China has been deploying humanoid robots to its border with Vietnam [1]. This is just the beginning; expect this trend to proliferate to other countries over time and for the robots to become much more capable.

This raises a lot of obvious concerns but one that jumps out to me is the removal of the general public from its own security. Security is being outsourced away from the group who ostensibly wants to be secured and at the sole discretion of a class of people codified into law as “above everyone else” (ie. the State).

This is happening within the broader context of general automation where factories are being automated top to bottom in more and more industries. The general public has less influence in society at an unprecedented scale.

In AI circles there’s always been the concept of the “alignment problem” where researchers are worried about advanced AI being aligned with humans but until we can figure out alignment between groups of us there’s no real “extra” threat posed by advanced AI for the vast majority of people.