What the article and the commenters here seem to forget is that it's not only the technological level/political situation has changed, but the way people think

What the article and the commenters here seem to forget is that it's not only the technological level/political situation has changed, but the way people think as well. There are several global trends that allow for optimistic predictions regarding big wars of the future. The global level of violence is dropping and overall tolerance of casualties is declining. Rising cost of human life shifts the perception of conflicts in the majority of countries. It's getting very hard to explain the necessity of even several dead bodies from local conflicts, let alone to justify a sacrifice of millions of lifes. Related to this is the shift of global power: throughout the history the ruling class is basically military. Thus the perception of war as of something possible, profitable under right circumstances and even desirable. This mindset was carried into the 20th century when it met technological progress which made possible the horror of World Wars. Likely, it seems that it has changed, at least to some extent. Current 'ruler of the world' is not the army, it's rather all sorts of special forces and agencies. It's hard to sell the idea of marching and dying for your king/motherland/god to the public today and thus get/take the funding required, but it's much easier to sell it the idea of security. Security is a good thing, right? So the agencies need more and more power to protect you better. Sadly, in a paradoxical way this is partly also a consequence of rising value of human life. However, 'special forces' elite is different from a military one and it's more bound to civil oversight in regards to casualties and the acceptable scale of violence. So we see that the conflicts of today are much less bloody than they could be given the weapons we have. Now one can argue that this only holds until the current order is not significantly destabilized, or that it can spiral into some perverted form of 'preemptive security' (like e.g. govt propaganda about the need to eliminate some threat completely and strike first and hard for the sake of 'security'). And yes, everything can happen. But thinking of probability it seems that the balance is shifting towards smaller local conflicts rather than global wars.