#Air force alea jacta est bayonet software#
(The engineering difficulty is that weapons can get pretty heavy, but right now there are drones with tasers on them.) And the autonomous part would come from the software side, and software is easy enough to smuggle copies of. You can buy "consumer drones" right now, strap some kind of weapon to it and you're in business. And I don't think that's really much of a risk.ĭrones don't seem like they should be exceptionally expensive to make. Setting up a hopeless dystopia would require a narrow opportunity where they're cheap enough for the rich to do what they want but the 99% can't afford them. If the Robot Lord dystopia manages to completely crush out all hope then sure, but people wouldn't be able to get their hands on guns in a hopeless dystopia either. The thing is, if drones become really cheap, then even rebels can afford them. In the end, he did expand the short story into the novel VULCAN’S HAMMER in March and April 1960,is a nice book for boys of six or nine years old. Okay? And thanks for your willingness to read this long rather rambling letter. In other words, But only if you want it. In some ways the situation looks good, but its a complex situation and I want to discuss it with you point by point, if you will bear with me. The letter from Don Wollheim about a rewrite of VULCAN'S HAMMER to expand it to 40,000 words has reached me. In his letter to Scott Meredith replying to the notice that Don Wollheim of Ace Books wanted him to expand "Vulcan’s Hammer", PKD wrote: In his reply Dick expresses concern about writing the expansion on spec for Don Wollheim, particularly after Wollheim’s negative attitude towards Dick’s earlier expansion of "Time Pawn" into DR. This letter referred to Wollheim’s interest in having Dick do an expansion of "Vulcan’s Hammer" into a 40,000-word novel. In early January 1960 Scott Meredith forwarded a letter to Philip K. The manuscript for the short-story "Vulcan’s Hammer" was received at the SMLA on Apand the story was published in 1956 in Future Science Fiction #29. They are easier to repair and reproduce than the vulcan hammer's the drone weapon's from the sci-fi of the 50's They can use 0,5% of humans to do the job 1% of 7,000,000 are 70 millions rich enough to kill the 99% No the purpose of the 99% is to consume and live enough to make less than 1%. Hen the Age of the Gun ends, the age of freedom and dignity and equality that much of humanity now enjoys may turn out to have been a bizarre, temporary aberration. Their only hope is to catch the attention of the Robot Lords inside the cantonments, either by having enough rare talent to be admitted as a Robot Lord, or by becoming a novelty slave for a little while. They can’t farm the land or mine for minerals, because the invincible robot swarms guard all the farms and mines. Outside the gates, a teeming, ragged mass of lumpen humanity teeters on the edge of starvation. Imagine a world where gated communities have become self-contained cantonments, inside of which live the beautiful, rich, Robot Lords, served by cheap robot employees, guarded by cheap robot armies. We can carry this dystopian thought exercise through to its ultimate conclusion. It’s the Robot Lords we should be afraid of, not Skynet. We’re all worried about the day that the 1% no longer need the 99%–but what’s really scary is when they don’t fear the 99% either. Just imagine Tom Perkins with an army of cheap autonomous drones. To pay the poor, you have to tax the rich, and the Robot Lords are unlikely to stand for that. The final, last-ditch response to that contingency is income redistribution – if our future is to get paid to sit on a beach, so be it.īut with robot armies, that’s just not going to work. Although few people have been focusing on robot armies, many people have been asking what happens if robots put most of us out of a job. Where this scenario really gets scary is when it combines with economic inequality. The day that robot armies become more cost-effective than human infantry is the day when People Power becomes obsolete.The rabble may think whatever they please, but the Robot Lords will have the guns. Omeday soon, autonomous drone militaries become cheaper than infantry at any scale. Or to put it another way: the end of the Age of the Gun. I’m talking about the coming obsolescence of the gun-wielding human infantryman as a weapon of war. It is also a change to which almost no one is paying attention. It is a change that potentially smashes our institutions and warps our society beyond recognition.
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The human race is on the brink of momentous and dire change. I have a new article in Quartz, about how cheap drone warfare might alter human political institutions for the worse.