It’s not a question of whether the robots could attack and kill people, it’s a question of whether they could defend the dictator’s interests. In a protracted guerrilla war against survivalist Americans with machine guns and large stashes of preserved food, not to mention access to tons of technology? I doubt it.

It’s not very difficult to attach a hand grenade (or even a pipe bomb) to a quadcopter drone and use it to attack a military checkpoint or a politician’s entourage. It’s simply much harder to defend than it is to attack nowadays, and centralized power is offset by scattered, decentralized resistance.

Finally, you might be able to convince a unit based in one state to attack another, but you’re unlikely to have the loyalty of all generals in a civil war.

This is actually something I've thought a good bit about. As robots become more militaristic, an armed populace becomes less of a threat to their government. There's a good sci-fi story in there somewhere.

I disagree. I think robots will actually decentralize power. The key to all of this is software which, as we’ve seen, is effectively impossible to lock up. So I think what you’ll see is the proliferation of cheap, effective drones armed with explosives that are extremely difficult to defend against.

We’re seeing this play out in the Middle East, most recently with a drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil production.

I definitely support civilian ownership of self-defense robots. But for them to be affordable (or maybe even possible), there needs to be substantial production of non-defense humanoid robots like robot maids to build up the supply chain. Even then humanoid robots have a lot more moving parts so they'll never be as cheap as today's civilian drones.

It's not so much the murder-bots, as it is the murder-bots in combination with the farming-bots, builder-bots, and general servant-bots.

If the rich and powerful consolidate autonomous labor under their control, this removes the self-interest of keeping people around, and would allow them to unleash whatever level of violence is needed, all the way up to genocide.