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Wouldn't the beneficial effects of using robots be like the beneficial effects of a broken window? You are still destroying industrial production and diverting

• jerf 16y ago
  I would agree that one conceivable economic failure case would be an endless incentive to pour resources into war, instead of real wealth. In fact one can argue that Orwell's 1984 had this economic setup. IIRC he explicitly had it set up so that all excess economic output went into an endless war, so that the proles never got wealthy enough to have enough spare time to rise up. He never addressed the question of how the military was structured but in a way it makes even more sense for the militaries to be fully robotic, rather than placing humans in command of powerful machines that could be used to start a coup against the State.
• jws 16y ago
  That sums up the end of the Cold War. The US and the USSR were competing by devoting huge portions of their production to wasted[1] war materials. Finally the US out crazied the USSR under Reagan and Gorbachev conceded. The benefit of using robot war to compare nations' will power is that you aren't one glitch away from Armageddon as when you use nukes, and you don't kill a generation of people like a human war. [1] "wasted" in the sense that they were never actually used in combat. The deterrent aspect was part of the "cold".