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Good point about materiél. When I wrote the GP, I tried to think of a country with wealth (and population) that lost a war due to a lack of manufacturing capaci
by forapurpose 8y ago
Good point about materiél. When I wrote the GP, I tried to think of a country with wealth (and population) that lost a war due to a lack of manufacturing capacity and couldn't come up with one, so I stuck with 'wealth'.
Honest question: Can anyone think of such a place? I'm not including countries that had manufacturing capacity but didn't use it for military purposes.
> Smarter software will help equalize and hopefully reduce coordination costs (i.e. command hierarchy & effective intelligence) but doesn't really help with population nor materiél factors.
That omits another application of AI: Autonomous or semi-autonomous robots that do the fighting. That greatly reduces the need for population, because the AI robots are the 'boots on the ground'.
And while you need manufacturing capacity to build lots of robots, likely the software would be the difficult part. Manufacturing capacity is no longer particularly expensive or exclusive - it's so inexpensive that developing countries do most of it while wealthy countries moved on to higher-skill, higher- profit industries decades ago (such as writing software), and arguably the wealthy could rebuild capacity quickly if needed. Also, victory might depend far more on AI quality than on hardware quantity.
That's all speculative, of course. Who knows how it will work out. On one hand, we can't even build an AI that can drive safely on the freeway; on the other, AI might be simpler in a war zone, where safety and precision may take a back seat to destructive power - see it, shoot it - especially for the unscrupulous.
- rangibaby 8y agoGermany and Japan. The USSR and USA both completely dominated them in terms of industrial capacity. Germany in particular had about a 10-year head start in terms of weapons (strong tanks, jet fighters, assault rifles, drones, ballistic missiles) but simply could not build enough to make a difference. Japan had a large population and plenty of soldiers to spare at the end of WWII but again couldn’t compete with Allied manufacturing. It was a fact they were aware of before the war.
- forapurpose 8y agoI agree that Germany and Japan lost principally due to relative manufacturing capacity (though we could say they lost because their strategies didn't take that into account, particularly Germany, whose attack on Russia put them even further behind). But I think that's a different question. I was looking for, > a country with wealth (and population) that lost a war due to a lack of manufacturing capacity I should have been more clear, though I think the context still conveys it: I meant, has their been a wealthy country that lost a war simply because it didn't invest in manufacturing capacity? Germany and Japan invested heavily in it, but the Allies, combined, were simply much wealthier and larger. Also, the Allied capacity in the USA wasn't reduced by bombing.
- megaman22 8y agoThere are significant questions as to whether strategic bombing was effective at all. I can't find the USAAF studies from after the war at the moment, but I've seen them here.