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Robots will change the relationship between populations and power. You needed populations to drive your economy and man your army. At the very least, no man ruled alone--your court could always overthrow you.

A robot army could be built to obey only one. And a factory of robots can make wealth without people.

Even assuming we solve the weak control problem, we are about to enable unprecedented capacity for absolute power.

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There's precedent for something like this in the UK, and it's not a happy one. There was a moment in history where landowners who had a lot of sitting tenants on land realised they could make more by converting them into large sheep farms and removing the tenants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances

But in democratic states you still have one dispossessed person, one vote. So the robot controllers have all the power, until each election when all the angry people vote for unhinged assholes like trump (or not all, as the case may be).

> So the robot controllers have all the power, until each election when all the angry people vote for unhinged assholes like trump

So the solution is to give robots the rights to vote?!

This only holds if the democracy owns and controls a robot army bigger than potential usurpers' armies.

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