Is it ethical to work on general-purpose robots given the risk of totalitarianism?

By themasterchief166 @ 2026-08-10T06:41 (+8)

One potential risk of developing general-purpose robots is that they could greatly reduce the friction required to establish a totalitarian regime. If robots became physically capable of manufacturing additional copies of themselves, a small group of bad actors could potentially manufacture millions of general-purpose robots and use them to establish a repressive state — for example, by arming them and using them to coerce the population.

(To clarify, I do not mean “general-purpose robots” as a synonym for ASI. I define "general-purpose robots" as robots capable of i) learning human-like physical tasks on the fly, such as being placed on a worksite and quickly learning new construction tasks and ii) manufacturing more copies of themselves when instructed. They would not have to self-replicate autonomously; it would be enough for them to have the physical dexterity and manufacturing capabilities to build additional robots when directed by humans.)

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 it is ethical to work on general-purpose robotics, given its ability to increase the baseline risk of sliding into totalitarianism; and 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 appreciated.