I doubt it'll work this time though though, since we are beginning to make big strides in automating violence too. The people who own the boxes will own the murderbots too.

You probably don't even need automated violence for this anyway. High quality cheap pervasive surveillance allows you to deploy a small group of thugs to crush any smaller movements before they get large enough to be a real threat. Kill bots would make it even easier, more efficient and even less limited of course but I don't think it changes the equation much.

They always owned the police anyway.

True but police are people too with their own expectations and morality and the number of police required to suppress a population is relatively large.

There's still enormous room for abuse, but automating suppression drops even the imperfect checks that we have on the power of the few to oppress the many

It's a historical fact that the police (or police-adjacent things before they were called the police) have always been quite willing to crack the skulls of workers.

  > police-adjacent things before they were called the police

It seems that you have some history you could share, I would love to hear it.

> True but police are people too

That can be solved, too. Some other (now deleted?) comment mentioned the inevitability of killbots, which will have to be created and deployed for this dystopia to stick. The elite living in Elysium will need a controllable, automate-able, way to keep the underclass in line, one that doesn't involve less-reliable human enforcers.

>The elite living in Elysium will need a controllable, automate-able, way to keep the underclass in line, one that doesn't involve less-reliable human enforcers.

I thought the rich elites living in Elysium had to completely depend on one weird mercenary dude on Earth with a shoulder-fired rocket launcher that somehow had rockets that could achieve escape velocity in order to protect Elysium from spaceships with illegal immigrants attempting to invade and use their magic healing machines.