Consider the parallel with multicellularity in nature. If you stop to think about it, multicellularity is deeply bizarre. If it had not yet happened, I would judge it phenomenally unlikely. What began as loosely collaborating colonies of plankton became tightly bound and highly specialized organizations, such as mammals, where only a small subset of cells were destined to reproduce at all. It’s staggering to consider that the overwhelming majority of cells in your body are meant to die, are ready to die, in the service of the germ cells (sperm and eggs). Our bodies are fantastically fine-tuned collections of celibate specialists engaged in monkish harmony for the purpose of highly orchestrated reproduction. It’s as if skyscrapers conspired to build more skyscrapers.

Robotics may take yet another page from biology. The future may contain fleets of drones, building our structures, excavating, performing grand projects and heavy lifting, finding people lost in the wilderness, helping to form mesh networks, deliveries, and much more. If this comes to pass, we should consider first and foremost the network architecture underlying so many AI elements. It may not make sense for numerous little robots to obey a central server somewhere else. What should the command and control hierarchy look like? Already the US military chafes against the limitations inherent to controlling drones with human operators from thousands of miles away. Delegating responsibility to local AI will become essential as the number and scope of drones grow. But how to delegate without focusing too much responsibility on trusted ‘master’ nodes? What happens when master nodes fail? What happens when malicious actors try to spoof commands? What is true and what is untrue in the world of peer-to-peer networks? Who has access? What happens when the drones start lying to each other?

What happens is then we're in a world of hurt.

A truly frightening thought.

Unless we've created social user interfaces - or characters - which mimic human in ability to both deceive and to be bad poker players about it. ... on the other hand, given the huge amount of crap humans continue to create, we are looking at a world of hurt - or at best 'robot smog'.

"Robot smog" is an interesting phrase.

Elon Musk does seem to believe the robots are going to rise soon:

http://pandawhale.com/post/52650/elon-musk-compares-building-artificial-intelligence-to-summoning-the-demon