A lot of modern military tech is built around killing less and less, only as much as necessary but the fear density (fear per victim) keeps going up. My guess is that the lack of deaths makes each death more significant and visible. It becomes much easier to connect to those deaths than to the 140000 nameless Japanese citizen living in Hiroshima who died from a single bomb.
In 10-20 years, "small killer robot swarm" will be achievable for a single individual. It won't be as terrible as a world war, but I'm not looking forward at extremists randomly blowing up people with lightly modified COTS drones.
There's a Black Mirror episode on this IIRC.
The same issue applies to non-lethal weapons. In theory they represent great moral progress, but by reducing the stakes their use for totalitarian repression becomes less controversial and no longer produces martyrs.
Much like the 1976 movie “Drive-In” showed how an airplane can crash into a skyscraper, such inspiration is misguided.
“Drive-In” IMDB: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0074433/?ref_=fn_al_tt_0
Are you saying that the movie "Drive-In" inspired people to fly planes into skyscrapers?
Are you saying that the movie "Drive-In" inspired people to fly planes into skyscrapers? Are you also saying that people shouldn't create terrible acts in fiction because they might inspire people to perform them in real-life?
Power is going to become even more hidden than it already is; not only will powerful people need to hide from the public, they will need to hide from each other.
