Excuse me? You are taking the number of military-age males and using it as the number of soldiers!
Yes!
The actual US armed forces are a few million. 5% would be a much better estimate.
If the question here is "How many people are currently in the military" my figure is wrong. However, that's not the question. The question is "In the event that a robot army tries to take over the American population, how many American soldiers might there be to defend America?" You're estimating in a different context than the one in my comment.
This aside, you are ignoring that "lethal autonomy" is nowhere near the same thing as "operational autonomy"
Actually, if you're defining "operational autonomy" as "how many people it takes to run weapons", I did address that when I said "I'm not sure how many maintenance people and logistics people it would require, but even if we double that .22%, we still have only .44%." If you have better estimates, would you share them?
How? "Do as I say, or else I'll order you to fire up the drones on your base and have them shoot you!"
Method A. They could wait until the country is in turmoil and prey on people's irrationality like Hitler did.
Method B. They could get those people to operate the drones under the guise of fighting for a good cause. Then they could threaten to use the army to kill anyone who opposes them. This doesn't have to be sudden - it could happen quite gradually, as a series of small and oppressive steps and rules wrapped in doublespeak that eventually lead up to complete tyranny. If people don't realize that most other people disagree with the tyrant, they will feel threatened and probably comply in order to survive.
Method C. Check out the Milgram experiment. Those people didn't even need to be coerced to apply lethal force. It's a lot easier than you think.
Method D. If they can get just a small group to operate a small number of drones, they can coerce a larger group of people to operate more drones. With the larger group of people operating drones, they can coerce even more people, and so on.
Why will that work better with drones than with rifles?
This all depends on the ratio of people it takes to operate the weapons vs. number of people the weapons can subdue. Your perception appears to be that predator drones require more people to run them than a fighter aircraft. My perception is that it doesn't matter how many people it takes to operate a predator drone because war technology is likely to be optimized further than it is today, and if it is possible to decrease the number of people it requires to build/maintain/run/etc. the killer robots significantly below the number of people it would take to get the same amount of firepower otherwise, then of course they can take over a population more easily.
A high firepower to human resource ratio means takeovers would work better.
A lethally-autonomous robot is just a weapon whose operator is well out of range at the moment of killing.
That's not what Suarez says. Even if he's wrong do you deny that it's likely that technology will advance to the point where people can make robots capable of killing without a human making the decision? That's what this conversation is about. Don't let us get all mixed up like Eliezer warns us about in 37 ways words can be wrong. If we're talking about robots that can kill without a human's decision, those are a threat, and could potentially reduce the human resources-to-firepower ratio enough to threaten democracy. If you want to disagree with me about what words I should use to speak about this, that's great. In that case, though, I'd like to know where your credible sources are so that I can read authoritative definitions please.
and you still have to convince the people doing the work that it needs to be done.
Hitler.
Milgram experiment.
Number of sociopaths: 1 in 20.
Is rationality taught in school?: No.
Methods A, B, C and D
What prevents these methods from being used with rifles? What is special about robots in this context?
Even if he's wrong do you deny that it's likely that technology will advance to the point where people can make robots capable of killing without a human making the decision?
No, we already have those. The decision to kill has nothing to do with it. The decisions of where to put the robot, and its ammunition, and the fuel, and everything else it needs, so that it's in a position to make the decision to kill, is what we cannot ye...
A new TED talk video just came out by Daniel Suarez, author of Daemon, explaining how autonomous combat drones with a capability called "lethal autonomy" pose a threat to democracy. Lethal autonomy is what it sounds like - the ability of a robot to kill a human without requiring a human to make the decision.
He explains that a human decision-maker is not a necessity for combat drones to function. This has potentially catastrophic consequences, as it would allow a small number of people to concentrate a very large amount of power, ruining the checks and balances of power between governments and their people and the checks and balances of power between different branches of government. According to Suarez, about 70 countries have begun developing remotely piloted drones (like predator drones), the precursor to killer robots with lethal autonomy.
Daniel Suarez: The kill decision shouldn't belong to a robot
One thing he didn't mention in this video is that there's a difference in obedience levels between human soldiers and combat drones. Drones are completely obedient but humans can throw a revolt. Because they can rebel, human soldiers provide some obstacles to limit the power that would-be tyrants could otherwise obtain. Drones won't provide this type of protection whatsoever. Obviously, relying on human decision making is not perfect. Someone like Hitler can manage to convince people to make poor ethical choices - but still, they need to be convinced, and that requirement may play a major role in protecting us. Consider this - it's unthinkable that today's American soldiers might suddenly decide this evening to follow a tyrannical leader whose goal is to have total power and murder all who oppose. It is not, however, unthinkable at all that the same tyrant, if empowered by an army of combat drones, could successfully launch such an attack without risking a mutiny. The amount and variety of power grabs a tyrant with a robot army of sufficient power can get away with is unlimited.
Something else he didn't mention is that because we can optimize technologies more easily than we can optimize humans, it may be possible to produce killer robots in less time than it takes to build armies of human soldiers and with less expense than training and paying those soldiers. Considering the salaries and benefits paid to soldiers and the 18 year wait time on human development, it is possible that an overwhelmingly large army of killer robots could be built more quickly than human armies and with fewer resources.
Suarez's solution is to push for legislation that makes producing robots with lethal autonomy illegal. There are, obviously, pros and cons to this method. Another method (explored in Daemon) is that if the people have 3-D printers, then the people may be able to produce comparable weapons which will then check and balance their government's power. This method has pros and cons as well. I came up with a third method which is here. I think it's better than the alternatives but I would like more feedback.
As far as I know, no organization, not even MIRI (I checked), is dedicated to preventing the potential political disasters caused by near-term tool AI (MIRI is interested in the existential risks posed by AGI). That means it's up to us - the people - to develop our understanding of this subject and spread the word to others. Of all the forums on the internet, LessWrong is one of the most knowledgeable when it comes to artificial intelligence, so it's a logical place to fire up a discussion on this. I searched LessWrong for terms like "checks and balances" and "Daemon" and I just don't see evidence that we've done a group discussion on this issue. I'm starting by proposing and exploring some possible solutions to this problem and some pros and cons of each.
To keep things organized, let's put each potential solution, pro and con into a separate comment.