd and exaggerated.
    • deleted 15y ago
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• forensic 15y ago
  This is the classic view, but things have changed. Robots do not just make better workers, they are also better warriors. How many Chinese peasants does it take to kill a single UAV? How many protestors can modern riot police crowd control using sophisticated psychological warfare combined with advanced nonlethal weaponry? Once the violent, unskilled, uneducated, unmoneyed lawbreakers are rounded up by the riot police and thrown in jail... then what? The Chinese are not shy about executions. How about humane lethal injections for everyone?
  • zizee 15y ago
    I guess it could happen gradually (as these things usually do). But the original poster was talking about 50% of the population (500 million people in China alone). I have a hard time believing anyone could think that killing off half a billion people would be the way to go (rather than trying to work change into your social structure). It just sounds too James Bond villanesque. Also, if 50% of people are unemployed there will be a lot of people who are employed who sympathise with them, so we are really talking about 80% plus.
    • deleted 15y ago
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    • jamieb 15y ago
      I have a hard time believing anyone could think that killing off half a billion people would be the way to go ... It just sounds too James Bond villanesque. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#Number_of_deaths http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#Number_of_deaths http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_an... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history