If a general lives in the penthouse at the top of a skyscraper, and maybe has a few thousand people who support him, nukes are not going to help deal with revolutionaries on the bottom floor. They are too indiscriminate and can't be used against close up targets.

Whereas a general with a drone swarm and a few thousand supporters might be able to suppress a city. Fortunately a little far fetched, but what was impossible with nukes is only impractical with drones.

This is well put. There is also the idea that as armies got MI-24s/AH-64s, etc, opposing forces got Stingers/Iglas. Perhaps it will play out in a way where once armies get drones, OpFor gets counters - jamming / hacking / EM / whatever.

The world made it through the cold war without major disaster, but it is easy to imagine history taking a different path, so I don't think that this is a comforting comparison.

Also, nuclear weapons can't be used 'a little bit' but killer robots can be -- it is much less clear where we draw the line. It seems likely that their use will be normalized/entrenched before we figure that out.

Though I hope that you're right.

Sufficiently advanced robots would leave a lot more of value behind than a nuke which makes deploying them much less costly to the person that wants to actually control the territory.

It's a much harder weapon to control via regulation and treaties than nuclear weapons: there is no nuclear material required to hook guns up to computers en masse in factories, let alone improvisationally. Once this cat is really out of the bag, everyone who wants it will have it.

Manufacturing chips is an extremely complicated process and requires thousands of specialists from multiple different disciplines to cooperate. Building a new fab costs billions and the buildings are extremely sensitive for damage.

I think one of the reasons why the west wants to block mainland China from manufacturing chips is to prevent them from building a robot army.

It's true that building the chips is hard, but making it hard to buy general purpose small computers, or digital camera sensors suitable for vision, or rotor blades, or batteries, or antennas, is also going to be very difficult. Proliferation has already happened.

Maybe cheap LIDAR will be something we can keep a lid on? But regular vision is still likely pretty good for lining up a shot or finding a face.

> but making it hard to buy general purpose small computers [...] is also going to be very difficult

Just ban general purpose computers that allow running arbitrary unsigned code. I'm sure lots of governments and corporations would be happy to get on board that one, and many end-users wouldn't notice.

A cure worse than the disease. Also wouldn't stop the military from building up a drone army and then someone within it choosing to go rogue and take it with them. It only ensures that no one else can stop them.

I think the parent post agreed with you and was just being facetious -- 'just ban general purpose computing' isn't very likely to be a popular sentiment on hn!

I hope so as well ;)

In a war situation, likely supply chains will be disrupted, so the regime will have to use whatever it has in the country. There are chips in circulation, but each different chip needs different drivers, has different performance characteristics, etc. E.g. I read that Tesla changed a bunch of chips due to the current shortage and they had to write new drivers for them. That's one chip they had to replace.

Of course you could make your population turn over their old smartphones, remove IR filtering from the camera lenses and solder them to a robot body. But this will slow down manufacturing as it isn't well suited to mass manufacturing processes. Furthermore, it's a limited resource so you might have to deal with attempts by your enemy to exhaust it. Last, you'd be limited in fanciness, as in your robots can only process limited amounts. The best place to source the computation needed for really "smart" robot soldiers would probably be self driving cars as they have the AI processing power needed.

Sadly you can't make a general-purpose chip that only refuses to perform military tasks and otherwise functions normally.

The land to be ruled by said rogue general will not be a radioactive wasteland.

Seeing AI weapons as a weapon of mass destruction is a trending discourse.