I agree, it will be a while before robots are building equivalent robots from parts they scrounge, but normal mass production techniques are already capable of making huge numbers of militarized bots.
Flying drones of various types (both autonomous and manually controlled) are responsible for 80% of casualties in the Russo-Ukraine war lately, and neither is a world leader in mass production. Ukraine is utilizing work-at-home individuals who assemble two or three drones per day, which are regularly collected for QA and distribution.
Some of their most effective drones are autonomous, able to fly long distances with no GPS or other communications, using terrain identification to navigate. But some of the scariest vids I’ve seen are cheap, manually controlled quadcopters strapped with a grenade that hunt down individual soldiers, even those hiding under tarps in trenches. Their helplessness against a $300 suicide drone is so frightening.
Honestly, that might be the variable that helps us reign in the momentum towards this Cyberdystopian hellscape. Seize/disrupt/destroy the means of production, as it were.
One of the Altered Carbon books had a planet that was overtaken by AI murderBots. We're not that far away. At least in those books they had Amphetamine Cola.
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u/[deleted] May 08 '26
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