One potential risk of developing general-purpose robots is that they could greatly reduce the friction required to establish a totalitarian regime. If there were millions+ of general-purpose robots deployed in the world (in households, nursing homes, construction sites, etc.), and someone were able to hack / take control of a large fraction of them, they could easily create a repressive state through telling the robots to oppress humans (e.g., arm themselves with weapons and threaten humans).
(To clarify, I do not mean “general-purpose robots” as a synonym for ASI. I define "general-purpose robots" as robots capable of learning human-like physical tasks on the fly, such as being placed on a worksite and quickly learning new construction tasks. This ability to quickly learn new tasks could make them dangerous if they were compromised — for example, a hacker might teach such robots to pick up weapons and intimidate people.)
When I tried to find assessments of this risk pathway online, however, I found very little; there is some discussion of the ethics of developing autonomous lethal weapons, but none on the ethics of developing general-purpose robots more broadly.
For this reason, does anyone happen to know: i) what the mainstream AI safety community’s view on this issue is — i.e., whether the cyberhacking of general-purpose robots is considered a serious risk -- and if so, whether it is ethical to work on general-purpose robotics; or ii) any good online discussions that examine this specific issue? More generally, I feel like there has been relatively little discussion in the AI safety community about the ethics of working on robotics, so any relevant resources would be deeply appreciated.
One potential risk of developing general-purpose robots is that they could greatly reduce the friction required to establish a totalitarian regime. If there were millions+ of general-purpose robots deployed in the world (in households, nursing homes, construction sites, etc.), and someone were able to hack / take control of a large fraction of them, they could easily create a repressive state through telling the robots to oppress humans (e.g., arm themselves with weapons and threaten humans).
(To clarify, I do not mean “general-purpose robots” as a synonym for ASI. I define "general-purpose robots" as robots capable of learning human-like physical tasks on the fly, such as being placed on a worksite and quickly learning new construction tasks. This ability to quickly learn new tasks could make them dangerous if they were compromised — for example, a hacker might teach such robots to pick up weapons and intimidate people.)
When I tried to find assessments of this risk pathway online, however, I found very little; there is some discussion of the ethics of developing autonomous lethal weapons, but none on the ethics of developing general-purpose robots more broadly.
For this reason, does anyone happen to know: i) what the mainstream AI safety community’s view on this issue is — i.e., whether the cyberhacking of general-purpose robots is considered a serious risk -- and if so, whether it is ethical to work on general-purpose robotics; or ii) any good online discussions that examine this specific issue? More generally, I feel like there has been relatively little discussion in the AI safety community about the ethics of working on robotics, so any relevant resources would be deeply appreciated.