If they reach their goal, they won't need a lower class, and they can address that problem however they see fit. A soldier might refuse to fire on their own side, but an autonomous drone won't.
It is very curious to me that people think of technology in such magic way.
For those drones work you need hundreds of people to operate that, monitor, maintain, make repairs stock the warehouse with spare parts etc. Look at military, how many people they need to operate all that complex machinery.
'How about AI controlling those drones' sure but then you just move maintaince of all of it to slightly different place. Probably even sabotage of AI datacenter would be much easier than autonoums or remote drones operated by hundreds of people.
You can create warfighting machines today capable of unspeakable horrors to another person if you merely give those engineers a suburban house in northern virginia in a good school district, evidently. Now imagine a future where the offer is not only that idyllic beltway suburban experience but also the realization that not taking that offer throws you in with the dogs in the lawless parts of the country that this autocratic government authority withdrew from over lack of profit motive. You’d probably do everything in your power to keep your head down and look like a good little engineer to master so your daughters don’t have to face a roving gang of perverts.
> For those drones work you need hundreds of people to operate that, monitor, maintain, make repairs stock the warehouse with spare parts etc
Not when AI bots do all of those things. This is the point, once that is reached the working class no longer has any sway over the upper classes and can be wiped out by an autonomous drone swarm that was built by an autonomous drone factory network.
I think we lack many tools to achieve that.
Really silly example do we have autonoums drones that can turn on electrical fuse. You have hundreds of those in any factory. Or even simpler: can robot change light bulb? One can say that you do not need those in automated factory, which would meaybe the case but I think it would be much easier to have simple external light instead of equipping each automaton with their own light instead. With more more and more complex machines the maintenance of those grows rather exponentially. Add to it miniaturisation and you have modern electronic parts like SOC computers and gpus - they are very hard to rapair and most of the time just get replaced - because it is easier. Can you create autonomous factories with such technology?
I do not think so. The whole process would have to be redesigned from the bottom up. And I mean everything, gathering resources, refinement of those, packaging, transport, assembly of more complex parts, energy distribution... Everything basically to operable by not humans but by some kind of unified autonomous drones of similar design. And those drones would have to be part of the same industrial process so made and maintained with similar drones. This is not easy to achieve within bounds of our current civilisation.
Probably something as simple as regular screw would have to be redesigned or replaced. I was trying to teach my kid to tight one of those not so long enough and it is not such easy thing to do for small child. Would autonomous drone would perform better? If specialised maybe. But you can't have hundreds of specialised drone designs if you want to build whole civilisation with them. After all human beings are mostly the same and we managed to built what we have now.
and those are just the ones I know about. I'm sure the US and Chinese militaries are weighing up their options, too.
Of course, they don't need to be humanoid in the end: that just helps them maximise compatibility today. As they take over more of the process, they can specialise and scale up. Once you have robots working the entire process, the sky's the limit.
yes, I am aware. Maybe I was not able to communicate my opinion on that matter clearly, so yet me reiterate: does any of those robots can replicate? Can any of this robot survive in harsh industrial environment without maintenance for long? I.e. usually home appliances have IP code 22 [0], in industrial complexes it is IP 44 as far as I remember. Outside you need IP 65 or 66. I doubt any of those robots have anything higher then 20.
And how about batteries?
I do not think we are everywhere near self-sufficient robotics.
I don't think weatherproofing them is as much as a lift as making them work autonomously: once you have a proof of concept, it's much easier to evolve it to whatever spec you need.
For replication, probably not by themselves, but as part of an industrial system run by elites? Sure, why not? You progressively automate all the prerequisites to the manufacturing of your robots until the entire supply chain is automated. If they're unlucky, The Machine Stops [0]. If they're not... well, they won't need us.