if one groups gives up the arms race of ultimate coercion tools or loses a conflict then they become subservient to the winners terms and norms (japan, germany, even Britain and France plus all the smaller states in between are subservient to the US)
Who could possibly have predicted that the autonomous, invincible doomsday weapon we created for the good of humanity might one day be used against us?
Surely this applies to how individuals consider states, too. States generally wield violence, especially in the context of "national security", to preserve the security of the state, not its own people. I trust my own state (the usa) to wield the weapons it funds and purchases and manufactures about as much as I trust a baby with knives taped to its hands. I can't think of anything on earth that puts me in as much danger as the pentagon does. Nukes might protect the existence of the federal government but they put me in danger. Our response to 9/11 just created more people that hate my guts and want to kill me (and who can blame them?). No, I have no desire to live in a death cult anymore, nor do I trust the people who gravitate towards the use of militaries to not act in the most collectively suicidal way imaginable at the first opportunity.
Possibly true, but the state is also responsible for the policing that means the pentagon is your greatest danger.
Great question! To add my two cents. I think many people here is missing an uncomfortable truth that given enough motivation to kill other humans, people will re-purpose any tool into a killing tool.
Just have a look at the battlefields in the Ukraine where the most fearsome killing tool is a FPV drone. A thing that just few years back was universally considered a toy.
Whether we like it or not any tool can be a killing tool
The nature of the world is at our finger tips, we are the dominant species here. Unfortunately we are still apes.
The enforcement of cooperation into a society does not always require a sanctioning body. Seeing it from a skynet-military perspective is one sided but unfortunately a consequence of poppers tolerance paradox. If you uphold (eg. pacifistic or tolerant) ideals, that require cooperation of others, you cannot tolerate opposition or you might loose your ideal.
That said, common sense can be a tool to achive the same. Just look at the common and hopefully continuous ostracism of nuclear weapons.
IMO its a matter of zeitgeist and education too and un/fortunately, AI hits right in that spot.
The list of things states have attempted to deploy offensively is nearly endless. Modern operations research arguably came out of the British empire attempting (succeeding) to weaponise mathematics. If you give a state fertiliser it makes bombs, if you give it nuclear power it makes bombs, if you give it drones it makes bombs, if you give it advanced science or engineering of any form it makes bombs. States are the most ingenious system for turning things into bombs that we've ever invented; in the grand old days of siege warfare they even managed to weaponise corpses, refuse and junk because it turned out lobbing that stuff at the enemy was effective. The entire spectrum of technology from nothing to nanotech, hurled at enemies to kill them.
We'd all love if states commit to not doing evil but the state is the entity most active at figuring out how to use new tech X for evil.